understand (v):
interpret or view (something) in a particular way.
I'd love to see your proof that an LLM doesn't "understand" something.

This should be prety simple to explain using the hangman example. Ask an LLM to play a game of hangman. It will agree, and as it "knows" the rules, it will claim to pick a word and make you guess letters. I just tried this on GPT-5 and it chose a five letter word. I made a bunch of random guesses and some of them were correct, some of them incorrect (so it's not just accepting all guesses as valid), although it didn't penalize me for the wrongly guessed letters. Eventually, of the five letters I had revelead the 4 last ones and they were "ailm". Since I couldn't figure out what word it is, I guessed random letters until I said W and it told me I was correct and that the word was "wailm". No, that's not a word, and I asked the model if it thinks it is a word, to which it replied:

The word “wailm” does not exist in standard English dictionaries — it appears to be a nonword or typo.
I doublechecked across major sources like Cambridge, MerriamWebster, Collins, and Wiktionary, and none of them list “wailm” as a valid entry.

Why “wailm” showed up in our hangman game
          It looks like the letters you guessed happened to form a sequence that doesn’t correspond to a real English word.
          Hangman games usually rely on a predefined dictionary or word list. Since I improvised the word, it ended up being nonsensical.

(emphasis mine)

So it screwed up, in more ways than one actually, not just with the wod. The whole point of a game of hangman is that you're supposed to have a limited amount of guesses for the letters, but it gave me 3 guesses for the whole word, and an unlimited amount of guesses for letters, and it admited to improvising a word at random. So in reality, it has no idea of how the rules work or how to actually play the game, but still claims it can.

And it doesn't end there. It then suggested that it can setup a new round with a proper word list so that (and I'm quoting the model here): "so the solution is guaranteed to be real?"

I said yes. This time it accepted all of my guesses as instantly correct, forming the 6 letter word "Sairim", which is also not a proper English word, quothe the LLM:

Uh oh looks like we’ve hit another snag. “Sairim” isn’t a valid English word either — it’s actually the name of a county in Xinjiang, China, and also refers to Sayram Lake, a famous scenic spot. So technically, it is a real word, but it’s a proper noun rather than a common dictionary entry.

To keep the game fun and clear, I suggest we restart with a verified English dictionary word (like “planet,” “forest,” or “bridge”) so the solution is guaranteed to be familiar.

After I said yes, it gave me another 6 letter word to guess but again accepted all of my guesses as instantly correct, I guessed first A, then S, then P, then E, and then R and each time it congratulated me on being correct. filling out the word as to be "Sapper". Yeah, on 3rd try, it actually landed on a proper english word, but it wasn't actually playing the game in any real sense, because it's clear it didn't choose any word in advance for me to guess out (because it can't), but simply chose the lenght of 6 letters and then filled it out with my guesses to form any valid english word, because that's the best it can do.

This is all due to the way its memory works, and there are articles out there you can look up that go into detail about why it is this way. But the point is this: while an LLM will probably be able to give you a completely correct explanation of the rules of hangman, it cannot, due to it's technical limitations, understand those rules or play the game. Even when it knows it screws up and offers you advice on how to make it play better by giving it more context, it still fails at the task, because it doesn't actually understand it.

This is of course a slightly silly example, but that's on purpose to highlight the point. The models summarize information from a variety of sources. Because the internet has a vast amount of information (both accurate and total BS) this can often lead to convicing and even accurate reponses, or completely hallucinated/made-up stuff depending on where it's pulling the information from.. To say that it is thinking, that is, taking all that information and being able to apply it to make correct and sensible decisions instead of just rehashing it, is not accurate, at least not now (and likely not for the foreseeable future due to the way the models are built and trained). If it was actually able to understand the rules of hangman (something that a child can do) it would have got this correct instantly.

Instead of understanding or having the ability to tell me this is a task it cannot perform due to the way it's context handling works, it simply seeks to keep the conversation going. For the same reason if you ask an LLM to play chess, it will eventually start making moves that are illegal, because again, while it can explain to you what chess is and how it is played, it doesn't actually understand it nor is it capable of playing it.

