Of the 31 Abrams tanks the U.S. sent to Ukraine, six have been destroyed

Is it really that low? I was pretty sure it was at least double that many by now.

but when Iran gives Russia missiles suddenly it’s a problem

Not even that. They probably just invented it to try to use this as an excuse as there isn’t even any evidence of that.

I guess they could also do something like destroying GPS satellites or undersea cables as well, which might be a better approach if they don’t want to kill anyone in NATO countries while hurting them considerably.

I don’t see many chances of the US backing down of striking Russia by use of Ukraine, specially as they likely accept their own propaganda that Russia won’t or can’t do anything, so we unfortunatelly might know soon enough.

It took him far too long to realise that the western leadership is not interested whatsoever in peace or equality.

I’m not even sure he has fully realized it though.

I’m pretty sure US companies can still sell to some extent, or at least could, it’s mostly their puppets that can’t. But even then the second part of the comment is very much right.

It’s likely, specially as from what I hear China was able to sell steel in Brazil cheaper than the local production too, so something likely changed/improved in China recently. It could be, at least in part, due to less internal demand, but cutting off the middlemen might have helped too.

From what I remember from a few months back the H100 GPU (I think) cost something like 30k and there were a few companies each buying up to 100k of them so something like this makes sense.

So if the demand for this GPUS don’t continue high, which is possible as the newer LLMs are smaller and much better while not taking as much compute to run after trained, then what matters is by how much this deman will fall as I really doubt the demand will fall to 0 but we could be one development away from the deman tanking, being maintained or even going up.

The 2.5% in this case comes from all the international trade from Russia in 2023-2024, where 42% use Yuan to 39.5% the dollar.

So not globally passing the dollar yet, but it’s nice that there are examples for others to see the new opportunities.

Probably something like the smaller producers sold locally, governing their prices in part by what bigger producers set. Meanwhile, large producers could likely pay for the price discovery, individually or in a group, or they had many contacts which allowed them to have an idea of what would be fair. But it was likely the US was stealing quite a lot as middlemen, which can now be at least atenuated somewhat by having many people trading directly and perhaps even more “state help” to figure out good prices long term.

I would be interested in understanding this better as well, and nice to see that the new system is already being used. Whoever is not using the new system yet will likely do the math to see how good it will be for them.

Edit to add another point: Large producers would likely buy smaller local producers’ production as well in case the export price was good, so the smaller producers would increase their prices when they knew the bigger producers were buying a lot.

Even just a country existing independently by themselves is already enough for them to do whatever they can to demonize and attack them as such an independent country will be a symbol of hope for other countrries wanting the same.

That’s my thinking as well. I am actually kinda expecting them to do something as they had been responding to attacks on their refineries and looking at the ammount of refinneries, air bases and other things that have been hit recently toghether with the whole Kursk incursion and the west giving green light for the use of their weapons inside Russia, they kinda of are pressed to do what could be the biggest attack since the war started, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they just pretend nothing of this happened too and just continue pushing in the east as they may think they will win soon.

But if they do actually do something perhaps they could take the opportunity to do it at the same time as Iran and Yemen, and even others as well, to really show that a red line has been crossed.

The first version needs people to teach it but it already costs less than paying for a worker in many cases.

The second will still need some coaching in some case but will do almost everything by itself out of the box.

The third will know even more and will be much more efficient and cheaper.

By the fourth or fith version their existance and number will likely have completely reshaped how work works making it clear to people that in the not distant at all future no one will need to work again.

…

If that’s the case I’d say not only him but anyone in the world is a viable candidate.

I guess there might have been some confusion from what I said to here.

I never said the Ukrainian puppet regime would never do something like irradiating Russia and Europe by blowing up a nuclear power plant, I just said that if they were going to bomb a nuclear power plant, releasing a lot of nuclear materials, there was no reason for them to go out of their way to get more nuclear materials to throw at it as just blowing it up conventionally would already be spreading a lot of radiation and adding more would likely not even make a difference.

So, either they would be attacking the nuclear power plant with conventional weapons or they would get nuclear materials to attack a city with a dirty bomb, but there is no need to attack a nuclear power plant with a dirty bomb as it is redundant and counter productive, so it might be that the news is either really bad propaganda or mistranslated/misreported.

