What about them? Suppose China sends 100,000 troops to Ukraine? How does that expand the conflict in any way?

This is the problem with people just buying this Russian line about America “escalating” the conflict. Increasing the scale or intensity of the conflict in Ukraine has zero bearing on its scope. China entering the war doesn’t force America, or any other NATO country, to suddenly become involved.

It doesn’t matter if China sends a million troops. Ten million. At the end of the day the conflict is still between Ukraine, Russia, and Russia’s co-beligerants. Even if Ukraine somehow ended up invading China, this still doesn’t directly involvre NATO in the war.

The only thing that can possibly involve NATO is either NATO choosing to get directly involved, or some opposing party directly attacking NATO. And none of those opposing parties have anything to gain by attacking NATO. So why would they?

What fucking idiot is complaining? Arcane is amazing. I hope they keep throwing money at that studio forever.

Of course not. Because he’s like the least manly person ever by any normal definition. Which is exactly why he’s so fucking insecure about it.

This is also why his followers have to constantly reframe him as some sort of paragon of manliness (see Ben Garrison’s absolutely ludicrous hagiography, for example), because they know, intuitively, that he in no way measures up to their supposed ideals of what manliness is and that bothers them a lot.

Trump has this really weird attitude to the military. He decries war because it’s wasteful (and because this stance plays well to a US that is going through one of its regular isolationist phases), but he also seems have a deep seated insecurity about the military. Like, it’s really obvious that military personnel make him feel less manly, so he has to constantly flex on them by shitting on their traditions and attacking their leadership, but also by engaging in big flashy military actions like missile strikes and dropping “the biggest non-nuclear weapon in existence.”

He hates war but loves doing war stuff. He hates the military but loves proving that he’s better than them by any metric possible. The whole thing is fucked up in a really pathological way that makes me think the whole “private bone-spurs” thing really, really gets to him.

For any of this to lead to “world war” one of two things has to happen:

1. The US directly enters the war on the side of Ukraine - If this didn’t happen at any point in the last two years, it’s not suddenly going to happen now. And it’s not more likely to happen because the US “provokes” Russia, so it’s irrelevant anyway.

2. Russia directly attacks a NATO country - Why would Russia ever do this? They can’t even defeat a NATO aligned independent nation. How the fuck would they ever have a hope in hell of defeating all of NATO? In what possible way would they benefit from escalating the war?

Russia claiming that American “provocations” will lead to world war is meaningless because the reality is that for them to be “provoked” into starting a war they would have to be provoked into voluntarily deleting their entire country.

No matter how badly this hypothetical world war 3 goes for anyone else, even if - no, especially if - it becomes a total nuclear war, the one guarantee is that Russia loses. And they lose hard. Putin’s best case scenario here is great he Hitler’s himself in a bunker in a few years and that’s if he’s lucky.

So unless Putin and every single person in his orbit have joined a suicide cult and are already cooking up a big old bowl of spicy Kool-Aid, there is no reason whatsoever to take these claims seriously.

Russia has been claiming that they are functionally at war with all of NATO for the last two years. Did that result in all out nuclear war?

If not, why would this be any different?

See, government regulations are just red tape and inefficiency. It’s much better if you have to constantly risk death for the sake of more corporate profits.

You honestly think that every single person around Putin is ready to burn in nuclear fire for his sake?

A lot of the game is built around guilds and player to player interactions.

For a while that was true. But that entire design direction has basically been abandoned. Clans are more or less a vestigial organ at this point. Literally the only interaction I have ever had with a member of my clan was when I asked for an invite.

The core story content is single player only. The rest is multiplayer, but unlike Destiny there’s nothing that requires you to form your own group outside of the game, and all the gameplay is designed in such a way that you really don’t need to communicate. You can basically just turn on public matchmaking and get a bunch of humans who might as well be bots for all you’ll have to actually interact with them.

You can play all the content solo if you want to, but the difficulty might get a bit much, especially starting out (there are also certain game modes / mission types that really lean on having a full group).

If you’re a Destiny refugee, the most obvious answer is Warframe, which just keeps on getting better and better.

What benefit does Russia get from escalating to nuclear weapons?

Putin wants to be alive, and have a country to be in charge of. Ukrainian aggression forcing a peace that’s more favorable to them doesn’t cost him either of those things. Deploying nuclear weapons against NATO does.

It’s not about whether or not Putin is willing to use nuclear weapons in the abstract. It’s about whether he would actually derive any benefit from doing so.

That’s meaningless. Russia can call it an act of war all they want, it doesn’t actually do anything. The only way for the US to get “drawn into” the war is for Russia to directly attack a NATO country, which there is literally zero chance of Russia doing, because if they can’t win a war against a single country being funded and supplied by NATO, how the fuck would they ever have a chance to prevail against the real thing?

You can find fringe cases of anything. That’s why they’re fringe. I refuse to constantly add ten pages of fucking legal disclaimers to every comment I make just to account for the possibility that one idiot tweeted something one time to their ten followers.

Not even remotely, and it’s really important to understand a) why there is a difference, and b) why that difference matters, or else you are going to hoover up every bit of propoganda these desperate conmen feed you.

People are not automated systems, and automated systems are not people.

Something that people are generally pretty good at is understanding that a process has failed, even if we can’t understand how it has failed. As the adage goes “I don’t need to be a helicopter pilot to see one stuck in a tree and immediately conclude that someone fucked up.”