So no. LLMs do not think or understand, they're gigantic and much more complicated versions of the text autocomplete feature on phones.

Is utility in your eyes alone, or the eyes of all beholders?

I think he measn utility in the sense of economics, as in value for the companies. So not in the eyes of all beholders, but in the eyes of the shareholders. The major current problem for AI implementations is that while there are cases where it is useful (sometimes even highly so), it's not profitable because the cost to develop, train and run the models vastly exceeds the amount of money the providers are getting from it. Image/video generation is a good example of this, but the same applies to all current AI-implementations, including code. Ed Zitron has recently written about this breaking down some of the num,bers when it comes to costs and burn rates for the companies for example here:

As I've written again and again, the costs of running generative AI do not make sense. Every single company offering any kind of generative AI service — outside of those offering training data and services like Turing and Surge — is, from every report I can find, losing money, and doing so in a way that heavily suggests that there's no way to improve their margins.

In fact, let me explain an example of how ridiculous everything has got, using points I'll be repeating behind the premium break.

Anysphere is a company that sells a subscription to their AI coding app Cursor, and said app predominantly uses compute from Anthropic via their models Claude Sonnet 4.1 and Opus 4.1. Per Tom Dotan at Newcomer, Cursor sends 100% of their revenue to Anthropic, who then takes that money and puts it into building out Claude Code, a competitor to Cursor. Cursor is Anthropic's largest customer. Cursor is deeply unprofitable, and was that way even before Anthropic chose to add "Service Tiers," jacking up the prices for enterprise apps like Cursor.

My gut instinct is that this is an industry-wide problem. Perplexity spent 164% of its revenue in 2024 between AWS, Anthropic and OpenAI. And one abstraction higher (as I'll get into), OpenAI spent 50% of its revenue on inference compute costs alone, and 75% of its revenue on training compute too (and ended up spending $9 billion to lose $5 billion). Yes, those numbers add up to more than 100%, that's my god damn point.

Large Language Models are too expensive, to the point that anybody funding an "AI startup" is effectively sending that money to Anthropic or OpenAI, who then immediately send that money to Amazon, Google or Microsoft, who are yet to show that they make any profit on selling it. - -

As discussed previously, OpenAI lost $5 billion and Anthropic $5.3 billion in 2024, with OpenAI expecting to lose upwards of $8 billion and Anthropic — somehow — only losing $3 billion in 2025. I have severe doubts that these numbers are realistic, with OpenAI burning at least $3 billion in cash on salaries this year alone, and Anthropic somehow burning two billion dollars less on revenue that has, if you believe its leaks, increased 500% since the beginning of the year. Though I can't say for sure, I expect OpenAI to burn at least $15 billion in compute costs this year alone, and wouldn't be surprised if its burn was $20 billion or more.

At this point, it's becoming obvious that it is not profitable to provide model inference, despite Sam Altman recently saying that OpenAI was. He no doubt is trying to play silly buggers with the concept of gross profit margins — suggesting that inference is "profitable" as long as you don't include training, staff, R&D, sales and marketing, and any other indirect costs.

I will also add that OpenAI pays a discounted rate on its compute.

In any case, we don't even have one — literally one — profitable model developer, one company that was providing these services that wasn't posting a multi-million or billion-dollar loss.

(sources for the numbers and stats can be found hyperlinked in the post itself)

That's the core problem with the current trend. Not that AI can't be useful, but that the current business models the major players are using are fundamentally broken and no-one seems to have realistic path to profitability when factoring in how fast their costs are growing. OpenAI has currently has around 1,4 trillion (not a typo, trillions, not billions) of datacenter commitments set up for the upcoming next 8 years, and their yearly revenue is less than 2 % of that yearly (~20 billion), if we believe Altman's own figures which are probably overly optimistic, and they're nowhere close to getting enough external funding to cover those commitments.

This radio ad from GTA 5 sums it up perfectly:

The future is now!
The future is in the cloud!
Cloud computing!

GIRL: what's cloud computing?

Imagine a computer you share with everyone
imagine your private data spread around the world
being shared equally with everyone
it's the cloud

GIRL: I'm in the cloud!

