True, but whats even dumber is that 99% of the use cases people are getting angry at would never be given to a real designer anyway (too low value).
The funniest genre of AI backlash imo is normies yelling at small businesses for using AI on social posts.
There's no world where your local flowershop has both the time and money to brief a design agency to create a flyer for Fridays social post.
Yet, in the mind of the mob, they imagine some designer is losing a job due to the existence of AI...not realizing that every social post they've previously been looking at from the same flower shop was just a 1-click Canva template.
The only person losing a job due to AI design is Canva, which itself was hated for taking jobs away from Photoshop designers, whom in the 90s ended up taking jobs away from the phototypesetting industry, who took the jobs away from the manual typesetters, etc etc etc. Meanwhile the economy and living standards grew each time.
Most people aren't aware of the prevalence of stock imagery during the 2000s. AI is just synthetic stock images, which I have zero problem with.
Artists with taste are the ones creating the best AI images, just they were the ones who photoshopped the best things out of stock images when that was the main mode, and just as they created the best stuff when everything was manual typesetting and dark room photography.
That assumes that AI is only used in place of stock imagery.
In reality it is seeping into our lives at an alarming rate which I worry is disrupting our shared sense of reality (which was already tenuous.)
AI has capabilities that were impossible (or very difficult before.) You could easily generate a realistic video of me saying terrible things or kicking a puppy or doing a pornographic act. You could clone my voice and call my grandma asking for money. It’s very hard to tell what is real now and it will get harder as the capabilities improve.
These tools are also much more accessible than photo editing software. Before, few people had the skill to create realistic fakes. Now anyone can do it. This has led to a flood of fake images, videos, and text online. This crowds out real humans and makes it hard to know what is real. My older relatives especially have Facebook feeds filled with fake content they think is real.
The capabilities combined with the scale make it hard to know what is real in a way Photoshop never did.
Given the fact that humans reach emotional conclusions first, and then only accept evidence that justifies already-held beliefs, it would be a waste of time to try to change your mind.
intelligence as conveyed through human form is indeed reliant on an emotion based reward network. ai was trained by humans and will always be marked by original sin. so based on what we may access, you are correct that any living response is emotionally predicated to a certain degree. doesnt make art any less cool, or, more applicably, a good argument any less productive (provided agreed rules are followed).
denial of our nature is a valid course of action. another course is to accept such limitations and free up memory to be used otherwise.
Ahhh the downside of “data sovereignty” rules and the de-globalization meme strikes again. I’d bet a bajillion dollars the reason this happened is due to government thinking it’s a good idea to make it illegal to store data outside their country.
Hey EU, take note of this next time you create silly data residency requirements that don’t allow data to travel outside your region. Encryption is an easy solution to multi-region residency…as long as the European Commission doesn’t stupidly keep trying to make encryption illegal too!
Hint: Russia absolutely knows where your data centers are.
Yes there’s never been division or wars in Europe and the EU will always exist…
Germany and France in a debt spiral and turning inward/hyper-nationalist while massively re-militarizing means the EU is a safe place to structure your data with zero redundancy.
I wouldn’t bother worrying about key industries and functions, since, as history has shown, the EU is a bulletproof institution that no country has ever left.
And of course every data center in Europe has Israel-grade air defenses, it’s not like they are just sitting ducks for a fleet of drones to take out within 24 hours.
I just solved the famous 1917 Ricardo Meechum Conjecture with Astra.
Trust me when I say it’s super important to a niche area of physics. People have spent their whole careers trying to solve it.
What people? Well you or I have never met them. I swear I have a girlfriend, she just goes to a different school. But trust me it’s a super important problem.
What will this change about the world? Nothing, but trust me this is a historic event and it means these LLMs are super smart and not just brute forcing machines.
I’m certain there’s a 10% chance that brute forcing old riddles that 4 people know about might kill us. Please regulate me I’m too smart for my own good and out of control.
I was trying to avoid that topic on HN, but DS' takes on the Ukraine ware were the MOST atrocious, amoral, and just plain wrong, basically suggesting Ukraine should just give up because Russia would win anyway.
Nevermind that any decent person would support a people's right to live and determine their own future without a neighboring despot using all his nation's might to literally eliminate them as a people.
Quite the opposite is true. And even if it weren't, condemning all of Ukraine to the fate of the massacres Bucha and Mariupol is just plain evil.
