Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Folds!

The Chinese are spending a lot less than the US; and are getting essentially the same results, if not better. Compared to the US they also have a lot more money to put into it, if they should want to. There's nothing unreasonable about that.

The difference between the Chinese state driven approach and the US private driven approach, like in any other area, is twofold. First, the Chinese actually have a plan, and the plan is made by an administration where competence and results are the main driver of careers. None of this applies to the US. Second, within the limited semiconductor supply available, the prices the US is paying inflate to suck up all available funding, however much of it should become available. The inflating part of this does not apply to China, and this is a major part of them spending less than the US. But the inflation part applying to the US, that is indeed a good example of the adaptability of the private model. Expect energy prices to adapt next.

And like drinky already drew attention to in his post - none of the US AI companies and endeavours are profitable. The difference between spending and revenue is 100-fold. And there's no way to profitability anywhere in sight. Spending is only going up with no limits, while revenue is hard limited by competition from the labour the AI is hoping to replace. As of now, even the highest paying customers are losing AI companies money on every query.

Who exactly is this mythical customer who is not aware of Autodesk products? In any of the fields where they are present, it is impossible to not know of them.

And the idea that a company with thousands of seats can shift tools relatively easily is such a wild statement that I don't know whether I should laugh or cry at it. The bigger a company is, the more difficult it is for it to change anything about how it does anything. If it were not that inertia and corporate culture are paralyzing, they will be done in by the fact that by changing tools they pretty much sever every business connection they have. It's not going to happen.

The Chinese are spending much less on it, and on top of that, they have a lot more to spend. It has been debated whether it was the US/SU arms race that broke the SU's back, but here we almost certainly have one that will break the US's back. The US has basically put their whole economy all in on the one chip that is AI. Even if the bubble does not pop, but will deflate slowly, none of the money invested into it will ever come back.

They'll replace the marketers with AI slop. Nothing of value lost, nothing gained. Nobody ever bought Autodesk because of sales and marketing. Ther products are bought because they are industry standard, and/or the best tool for the job. Might as well sack all of these people, and not a single sale lost.

They will deal with it as they have done so far: if the service is better than the ones that came before, they sign up.

Lol no. Nobody like that will ever get to run the country. Remember what Biden had to promise his donors to get the money flowing: nothing will fundamentally change. This is the promise and job description of every president in a country that cannot elect anything but 80 year old guys with rotting brains any more. The same as was the end of the Soviet Union.

To generalize on the very good read that is Chomsky's "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream", one cannot get ahead in a system if your values to not match those of the system. It follows from that that anyone who gets to run the system best represents the values of the system. By now to get there you need to have had marinated 60 years in the system, and served it with a proven track record.

By now both parties are openly hostile to everyone who takes a step off the party line. Democrats are looking for a democrat Joe Rogan. Well they had one, but they shunned him and drove him away. Republicans are cancelling Tucker Carlson because he asks too many questions... It's either groupthink or gtfo. Well it's that groupthink that got America to where it is now, and it's not going to be what will get it out of it. Things will get a lot worse before they get better again.

Is this where "to be on the chopping block" comes from? :)

It is also our experience that huge ERP deployments almost never come to fruitition. The companies hired to make them happen are more interested in milking the cash cow than getting the job done. Getting rid of that incentive is probably the most important thing one can do there.

On top of that, the customer company is going to ask for an endless amount of customization to be made to the ERP to suit their processes, and these end up exactly as you describe the in-house app. Except worse, because you are basically juggling things around on top of an immutable base, stuck between a rock and a hard place. The right way to do it is to change the processes to suit the ERP, but it's almost unfathomable that any big company would undertake such a thing, as it amounts to basically rebuilding the whole company from ground up.

Code quality and software architecture are certainly issues to take care of, but there is no reason one company should fail to build what others have succeeded to do. You will certainly not accomplish this with the run-of-the-mill latest-js-framework hipsters, you will want old guard java guys with decades of experience. In no way am I saying it's easy, it's still likely to fail, but it's still possible, and more likely to succeed than bringing in ERP consultants to do it.

