I think it's rare for people behaving badly to be fully aware that they're behaving badly, and proceeding anyways. Humans are constant rationalizers, and where sexual consent is the issue, there's a lot of ways for people to tell themselves it's okay. I've heard men say horrifying things in all seriousness. "You need to be a little forceful so she can say 'no' and then give in." "I kept going and she stopped saying no." "Women have rape fantasies, so they actually want it to happen"
NATO has virtually no experience in modern warfare, which is substantially different than how they're organized now. NATO is well equipped for an armor-centric battle of maneuver, but Ukraine showed that's not at all how it has to be fought.
Russia wouldn't use armor or logistics to take over the Baltics. They've already got their human waves and infantry infiltration tactics worked out, under a cloud of drones and cruise missiles that NATO has no counter for (and the US just disbanded its drone warfare division because drones aren't manly enough for Hegseth).
> Ukraine showed that's not at all how it has to be fought.
You're taking a regional conflict between militaries using cold war gear and drones and saying "this is what warfare is now".
> They've already got their human waves and infantry infiltration tactics worked out
A million casualties and three-year stalemate in Ukraine is "worked out"? Good for them. I see those swarms are especially effective at defending energy infrastructure, something that's of particular concern when you're fighting an alliance with stealth aircraft.
> under a cloud of drones and cruise missiles that NATO has no counter for
This is the Russian drone infantry currently occupying Kyiv?
> the US just disbanded its drone warfare division because drones aren't manly enough for Hegseth
I'm taking a regional conflict where the total manpower of both sides outnumbers all the rest of the armies of NATO without the US. Where one side, Ukraine, sends OPFORs to NATO exercises and wins handily with drones because NATO doesn't know how to fight drones, or how to operate in a front line that's 20km deep and the enemy knows everything going in it and it's impossible to mass forces because tube artillery is still cheap.
And yes, this is what warfare is now. When Russia invaded in 2022, it was using its new armored battalion tactical groups, and they failed to reach Kyiv at all, or to conquer Kharkiv or Sumy--they just surrounded them and stretched out along the highways, where infantry teams with Javelins destroyed them in detail.
The battlefield transparency that drones bring is a sea change in warfare, and a big part of that change that Ukrainians and Russians have learned is total force dispersion. You can't assemble an armored fist because it's bombed to oblivion before it ever sees the enemy, or encounters an artillery deployed minefield that didn't exist the night before.
NATO will take years to ingest the obvious lessons from Ukraine and adjust its doctrine to handle them. Until that time, they face an adversary who knows them in its bones.
> A million casualties and three-year stalemate in Ukraine is "worked out"? Good for them.
Could NATO take a million+ casualties and still be fighting with another million in uniform and the nation not yet undergoing general mobilization?
> This is the Russian drone infantry currently occupying Kyiv?
If that Russian drone infantry suddenly showed up on Estonia's borders, what chance would you give the Estonians?
>> the US just disbanded its drone warfare division because drones aren't manly enough for Hegseth
> Please explain what you think this means.
It means the most expedient way for the US to learn to apply the lessons of the war in Ukraine was just discontinued. The Pentagon does not see drone warfare as a top priority.
> NATO doesn't know how to fight drones, or how to operate in a front line that's 20km deep and the enemy knows everything going in it
Source: youtube I imagine. Speculation is fine but here you are making assertions without evidence.
> The battlefield transparency that drones bring is a sea change in warfare
And it began 20 years ago.
> Could NATO take a million+ casualties
This is a weird argument for the effectivness of your Russian drone infantry.
> If that Russian drone infantry suddenly showed up on Estonia's borders
They teleport now too? This is getting serious. I imagine within a week Putin would be meeting Gaddafi's fate. Attacking NATO is nothing like bullying a smaller country with no defense pacts. China and India would stop being patron states. You'd see a half dozen Prigozhins as the oligarchs would realize it's not survivable.
> The Pentagon does not see drone warfare as a top priority.
Anduril, GA, Boeing, and Lockmart absolutely inconsolable right now.
> I hope NATO leadership isn't as blythe as you about the changing face of war.
I am fairly confident they are not. And I'm not blythe about it, I just don't see Russia as being some sort of dominant drone army and believe the location that 20 km-wide no man's land is pretty strong evidence. And that there are many aspects of armed conflict we are not seeing in Ukraine.
