It's almost adorable when you find someone who believes one side is less corruptible than the other.
It's like saying the banker who embezzled your retirement is less icky than the the guy who stole your car.

Map of agricultural production changes in the nuclear winter following a minor nuclear exchange, posted for no particular reason.

(For a full-scale exchange...)

Also, for no particular reason, a map of Russia's population distribution, alongside a reminder of Russia's nuclear missile failure rate, particularly booster failures. And that nuclear warheads have been commonly lost disturbingly often even during peacetime, with at least seven weapons from four incidents lost in flight landing in a way that left them fully intact and easily reparable, just from the US alone. And that Ukraine is rich in nuclear engineers, including still some retirees who worked in the Soviet nuclear weapons programme.

There's also this myth that "if you just use a nuclear weapon, you automatically win the war". Nuclear weapons are immensely effective terror weapons, but their effectiveness on the front is a lot weaker than most people think. People on frontlines tend to be in trenches, bunkers, basements, armoured vehicles, etc, and can be surprisingly close to a tactical nuclear blast while still surviving. They're effective against hard points but struggle against a broad, diffuse front (aka, today's front, which is a sparsely populated, deep, amorphous zone, thanks to drones). Amortizing Russia's estimated budget for tactical nuclear weapons comes up with ~$15-25M per weapon (not counting the delivery system), so they're hardly a dime a dozen either.

IF, via terror bombing or threats of terror bombing, you can convince your enemy to surrender, then congratulations, you have won (enjoy your nuclear waste heap and restive population who wants nothing more than to kill you). If they do not, however, their only goal remaining will be to focus 100% on using their extensive nuclear waste supplies rich in plutonium, their extensive long-range strike weapon supplies, and their extensive metallurgical experience, to render your major cities to ash in the same way that you did theirs.

(I also just assume herein that Ukraine doesn't actually have a secret nuclear weapons programme already, which is certainly an assumption).

I look forward to the unplanned broadcast of Swan Lake.

Just a hypocrite. Like, honestly, most "green" advocates.

"reality has a well-known liberal bias"
As we both know, reality has no bias; but Colbert's comment is so delightfully self-affirming that narcissist progressives can't stop repeating it as fact.

Personally, I think any society needs both liberals and conservatives to be healthy. Lately, progressives seem to delight in actually killing conservatives. (shrug)

Liberals cheerfully explore the world, and while many fall off cliffs, get eaten by bears, and eat berries that kill them, the ones that survive make progress possible. Without them we wouldn't have found wonderful new places better than where we were, animals to domesticate, and delicious berries that are good for us. Confident, naive liberals die in droves but pull civilization forward.

OTOH, conservatives are insurance for survival. They DON'T explore where stronger, dangerous hostile tribes may lurk to be led back to our village to enslave/kill/eat us. They don't eat those lovely red berries because the blue berries our ancestors have eaten have kept us healthy and well for centuries and are good enough, thank you. They do not accept strangers because if someone was a decent good person, why would he have been driven out of HIS village and come here?

Which is more important, survival of our tribe, or advancement for our tribe?
Trick question: both. The tension between sides is fine, rational, and normal; both should be encouraged. In a healthy society, our educational system would put out both.

What's odious to me is certainty. (To be clear, I find the same sort of certainty among Evangelicals and it is equally if not more repellent. And I consider myself a person of some Faith, maybe that's why?)

I get it; as a liberal you *have* to be confident that whatever whacky bullshit you're following today MUST be right, it MUST be better, or you wouldn't chase after it like an OCD squirrel. What's ironic is that most of the values leftists insist are core humanist values - even humanism itself - was born in the hearts of deeply religious men like Luther, Erasmus, and Scottish Presbyters.

Nationalize the discussion all you like but the US government itself isn't secure if it depends on Starlink, Microsoft, Google, or Amazon, either. To assume assume that these each have a nationalist bias is one thing, to assert that it is automagically in line with the policies and goals of the US government (or the party in power, if you will) is provably absurd.

The internet has become a major strategic context (resource? arena? theater?). Any country that maintains its sovereignty MUST insist that they control their own destiny there. OTOH only China can really say that national/corporate interests align reliably; it takes a level of central planning and control that most* would say is odious to western democratic humanism. In the west, I believe it's farcical to think that a government could possibly keep up with megacorps in this realm; it just demands too much nimbleness. So we have governments which MUST depend on corporate actors to stay in the race.
It's a puzzle which is only being repeated in AI.

*honestly, I'm not even sure what passes for western democratic values any more. Free speech? Free thought? Free religion? Secret ballots? Informed electorate?

The use of that particular derogatory epithet does not reflect on the person to whom you applied it. It reflects back on you, the user, who it shows to be as uninformed as ignorant and pitiably out of touch with modern social mores.

We do not any longer make derogatory epithets for people out of obsolete and oppressive 19c theories of abilities, any more than we any longer use racial epithets derived from unscientific and oppressive accounts of human origins.

Normally I'd be skeptical of such a use of social media, but luckily Reddit has a famously-effective "no bots allowed" policy, so surely this cannot possibly go wrong.

To be clear: you can still totally argue about qualia, sentience, things of that nature. What is not up for debate is that they work through unimaginably-complex chains of logical reasoning on superpositions of conceptual states and engage in forward-planning and metacognition. These are just demonstrable facts.

There is no 'sentiment' in an LLM or internal state equivalent to 'thinking' anything.

Yes, there is.

No, it's called "Evidencing The Fact That It's A Widespread Shorthand" (in specific, among Wikipedians, where it's in official terminology as well), a widespread usage that was falsely claimed to not exist.

(I'll also take this opportunity to note: rage about the use of shorthand on "copyvio", but not a word about "algos")

Shorthand should be something that other people actually use

Okay Felicia.

TL/DR: "copyvio" is the Wikipedia-standard shorthand for copyright violation, used both in direct speech and in official templates. If a person says "copyvio", they've probably spent a lot of time hanging out at Wikipedia, where copyright violation is a frequent topic of discussion.

I'm sorry if shorthand offends your sensibilities. Should I spell out all shorthand for you? Maybe make sure I only use emdashes instead of "-" while I'm at it?

And when someone eventually asks me why slashdot stopped publishing, I'll explain it's because the normals all departed in the face of relentless leftist screeds & waves of bot posting.

I'll save this little gem for them and explain how an Indonesian pedophile with a bot legion cosplayed as an American.

Oh, also, as pointed out further downthread, any LLM with a training cutoff before the license change date is pretty much assured to be okay for use in a cleanroom implementation. Copyright holders cannot make retroactive copyright changes, and open source licenses generally explicitly grant rights in perpetuity anyway. The threat would be new code. But since the cleanroom side has never seen that new code (it was released after the training date), it remains untainted. And training cutoffs generally lag model releases by many months, so not only should all current models be in the clear, but most next-gen models as well (subject to cutoff date verification, and various kinds of nuance such as avoiding RAG, potential post-training contamination, etc - but there's easy ways to guarantee these aren't problems that are present)