Ooooh, new favorite meme for the current times
Hopefully Syria can be unified and hopefully the Kurds will be treated well.
Agreed.
Big news! I hope this is from a position of relative trust and not the SDF feeling like they will disappear elsewise.
The whiplash from the two titles in your second pic really hit me hard
That means that the harm done by these systems compound the more widely they are used as errors pile up at every stage of work, in every sector of the economy. It builds up an ambient radiation of system variability and errors that magnifies every other systemic issue with the modern state and economy.
Wanted to shout these two sentences out in particular. Best summary of my biggest current fears regarding use of "ai"/llm/transformer(?)-based systems.
I swear these dudes really need to supplement their Ayn Rand with some Terry Pratchett....
“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
-- Hogfather
The most naked attempt yet at allowing billionaires to live on without the rest of us.
What infuriates me the most, for some reason, is how nobody seems to care that the robots leave the fridge door open for so long. I guess it's some form of solace that, even with the resources and tech to live on without us the billionaires still don't understand ecosystems or ecology. Waste energy training a machine to do the same thing a human can do but slower and more wastefully, just so you can order the machine around without worrying about it's feelings... I call this some form of solace as it means, even if they do away with us plebs, climate change will get'em as well - and whatever remaining life on Earth will be able to take a breather for the first time in centuries.
Now that Trump's plan to seize 50% of Ukraine's mineral deposits has leaked, Putin might be more worried about the USA/NATO/"the west" getting "all" of Ukraine and Russia getting nothing. So if he backs off from wanting to seize Ukrainian territory, he can push for "Ukrainian sovereignty" to prevent the USA from turning Ukraine into a vassal state.
To extend your metaphor: be the squirrel in the digital forest. Compulsively bury acorns for others to find in time of need. Forget about most of the burial locations so that new trees are always sprouting and spreading. Do not get attached to a single trunk ; you are made to dance across the canopy.
Bernhardt tweeted in January 2025: “The dead internet theory is coming to fruition.” And he’s doing his part.
.... we live in a farce
My naive, optimistic guess is that they really don't want the Ukrainian forces to summarily execute him from a distance, and so many Russian soldiers have faked surrenders over the past 2 years that they figure anything less than taping this man's arms around a tree will just get this guy killed.