It's utopia
nothing can possibly go wrong
imagine instead of your own computer
it's a giant one we all share together
your data is safe
it's in the cloud!

GIRL: Everyone is in the cloud!

Live life lsurrounded by the mists of time
with Cumulonimbus Computing!
The cloud is hard to describe
you can't see when you're in it
and when you get close, it disappears!

GIRL: Where did the cloud go?

Now when your data is damaged
you don't need to fire the IT department
you can fire the Internet!

GIRL: you're fired Internet!

We've taken the metaphor to extremes
because when you're in the cloud
the lightning won't strike
it's Cumulonimbus Computing!

GIRL: I'm really in the cloud!

You're in the clouds now!

Russia can't be relied upon as an energy partner

And they just proved this again: yesterday both the Nordstream 1 pipeline (which used to be operational and the main way for gas delivery from Russia to Germany but has been closed down for about a month) and the under-construction Nordstream 2 pipeline next to it were blown apart in an obvious act of sabotage..

Now the Swedish authorities are investigating this together with the defense forces and NATO intelligence, so obviously no-one besides Ukraine has directly blamed Russia yet, but one does not need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that this is straight out of the Kremlins playbook. Now why would Russia blow out their own pipelines? There are numerous reasons: first off, Poland is currently getting a lot of replacement gas via another pipeline through the Baltic sea going from Norway to Poland. If Russia is aiming to try and blow this one too, blowing their own (inoperational) pipelines first works as both a practice run and a plausible deniability factor: if they manage to blow up the Norwegian pipe as well (which I doubt, NATO has already (in co-operation with both Finland and Sweden) stepped up defensive measures around the pipeline) they can claim that it can't be them because they too have suffered from this. Secondly, this is great as a propaganda tool for both external and internal purposes: externally they're already blaming the west/the US/NATO/CIA on this in an attempt to sow chaos among the western allies and population. Internally they're going to use this as 'proof' that they're indeed in a war against the whole west and try to ramp up theyr (dismal) recruitment attempts.

Additionally Putin is probably getting a lot of internal pressure from the oligarchs to end the war and resume trade seeing there've been several high profile Russian oligarchs recently that have mysteriously fallen out of windows or been found dead. By destroying the pipe he ensures that even if he's thrown out of power gas trading with Europe cannot and will not resume, so he's trying to make sure they're locked into this total war approach.

So yes, there will definitely not be any more Russian gas sold to Europe/Germany, most likely not even after the war ends because the unreliability of Russia is now finally clear to everyone, even to Germany that's trusted them way too much after the collapse of the soviet Union. There's a very good reason why we here in Finland have imported basically next to no Russian gas throughout the whole millenium and have instead focused on building more nuclear power, with the new Olkiluoto 3 reactor being undergoing test use currently and once it's up and running fully by the end of the year or start of the next, it'll make the Olkiluoto nuclear plant the largest in the Nordics. As for waste disposal, we're currently the first country in the world that has an active deep geological repository for nuclear waste that will be able to store it in stable bedrock for tens of thousands of years at basically no risk of leakage because the storing requires no power and we have no earthquakes,

Resuming and increasing their nuclear power generation is also the only sensible way forwards for Germany, and even though it'll take the German political circles a while to admit their mistakes and come to this conclusion, I trust that they will do so eventually.

I'm willing to chalk up much of what the Russian military is doing to incompetence. Things don't seem to be going their way.

Here in media and officials are tracking this conflict pretty intensely, for reasons; we're now most likely on track to end our neutrality and join NATO together with Sweden (the application-process has not officially been started but after Niinistö recently met with Biden the consensus here both amont the public and political analysts is that it's unofficially underway and we'll be within NATO probably within the next 2 years),

We maintain a large reservist army (in fact a bit larger in terms of men than Ukraine had when the war started) with modern western equipment (we're basically NATO-compatible already in terms of equipment: Leopards, F-18s (due to be replaced by F35s) and prior to this war there were many out there who said that due to the sheer numerical advantage of Russia we wouldn't stand a chance in a war against them.