Unreal anyone would call that kind of take "fair". Rethink your life
So to clarify...your position is that: it's better that Ukraine has been completely decimated and half a million have died fighting an un-winnable war...instead of taking lesser concessions upfront than they will ultimately have to make for this thing to end?
Russia was clearly in the wrong here, and I wish Ukraine could win, but reality exists, and we kind of have to anchor our decisions based on it or suffer the consequences.
I get it, realism is emotionally upsetting. But if you actually care about Ukraine, the only approach that can get the best outcome is realism.
Because while Russia was in a way stronger position than western media was portraying, they don't have an infinite capacity for pain.
They would absolutely love to not be sending their kids to die and selling natural resources to whomever again and traveling around the globe without sanctions.
The concessions they would have accepted at the beginning were less. However, now that they've lost so many men and risked their regime on it, they can't simply accept the same deal.
This is why the incentives that wars create are so terrible, especially for authoritarian regimes, even if they're at fault.
If Russia does not have "an infinite capacity for pain", then it does not sound like an unwinnable war. Ukraine estimates that they need to inflict at least 50 000 casualties a month to break the backbone of Russian military. The latest surge has brought it to 42 000 a month, up from 30 000 earlier this year. This already exceeds recruitment and training capacity.
Who are those who would love not to send their kids to die, sell resources and travel the world? Putin? His children already live a pampered life in palaces and he himself is probably the richest man in the world, currently on a trip to India. The rest don't matter. Even the head of security services Patrushev, historically the second most powerful man in the country, is scared of Putin like a schoolboy and fumbles words before him. That has been one of the most shocking revelations since the war began: that oligarchs, security services, nor anyone else can put out even the slightest opposition. The whole country dances to Putin's whims. His only real opponent is time.
And Putin doesn't give a shit about Donbas. The aim is to restore the world that birthed him, the USSR at its peak. Russia has not backed one one inch from the 2021 ultimatum to return to the European political order of the 1980s. Any concession only confirms that attacking Ukraine was a viable strategy, that piece by piece he can claw his way closer to that goal.
Military specialists from Northern Europe estimate that Russia would be in position to attack the Baltics and Poland (and have a reasonable chance of succeeding, especially if "realists" are at the helm in Western Europe and the USA) no more than 6 months after the war with Ukraine ends.
Wow, clueless. You entirely miss the point of the war.
Putin sees the mere existence of a successful Ukraine's as an existential threat. Putin initially got elected on promises that included becoming an advanced Western-style economy. He abandoned that to crony oligarchism, stripping the country for parts. Now, he and the Russian people see former Soviet state Ukraine actually becoming successful, well-off, and aspiring to EU membership. THAT can not be tolerated, because it would give Russian people the idea that they should have the same, and create a likely revolution at home.
So Putin's goal is to wipe Ukraine not only off the map, but off the consciousness of everyone in the world as Ukrainians as a people
Putin will stop until either 1) he achieves this goal, or 2) he is forced to stop.
THAT is the reality.
Thinking that Putin would somehow have accepted lesser sanctions earlier, and that he would have actually respected your new peace plan when he has never respected any other is to be played for a fool.
Allowing 1) to happen is unacceptable. Note the Ukrainians who are directly suffering the daily assaults can think as well as you can of the "realpolitik solution", and they reject it, because they know it is absolutely stupid, and leads only to rape, torture, and death — theirs, personally.
Making 2) happen is the only course of action. Ukrainians will follow it until they cannot.
If you want to stop the suffering, then accelerate Russia's exit. Garry Kasparov articulated a fine plan days ago [0]:
1: Provide complete protection of Ukrainian airspace
2: Immediately send Ukraine all the weapons it needs; no delay
3: Enforce existing sanctions. To this I add including seizing Russian and Iranian shadow fleet vessels
4: Cessation of diplomatic affairs with Russia
5: Seize Russian sovereign funds immediately and use them to power the war effort in Ukraine
This would be a start. Ukraine continuing its "long-range sanctions" is already bringing the Russian state coffers to rapid decline and looming budget crisis. Continuing it longer will force Putin's hand.
I agree the EU actually stepping up and entering the war in a serious way would tilt everything in Ukraine's favor.
The problem is they just won't. The most important members of the EU (Germany and France) are in shambles domestically and turning far right. Both have little desire to stick their necks out to support Ukraine any further and are likely turning the opposite direction.
