I'm sorry but this is bullshit, Russia has zero reasons to fear unprovoked invasion from NATO, that's cope. Those "formally neutral" countries lobbies and voted to join NATO because just like the USSR Russia still liked fucking with it's neighbors in the 90's and 2000's. The Baltics are feeling pretty good right now, they're not getting invaded despite sharing a border.

They're (Putin and his oligarchs) mad because all these nations have gone towards the EU just like they started invading Ukraine with paramilitary right after Euromaidan, Ukraine wanted to join the EU trade group instead of their bloc.

This is absolutely unjustified Russian aggression against a neighboring country. Russia can go back to respecting Ukraines borders like they agreed to in 1994 and then we can talk about who's antagonizing who here.

The Unix and Linux equivalents just do not have the tools needed to scale the way the Windows active directory tools do. There's no reason why those tools couldn't be built but it's a classic catch-22 where there isn't enough demand so nobody's going to spend the money but there will never be enough demand because the tools aren't there so it can't get anywhere.

I think that if you ever do see Linux on the desktop in Mass it'll be because Europe does it in order to get away from Microsoft because of rising international tensions. Basically you need nation states to step in for national security reasons because businesses aren't going to do it especially with Microsoft's typical antitrust violations hanging over their heads like a sword of Damocles.

You might be able to turn that around if America and other countries would strictly enforce antitrust law but that's just not in the cards. So regular market forces and competition are basically useless here because they have been completely undermined and eliminated

Eastern Europe was screaming about how dangerous this was, but they weren't listened to.

One of the most insane things is how after Russia's surprisingly poor military performance in the Georgian war, the Merkel government was disturbed not that Russia invaded Georgia, but at the level of disarray in the Russian army, and sought a deliberate policy of improving the Russian military. They perceived Russia as a bulkwark against e.g. Islamic extremism, and as a potential strategic partner. They supported for example Rheinmetal building a modern training facility in Russia and sent trainers to work with the Russian military.

With Georgia I could understand (though adamantly disagreed) how some dismissed it as a "local conflict" because it could be spun as "Georgia attacking an innocent separatist state and Russia just keeping their alliances". But after 2014 there was no viable spin that could disguise Russia's imperial project. Yet so many kept sticking their fingers in their years going, "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" and pretending like we could keep living as we were before. It was delusional and maddening.

The EU has three times Russia's population and an order of magnitude larger of an economy. In any normal world, Russia should be terrified of angering Europe, not the other way around. But our petty differences, our shortsightedness, our adamant refusal to believe deterrence is needed, much less to pay to actually deter or even understand what that means... we set ourselves up for this.

And I say this to in no way excuse the US's behavior. The US was doing the same thing as us (distance just rendered Russia less of a US trading partner) and every single president wanted to do a "reset" of relations with Russia, which Russia repeatedly used to weaken western defenses in Europe. And it's one thing for the US to say to Europe "You need to pay more for defense" (which is unarguable), even to set realistic deadlines for getting defense spending up, but it's an entirely different thing to just come in and abandon an ally right in the middle of their deepest security crisis since World War II. It's hard to describe to Americans how betrayed most Europeans feel at America right now. The US organized and built the world order it desired (even the formation of the EU was strongly promoted by the US), and then just ripped it out from under our feet when it we're under attack.

A friend once described Europe in the past decades as having been "a kept woman" to America. And indeed, life can be comfortable as a kept woman, and both sides can benefit. America built bases all over Europe to project global power; got access to European militaries for their endeavours, got reliable European military supply chains, etc and yet remained firmly in control of NATO policy; maintained itself as the world's reserve currency; were in a position that Europe could never stop them from doing things Europeans disliked (for example, from invading Iraq); and on and on - while Europe decided that letting the US dominate was worth being able to focus on ourselves. But a kept woman has no real freedom, no real security, and your entire life can come crashing down if you cross them or they no longer want you.

Europe is still dependent on Russian oil and gas especially during winter. This was by design it was supposed to create an interdependency that would moderate Russia's extremism and eventually lead to them becoming a proper Democratic state. It didn't work because dictators go really fucking crazy especially in their old age. Dictators are often extremely incompetent at everything except violence and holding power.

Joe Biden when speaking to the Senate in 1995 about American getting involved in Bosnia; This part is at 12:58 but really the whole thing is really compelling, Biden makes a very enthusiastic case for America's role as you describe (and really it also lines up to Ukraine today in my opinion, particularly since Europe is uniting around it and we should be supporting them for the effort.)

https://www.c-span.org/clip/se...

What is the message we send to the world if we stand by and we say we will let it continue to happen here in this place but it is not in our interest? We do not fear that it will spread? I am not here to tell you that, if we do not act, it will spread and cause a war in Europe--tomorrow or next year. But I am here to tell you that within the decade, it will cause the spread of war like a cancer, and the collapse of the Western alliance. What is so important about the Western alliance? NATO for NATO's sake so that we can beat our breast?

