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Comment by f6v | Hacker News Reader

The achievements aren’t in any way tainted by their nationality, citizenship, sex, sexual orientation, age, etc.

Some people see it differently.

Well... I'm sorry if I reach for the reductio at Hitlerum, but any achievements Nazi scientists might have reached in concentration camps are definitely tainted. Similarly, achievements in the field of online consumer analysis in a country where consumer-privacy protections are nonexistent, surely should be considered tainted...?

I suppose the question should be: did the malevolence help in reaching the results?

Wernher von Braun would disagree

They are and we use them all the same. Rockets fly almost every week now, jet engines are the most common form of propulsion, tons of medicine forcibly tested on innocent people is on the market, and to pass up any of that technology would be pure idiocy.

>tons of medicine forcibly tested on innocent people is on the market

What medicine?

That is why the US imported Nazi scientists in bulk to work in their labs. Starting with Wernher von Braun who had become the heart of the US space program. Soviets did the same at the time.

If you are so conscious about consuming tainted fruits the only way to escape is to be living on some deserted island catching your own food.

And Yandex's AI work got helped by the Russian invasion of Ukraine how, exactly? Did they train the bots on Ukrainian captives first?

Its developers stayed complicit with a company with a biggest propagandist pro-war resource in a country (Yandex News).

I'd guess they've been getting a whole lot more traffic lately, thanks to ban on Western services.

It's the other way round. It's quite possible that e.g. this model helped to spread Kremlin propaganda in various discussion boards.

Yandex search, which works on top of their AI is straight out propaganda machine for Russian government. Every time you go to yandex.ru, you're greeted with curated happy news about how Ukrainians are killing themselves, and russians are not fascists at all.

Their government does. They empower it. Just to be clear, it is their army, and their government doing the deed. They elected, they pay salaries to.

> consumer-privacy protections are nonexistent

And you can back this up how?

Wow. Yes you should have refrained from this. You are comparing Nazi scientists who killed many innocents to some software engineers working on a cool project and releasing it for free to the world.

What is your problem?

Just FYI regardless of your stance on any of the recent conflicts. De-humanization is a primary tool in information warfare these days.

> definitely tainted

Operation Paperclip...?

the age old question if the art should be linked or disconnected from the artist

and if technology is neutral.

This is nothing like that, because the question is not one of their own personal actions - but of their nationality or ethnicity. That, until about 4 months ago, would have been widely acknowledged as racism.

The difference between holding values, and holding values when convenient rather sums up the entirety of human history in one phrase.

Yeah, it's certainly about ethnicity, not at all about being controlled by a government which is in the process of perpetrating genocide.

I'm ethnically Russian (mostly), although I've never been to that country and have less influence on their foreign policy than your average European (who at least has some say in how his own country behaves towards Russia — and we've seen how well they managed that). I don't know how this would translate to the real world if I lived in "the West", but from what I'm seeing on the internet for the past few months, it definitely is about ethnicity. I've been called many things and blamed for everything bad that has happened since 1945, and not many seem to care that half of Putin's army consists of people of Asian and Caucasian ethnicities, and there are many Russians in the Ukrainian army. If you go to places like r/worldnews, there are open calls for violence that have strong fascist overtones, and those seem to be getting more popular.

Can't say the same about HN, it's one of the few places that seems to have kept its sanity (for now?)

How is your Russian ethnicity different from average Ukrainian?

But yes, there is, sadly, some discrimination. It's got nothing to do with ethnicity though; it's the same thing that happened to ordinary Germans in 1939-1945, and for the same reasons.

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