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It’s this pathological inability to understand alliances and coalition-building that will ultimately doom the New Right. Like the far Left, this is a movement built to exclude and divide and splinter — both because of the querulous personalities of rightists themselves, and because of the intransigence of a racial ideology that abhors any impurity.
we produced our own conservative estimate, finding that the climate impact from 2025's use of NVIDIA'S AI products is on par with the state-owned Russian Coal company.
The US military is being run by a group that apes the Russians and not the Ukrainians—when we have in front of us one of the best statements of command principles I have ever seen from the latter.
the Trump administration's deferential posture towards Russia and China has alienated allies. But on the other hand, it has gained the United States nothing in the way of strategic stability.
While Western export bans have severed Russia from much of the auto market, they have not tempered the demand for brand-name SUVs and trucks. That has given rise to a sophisticated network of criminals that steals cars, hides them in shipping containers and sends them to Russia, often by way of the Middle East
The reality is quite the opposite; a country that can create a national health care system is more aware of its own existence, because of the experience of solidarity which enables everyone to thrive thanks to everyone else.
However senseless it is, American rhetoric of the non-existence of Canada is concerning, because it resembles the way the Kremlin spoke about Ukraine, and rightly reminds Canada that their sovereignty is indeed the issue.
The Nordic-Baltic warmongering under the current conditions is therefore (i) irresponsible, (ii) hypocritical, (iii) immoral, and (iv) flirts with a disaster of immense proportions.
Such, indeed fragile, peace not only puts an end to today’s carnage, but leaves open a possibility of eventual long-term solution between Russia and Ukraine.
In other words, it is not harmless optimism to act like Trump might help Ukraine, it is falling for a deadly, pro-Putin maneuver that is and will increasingly lead to Ukrainian suffering.
It is not because it affects Russian morale, or causes inconvenience, it is because ultimately it is the best way to take away the one thing all war machines need—money.
Technologies from our community - CRDTs, sync engines, universal version control, and good old-fashioned open protocols and file formats - can give a nation more independence and control over its own critical software infrastructure.
I genuinely believe that if you took an open weights model from 2025 and built a pentest harness for it, it could do this kind of sandbox escape and scan/hack in most networks. This is only surprising because you assume OpenAI has sounder sandboxes.
After the financial deplatforming of Western proles and foreign elites, of Canadian truckers and 145M Russians, it’s clear that digital finance is a weapon of war.
By resisting Russia, Ukrainians are defending what is perhaps most basic about decent political life: the idea that people should be who they choose to be, not whom they are forced to become.
One, you're surrounding yourself by failing states. You can look at Russia and China and they're surrounded by some of the most dysfunctional places on the planet and you go, "Gee whiz, are they unlucky or they complicit?"
It was a miracle of your lifetimes. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The problem for the likes of Putin is that this wealth producing trade was not happening at his house, but the houses of those vested in the trading order, not in extortion.
And Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China much more so under Deng Xiaoping, but recently Xi Jinping has been privileging the crony sector over the private sector and neither one has stable government institutions.
You set them up to fail, you destabilize the rising, you ingest the failing, and you set up buffer zones in between, and you await the opportune moment to pounce and absorb. This is Vladimir Putin's game.
Many AI researchers are overly focused on risks from model misalignment, and will be in for a rough surprise when havoc arises from other layers of the stack.
The best book I read last year was Mark Lawrence's The Book That Wouldn't Burn, which much to my surprise did not make a single award list for its publication year of 2023. It was a tour de force of world-building that surprised me multiple times.
Nick Lloyd’s The Eastern Front covers the clashes between Imperial Germany and the Russian Empire as well as the Austro-Hungarians against the Italians and the Serbs. Whereas the western front was essentially static throughout the whole war, the east was characterized by the sort of maneuver warfare that most generals had expected to fight.
Breakneck by Dan Wang Wong does an excellent job at objectively looking at the pros and cons of the Chinese and American societies. The engineering state versus lawyerly society as a way to explain each nation is brilliant.
And the German war machine could only win in so-called speed wars, like lightning war. Only if they would do it very fast and surprise, because they were always weaker, basically.
So Hitler receives this Dolantin injection, and he gets up, he goes into the meeting room, he dominates the meeting room, he feels great. He decides, you know, in front of everybody, no one is able to… no one overpowers him in that meeting. He was very good in the room. And the troops are split up. Like Leningrad is now a target. This weakens the general thrust towards Moscow. This is probably why they didn't take Moscow.
And that was not the British soldier, not the French soldier, not the Russian soldier. That was fatigue. He had been looking for a way to keep a soldier awake longer.
This is Russia's war. And it is Russia that should pay. This is why we need to work urgently on a new solution to finance Ukraine's war effort on the basis of the immobilised Russian assets. With the cash balances associated to these Russian assets, we can provide Ukraine with a Reparations Loan.
I think that sedentary armies, sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in ways, this is how we do it. And we're going to make it a little faster, we're going to make it a little bigger, a little stronger but this is how we think. Genghis Khan had no set way to think and, when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209 after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids and I really think there were raids not wars at first.
If you have a nation of 1 million people and you are ruling over hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, China, Russia, the Middle East, you do not do that through warfare. You conquer them initially through warfare, but you do not rule them through warfare. You've got to be offering something that they want, something that they like.
No other power in the history of the world has conquered Russia and China and Persia and Central Asia and Turkey and Korea. No power in the world has done that. Not Alexander, not the Romans. Nobody will ever do it again.