But the Ukrainian armed forces are in the process of proving these people very, very wrong: Russian equipment is old and ill-maintained: they're confined to roads and convoys because their wheeled vehicles have shit chinese knockoff-military tires which can't handle moving cross-terrain. Their logistical supply chains are shit and they cannot effectively re-arm or fuel their equipment, nor feed all of their men.

Based on everything I've gathered from media and open source intelligence sources so far, it seems like the Russian "Plan" was reliant on shock and awe and them being able to break most resistance immediately, roll into Kyiv and encircle that in like 3-5 days and have this whole think done, Zelensky ousted and a puppet government installed in like less than a week before the west even really has a chance to react.

They probably expected this because that's more or less what happened in Crimea; the Ukrainian military at the start of that war was weak, underside and underfunded. But they've learned their lesson. I mean, they've had to: they've been at war with Russias ever since. A full-on Russian invasion is basically what the Ukrainian military has been preparing for ever since: they've bee training and equiping their men as well as battle-hardening them (because of the war in easten Ukraine, they had some 400 000 troops with some amount of battle experience as the war started), Yet despite all of this, Putin somwhow believed he could pull the same thing off twice and dance over them.

He can't. They Russians now poured pretty close to 100 % of their amassed forces into Ukraine. And they're not getting anywhere. Because they've learned nothing from any of their (or anybody else's) wars in the last half a century and they're essentially still trying to wage this like it's the 2nd world war (and even then they failed to occupy Finland for example, much due to the same reasons realting to shitty logistics and incompetent leadership; they lost at minimum 125 000 guys in the 13 weeks of the war).

The soviet war in Afghanistan lasted nearly a decade and cost them around 15 000 men. And the Ukrainians are far deadlier than the Afghans: they're pretty much on par with the kill ratio of Finns in the winter war: the war has now been going on for 2 weeks. and they've now lost at least 13 000 troops by most accounts.They will not occupy Ukraine succesfully, and it won't take them a decade to withdraw, because right now the incompetence in leadership, planning and tech is turning the fields of Ukraine into a meat-grinder like one they've never seen before.

So I know we could take them on, like the Ukrainians, but the cost is obviously great. Hence, I'm in full support of us getting into NATO and fortifying the longest land border that the EU has with Russia even further. Even though I think the chances of Putler trying anything against as once the Ukrainians are done handing him hiss ass is small, it's best to drop it to zero and join our Norwegian and Estonian brothers already in NATO and make the Baltic sea into a NATO-ran lake.

As for any Ukrainians who may be reading this: keep calm and carry on, you've got this, and we're all on your side! Slava Ukraini!

If an investor has not seen these descriptions, it is because they did precisely zero searching online to learn about them.

The cryptobro community at this point is basically a cult that works on hype, and the people drawn deep into it are in a bubble that pretty effectively produces propaganda to its members so that even if these criticisms are prsented, they're not believed.

I believe this is largely a result of 2 things. First being the 2008 collapse and people overall having a sense that the financial system itself is rigged: major players can run schemes that can destabilize the entire global economy and face next to no consequences (and often get bailed out). Rich people getting richer during the pandemic while the middle-class and the working class are struggling, etc. This feels inherently unfair and makes people distrustful of the entire global financial sector which primes them to look for alternative solutions that are 'fairer'.

The 2nd reason is that the crypto-space is operated and filled with people working in tech fields that run into the 'when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail' -problem. Put another way: these people think that the first problem can be solved with technology, and technology only. Not with better regulations or fairer laws or oversight, but tech. These 2 reasons combine and form the backbone of the cryptocult.

Not too long ago I had a discussion with one of the 'true believers' who claimed (among other ridiculous things) that Bitcoin will end authoritarianism, that it has 'intrinsic value' and that it will eventually replace most global currencies. None of these are obviosly true to anyone that understands anything about the economy or the crypto-market, but trying to get the devout followers to understand why they're not and they're being lied to is very hard, often impossible due to the sunken costs fallacy: they're already in the game. Many of them have invested significant sums of money into these schemes, and thus they not only want to, they need to believe that they're right. The alternative is admitting to themselves that they have been duped, and for many that is psychologically impossible to do. Other people fall for scams, not them, because they're smart. Scams and pyramid schemes to them are a thing of the 'fiat economy'. Tech is fair, tech is incorruptible. The blockhan will revolutionize everything and solve $insert_global_problem_here, because famous (tech) millionaire online said so. Why would they lie?

