There actually are ways to poll people in repressive regimes. A classic one goes like this: instead of saying "Do you support President Putin?", you give them a list of a bunch of world leaders - say, Putin, Trump, Modi, Erdogan, and Macron - and ask, "How many of these leaders do you support?" And then you give the next person a different set of leaders - say, Putin, Xi, Starmer, Khamenei, and Merz - and again ask, "How many of these leaders do you support?" You can then statistically disentangle the level of support for Putin, without any individual having to ever say whether they support Putin or not.

Given what Ukraine is managing to get past Russian air defences, do you think Putin is going to nuke Europe and risk French nukes hitting Moscow and Petrograd?

That's not how this works; Russia comes at more powerful opponents sideways, with incrementalism, division, and hybrid warfare. They try to get pro-Russian candidates elected so that they can veto collective action. They have "accidents", such as missiles flying into your airspace, to probe how you'll react, and if the reaction is insufficient, probing ops can go further, or become normalized so that you get used to it and then don't freak out when they go a bit further the next time. They famously support "pro-Russian rebels" (quotation marks definitely demanded) in countries to try to break off chunks, and encourage secession movements. Russia prefers to work piecemeal, tearing apart countries by chunks, and only launching large-scale invasions when they think (rightly or wrongly) that they can get away with it.

Do you honestly think that France would fire nukes at Moscow - and thus face nukes raining down on Paris - if quote-unquote "Russian Separatists" with suspiciously good arms and military training took a chunk of one of the Baltics or Poland? Of course they won't, and Russia knows that. And then, "Oh, we're just sending aid to the oppressed people in the separatist regions!" "Oh, the separatist regions have requested help from us, we're sending advisors!" "Oh no, the separatist regions were "attacked" by their oppressive government, we must launch a counterattack in response!"

This is hybrid warfare. Nobody fires nukes in response to hybrid warfare. Meanwhile, Russia gets incrementally more powerful with each region it captures. A couple decades ago Chechens were bloodying the Russian army. Now they're dying on behalf of the Russian army in Ukraine. Everywhere they take represents human, industrial, and mineral resources. People are constantly propagandized to and kept in a state of poverty from which only service to the Russian state can rescue them.

Yeah, let's feed the Ukrainians into the Russian maw. Want to guess how the Ukrainians feel about that?

Why would you have to "guess" when there's polling? Ukrainians are far less interested in conceding their lands and people to Russia than the west is, in polling.

However, Europe doesn't even have a usable navy to put to sea.

Huh?

The US navy some things it's very good at: nuclear powered carriers, nuclear powered submarines, large surface combatants, and support ships. It sucks at smaller ships (frigates, corvettes) - it's been one project disaster after the next. Europe, by contrast, excels in frigates and corvettes. The US is currently trying to copy the European FREMM as the Constellation class, and it's somehow managing to even screw that up. It's one of the reasons that the US really wanted Europe involved in escort operations in the Persian Gulf - you don't escort a tanker with an aircraft carrier.

With submarines, the US doesn't bother with non-nuclear submarines. That was more defensible in the past, and there's still long distance power projection advantages, but there have been major leaps in AIP in recent decades. Non-nuclear submarines are now far more capable than they used to be. European AIP subs are quieter and much cheaper than US nuclear subs.

Europe also has a strong commercial shipbuilding industry. The US's commercial shipbuilding industry is in a terrible state. The net result of this is that it's often proven difficult for the US to scale up production or adapt to new designs. Europe is more flexabile in its capabilities in this regard.

None of this is to demean the US's unambiguously impressive capabilities in certain naval fields. But to call European navies unusable is... silly?

The economy overall does better if you don't have rent-seeking leachers - if people can use the tools that empower their companies to produce goods and services cheaply and freely.

"Every EV owner I talk to tells me their car is great and how pleasant the ownership experience is; clearly they're all in an organized conspiracy to lie" is.... certainly quite the take you have there.

Doesn't hurt, it's just disappointing that people keep falling for what seem to me such obvious scams. People are so desperate for the "Plucky Inventor Overturns An Industry's Premises" narrative.

Honestly, I somewhat suspect that most of the people involved in this fraud didn't actually know it's a fraud, or at least didn't actually know the full extent of it. You have a struggling electric motorcycle maker with what seems like genuinely decent electric motorbike, who thinks that if they can get a battery that nobody else has for their bikes it'll save their company, and seemingly only slowly starts to realize that it's not what they thought it was. You have a startup cell manufacturer who is approached by companies making the materials to include in their cells. Even at the coating manufacturer, which seems to have been ground zero for the fraud, there were probably plenty of employees in the dark about what was going on, while those who knew what were going on probably thought they were going to "fake it until they make it".

And reading comprehension is not your strong suit.

My point was that the other part of your comment, "They just regurgitate random stuff they found on the Internet", is clearly false.

"Lots" and "one that is widely accepted" are not the same thing at all, which is my point. There's no point in discussing intelligence without first nailing down which definition the interlocutors are using.

Also, nearly all of the definitions are extremely fuzzy.

Indeed.

The claim you made was not about whether machines can currently perform like a brain, nor about complexity. The claim you made is that the human brain cannot be simulated by a Turing machine, which is a much, much stronger claim.

So I repeat, why do you think that?

38 of the 50 US states are "one-party consent" states, which means that as long as one person present (e.g. the person wearing the glasses) is aware of the recording, it's legal. Roughly half of countries around the world either allow any party to a conversation to record it without telling the rest, or don't have any restrictions at all.

Since there's no clear definition of what "intelligent" means, much less one that is widely accepted, that's a pointless argument.

You clearly have not used them much. Try using an LLM (one of the top commercial models, e.g. Claude Opus 4.7) to debug code that has never been on the Internet. I don't think anyone knows what "intelligent" means, so arguing that point is a waste of time, but LLMs clearly can observe results, reason about them, form hypotheses, devise ways to test those hypotheses, perform the tests, evaluate and reason about the results, etc.

My guess is that the face blurring happens on the car, before the data is even uploaded to Waymo, as a way to protect the privacy of random passersby from Waymo and Waymo employees. They likely never had possession of imagery with unblurred exterior faces, so there was no way they could provide it.

There's no way that Waymo is just defying a court order.

Why do you think that?