What I am about to say is going to cause me great difficulty if I am reelected and come back here as the ranking member or chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. But Europe cannot stay united without the United States. There is no moral center in Europe.

When in the last two centuries have the French, or the British, or the Germans, or the Belgians, or the Italians moved in a way to unify that continent to stand up to this kind of genocide? When have they done it? The only reason anything is happening now is because the United States of America finally--finally--is understanding her role.

And they implicate Trump in pedophilia and child rape. We learned that from the Epstein file leaks we already have.

We all had a good laugh about Jeffrey Epstein talking about Donald Trump giving Clinton a blowjob but that was obviously just an exaggeration for a fact. The real takeaway is that Jeffrey Epstein knew that Trump had compromat in the hands of Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.

It's painfully obvious that Epstein didn't kill himself. He had a ton of leverage against the president of the United States and would have been expecting to get a pardon out of that.

I don't think the details are relevant the takeaway here is that the ruling elites fuck kids a lot and we have to decide whether or not that's a problem or not.

Because there's a whole shitload of people who take the attitude of "if there's grass on the field play ball" which is exactly as disgusting as it sounds. And some of those people are probably family members of ours.

The only reason anyone would even think about adding "Russia" to that list is because the current elderly resident of the White House has a hard-on for Putin.

Militarily, Russia has demonstrated it has a hard time defeating a country 1/10 of its size.

Technologically, Russia is so far behind, it's had to rely on equipment being manufactured by Iran and North Korea (neither of which is "first world").

Economically, yeah I'm not even gonna bother with that one, even their sycophants know Russia is a basket case.

Oh Israel has a lot of different populations still and the West Bank settler's are fuckin' nuts. If you're American you hear about those out there ethno nationalist militia groups, that is kinda their version of it. Really while everyone focuses on Gaza the worst shit is consistently happening out there.

Because there is no Central authority for open source software it's basically impossible to get good administrative tools for it.

So for example it becomes really really hard to enforce document labeling for different classes of document at different security levels for your company.

This is before we talk about the mess that is active directory equivalence under linux.

I don't really see any solution. Maybe if Microsoft wasn't able to do all the antitrust violations so that a company could come along and build up Linux into something but every time anyone tries to that all gets shut down by buyouts and mergers and other nasty little tricks.

(Score:X, Troll)

And yet, your imaginary friend still isn't real. ;)

Xi is absolute dictator of China now. So they can easily quell any social unrest with violence.

That's why you're seeing this now. It's because the elites of China have control of the situation whereas before they didn't

Stepped in and prevented companies from automating factory jobs in order to prevent social unrest. Now that Xi is an absolute dictator they're not as concerned as they used to be and they are moving to automate.

I've said it before but if you Google you will find an article about how 70% of middle class jobs in America got taken by automation since 1980.

Automation has devoured the middle class. We can't do anything about it because there really isn't a solution.

Nobody is going to redistribute wealth because that feels bad. If you take money from me to give it to somebody else that just feels awful and if you do it to somebody who's rich most people think you're going to do it to them next. It doesn't help that there is a shitload of propaganda reinforcing these ideas.

How many people here are chomping at the bit to had more means testing to government programs? It's basically lizard brain. It doesn't feel fair that you have to go to work and somebody else doesn't.

That's another major problem we are going to have a huge disparity where you have people we need to do work and people who we just don't have any work for. We are going to have tens of millions of basically useless people.

Traditionally when this happens it's accompanied by food shortages but technology has solved that. So now the work itself is the limited resource.

I really don't know any solution and I think we're just going to have a giant world war eventually going nuclear possibly or even probably wiping out our species. Happy to be proven wrong though.

They clearly didn't even use a proper image generator - that's clearly the old crappy ChatGPT-builtin image generator. It's not like it's a useful figure with a few errors - the entire thing is sheer nonsense - the more you look at it, the worse it gets. And this is Figure 1 in a *paper in Nature*. Just insane.

This problem will decrease with time (here are two infographics from Gemini 3 I made just by pasting in an entire very long thread on Bluesky and asking for infographics, with only a few minor bits of touchup). Gemini successfully condensed a really huge amount of information into infographics, and the only sorts of "errors" were things like, I didn't like the title, a character or two was slightly misshapen, etc. It's to the point that you could paste in entire papers and datasets and get actually useful graphics out, in a nearly-finished or even completely-finished state. But no matter how good the models get, you'll always *have* to look at what you generate to see if it's (A) right, and (B) actually what you wanted.

And clearly God (who as we know, is a scalar field) is an AI. That's why there's so much "slop" in the Bible - factual errors, contradictions, different versions of the same text that heavily contradict each other, etc etc. It all makes so much more sense now!

The number of violent conflicts is only going to increase from now on. Climate change is only causing things to shift and our water management practices are not very good to start with.