What advances the national interests of a country is good for that country. If that comes at the expense of another country, it is bad for that country.

Well can simplify and say that on the international stage, 'good' is whatever is good for whoever is doing it. The highest authority on what is good, unless we go into religion, is probably a UN security council veto, and these are 100% based on national interest. So if that good involves killing, well it sucks, but it is what it is. When I start killing people, there will be an authority to step in. When a country starts killing people, there's no authority to step in, and what we get instead is mostly speeches and posturing.

US forever wars killed 5M people in the Middle East. The US-supported genocide in Gaza has cost about 74K people so far by Israeli numbers, which is a little below 4% of the population. With our experience of how these numbers work, we can expect the actual numbers to be 4-8 times higher, possibly even more, as the population/build-up density is unprecedented. Do we, the Western society, condemn these things as bad? Do we pause to think and realize that this is the worst track record any counrty has this cenutury, therefore the US must be the bad guy? Not really, no, we are more about jailing protestors, and calling these a good thing. And when asked about why these things are good, we stumble around and grasp for soundbites, and when pressed further maybe mumble something about national interest.

So yes, on principle usually it's not difficult to distinguish. On principle everyone agrees that killing people is wrong. But in practice, we live in societies where whe assume our guys are the good guys, and never really think about it, nor look into it. What is good is being told us by the politicians and the news, and we go 'I guess so', shrug, and move on with our lives. And when someone comes and says that your country is doing bad things, it's highly likely that we run to the defence.

For Russia, attacking e.g. Ukraine is 100% good and in national interest. It's not in Ukrainian national interest, but at least in the beginning the US thought it was in US national interest. The fact that we as the Western society don't understand the how and why of that is the result of the same politicians and news telling us what is good. In the West we have a need to debate policy based on values, but pretty much everything a nation does is still based on interest. The disconnect between these two creates for a rather schizophrenic public discourse, where speaking the truth about things is considered a gaffe, where any argument to support a policy is a parallel construction, and wishful thinking, reality denial and delusions abound.

As for Iran, I haven't looked into it too much. But the idea to bring back a shah... Well the last time that happened was when the prime minister decided to nationalize the oil from the British, so the CIA put up the shah instead, the shah fucked up and the Islamic Revolution happened. To put it lightly, the US has disliked Iran ever since. In that context I am bound to assume that while there's probably legitimate concerns for the populace, as usual there's also going to be the hairy hand of NED or some other CIA branch fanning the flames there. But since a regime change in Iran is highly likely to be in US national interests, making sure it does not happen is highly likely in Iranian national interests.

Maybe they built it in-house - there's a chance then. Or if they went to SAP or the likes, they better have had customized their processes to the ERP, not the other way round, because that would be the shortcut to clusterfuck and a bottomless pit to throw money in without ever getting out of pre-alpha.

Or, considering the times we are in, maybe they had someone vibe code everything with an AI backend. That would be fun to watch.

I'll give you that misread, I'm tired and have a lot on my hands right now.

How about the rest of it though...

Where I come from, and the US used to come from a similar place, is the idea that to best your opponent you have to understand him and know him well. You need to be able to admit the strengths of the enemy. Without any of this you are at best shooting in dark. To bring in the classics:

A big part of the current twilight of the US Empire is a complete disregard for knowing anything about the enemy. Jump in guns blazing through any door and expect to win on vibes Rambo-style. Well it's not working out very well... China is taking over the World and the US is falling back on Monroe doctrine. I mean the Venezuela ordeal shows that the US knows at least something about it's predicament... The general sentiment in air still seems to be reality denial, of which calling someone a foreign agent for bearing harsh news would be a good example of.

Multiple problems with this argument.

Tanks get destroyed by powerful purpose built weapons. News at 11. But which tanks are doing better in Ukraine? US tanks, or Russian ones? Russian ones are doing better. Ukrainians rarely even dare to show up on the front line in an Abrams. So by definition Russian tanks are better.