Also, Russia has nukes. Nobody wants to provoke that any more than necessary. If Europe weren't a feckless, fragmented military vacuum things might be different, but nothing about that appears to be changing any time soon.
You still insist on overlooking the fundamental truths:
1) If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends.
2) If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.
Whether or not the EU steps up and helps, whether or not Russia uses nukes (another entire discussion), this is still the fundamental fact of the matter.
The Ukrainians know this, and that is why they must, and they will, fight to the end.
It is easy to sacrifice the land and lives of others.
Would you willingly surrender YOUR OWN city/sat/country to Putin's under those plans; do you have children and do you know what happens to captured children, particularly girls? (serious question)
Your "realism" is [unprintable here]. Worse, it is not reality at all, but believing a false promise from Putin.
The ACTUAL realism is to recognize Putin's Russia for what it is: a relentless aggressor who will respect no peace. Putin's Russia has violated EVERY "peace agreement it has ever made. "Peace" in their mind is merely a strategic pause in the conflict to regroup and rearm.
The list is extremely long, Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, Donbas, and more. Exactly ZERO concessions brought peace.
The REALITY is Ukraine submitting to such a peace would merely be buying another worse war a few months or years down the road, after Russia has had a breather and a chance to rearm. It'll just be more deaths at a faster pace in Ukraine.
If you think otherwise, I'd have both a bridge and some oceanfront property in Kansas to sell you.
Meanwhile, your view of Ukraine is years out of date and was never true.
Ukraine has been anything but "completely decimated" — they have emerged as the leading global power in drones and air defense.
As to your 'half-million who have died', they are overwhelmingly Russian fighters — the absolute f'kn aggressors, and documented war criminals, torturers, rapists, thieves and worse. Zero sympathy. If they didn't want to die they could have just stayed home.
Also recognize the absolute goal of Russia, and Putin has NOT ONCE backed off from the stated goal: The entire concept of Ukraine as a people and as a state must be eliminated.
There is not even a surrender that can be acceptable to the people of Ukraine.
There is no compromise with someone who has the goal of murdering you or genociding your people.
The ONLY realistic solution is to boot Russia from every square inch of Ukrainian land, and force it back i it's box.
You obviously haven't noticed that Ukraine is on its way to accomplishing that, both decimating Russia's economic engine, and now taking back more land than RU has taken in 2026.
The shame here is the Western countries and Russia convinced Ukraine to give up nukes in return for inviolate borders, and when Russia violated that treaty back in 2014 taking Crimea, not one Western country pushed back.
Allowing Ukraine to get wiped off the map, and Ukrainians each, individually, to be forced to abandon their identity and language, and suffer rape, torture, and death may be a "realistic" option, but it is not an option to anyone who has an ounce of morality. Perhaps you should learn about it.
The only outcome that actually works is to force despots like Putin back into their box. Preferably six feet underground.
It sounds like your whole position is again dependent on the west's wishful thinking narratives of this war being true (which it hasn't been thus far).
The numbers I cited were purposely in between the Russian numbers of Ukrainian casualties (1.5M, obviously false) and the Ukrainian numbers (100k, obviously undercounted). The Netherlands intelligence service and the CSIS put the number around 500K, which could also be wrong, but intelligence services tend to have better methods than media orgs like the BBC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...
As far as your assessment of 'decimated', the UN projects Ukraine will require over half a $Trillion to rebuild. For a country with a GDP per capita of $7,000...I would call that decimated unfortunately. And that's not something that makes me happy: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2026/02/23/u...
The idea that Ukraine is winning or Russia is winning on any given week is entirely dependent on which news source you're reading, and given the fog of war, unless you have actual intelligence service briefs we don't actually know how its going other than the fact the frontlines have basically stayed +/- some kilometers for a super long time at this point.
Also, the idea that Russia would not accept concessions and also that Putin being dead would be desirable (hard truth: there's people who are even more hardliners than Putin waiting in the wings), are unfortunately incomplete assessments of the reality.
Again, I don't disagree with your emotional take on this, or the moral question of who's right or wrong. But on the reality of the situation I don't think your assessment is accurate as far as what's going to get the best outcome for Ukraine.
You are treating this situation like a game where there has to be a possible good outcome and since the current situation is not good the other move would have been the correct one. That is not a very realistic take.