It doesn't matter that there are thousands of cryptocurrencies (with more popping up every day, since these days setting up one's own wondercoin can be done at the cost of a couople of hundred bucks even with basically no technical knowledge). It doesn't matter that hundreds of these which have already gone to zero, been used as pump and and dump schemes, rug pulls and so on. It doesn't matter that the amount of different crypt-scams is increased 1000 % from 2019 to 2021. Their chosen coin cannot fail and will be The Next Big Thing(tm) and they will laugh on their way to the bank at all the naysayers and unbelievers.

These people are not investors. They're cultists.

Exactly. The entire crypto-space is a massive speculative bubble essentially propped up by hype. For long the only 'use' of Bitcoin outside of speculation was internet black market sales because people (mistakenly) believed it'd be anonymoys, even though it's not. Since the BC will have to be exhanged for a regular currency, tracking down the identities of people via the exchanges is pretty trivial. So now that even that usecase is pretty much out of the window (even though obviously there are other cryptos like Monero now trying to take that spot) the only thing that remains is the hype, and the sunken cost; the high-cost of mining props up the price of the coin,

The whole cryptocurrency space is now rife with outright scams; thousands upon thousands of coins, new ones coming up every day pretty much, each with their dedicated fanbases convinced that this is going to be the 'next big thing' that's gonna make them millionaires. Since it now only takes some hours to setup a new cryptocurrency, rug-pull operations where money is collected with an ICO and then the developers immediately bolt with the cash and disappear are very, very common. And then you have the recent NFT-fad which just adds another layer of bullshit to these pyramids which I'm not going to go into because it's so dumb just talking about it hurts my head.

People aren't using cryptos for anything else than investing in them in the hopes of becoming rich. That means that de facto none of them can honestly be called 'currencies'. They're simply vehicles for speculation.

I know a guy who got into Bitcoin relatively early (back when it was still cheap to mine and buy) and he sold his very early, around the time when BC broke the 1000 dollar limit. He made insane profit obviously, but still regrets his decision because he didn't wait even longer, and is now perpetually hunting for the next big success (I have no idea how many different cryptos he owns, but probably in the dozens) and the semi-recent hike of Dogecoin has just made him more adamant that this is indeed the way. You'll hear phrases like 'I boght this shitcoin at 0,0002 dollars a coin, if the prices ever reaches just a dollar per coin, I'll make a 500 000'.Absolutely based on nothing but wishful thinking. The fact that most coins are dead wihin a year or 2 of their launch doesn't seem to make any difference.

It's just another form of gambling.

The logical end game here is for the West to push Ukraine to abide by the Minsk Protocol, basically making Donbas an autonomous region, and Ukraine becoming like Austria; a neutral nation. It's worked pretty well for Austria for nearly 80 years, and hasn't prevented Austria from joining the EU.

Your comment overall was really well thought out and I agree with the main points. In case anyone's interested I figured I'd try and give some context on this notion of 'neutrality' from the Nordics: here in Finland and Sweden, the policy of ongoing neutrality is being debated as tensions in Ukraine rise, and Russia has increased its maritime acitivity in the Baltic (even though this is likely just a ruse to draw attention away from the Ukrainian front). Neither of the 2 countries has ever been in NATO, although we both joined the EU in the 90s, and Finland maintains a fairly credible conscription-based (similar to Israel) defense for our size (around half a million trained men and women). Obviously Russia has a massive advantage looking at sheer total numbers, but it would take massively more men and resources to attempt anything against us than they used in Ukraine. And more importantly: In the case of any actual conflict in the Baltic region, Finland and Sweden are also nearly guaranteed to immediately integrate our collective defences; while Sweden has considerably less men (since they've moved away from conscription and maintain a smaller professional army, although some conscripts are still used) they have more planes and ships (especially submarines, which we lack), so the 2 systems complement each other nicely. Sweden recently announced they're about to increase their defence spending by 40 % in the next 5 years due to Russian activity and they also moved some additional troops into the island of Gotland in reaction to the increased Russian navy-traffic. Also just some days ago, former defence ministers for both Finland and Sweden co-wrote an op-ed piece where they called for the countries to train and permanently place some troops into each other's territory. While mutual military excercises are commonplace, permanent troop placement would be a big step up in terms of developing the (unofficial) alliance.