Second, in WWII a single German tank could take on four Soviet tanks and expect to come out on top. Better in every battlefield measurable way. But the soviet tanks were cheap, simple, and plentyful, and they won the war. So turns out they were still better by the ultimate measuring stick.

Third, If you say Russian tanks were not being able to be destroyed by Javelins, the supposed US anti-tank infantry wonder weapon, I say this speaks very highly of Russian tanks indeed.

As to the smaller ponts, it's not like US can build it's tanks witout foreign components. Chips and rare earths from China... Russia is at least dependent on their allies for their supplies, unlike the US, which seems to be dependent on their enemies... Pot, kettle, but mostly, wtf.

Convicts, I hear, got mostly all spent in Bakhmut. But as to the body throwing problem.. Finding numbers on Ukrainian casualties is surprise surprise much more difficult than Russian ones, but they seem to be losing about 2/3 what Russia is losing. A rule of thumb for the attacking side is you need 3 times more of everything, so manpower-wise, Russia is doing twice as good as expected. Before the war Russia had about 4 times bigger a recruitment pool, and outgunned and still does Ukraine about six times. By now Ukraine is deflated by 25% the population. So the math game here is completely out of Ukraines favour. Even if you we should call what Russia is doing throwing bodies at the wall, at this rate, they are still going to win doing it. And if they do win, ultimately, this is going to have been the best approach.

Whatever is going on in Venezuela, and I don't know what kind or of which origin the communication links there are, the capabilities of US to jam signals there does not say a word about the capabilities of Russia to jam signals anywhere else. But if you want to do some failure analysis on Venezuela, until we have a clearer picture of how the Maduro capture was pulled off, my first bet is on the incompetence and general panic of the Venezuelan Army, with a side note of possible sell out. To put it in a more general sense, the US has never had any trouble beating up small third world armies. It's the big ones in second one we should be worried about.

Now as to actively tracking signals in order to jam flexible transmissions, I don't know what you mean by that. One does not jam transmitters. One jams receivers. Noise only exists on the receiver. There is no such thing as jamming transmitters. Triangulation of transmitters is of course an important topic, but that's not part of the jamming tech stack. And you do that to set artillery targets and such, not to fine tune your jamming.

Local situations and fequency requirements... The enemy is in an area, using frequencies we have known about for years. That's all there is. For these known frequencies we have developed a jamming platform, which needs to be both close enough to jam the area, and far away to have some hope of being safe. You absolutely want to use the highest power you can cram into a moving platform and cover a large area so that you can stay far behind the front line, while still jamming the operational depth of whatever you are targeting. Jamming is basically an area denial weapon for radio transmission, there's zero reason to try to do it in a more limited way, other than a specops mission I suppose. Even if you have a single target, you push out enough power to jam it, and any collateral damage to enemy transmissions is an added bonus to that.

Even if Russian jamming takes out their own comms, they will not bat an eye about it if needed. For the Russians, existing forever in a state of balance between order and bardak, this is just another day. To risk sounding cliche, they are born into chaos, molded by it.

War is chaos, and they embrace it on the doctrine level. People are expected to manage and succeed in chaos, and those that do, get ranked up and get to carry the mission. Failing units are left to their own devices, and succeeding ones get the support lined up behind them, and counterattack, and break through. Nato doctrine is the complete opposite, emphasizing plugging any developing holes and reinforcing underperforming sections of the frontline. One of these doctrines has initiative, the other one is just running around putting fires out. And Nato has chosen their approach here... poorly, sadly.

Oh they absolutely can have the best. Not always, and usually, not at scale. But within a population of 150 million you can always find a few minds to be the best at anything, if you give them the support required. Where Russia is usually bottlenecked is in their ability to mass produce the inventions of these minds. But when the push comes to shove, they have the ability to put the thumb down on a priority area and make it happen, the wider bardak notwithstanding.