The Gulf monarchies are unsustainable as anything other than vassal states. If they play nice with the biggest bullies, they get paid handsomely and a small fraction of them can be rich beyond reason and fly around in luxury jets with their personal organ donors.

Except now Iran is calling the bluff of the big bully, demonstrating that America and Israel won’t protect them.

Used to care for a bunch of hens. The leader hen was wicked smart.

One day, she was mad as hell. She was charging at me, screaming her head off, stopping right in front of my feet and then looking at me sideways. She started slowly walking away, and then turned around to charge at me again. She repeated this about ten times and I was bewildered.

Finally, a kid told me “I think she wants you to follow her.” So I did. She lead me to a neighbor’s house, someone who had just moved in. Finally it clicked for me. I’m like, “excuse me miss, I think my hen is filing a complaint that a new cat has moved to the neighborhood. Is your cat going to be a problem for the hens?” She answered no. So I turn to the hen and I’m like “she says it’s fine.” Hen keeps looking at me sideways for a minute and then walks back to her group.

Almond-sized dinosaur brain by the way.

It is. As a European, essentially all of Europe trusted the US until the Iran war. Proof: Sweden and Finland just recently joined NATO, and it was because we ultimately wanted to be in an alliance with the US.

But I think we finally woke up.

He’s not asking for your pity, or mine. He’s explaining why he and many other Americans are feeling helpless and are finding it difficult to mount a resistance, eventhough they know they should.

Interstingly sanctions had this same effect on the Iranian middle class. No way to revolt and replace the government when your rent is double your income.

It appears that sarcasm doesn’t translate well to text, even with aggressive use of emdashes and italics

Yes but some of them chanted Death to America – completely uncalled for – so what goes around comes around

Vance, while clearly evil, is intelligent and flexible. I think that with some help he could find serious negotiators to send, and then he’d just need to make sure that there is clear communication.

To be clear, I don’t think he will do that, because he’s also a coward, but I think it is within his ability to do so.

I’d rather see them demanding that Israel joins the NPT, but they don’t want to legitimize the existence of a genocide state by asking it to do things.

Because all sides have so much to lose, so they’ll pursue maximalist goals. The US retreating essentially means giving up the Gulf and by extension the Middle East, which is central to their doctrine of energy domination and a huge part of their leverage over Asia.

Iran on the other hand is fighting for its survival and needs to expel the US from the Gulf to ensure they can nevet attack them again.

I don’t think a path for deescalation exists anymore. JD Vance could maybe have taken the reigns by referring to Trump’s ill health, promised to send more competent negotiators who could meet Iran in good faith, and essentially dropped Israel to save America (or at least give it a few more good years).

But that’s a very tall order, and he just went out to claim Iran is designing nuclear suicide vests, so I guess he watched Wag the Dog and took some inspiration.

It’s Eagle vs. Cat.

I think you’re right. It’s a bit of a dance with the devil as far as your own abilities are concerned. If we could have exoskeletons that would make us 40x stronger, would our bodies atrophy in the same way, and would we accept it?

And yet, I wouldn’t argue against the objective utility of an exoskeleton.

Well, I think to most of us, language is extremely closely tied to our actual thoughts. So verbal expression is at the very least part of the thinking process.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just not faced with the abuses of LLMs the way you are? I don’t regularly experience people who clearly skipped the effort and just let an LLM do the thinking for them. (It happens, and it’s problematic, but at in my experience it’s rare.) And it’s possible that it’s just because my bubble haven’t caught up yet.

I find it really difficult to engage with this because it’s so obviously motivated by fear. And to be clear, there’s a lot to be afraid of with LLMs and generative AI, because the avenues for abuse are vast. However, the utility is also immense, and I really do find it an incredible curiosity that to so many Lemmy users generative AI is just bad, as though it can’t really do anything properly.

We live in an age where China spits out cute propaganda cartoons about the Iran war almost in real time, at a much faster pace than South Park in its prime, and you can’t be a little bit amazed? Where the fuck is your sense of wonder, man?

And I get it, mediocre people use AI to do dumb shit and it’s infuriating, and evil corporations use it to compile kill lists, and if we let it take away our ability to write creatively, to compose new music, to write new code, then we atrophy perhaps the most important part of ourselves and we’ll live in a poorer world as a result. But that’s an us problem in the end, not a tech problem. If we want to avoid a future like that, we’ll have to accept the fact that LLMs are here to stay and figure out how to reconcile that fact with a better future.

I do not agree with this at all. Some of the smartest people I know have severe dyslexia. And those are not just extremes, all of us exist on a spectrum where we have strengths and weaknesses, and not all of us can be literary geniuses.

The fact that capitalism promotes mediocre bootlickers to positions of power has nothing to do with LLMs as a technology. Of course it will be exploited by these exact same people - all the more reason why we shouldn’t give them a monopoly on what’s genuinely a transformative technology.

This is a bit alarmist I think. It’s about how you use it. If your prompt is “please write a funny story about a bunny” you’ll get slop. If you write a full-ass Wikipedia article and ask it to simplify and punctuate long passages for increased legibility you can get valuable feedback.

Yes, Iran understands this. Iran is in full, single-minded cancer removal mode. You beat cancer or you die.

Greece has one of the largest commercial fleets in the world. Likely the companies connected to these ships made a deal to be able to pass. It could depend on their destination (let’s say it’s Japan) as well.

Sweden is not about to produce a 5th or 6th gen fighter. Gripen is most likely the end of the line. The next step for Sweden is drone warfare.

$200B is nothing, because with the petrodollar they can just print more. But losing the petrodollar would collapse the US so fucking fast. Petrodollar means sustainable trade deficit, it means they can export all of their crises and let the manufacturer countries (Europe, Japan, China) eat the inflation as they print money. No petrodollar means rapid collapse.