Ukraine's main chance is to bleed Russia dry and make a future invasion not feasible. That needs a Russian economic breakdown and a 10 year time window to let the Europeans arm Ukraine to the teeth. Russia knows this which is why Russian "diplomatic" proposals have the clear goal to make that future invasion easier. It is Ukraine's war of independence against their former colonial master and we will see how it ends.
If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.
There IS no choice other than to force Russia to end it.
There is no treaty or agreement Putin could sign that is trustworthy. He has broken EVERY SINGLE ONE the moment it became convenient to him.
Yes, Ukraine will take a lot to rebuild. It will also substantially increase the EU's economy when it does.
And no, the trends are NOT merely which news source or week. Russia's revenues are declining, it is selling its gold, and its sovereign wealth fund is close to gone [0]. It is exhausting military supplies so badly it is now humiliatingly reliant on North Korea and Iran. Yes, it builds some of it's own drones and missiles. Ukraine has built its own defenses against almost everything but the ballistic missiles, and that shortage is the only area in which they are losing. Russia can only get more territory by attempting to "negotiate".
And again, stop trying to act as if this is somehow emotional and surrender is rational — an even slightly realistic look at Russia's goals, and their strategy of war crimes, terror, rape, torture, and child kidnapping shows the only rational way forward is to fight to the death.
A fight to the death is literally less bad than life under Russia, on every measure of quality of life.
And that is the assessment of the vast majority of Ukrainians who actually experience it.
Stop trying to give away their land and lives as if you are somehow superior. Figure out how to argue how to help them.
Mainstream narratives for the first year or two of the war were:
- Russia was a paper tiger and weak
- Ukraine was going to win against a corrupt/unmotivated Russian military so it should keep fighting
- Putin had made an error and he would get overthrown
- The Russian economy was going to collapse due to sanctions
- Russia oil pipelines would freeze and never come back online without western help (this was a Peter Zeihan favorite)
- Europe would come to Ukraine's defense
- Etc.
He threw cold water on every single one of those narratives (specifically) from the beginning, meanwhile western media was busy spinning false rah-rah propaganda narratives like "the ghost of Kiev" etc.
Basically he was correct that we should not have cheered on this war. If a settlement and concessions were reached much earlier it would have been better for Ukraine (they likely would have kept more territory) and we wouldn't have 1+ million casualties and EU economies like Germany death spiraling and turning far right due to cutting themselves off from Russian energy.
My layman definition is it’s the people writing in major newspapers, the people getting paid by CNN to sit in a half circle on their news analysis shows, etc.
Is Peter Zeihan “mainstream”?
The only time I remember anyone speculating that Russia was in trouble was the short lived Wagner Rebellion - because nothing like it had happened before. But that lasted … two days?
Going on Joe Rogan and having a million YouTube followers is absolutely the modern definition of mainstream.
Also you appear to have been living in a different algorithmic bubble. Joe Biden was literally on stage multiple times saying everything I listed. If a democrat US president isnt mainstream, I don’t think your assessment of reality is accurate.
No wonder this account is such a font of idiocy and backwards takes — it considers "Joe Rogan" to be a serious mainstream source of information.
If "mainstream" counts as having lots of viewers, fine.
But no one who is serious about information, especially about geopolitical information would ever mistake a numerous count of viewers for the serious multi-layer vetting and double-checking of information that happened in a serious old-school newsroom, or give them anything like the same kind of credibility.
Yet this account clearly gives such massively biased and uninformed podcasters the kind of credulous belief formerly reserved for the the likes of Chet Huntley and Walter Cronkite, which no longer exists in any newsroom today.
So, a great example of Dunning-Kruger, where the most ignorant spout the most nonsense with the greatest confidence — explains the plethora of nonsense in the posts.
And NO, those were not the narratives of any actual serious reporter or govt figure. I've followed this very closely from before the 2022 invasion; some I'd heard of as remarkably optimistic takes, and some I literally never heard of.
The entire world, including Putin, was stunned Ukraine did not fall in three days. It was pretty much universally accepted that Russia was the second best military in the world. Of course, it was also soon shown that RU was not even the second best military in Ukraine.
Only recently, since the Operation Spiderweb and the 'long-range sanctions' making serious strikes deep inside Russia disabling military targets, oil production & transport, and dual-purpose logistics, and since the RU casualties have exceeded 1000 dead/month and RU started LOSING land, have any serious people started speculating about cracks in RU's ability to continue, and those are still tentative.