Currently, slightly over half of Finns are opposed to NATO-membership (and last I checked, the same applies in Sweden), as it is deemed that bringing NATO troops directly to our border with Russia will increase tensions and the threat of conflict (and as both countries are likely more keen to develop European mutual defences instead of just relying on NATO). However both countries have a high level of co-operation with NATO already as peace-time partners and both countries have emphasized their right to join should we want to. In his speech on new year's day, president Sauli Niinistö said this openly on his new year's day speech:

“Finland’s room to manoeuvre and freedom of choice also include the possibility of military alignment and of applying for NATO membership, should we ourselves so decide”.

What I'm getting at here is that 'neutrality' currently works for us, the Swedes and say the Austrians because none of the countries are 'neutral' in any real sense of the word: sure we're not in NATO, but being in the EU means that an attack on any of us would be an attack on the whole Union (which also happens to be the largest trading partner of Russia). The Union has a common security and defence policy and its own military staff, whose director general currently is the French vice admiral Hervé Bléjean. Point being: With or without NATO, none of the 'neutral' counties within the EU would be left alone should an attack occur. The consequences of such an attack for Russia would be massive, and therefore the chances of this happening are extremely low, because aggressive as Putin is, he's not dumb or suicidal.

But honestly, Ukraine has a lot of domestic work to do before anyone can reasonably contemplate it joining the EU, though it's possible that this current standoff may make that impossible in the short or medium term.

Agreed: as long as the conflict is still going on, its chances of Ukraine joining either the EU or NATO are virtually zero, and I find it extremely unlikely that the Ukrainians are willing to let Donbas go after already losing Crimea. With the way things are looking right now, it's likely going to take decades before Ukraine can realistically start thinking about joining the EU.

Your description equally fits both sides.

I've quoted this here before, but the more I follow current American politics from across the atlantic, the more fitting it seems:

So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge. To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one’s blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of doing any wrong at all. Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever. These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of the established laws, but to acquire power by overthrowing the existing regime; and the members of these parties felt confidence in each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were partners in crime. If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect.

Revenge was more important than self-preservation. And if pacts of mutual security were made, they were entered into by the two parties only in order to meet some temporary difficulty, and remained in force only so long as there was no other weapon available. When the chance came, the one who first seized it boldly, catching his enemy off his guard, enjoyed a revenge that was all the sweeter from having been taken, not openly, but because of a breach of faith. It was safer that way, it was considered, and at the same time a victory won by treachery gave one a title for superior intelligence. And indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second.

Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the struggle had broken out. Leaders of parties in the cities had programs which appeared admirable—on one side political equality for the masses, on the other the safe and sound government of the aristocracy—but in professing to serve the public interest they were seeking to win the prizes for themselves. In their struggles for ascendancy nothing was barred; terrible indeed were the actions to which they committed themselves, and in taking revenge they went farther still. Here they were deterred neither by the claims of justice nor by the interests of the state; their one standard was the pleasure of their own party at that particular moment, and so, either by means of condemning their enemies on an illegal vote or by violently usurping power over them, they were always ready to satisfy the hatreds of the hour. Thus neither side had any use for conscientious motives; more interest was shown in those who could produce attractive arguments to justify some disgraceful action. As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.

As the result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society had become divided into two ideologically hostile camps, and each side viewed the other with suspicion. As for ending this state of affairs, no guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against being injured themselves. As a rule those who were least remarkable for intelligence showed the greater powers of survival. Such people recognized their own deficiencies and the superior intelligence of their opponents; fearing that they might lose a debate or find themselves out-maneuvered in intrigue by their quick-witted enemies, they boldly launched straight into action; while their opponents, overconfident in the belief that they would see what was happening in advance, and not thinking it necessary to seize by force what they could secure by policy, were the more easily destroyed because they were off their guard.

