So your idea is that Russia takes Estonia, and then just decides, "Meh, I'm good, that's enough"?

You understand that Estonia is part of Europe, right?

You understand that Estonia is part of the EU, right?

You understand that Estonia is part of the NATO, right?

Also, FWIW, the Russian population of Poland is the size of a large town or a very small city

Russia is more than happy to use "pro-Russian slavs" even if not ethnic Russians. And FYI, 20% of Estonia's population is ethnic Russians.

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".

Free open source models that cost a tiny fraction as much for the same capabilities?

I can understand your stance if you think that AI is just a fad. But for those who believe that AI is going to kick off a new industrial revolution, it's the difference between that new industrial revolution being in the hands of people like Musk and Altman (who are profiting off of having scraped the commons), vs. the public as a whole.

What open source is capable of, when it comes to AI models, depends entirely on how much compute it has available.

Prompt:

Hey ChatGPT, who is being reasonable in this argument?

---
Rei: " ... We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!), but they're all individuals each acting on their own.... "

Synonymous Homonym: "Drones are specifically the male bees. Most bees are not drones."

Rei: "That's not what I said. I said that the word "drone", as in a mindless unthinking being, is derived from drones, as in male bees. I did not say "all bees are drone bees"."

Synonymous Homonym: "What you actually said:

We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!)

Suggesting that the word "drone" means "mindless bee.""

Response:

Rei is being more reasonable here.

The key issue is whether Rei's original sentence implied that all bees are drones or that "drone" as a metaphor comes from bees.

Rei wrote:

"We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!)"

The parenthetical "literally, we took the very word!" naturally reads as:

The figurative word drone (meaning a repetitive, unthinking worker) comes from the bee term drone.
Therefore, our cultural association of bees with "dronelike" behavior is reflected in language.

That is a claim about etymology, not about bee taxonomy.

Synonymous Homonym's first correction:

"Drones are specifically the male bees. Most bees are not drones."

is technically true, but it doesn't actually address what Rei was saying. Rei wasn't claiming that all bees are male drones.

Then Synonymous Homonym shifts to:

"Suggesting that the word 'drone' means 'mindless bee.'"

This doesn't accurately paraphrase Rei either. Rei never said the word means "mindless bee." The sentence only suggests that the metaphorical sense of "drone" is derived from the bee term.

If I were judging the exchange, I'd say:

Synonymous Homonym's factual statement is correct: drones are male bees.
But it's responding to a claim Rei didn't make, making it a misreading.
Rei's clarification directly matches the ordinary reading of the original sentence.

So the stronger interpretation is that Synonymous Homonym misunderstood the original remark, and Rei's correction is justified.

Or to put it more simply: you're attacking a straw man (a claim I never made) because you cannot defend your actual scientifically inaccurate comments about bees having half-hour memories.

You are confusing "forgetting" with "disruption".

I am not.

Your entire argument was that bees have short-term memories. The example you cited demonstrates precisely the opposite - that bee memory is if anything too durable>/i>, such that bees will refuse won't even bother searching for their hive if it has been moved, that they always go back to the spot where they remember it being last.

However, what you are choosing to ignore is that, once a bee has been accepted into a different hive, it becomes part of that hive

That's like claiming that if you move to a different city, you've "forgotten" where you used to live.

When a bee, due to a navigation error or its previous hive being gone, enters a different hive (drifting), it absorbs the pheromones of the new hive. It is now chemically marked as belonging to that hive. Chemicals are communication to bees, just as much as vocal commands are to you. Bees do not learn all of the other bees in their hive, they don't have some sort of rolodex. If you smell like hive A, you're allowed into hive A. If you smell like hive B, you're allowed into hive B. Bees don't particularly "care" which hive they're in; they have their own individual motives and drives, which simply involve being in "a" hive. Once they're marked as belonging to hive B, they can no longer enter hive A (at least not safely).

Note in the above what has nothing to do with any of this? Memory. It's just about smell. Memory is about where the hive can be found after foraging (which is also about memory) - and it remains, even after drifting (they'll continue to return to the same spot - again, even if the new hive is moved). Smell is about which hive you can enter. Or for a summary version:

1) A bee leaves the hive to go foraging

2) It remembers where the best spot to visit is (usually from having gone there before, but occasionally from having seen a waggle dance) and what flowers (shapes, smells, sizes, etc) will be yielding best there at what times of day, and what areas to NOT go to, where there may be threats. This information persists for days, weeks, or even the bee's entire life. It can target an area to an accuracy of a couple hundred meters, and then begins a search.

3) When done, it returns back to where it remembers that the hive should be (this memory is highly persistent, and can only be reset by an orientation flight.

4) The bee starts by using the sun and broad navigational features as with outbound flights to get to within a couple hundred to a few dozen meters (the "visual catchment area"), then gradually switches to small-scale features and searching. This is all based on memory.

5) For the final approach, the bee relies on a mix of sight (remembered), sound (generic), and smell. The latter is not a learned trait, it's "whatever you happen to smell like". While it's usually described as recognizing the smell of their sisters, that's not exactly right. The actual underlying mechanism not so much learning what something does smell like as it being unable to detect what they do smell like

The mechanism the same as how humans become unable to notice their own body odour or perfume: sensory adaptation. Because they're constantly smelling themselves, their brain learns to tune out their own smell. However, it doesn't tune out the smells of others. When they return to their own hive, the scent is something that they're adapted to tune out. But when they arrive at a different hive, they're hit with a scent that they're not adapted to, and that they can detect.

If you want to put it in human terms, the underlying mechanism is "this hive thinks you're stinky, that one doesn't smell you because you've all been around each other for so long".

If you want to call sensory adaptation "forgetting", then you're going to need to call human sensory adaptation "forgetting" as well. And again, none of this has anything to do with actual memory tasks, such as navigation and how to find the best flowers. Bee memory is exceptional with them.

Who said the word "small"?

(My personal hot take is that, both for copyright reasons ("Purpose and Character of the Use", aka for-profit, is a critical factor in determining copyright violation, such as from scraping), and general moral reciprocity argument (closed commercial models extracts profit from the commons without giving back), closed source trainers should fundamentally be required to give back to the commons in some meaningful way)

... some public ownership of compute, to offer out for grants to Open Source development, so that the commons can better keep up with the closed source providers?

I'm sorry that the genitals of people you neither know nor are dating bother you so much, dude.

Do you also spend this much time thinking about the genitals of children, like so many of your ilk?