LLMs can’t do that. A human and an LLM will both cheerfully produce the wrong answer to “How many Rs in Strawberry.” But a human, even one who knows nothing about cooking, will generally suspect that something might be up when asked to put glue on pizza. That’s because the human is capable of two things the LLM isn’t; reasoning, and context. The human can use their reasoning to draw upon the context provided by their real life experience and deduce that “Glue is not food, and I’ve never previously heard of it being used in food. So something here seems amiss.”

That’s the first key difference. The second is in how these systems are deployed. You see the conmen trying to sell us all on their “AI” solutions will use exactly the kind of reasoning that you bought - “Hey, humans fuck up too, it’s OK” - in order to convince us that these AI systems can take the place of human beings. But in the process that requires us to place an automated system in the position of a human system.

There’s a reason why we don’t do that.

When we use automation well, it’s because we use it for tasks where the error rate on the automated system can be reduced to something far, far lower than that of a well trained human. We don’t expect an elevator to just have a brain fart and take us to the wrong floor every now and then. We don’t expect that our emails will sometimes be sent to a completely different address to the one we typed in. We don’t expect that there’s a one in five chance that our credit card will be billed a different about to what was shown on the machine. None of those systems would ever have seen widespread adoption if they had a standard error rate of even 5%, or 1%.

Car manufacturing is something that can be heavily automated, because many of the procedures are simple, repeatable, and controllable. The last part is especially important. If you move all the robots in a GM plant to new spots they will instantly fail. If you move the u humans to new spots, they’ll be quite annoyed, but perfectly capable of moving themselves back to the correct places. Yet despite how automatable car manufacturing is, it still employs a LOT of humans, because so many of those tasks do not automate sufficiently well.

And at the end of the day, a fucked up car is just a fucked up car. Healthcare uses a lot less automation than car manufacturing. That’s not because healthcare companies are stupid. Healthcare is one of the largest industries in North America. They will gladly take any automation they can get. I know this because my line of work involves healthcare companies regularly asking me for automotion. But they also have a very, very low threshold for failure. If one of our systems fails even one time they will demand a full investigation of the failure.

This is because automated systems, when they are employed, have to be load bearing. They have to be something reliable enough that people can stop thinking about it, even though that same level of reliability isn’t demanded from the human components of these systems.

This is largely because, generally speaking, humans have much more ability to recognize and correct the failures of other humans. Medical facilities organise themselves around multiple layers of trust and accountability. One of the demands we get most is for more tools to give oversight into what the humans in the system are doing. But that’s because a human is well equipped to recognize when another human is in a failure state. A human can spot that another human came into work hungover. A human can build a context for which of their fellow humans are reliable and which aren’t. Human systems are largely self-healing. High risk work is doled out to high reliability humans. Low reliability humans have their work checked more often.

But it’s very hard for a human to build context for how reliable an automated system is. This is because the workings of that system are opaque; they do not have the context to understand why the system fails when it fails. In fact, when presented with an automated system that sometimes fails, the way most humans will react its to treat the system as if it always fails. If a button fails to activate on the first press one or two times, you will come back to that same facility a year later to find that it has become common practice for every staff member to press the button five times in a row, because they’ve all been told that sometimes it fails on the first press.

When presented with an unreliable automated system, humans will choose to use a human instead, because they have assessed that they can better determine when the human has failed and what to do about it.

And, paradoxically, because we have such a low tolerance for failure in automated systems, when presented with an automated system that will be taking on the work of a human, humans naturally expect that system to be more or less perfect. They expect it to meet the threshold that we tend to set for automated systems. So they don’t check its work, even when when told to.

The lie that LLMs fuck up in the same way that humans do is used to get a foot in the door, to sell LLM driven systems as a replacement for human labour. But as soon as that replacement is actually being sold, the lie goes away, replaced by a different lie (often a lie by omission); that this will be as reliable as every other automated system you use. Or, at the very least, that “It will be more reliable than a human.” The sellers say this meaning, say, 5% more reliable (in reality the actual failure rate of humans in these tasks is often much, much lower than that of LLMs, especially when you account for false positives which are usually ignored whenever someone touts numbers saying that an LLM did a job better than a human). But the people using the system naturally assume it means “More reliable in the way you expect automated systems to be reliable.”

All of this creates a massive possibility for real, meaningful hazard. And all of this is before you even get into the specific ways in which LLMs fuck up, and how those fucks up are much more difficult to correct or control for. But thats a whole separate rant.

For the record the “change” from that deal would be, measured to any reasonable degree of accuracy, exactly one googol.

It’s really really hard to explain how numbers that big work.

Basically if you had ten trillion dollars, and you spent one single cent, you would have spent a greater proportion of your wealth than that fine would be as a proportion of one googol dollars.

And just to really put all that in perspective, let’s talk about how big that fine actually is.

It’s frequently said that it’s more than the entire world’s GDP, but that’s not even close. Imagine if every single planet (not “habitable planet”, just “planet”) in our galaxy - all eight trillion of them - was terraformed to support life. Imagine if all of them had a population and economy like Earth. The entire galaxy’s GDP wouldn’t be enough.

In fact, a hundred of those galaxies wouldn’t be enough. A thousand wouldn’t be enough. A hundred thousand wouldn’t be enough. It would take 20 million of those galaxies to pay that fine (at the time of reporting; by now its more galaxies than exist in all the known universe, because it doubles every day).

And all of that would still be a rounding error to a rounding error against one googol.

LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Do what you need to do to take care of yourself. “First, do no harm” applies to you as much as to anyone else.

You didn’t fail us.

We failed you.

Ford: Yes, but what about all these bribes?

Why? No one ever accused chatbots of always being wrong. In fact, it would be actually be better if they were. The biggest problem with LLMs is that they’re right just often enough that its hard to catch when they’re wrong.