Putin has to in order to distract from how desperately weak he is becoming, he has to know the instability coming in internal politics in Russia is impossible to predict like a crack spreading across glass and the only thing that can be said with confidence is that he will be at the heart of the shattering when it happens.
hell yeah, thank you!
I agree but I don’t think Trump’s body will hold out that long before collapsing from being treated like the dumpster it is.
Yes but today it is Palestinians, tomorrow it is us.
There is no correct amount to think about or talk about a genocide while it is unfolding, it is relevant to every single one of us in every single moment.
This is social media! Do you mean corporate social media or social media focused on using real names?
Exactly, centrist liberals forced us to this point by ignoring the boomerang of colonial violence headed straight for our faces AND the desperate attempts by the left to point it out.
This is going to hurt.
I think the better comparison is when Europeans brought horses to Turtle Island and got utterly schooled on how to truly use a horse in war by the indigenous people there. This is the reason the US army still names its helicopters after indigenous tribes, from a US perspective the concept of cavalry is rightfully owned by the indigenous tribes here as it took them a shockingly short amount of time to build up entirely superior cavalry tactics to European approaches after aquiring the horse.
who could have predicted this?!?
How much of a premium would you be willing to pay for a version of a game that stripped out any connection with Ubisoft?
If you answered more than zero dollars, how the hell does Ubisoft make basic sense as a business?
For me, just thinking of a couple off the top of my head I would gladly pay a $10+ premium for Steep (edit Shredders at $17 is a far better deal for this reason than Steep at $3) or Riders Republic if Ubisoft’s involvement in the games were completely removed, I am talking about right now in the year 2025 not even when these games came out originally… they are brilliant but utterly undermined by Ubisoft. I think for the recent Ghost Recon games Breakpoint and Wildlands I would happily pay a $15+ premium for versions that stripped out Ubisoft BS and added good mod support.
Ubisoft is an anti-brand more than it is a business.
Embedded in the DSA is a theory about what X actually is. It treats platforms like X as communications infrastructure where speech happens, and the platform is conceptualised as a singular place, mostly neutral, with certain obligations for moderation and transparency attached. It views platforms as companies that are capitalistic in a textbook understanding of capitalistic companies: entities with the goal profit maximalisation, that are responsive to legal and economic incentives. This place can be regulated properly via transparency and via a set of complex process requirements. The platform companies that run these places will then implement these requirements as they are incentivised to do so via legal and economic pressures. The DSA’s approach follows from this understanding: establish transparency requirements, ensure researcher access, and prohibit deceptive design practices.
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Where the EC treats X as a communications network, Musk understands intuitively that X is something more than that, although he does not spell it out explicitly. Social networking platforms are collective sense making tools. Social networking platforms, whether that’s X, Instagram or TikTok, are platforms that we use to shape our common knowledge, and to determine which political opinions are currently in-vogue. These platforms are used to create a shared reality. This goes from how TikTok and Instagram influencers can push Dubai Chocolate into a global hype, to how the conversations on X shape what’s inside the political Overton window. The algorithmic feeds actively shape which voices get amplified, which narratives spread, and which facts feel established. Henry Farrell summarises the problem as: “The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media misinforms individuals about what is true or untrue but that it creates publics with malformed collective understandings.” The fundamental power of platforms like X comes from its ownership over the tools to shape the collective understandings of the public, and allows them to be malformed in favour of fascism.
Viewing platforms like X exclusively through the lens of a communications network, without taking into account how the platform affects collective knowledge, leads to two problems, both on the individual level and on the political level. This misunderstanding operates at both the individual and regulatory level.
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In a recent blog post, Mastodon calls for “social sovereignty”, as a response to how X can retaliate against government institutions. Mastodon understands social sovereignty here as public institutions taking control of their social media presence, mainly by running their own social networking servers on software like Mastodon. They mention explicitly that the EC already has their own Mastodon server, at ec.social-network.europa.eu, and invite other organisations to follow suit. That the EC already has their social sovereign presence, but only uses it for press releases without any of the Commissioners using the platform, further accentuates the large gap between the rhetoric and behaviour. Still, the infrastructure for alternative ways for the EC to take power already exists. Initiatives like Eurosky further indicate that the tools for the EC to shift power structures away from the platforms they’re trying to regulate are available.
Fantastic article thank you for sharing!
“The current LLM tech landscape positions [neurodivergent people] to dominate,” according to the application. “Pattern recognition. Non-linear thinking. Hyperfocus. The cognitive traits that make the neurodivergent different are precisely what make them exceptional in an AI-driven world.”
What a load of bullshit, LLMs will be used in a million ways to sideline neurodivergent people in society whether it be BS AI “help” for a neurodivergent student replacing a human teacher or job applications using AI to illegally screen and filter out neurodivergent people, this is a bad decade for neurodivergent people and it is likely only to get worse as societies collapse into bigotry from the endless stresses and catastrophies of runaway climate change.