Russia has a million man standing army that's now thoroughly blooded and well versed in modern warfare, and an industrial base that's retooled to supply such an army (i.e., drones and missiles). The only problem for them is that they're facing the only other large, experienced army in the world.
Imagine if tomorrow, Russia went on the defensive and froze its lines in Ukraine, setting up Surovikin lines everywhere, then withdrew half the forces it has currently committed. Now imagine that a half million Russian soldiers show up on the border of Estonia, Finland, Kazhakstan, or Georgia.
Yes, Russia is exhausted and doing deep structural damage to its economy. It still has one of the best land forces in the world at the moment. The way Ukraine always smokes NATO forces in exercises is a strong indicator of what would happen if Russia decided to "liberate" the Baltics.
> Imagine if tomorrow, Russia went on the defensive and froze its lines in Ukraine, setting up Surovikin lines everywhere,then withdrew half the forces it has currently committed.
They'd have to give up a big chunk of the occupied land to do that, since creating that line within 50 km of the front line would now be much harder than it was 3 years ago. Who knows, maybe that's what's stopping them from attacking another country as you described.
I had a client call me up and complain about my reduce code because it was hard to read and he couldn't tell what was going on. I broke through to him when I added comments to it that showed a particular data structure going in, and what was coming out. Once the transformation was clear, the apparent complexity was no longer a problem, leaving me to believe that the problem with reduce is almost entirely about legibility.
Give me a dictionary, a computer, and infinite time, and I'll generate all possible English texts: Shakespeare, works regarded as surpassing Shakespeare, new holy books, math proofs never even imagined... none of which is either "creative" or "solving" anything. If I optimize my generation algorithm so that I'm not slavishly trying all possible combinations of words, it doesn't move me any closer to being creative, or solving anything.
The real casualty here may be our belief that humans are doing something more than some super-optimized version of what LLMs are doing. That doesn't elevate LLMs, it just makes us much less special.
I think you're leaving out a key aspect of the problem: not one of those people had the scope of responsibilities to really fix the issue. There was the website, windows update, and OS team, all being fed by a variety of product teams with marketing and delivery concerns. At root, Bill's problems were a coordination issue spanning half the organization. If you were on that email chain, you wouldn't want ownership either because that herding the rest of the cats towards a comprehensive fix that would probably restructure the whole company.
One thing that the earlier documentary on Theranos, The Inventor, made obvious is that Holmes is pretty charismatic at a personal level. At one point, Gibney is trying to interview her, but the camera he’s setting up isn’t working for some reason, and he’s apologizing. She says “it’s alright” and then leans in and says “we’re going to get through this” and smiles. It’s very warm. It was easier to see how people bought into her and her vision after that.
An unarmed woman climbing through a smashed window with a capital police officer on the other side, sidearm drawn, warning her not to advance, in the middle of a crowd storming the capitol building while a gallows stood outside,
waiting for the crowd to bring out a member of congress or the Vice President.
> * U.S. representative Markwayne Mullin [currently head of DHS], a witness to Babbitt's attempted breach, said that Byrd "didn't have a choice" but to shoot, and that his action "saved people's lives".* [0]
The shooting was deemed “lawful and within department policy”.
>The shooting was deemed “lawful and within department policy”.
I do not disagree with this at all. I only mentioned her death as contrast to the usual rhetoric of how the mob at the Capitol "killed" Officer Sicknick and others (who are always mysteriously unnamed).
I've yet to see anyone address the more immediate problem for (humaniform) robotics, which is that it runs counter to the economic benefits of specialization at industrial scales.
A robotic warehouse that's just like a human warehouse but with robots walking the aisles will always be more expensive (and likely far less efficient) than a warehouse purpose built for automated picking using standard containers and graspers, conveyer belts or path constrained wheeled platforms--something I've seen in operation 20 years ago.
A factory of general purpose robots sewing t-shirts will always be more expensive than a factory a low wage humans sitting there doing the same.
The Fourdrinier process for making flat-sheet goods (i.e., paper, thin plastic, in massive rolls) is more than two centuries old. The idea that robots, returning to dipping a mould into the furnish to create individual sheets, could even come close to the economics of modern papermaking is insane.
> "Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt," said the late Pierre Trudeau.
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