Go read the writings of people with ACTUAL knowledge of Russia and Ukraine, such as Garry Kasparov, Bill Browder, Volodomor Zelenskyy, all of whom are on Xitter or Substack, since you get your media from that type of sources.
You get your information from clowns, it is no surprise you post like a clown (no insult meant to professional clowns).
It appears you are living in a different algorithmic reality.
The root cause of everything going wrong in Germany is the war and cutting themselves off from Russian energy.
The rapid de-industrialization, economic stagnation, ballooning deficits, removing the debt brake, new massive military debts, etc.
All of it is being economically felt by normal people and they’re scapegoating brown people (immigrants) as a result. If Germany still had cheap Russian gas and was still growing its economy 3% per year you would not be seeing any of this go mainstream.
Here are the natural gas prices for Europe: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eu-natural-gas If you look at the price from summer 2021 on you will see a sharp rise in prices. The reason was that Russia stopped supplying the spot market. https://www.martenscentre.eu/blog/how-gazprom-manipulated-th... Russia also bought European gas storage capacity to let it sit empty and worsen the situation. All of these actions did not make much economic sense. They did however make a lot of sense when Russia invaded Ukraine and tried to use the gas supply for black mail. Their bad luck was that their hegemon China did not give Russia permission to invade till the end of the Chinese winter Olympics. Olympics ended on the 20th and invasion started on the 24th of february which made the gas threat far less potent.
I know Lenin said: "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them" but to suggest continuing the business relationship with Russia is beyond silly. It would show that Germany has no rudimentary survival mechanisms and put its viability as a political entity in serious doubt.
WTF? I remember the exact opposite. Everyone on social media and in the mainstream news said Ukraine was toast and the war would last a few months tops.
I don't agree with Sacks always but he's 100% correct here.
I heavily use frontier models daily, and quite frankly their capabilities are just not very relevant outside of a narrow subset of software engineering tasks and the production of generic white collar "deliverables."
We're many years into $10s of billions of dollars being thrown at coding as a problem space specifically, and its one of the areas with the MOST training data available, and still...I can't get a frontier model to execute simple front-end UI tasks beyond the level of a visually impaired intern.
I believe Fable and Astra-class models were the first fully trained on Blackwell GPUs (the latest and greatest) and I think the expectation was that throwing this much extra compute at the problem would lead to greater gains. It has not. And the next gen GPUs are not going to be the same jump that h100 clusters to Blackwell was. Claiming you're slowing down out of choice, when in reality you've hit the limits given current compute, is disingenuous at best.
I think a lot of Anthropic/OpenAI employees are true believers here (who doesn't want to imagine they're having a large impact?) and have deluded themselves into believing they're building a god in their science fiction fantasy world.
Unfortunately the type of people working at these orgs apparently don't have much understanding of how the world works outside of their extremely narrow specialization.
When I hear them straight-faced throwing out dumb statistics like "8% GDP growth," "50% of white collar workers unemployed by next year," and "10% chance of human annihilation," I cringe so hard my eyebrows hit my chin. Here's a real statistic: 82% of German companies still use fax machines.
I seem to recall Waymo told a 60 minutes reporter during an early report on self driving cars: "your daughter will never need to learn to drive." Well, over a decade has passed since then, that girl got a drivers license, and we're still without driverless cars in 99% of places.
This capacity for self delusion is what enables silicon valley to take on these irrational moonshots...but these are the last people I would trust when trying to form an accurate picture of reality.
82% number was shocking for me, even though I know they still send snail-mail for basically everything. And things only move when the snail-mail is received!
Do you care to elaborate on what “this” is that is so bad?
And just out of curiosity, have you come to this opinion independently through your own research?
Or is this just regurgitated sentiment you’re memetically repeating to signal in-group status after consuming reactionary media/clickbait on this topic?
The funniest genre of AI backlash imo is normies yelling at small businesses for using AI on social posts.
There's no world where your local flowershop has both the time and money to brief a design agency to create a flyer for Fridays social post.
Yet, in the mind of the mob, they imagine some designer is losing a job due to the existence of AI...not realizing that every social post they've previously been looking at from the same flower shop was just a 1-click Canva template.
The only person losing a job due to AI design is Canva, which itself was hated for taking jobs away from Photoshop designers, whom in the 90s ended up taking jobs away from the phototypesetting industry, who took the jobs away from the manual typesetters, etc etc etc. Meanwhile the economy and living standards grew each time.
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