The numbers from 2024 are reflective of the complete disappearance of russia from global markets. For instance, there have been no military procurement deals after 2023, only deliveries of previously ordered stuff.

The poorly hidden debt crisis is within the regions paying the death and recruitment bonuses, and the military contractors forced to sell at a loss and being propped up by state backed loans (one went bankrupt recently). Neither of those show up on official state debt numbers, but are unquestionably a problem for the state budget to fix. The one where 50% is being wasted to achieve nothing in Ukraine. At the best of times there are a few kilometres here and there, but even that is over now.

Ukrainians still unequivocally support keeping the war until russia agrees to leave them the fuck alone, and they get security guarantees (if you think you have polls saying otherwise, look again in the questions and answers, a tiny majority are ready to surrender Eastern Ukraine to end the war now, but practically nobody is willing to do so without guarantees). Those are achievable objectives. On the other side the leadership cannot admit defeat or they'll get toppled, and has no hope of achieving anything they could spin as a victory. So they keep wasting human lives to prolong the inevitable defeat.

As if the LLM trainers would care. They've ignored every single license and copyright policy out there because "fair transformative use". It's undergoing litigation in various jurisdictions, and the chaotic side of me really wants to see what happens if a UK or California decide that training an LLM on pirated copyrighted material is not fair use, and the rights holders have to be compensated.

And it's undeniable that the whole country is falling backwards - the economy is in tatters with high inflation, high interest rates , severe economic and kinetic damage to the main revenue generating activities (export of oil, gas, raw materials, military equipment), a poorly hidden ballooning debt crisis. And worst of all, a leader who cannot admit defeat so can't get the country out of the quagmire. So things will get a whole lot worse before there's any chance of them getting better.

This only works if you are American and think only about Americans and American companies. Which may or not be the case for Anthropic, and for sure is the case for the US government.

Because from across the pond, this is indeed free marketing... For Mistral and the Chinese open weight models and all the companies that sell them / fine tune and sell them. Who would ever trust their developer productivity / business process automation / support chatbot / whatever on models and providers that can be yanked with no notice?

The morale of the story is, you'd be dumb to rely on any LLM you don't run yourself in your own environnement. Reliability and predictability (including of costs) matter more than quality and features, especially when you can compensate for the quality with fine tuning.

That's a claim.

Switzerland is so democratic they refused to let women vote until the 1990s (in the last canton) because the voters (men) didn't allow that. It's my go-to example of how direct democracy has pitfalls too.

No, in most cases the contract stipulates profit/revenue sharing. E.g. Orano's uranium mines in Niger had 50% of all revenues going to the Nigerien government. In other cases it's much lower (e.g. Dundee Precious Metals in Bulgaria pay 10% of profits to the state).

Not the same type of AR, but the Even G2 look very promising. Can't use them as an external screen, they're more of an assistant with notes, live translate, app ecosystem, etc. I imagine they might be useful as a moving teleprompter.

Realistically, does it matter? Most people aren't going to switch phone ecosystems over the assistant available on their phone's OS.

Indeed, but police do this kind of thing in a lot of places. Didn't the US have multiple cases of people being arrested over comments on Kirk's death? It's not good, but cops on a power trip because you hurt their feelings is not a thing we can easily root out. Hence why courts matter.

> All speech is hate speech of you are not in line with the current govt.

Not at all what hate speech means.

> Basically if China is 100% authoritarian, UK is atleast 70% there. They just need a leader to abuse these systems to come in power.

Yeah, no, 70% is ridiculous. I'm not sure you can clearly measure this, but at most 50%. Even with an abusive leader you can still criticise them and the monarch without fear of actual repercussions. In China prison time is basically guaranteed.

The only cases this has happened has been over people actively calling for racial violence over an imagined scare - bunch of morons thought a muslim migrant killed someone, so they went on to riot, burn mosques, assault foreign looking people, etc; on day 2 it was revealed the perpetrator was a Britain born Christian son of foreign origins, but the morons didn't care, they had their excuse.

I struggle to think of many countries where calling for immediate violence, on Facebook or in public with placards, is acceptable. Or any reason why it should be.