Idk but they supremely vaporwave in the precise sense of the genre being about decaying visions of a positive future from a perspective hopelessly hurtling into the past.
“Is this a sub for ants?!”
Ukraine is chasing Russia out of the sea.
Yes and no, ostensibly everything the US does is to protect the children and keep them alive but the problem is our society is too broken to understand the value of children/human life and thus we must brutally and publicly sacrifice children to shock ourselves into a state of pseudo-empathy so that we can then extract the possibility of feeling deep emotions about protecting the children in a sense that spiritually absolves our guilt. So no, I am offended you would think that dead children is an acceptable sacrifice in the US! We feel a lot of emotions about dead children and you dismiss them all when you attack US culture that way, we feel terrible the entire time we are sacrificing children we promise you!
You know it isn’t easy sacrificing children and feeling bad about it when you refuse to stop sacrificing children, it is a Sisyphean existence we commit ourselves to as a form of worship at the altar of greatness that this most godly of countries embodies.
We need more audiophile memes in this sub! The amount of pseudo-science bullshit is intense in the audio world, it is nearly overpowering for somebody new to it.
Not arguing against trying to stop this as much as possible but I also recommend assuming your website will be scraped by bots and taking advantage of that to poison all the AI models you can. Feed in nonsense to the robots in places on your website that aren’t public facing to humans on your website, have 5% of your content be blatant nonsense that asserts obviously untrue statements confidently but in a way that doesn’t disguise the clear intent of purposeful absurdity to human viewers.
See it as an opportunity not a vulnerability. Text is cheap, it doesn’t even really take up storage space on your website so why not?
Be the change you want to see, from everything I have read it takes a shockingly small amount of “poisoned” information to undermine AI models, especially if multiple different non-consenting inputs to an AI model are participating in this strategy the impacts will grow exponentially as problem bits of data mix and mingle and become impossible to fully extract from bulk datasets scraped from the internet.
Thank you!
Experience in the past few years makes it seem that the viability of tank-based warfare has dramatically declined.
I do disagree here though, I think this is a serious miscalculation that arose from as a narrative primarily from two things. The first was Ukraine having to innovate with what they were actually given (not enough traditional AT) and had access to in order to stop Russian assaults (quadcopters) and the second is Russian armor has fatal flaws that haven’t been meaningfully been addressed despite decades of feedback and indicators of those fatal flaws.
Drones have radically changed land warfare, but in the end I think they will make armored vehicles more crucial as part of combined arms land operations.
Take the Bradley for example, it simply outclasses almost all Russian armor, Russia can’t compete even against much older cold war western military equipment like this. On armor thickness alone most Russian armor fails to meet battlefield realities, even smaller artillery calibers shred their armor to pieces. This forces Russia to focus on drone tactics and also to HEAVILY propagandize the idea that traditional armored vehicles are obsolete lest they look weak and stuck in the past on a dead end of obsolete armor design like they are.
Drones have transformed the role of armor not made it obsolete, Russia is just trying to desperately bullshit the rest of the world this isn’t the case with a firehose of propaganda about it.
Look at the most recent iteration of the Abrams, it incorporates a capacity for hull mounted PERCH systems for launching loitering muition/surveillance drones from within the vehicle, integrating the use of drones tightly in with the use of main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, further the CROWS system on Abrams tanks highly emphasizes the capability to observe and target fast moving targets with advanced optics and apply kinetic force to them. The Bullfrog turret program meant for Bradleys and other armored vehicles fulfills a similar role. This is the way forward rather than considering tanks obsolete unless you build a massive unwieldy metal cage on top of them and pretend artillery and other direct fire weapons don’t exist as decisive counters.
Drone cages/cope cages are likely here to stay, I am talking about the Russian turtle “tanks” that are basically barely moving deathtraps for the crews.
As a modular system, PERCH is designed to be simply bolted onto an armored vehicle; in the case of the Abrams, it is fixed in place using existing attachment points. In the MARS event, PERCH was operated via a tablet interface, although GDLS says that future iterations will be fully integrated with existing vehicle computer systems.
By utilizing the Switchblade, PERCH provides the vehicle with not only extended-range surveillance but also over-the-horizon lethality. In certain circumstances, this can even be extended to beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS), in which the loitering munition is used in an autonomous, preprogrammed mode to fly a route and/or hit a fixed target.
https://www.twz.com/land/m1-abrams-tank-armed-with-switchblade-drones-tested-by-army
The Bullfrog is equipped with a .50 caliber (12.7mm) weapon and a cyclic rate of fire of 600 rounds per minute. It is designed to defeat Group 1 through Group 3 UAVs and features both autonomous and semi-autonomous engagement modes. At just 165 pounds without ammunition and accurate to less than 1 MOA, the system is optimized for mobile operations and fixed-point defense.
Company specifications state the Bullfrog can engage aerial targets at ranges of up to 1,500 meters. In addition to battlefield deployment, the system can be used to protect critical infrastructure such as power substations.
https://defence-blog.com/bradley-abrams-get-drone-defense-upgrade/
Very cool!