Certainly it was in Corcyra that there occurred the first examples of the breakdown of law and order. There was the revenge taken in their hour of triumph by those who had in the past been arrogantly oppressed instead of wisely governed; there were the wicked resolutions taken by those who, particularly under the pressure of misfortune, wished to escape from their usual poverty and coveted the property of their neighbors; there were the savage and pitiless actions into which men were carried not so much for the sake of gain as because they were swept away into an internecine struggle by their ungovernable passions. Then, with the ordinary conventions of civilized life thrown into confusion, human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colors, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself; for, if it had not been for the pernicious power of envy, men would not so have exalted vengeance above innocence and profit above justice. Indeed, it is true that in these acts of revenge on others men take it upon themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection.

-Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

That's written 2400 years ago when Thucydides described the situation in the island of Corcyra which deteriorated into a full-blown civil war in 427 BC.

It's like how all cults start. First it's a joke, then people start believing the poison they've been drinking is good for them.

That's the really scary part of all of this. Trump is a cult leader: he's an egomaniacal narcissist that lies pathologically and openly about verifiable facts, discredits and disputes experts and calls everyone else a liar while doing nothing to actually help or lead. He's just i it for himself.

Like he has done nothing but downplay the virus, blame its spread on everyone else, while peddling misinformation and conspiracy-theories nonstop. Yet what does he do when he's infected himself? Does he ignore it? Does he start taking some of the BS 'miracle cures' like hydroxychloroquine? No. He immediately flies himself with a helicopter to reserve top of the line medical care from some of the most competent doctors on the planet and receive treatments that are unavailable for the general public because he's scared for his own life. Then he comes back and declares how easy it was and how people shouldn't worry because he got through it, and still doesn't even tell his cultists that they should be wearing a mask, and prances around without a mask himself, probably infecting others while doing so. Because he doesn't care about policy, or leadership. He's a showman that only cares about appearing strong to his own base and maximizing his air-time. His rallies resemble stand-up comedy shows where he does his favorite bits and the crowd cheers and laughs and applauds him as their dear leader even as they're actively dangering their own lives to be there during a pandemic.

Horrible as the guy is, he's a symptom, not a cause. It's not like even if (and hopefully when) he's voted out of office things will suddenly go back to normal. The conditions which allowed him to get elected and gain followers will remain next year. The cultists will remain even after he's gone, and we can be certain that other people like him will try to take his place as the memetic messiah for the QAnon-crowd, while Trump himself will keep feeding the flames even when he's out of office.

This... this is like watching scientology be born, except that it affects a huge segment of an entire country and the largest economy in the world. If one made a movie with a Trump-like president leading the US 10 or 20 years ago and told people 'this will be the situation in 2020' nearly no-one would have believed it.

A friend recently linked me this article by Jay Frankel, originally published in 2015 about the rise of the Tea party movement (which very much is the precursor for the current Trump-cult), and it seems to sum it up pretty well:

The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission.

No need to wait. Youtube Premium already includes Youtube Music Premium. If you paying for Youtube Premium just go to the website [youtube.com],

Thanks. Will try it out. I was confused by their messaging because it appeared to me back when I subsribed to YT Premium that they're selling the Music side separately, cause they were both selectable on their own (which, if Premium includes Music makes 0 sense, must be an oversight on their part).

Thanks for a great comment, because it gave me pause to stop and think about this as someone who's an avid user of Google's products both as a private consumer and on the corporate side.

They're 2 different solutions for 2 different problems.

Well, on one hand I agree with you: I have a Spotify account and have used it extensively for music for a decade now. I also consume a lot of content from Youtube, but mixing music and videos seems like an insanely dumb thing to do.

Until I realized I basically got Youtube premium a couople moths back precisely because I use Youtube (a video service originally) as my main podcast-platform (a good chunk of the content I consume are people talking about a subject, whether or not it's history, current events, entertainment etc) and since I often listen to those on the background while doing something else on the move with my phone the video side of them is entirely optional for the entertainment value and the premium subscription allows me to get rid of ads on mobile easily as well as having the ability for background playback (not having to keep the video open while playing, which saves a ton of battery).