And Russians will hate me for saying this, and I probably will get a whole load of bots on the back of it, but the truth is, it is not the street fighting that destroys Sixth Army, it is the encirclement, the subsequent encirclement.
That might surprise people. The bigger it is, the less noticeable it is that you’ve crossed the event horizon. One way to think about it is curvature is less noticeable the bigger it is.
America will be a manufacturing nation once again, and we have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have — the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth — and we are going to use it.
However, productive collaborations are not inevitable. Just look at ethnic violence in South-East Asia or Hindu Nationalism in India. Nation-building is really valuable, learning from multi-ethnic, democratic Indonesia.
Fascinating subject. Countries are made of stories. Kings didn’t need their subjects to agree, but nations do. So to build a nation, they need to make a story that helps people feel a shared identity, nationalism, and what distinguishes them from their neighbors. Back-creating a history. Founders of Israel did this brilliantly.
About Dry Grasses (Turkey, CC) 3.9 This is my favorite film directed by Ceylan, and that’s high praise. At times it feels like a long Russian novel. Engrossing from beginning to end, despite its 3¼ hour length. This one also could have been entitled “Evil Does Not Exist”.
is this idea that we form these internal models at particular points of high prediction error or points of, I believe also points of uncertainty, points of surprise or motivationally significant periods. And those points are when it’s maximally optimal to encode an episodic memory.
And so yes, the era when Europe bought its energy and fertilizers from Russia, had its goods manufactured in China, and delegated its security to the United States of America, is over.
But that was their official position, and that changed just two years ago when Putin gave a speech and he said that their position had changed, that they will no longer wait to absorb an attack.
First of all, we have 44 interceptor missiles total, period, full stop. Let me repeat, 44. Earlier we were talking about Russia’s 1,670 deployed nuclear weapons. How are those 44 interceptor missiles going to work? And they also have a success rate of around 50%. So they work 50% of the time.
there is an absolutely existential flaw in the system, which Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta confirmed with me, which is that our ICBMs do not have enough range. If we launch a counterattack against, say, North Korea, our ICBMs must fly over Russia. They must fly over Russia.
So part of the reason that we deploy the way we do, we call it iterative deployment, rather than go build in secret until we got all the way to GPT-5, we decided to talk about GPT-1, 2, 3, and 4. And part of the reason there is I think AI and surprise don’t go together. And also the world, people, institutions, whatever you want to call it, need time to adapt and think about these things.
So in historical terms and intellectual terms, what is happening today in the war between Russia and Ukraine is the vision on one level or another level that was formulated by the noble laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, half Russian, half Ukrainian.
And the Soviet collapse is continuation of the disintegration of the Russian Empire that started back in 1917, that was arrested for some period of time by the Bolsheviks, by the Communist ideology, which was internationalist ideology. And then came back in full force in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
So if NATO is the real concern, it would be probably not completely unreasonable to expect that if not every single soldier, but at least half of the Russian army fighting in Ukraine would be moved to protect the new border with NATO in Finland.
Russia and Russian identity was formed around the state, and has difficulty imagining itself outside of the state, and that state happened to be imperial for most of Russian history. Ukrainian project came into existence in revolt against the state.
So for him, the biggest tragedy is not the loss of life, the biggest tragedy is the loss of the great power status or the unity of those whom he considered to be Russian nations.
To my surprise, I really enjoyed The Republic. It is both well-written and weird, which puts it above many other famous philosophical books that are too obscure to be easily read.
In fact, I would say it’s more surprising that the matter that we know about is constitutes as big a fraction of the universe as it does. We’re limited, we’re human. The fact that we see 5% of the energy density of the universe, about one sixth of the energy density in matter, that’s remarkable.
There's no evidence he was interested in conquering all of Ukraine. There was no evidence beforehand that he was interested in conquering any of Ukraine. And there's no way that an army that had 190,000 troops, at the most, could have conquered all of Ukraine, it's just impossible.
Well, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. And if we don't like great powers coming into our neighborhood, it's hardly surprising that the Russians did not want NATO on their doorstep.
My second point is if he doesn't remain in power and he's replaced, I would bet a lot of money that his replacement will be more hawkish and more hard line than Putin is.
Look, I think I would just recommend do not send the flower of Ukrainian youth to die in trenches, whether he talks to Putin or not, just don’t do that. Whoever goes on the offensive will lose massive numbers of people and history will not look kindly upon them.
It is fair to say that, while economists expected the short end of the yield curve to reflect the higher rates needed to win the fight against inflation, the sharply steeper long end of the yield curve in the last few months has come as a surprise. I shall freely admit that I did not predict it.
Recently though, I went to The Drama Bookshop, which was a delightful surprise. It is the closest I have come to the experience of a Manhattan bookshop as a third place in the kind of Prairie Lights mode.
So, it wouldn’t surprise me any longer if we found life on Mars and it had a genetic code that was not very different to the genetic code that we have here without it just being transferred across, there’s some inevitability about the whole of the beginnings of life, in my view.
Once again, I was wowed by Towles’s writing—especially because The Lincoln Highway is so different from A Gentleman in Moscow in terms of setting, plot, and themes.
This one might come as a surprise to some, but the reality is that at Fitbit’s more reasonable pricing as of late, the Fitbit Sense is a pretty good option. And it’s a super well-rounded option
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