Machines with a lot of precision parts that need to hold up to the kind of wear and tear either a Marine or a maniacal quilter are capable of dishing out. So many layers of fabric...

I mean the Kharkiv offensive of 2023 showed us how effective tractors can be in capturing heavier-armored vehicles in certain situations.

Oh wait, there's one! How could I miss it when it's got an RCS as big as a 747! In fact, it looks exactly like a civilian airliner. Huh.

Oh well, still a plane so missile goes bwshhhhhhhhhhh

It's almost like when despots funnel oil money into maintaining power and self-aggrandizing megaprojects instead of basic public services you don't see the "lots of education" part kicking in.

Meanwhile, if there are these outliers where low IQ didn't prevent people from getting wealthy and there isn't some kind of political economy reason for it, doesn't that undermine the value of IQ as a metric? Like, you and I know that IQ is garbage but it's worth noting how "maybe IQ is just garbage" is always floating at the edge of their reasoning.

Read through the whole affair and just had to keep shaking my head the whole way through. Like, they're at least capable of pretending to disavow the Nazis and fundies who follow the same pro-kid-having definitely-not-eugenics ideas. And they talk about some of the real obstacles or having kids; raising a child and setting them up for something resembling success is expensive and hard and the world doesn't exactly feel like it's on an upwards trajectory. But rather than look at those problems in their own right and try to actually make living cheaper or easier for people in ways that would make having kids more viable and more rewarding (How long are you at the office? How much time and energy do you have when you get home?), these upper-class twits of their generation are trying to convince the few people for whom those aren't as serious problems that they should have kids. Like, I'm all in favor of improving reproductive health and that kind of technology but we are nowhere near the point where that's going to make a population-level impact on demographics. Like, they're out here trying to figure out if they can make the run to third base when they've only just brained the mascot with a foul ball. Solve the actual problem in front of us first.

‘It became clear to me that people wanted more children than they were having,’ Babu says.

So clearly the best action is to constantly tell everyone how great kids are and that they should totally have them. Because that solves the problem of people wanting kids they don't/can't have. I try to read even our designated sneer fodder in good faith but I can't understand why anyone thinks these people are at all intelligent beyond the "only slightly less than average" level. I thought Good Will Hunting taught everyone the difference between smart and rich, but maybe that was just me.

If only someone had written a pretty interesting case study in how you can use valid-looking data to prove anything, even the existence of psychic powers. And people have been trying to scientifically justify racism for just about as long as the scientific method has been a thing, while studying psychic powers didn't really pick up until the latter half of the 20th century.

And I'm sure he's sent several notices explicitly declaring that lack of contract between them that a judge evaluating the lien would be interested in.

Not gonna lie, "enforcing the line between ketchup and tomato sauce" isn't the sort of thing I'd expect the government to be into, but I guess I'm not mad about it?

I mean, I feel like the core problem with billionaire philanthropy isn't that they aren't effective enough at choosing causes; they're supporting exactly what they want to, whether it's saving lives and improving conditions in poor countries or making more classical music happen in rich countries. Rather the problem is that that much money can be thrown around by a single individual at all without public oversight. Like, EAs have a point in that philanthropic activities can mobilize a world-changing amount of resources. But then they do the libertarian thing of assuming that this is a necessary and inevitable fact of the world that must be worked around rather than considering the circumstances that created that ability and the degree to which the existence of billionaires requires African kids to die of malaria.

Note that the image here isn't from the AI project, it's from actual Doom. Their own screenshots have weird glitches including a hit splat that looks like a butt in the image I've seen closest to this one.

And when they say they've "run the game" they do not mean that there was a playable version that was publicly compared to the original. Rather they released short video clips of alleged gameplay and had their evaluators try to identify if they were from the AI recreation or from actual Doom.

Even by the abysmal standards of generative AI projects this is a hell of a grift.

Gee, I wonder if there were any major shake-ups in the Ukrainian government circa 2014 that could have explained this change in tune.

Ukraine wasn't able to join NATO because of active territorial disputes regarding Russia's 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea. The 2022 invasion and intervening Russian-backed fighting in Donestk and Luhansk were naked imperial land grabs trying to force Ukraine back into the Russian sphere of influence despite their democratic processes repeatedly trying to move towards the EU.

Or in simpler terms, imperialism is actually still bad when Russia does it and it's weird that you don't seem to understand that.