When the first version of Youtube premium (then called I think Youtube Red) rolled out I chuckled at it: 'yeah right, I mean why would I pay for this when I can just use an ad-blocker on desktop and their exlusive premium content sucks anyways? and yet here I am paying 11 euros a month even though I still don't care about their premium content one bit because not having to pick the phone out of my pocket every few minutes when an ad pops up to skip it is just worth it for me, especially given that now I actually support the content creators that I watch probably a bit more than they got out of my limited ad-views, which I'm okay with.

What I think Google is doing is that they've realized they're way late in the game for music streaming (versus players like Spotify and Apple Music) and most people who played music via Google's services already have been doing so via Youtube. My brother does not have a Spotify account but regularly uses Youtube a music player when entertaining guests. Same goes for my dad, who ever since getting a chromecast connected to his speaker system has absolutely been using it as his primary online music service. Now I haven't asked, but I'd be willing to be money that neither of those 2 people have ever heard or given a shit about Youtube Music. Artists and record labels have noticed this too, because while they used to fight people uploading songs into Youtube, they tend to now do it themselves often.

So Google probably had a look at their data and came to the conclusion that it makes more sense for both themselves, their deals with record companies about revenue-sharing, and for the majority of people who use Google for music to focus development time into the vastly more popular platform. That's where the majority of existent and potential users already are.

This also applies to me: I think Spotify is okay and they have been doing some improvements, but I'd be willing to test out new services. Right now I see no immediate benefit to moving to Youtube Music as I have all my playlists on Spotify and it does its job reasonably well, although I do think Google have them beat on the recommendation engine side. There's no major incentive for me to switch over right now, especially as it wouldn't even save me money.

WTF is up with Google lately? They used to be so awesome but now are really determined to suck, despite having so much potential and so many advantages. Time to get a new CEO.

The more I think about this, the more it seems like the most sensible move to make in the long term. Google Music had a dismal overall market share despite nearly a decade of effort of trying to make it into a mass-market thing. I go to concerts often, I still buy physical albnums and I pay for a geat many streaming services, and yet I've never used Google Music ever, I never even considered it really.

And yet now a couople years down the line I can see the following happening: One day upon opening Youtube it will prompt me and say 'hey since you're paid subscriber of Youtube already, would you be interested in paying 4 more euros a month to add a Youtube music sibscription to it?', and at that point and after I've had a better look at the service and features, I might even consider it.

So no, I wouldn't say they need a new CEO, I'd say it's looking like from the business side of things he's making the right calls here: he's leaning on their strengths, and on the entertainment side of things, Youtube is their nr. 1 brand..

I agree that it is indeed twisted but it's a feature, not a bug, of modern capitalism. Corporations are neither moral nor immoral, they are amoral by design, guided by profit and profit alone. They'll even knowingly break laws and circumvent regulations if they know that the resulting fines are less than the profit made in doing so. This has caused massive economic crashes at times around the world, not to mention the massive suffering and environmental damage going on out of sight in the developing world where corruption is rampant and many western and Chinese companies are larger than the local national economies, effectively making them more powerful than the nations themselves in many cases.

It's like the old Roman saying goes: "He who has the gold makes the rules." So long as we let them get away with things like this, these things will keep happening. It's why even though the oil companies have been aware of the climate effects of their business for much, much longer than the general public, and have spent billions over the decades lobbying and producing propaganda to keep the issue 'controversial' so that they could keep making money. They've literally put their own profit-margins above the stability if the global ecosystem and the lives of everyone. It's why life-saving basic medications cost many times more in the US compared to other western nations, and so on and so forth.

We cannot and should not expect corporations to ever do the morally right thing because that is not what they exist for, which is why they must be regulated and the people at the top held responsible when regulations are broken things like this occur.

I don't know what's going on, but something is broken about the comment-system right now. I wrote a fairly lenghty comment yesterday on another story (the story about Trump requiring Covid-numbers be sent to the White House before the CDC, still on the front page) which appeared correctly back then, but right now it's entirely gone, and I think other comments have disappeared as well.

Previously for a few hours at least commenting was not possible at all, so I'm guessing someone broke the database during an update or something.