You gave Ukraine security guarantees in exchange for Ukraine not keeping the nuclear weapons that were on its soil after the breakup of the USSR. There's an argument that the real mistake the US (and the UK and France) made was not getting involved in 2014 when Russia decided to unilaterally revoke Stalin's transfer of the Crimea to the Ukraine. The resulting lesson, which is also the lesson that the current war in Iran teaches, is that a state should do all it can to acquire nuclear weapons and then not give them up under any circumstances.

It's well documented that on entering a theme park most people turn right, but that is consistent with this research: turning right on entering a room means that you walk anticlockwise around it.

"Most of" allows exceptions. More than two thirds of EU residents live in countries which mandate SIM registration, and of the larger non-EU European countries Russia and Turkey do; the UK and Ukraine don't; without doing a full calculation, I suspect that the two thirds threshold is met for the whole of geographic Europe too.

I was responding to a claim that the entire existence of Europe is in danger, not that Russia might invade Estonia next. (Also, FWIW, the Russian population of Poland is the size of a large town or a very small city).

Europe just does not want to realize it yet, but their entire existence is in danger right now

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? Europe's at war, sure, but talk of an existential threat needs some serious justification.

In normal times, Iran's attacks on European nations would muster an article 5 reprisal

What attacks on European nations? Cyprus isn't a NATO member; if you're counting Turkey as European then it would have to invoke Article 5. Has it? And the fact that all three or four missiles were shot down with the aid of NATO allies would suggest that the spirit of joint self-defence is satisfied. For every member state to send a missile back would be disproportionate escalation.

shower beforehand

If the models aren't telling you to take the dirty underwear off before the shower and put the clean underwear on after it, maybe think about changing models earlier than scheduled.

The US government does, but they've already exercised the upper limits of punishment they can exert.

No it hasn't. The order imposes licence requirements on US companies for exporting or transferring goods to NSO Group, but it doesn't prohibit US companies from buying from NSO Group, nor does it target individuals. If the US government can prohibit all US companies from doing any business with UN special rapporteurs (Francesca Albanese) or Brazilian judges (Alexandre de Moraes - sanction now lifted), to the extent that they can't have a Visa or Mastercard nor a Gmail account, it can do the same to the C-suite of NSO Group.

A power company cares about a lot more than a single consumer

According to TFS the problem isn't a single consumer: it's four classes of consumer, of which data centres is one.

Absolute black-and-white positions like that are nearly always flawed because the world isn't perfectly simple. To take one straightforward example, one of my job responsibilities is maintaining a software installation on a server owned by one of my employer's clients. It would be a breach of contract to share the credentials which I use to access that server with anyone else: they're "my" credentials rather than the company's. If the company were to use a keyboard logger to obtain the passwords then it would be my reputation which suffers.

The point was that "republic" simply means "not a monarchy". The state is a "public thing/matter", not a private concern.

The grid has been forced to change faster than the operator would have liked it to in many places, which is a good thing.

In the main, although the Spanish national blackout just over a year ago suggests that maybe it changed too fast. (Hard to use a stronger word than "maybe" because my understanding is that the report on the causes didn't really say anything).

We are a republic for this reason.

No, you are a republic because your founding fathers, probably ascribing James III more power than he really had as a post-Glorious Revolution monarch, decided that head of state should not be a hereditary position.

Whitespace is a HUMAN affordance for a HUMAN audience. If you think it looks kinda okay, that's all that's needed.

There's a bit more to it than that: consistent whitespace means that version control diffs contain relevant changes and you don't need to filter out the changes that just remove some spaces from the end of a line. This is also really a human affordance, but while there are humans in the loop either approving changes or needing to understand when something changed, it's a valuable one. And there's a general principle here which is directly relevant to LLM-generated code, which is that until LLMs have minimising the diffs as part of their goals they're going to produce diffs which take a lot of effort for humans to review.

No, the law of large numbers says that if you take lots of samples then the sample average will be very close to the underlying expected value, but it doesn't say that the underlying expected value of a binary valued random variable must be 0.5. To take a simple, albeit obviously pessimising, example, if we take two truly random uniform bit generators then we can combine them with bitwise AND to get a truly random bit generator with expected value 0.25.

Truly random doesn't necessarily imply a uniform distribution.