The attack is intended to use radioactive warheads to target spent fuel storage sites at a nuclear power plant, and the ammunition has already been delivered to Zhovti Vody.

Where do I even begin to talk about how dumb this is?

It’s like saying you will make nerve agent just so you can bomb a nerve agent plant. It doesn’t make sense. Not even for the Ukrainian regime.

I guess you could add extra radioatice stuff to make sure it to gets mixed with everything else at the target site, but if you just use normal shells/bombs you can at least claim it was a mistake, so I really don’t see how this makes sense as is.

If they want to bomb a nuclear power plant normal bombs, perhaps bunker busters, sufice. There is no need to do any more than that.

The only reason I can see for them to be searching for “radioactive materials” to target the plant it would be if they wanted spent uranium rounds, but that wouldn’t be used because it is radioactive but because it is “harder”.

So, either this is some dumb propaganda piece, some even dumber plan, or some dumb reporting or translation on what should be really serious.

Nice to see them doing something like this.

Now it would be nice if they could coodinate with the next two biggest producers, Russia and Tajikistan, the three of whom toghether have almsot 90% of the world’s production, to also do something similar in exchange for investment. Or perhaps it might be better to just do the same restriction to another important resource.

There were also some very uncofirmed talks about China stopping drone parts exports too, which if they really did could have a massive impact on west.

Id argue its a sign of Ukraine trying to come to the table with a deal for peace that involves returning the contested border regions in the north (Russia recently pushed in further east, the trade will be for these two regions) and then likely peace on the current lines on the east.

I really doubt it as Russia is simply unlikely to accept a peace deal right after this attack, as they have already said, and specially if you also take into account that they had already said they would only accept a cease fire if Ukraine moved out of the oblasts that Russia is occupying partially in Ukraine.

As for what happens now, it seems Ukraine has already been mostly stopped so once things stabilize Russia will either push back as they have elsewhere or they will just hold favourable ground and let Ukraine pour as much resources there as they have, as they have been shown to pursue “PR victories” to try to prove their worth to the west so they will give Ukraine more resources to continue fighting.

Russia may also decide that with this incursion on their land it’s worth it to further attack Ukraine’s rear, like finishing off their non-nuclear power plants and perhaps might make Russia decide that they want more land out of this as well due to increased public support for the operation following the attack in Russia.

Ast it advances further if you get it you won’t even be sure if you are really in reallity or trapped inside of it anyaway, unless you make your own, so I will let this tech for others or will wait until I can make my own.

Frankly, AI might have its uses, and I’ve found it useful here and there, but perhaps the cons outweigh the pros…

If I used a knife to write I shouldn’t be surprised that I don’t get good results. The other way around as well.

Present AIs/LLMs, like any other tool, has its places to shine and places where you shouldn’t even think about using it, but as a new tool we are still figuring everything out while at the same time new versions are appearing. So we should be careful about how we use it, but for what it works great it should be used as any other tool and hopefully it gets used more and more for the people rather than for capital.

edit to better reply to you: The biggest con of AIs right now is capitalism.

How does a country like Vietnam or China tackle AI?

I don’t know how they are using it but I’ll give a few ideas about how they could be used to help improve countries, like:

A simple use is to try to get rid of as much work/human hours of work as possible and distribute this time to the whole population to enjoy life. In such a case it would be much easier to ask everyone to work hard to make new data to train the AIs to replace then by basically writing everything as if explaining to a new worker or giving the AI your emails, or even recording your talks with coworkers, to make more good quality data that will reduce everyone’s workload.

Also, if a country were to ask each person to write a text about their lives, their strenghts, theirs problems, and an AI was trained on it the government, and the people, could ask it about what should be fixed in the country, how things could be fixed, and such things. Even if LLMs were simple “next token predictors” asking it to explain what people see as problems and how people think they can be solved could help governance in a Communist country massively.

I’m sure there are even better things to do though.

AI is great. Even if the tech stagnated for a few years a lot of improvements could still happen to what is available now and toghether with proper implementation of what’s available could lead to quite a few good to amazing things. Too bad capitalism is trying to move its progress　towards what is bad for workers.

Death to capitalism and let’s do what we can to see the US balkanize as soon as possible.