stefs

the assassination of archduke franz ferdinand was just the trigger but not the reason. the war would have started anyway.

i agree with this. the kremlin sees this as a win-win strategy. there are two options:

1. either their actions are ignored by the victim states, which makes this very cheap and effective sabotage to weaken EU members.

2. or alternatively, if there's military retaliation, putin can finally do the mobilization he promised not to do for his war on ukraine, because he can now assert that the country is under attack by foreign nations.

the EU / the member states are now in a pickle: they know it's russia but can't say it out loud because then they'd have to take action. they also can't do nothing because then russian sabotage could wreak havoc with the population and economy. so what can they do?

1. military support of ukraine 2. further sanctions of the russian economy, which includes getting rid of dependencies on russian goods 3. re-arming and modernizing their own military (i.e. introducing modern drone warfare capability, launching their own satelite intelligence, ...) 4. start opposing/controlling russian influence by local malicious actors, i.e. russia friendly right wing political parties (which is somewhat complicated but not impossible in a democratic setting)

part of the answer is the peace time dividend. the decrease in european spending has mostly been used for lowering or abolishing taxes on the corporations and the wealthy. if this was to be reversed (because we're not in a peace time anymore), the added tax income could be used to finance the re-armament.

normal: https://share.gemini.google/DhWqDtE74ASX

boldly improved: https://share.gemini.google/cR72HXmY4UdH

i asked nano banana to imagine mrs regan from the source and final text:

initially https://share.gemini.google/eJ54qDXM1gzC

boldly and maximally improved tone, clarity and flow: https://share.gemini.google/RiqX4x6mLB82

> Congress to close the loophole

But i think one of the prediction markets more important uses is to enable insider trading for the current administration.

i don't think that's correct. SEO has been popular long before google. many websites were overloaded with long lists of unrelated keywords at the bottom.

google became the most popular search engine exactly because those SEO keyword spam lists didn't work anymore and, after a while, they vanished. blogs, on the other hand, worked exceptionally well, because they used to link to other blogs' entries a lot, and blogs also used to be (comparably) high quality content.

so the main SEO guideline for getting a good page rank used to be: have a blog/news and publish lots of high quality content that bloggers link to.

i feel like that's still a kind of security by obscurity. the LLM isn't guaranteed to trigger a booby trap.

in my opinion there's no _fundamental_ reason between an AI agent and a human adversary attacking your code, just a practical difference. in the long run the only way is to fix the bugs.

but i agree with you that in practice, it's also a question of cost effectiveness. booby-trapping your code is probably making attacks cost prohibitive for almost everyone (which is the same situation as before, when attackers had to employ security researchers/hackers or buy zero-days from 3rd party providers).

running SOTA models is expensive, so the attackers aren't going to do drive-by attacks. next generation cheap models might do the same, but they can also be used by the defenders.

that's not a solution, that's just an impediment - at least if the agent can keep persistent memory about its state between attempts.

this is addressed in "Solution #3: Allow marketplaces to represent and manage micro-enterprises collectively as if it were a single producer."

so apparently, what you are describing is not what's actually happening.

same here, on my amiga 500 and later on the PC. i was a kid and barely able to understand what was going on (but that didn't matter that much anyway), my english was absolutely inadequate for the text. i remember pestering my father about the vocabulary: "what does 'squashbuckler' mean? what's 'swashbuckler'? what's 'merchantman' and 'the flying dutchman'?" (the last was actually a misreading of "she's flying dutch colors" when you looked at a dutch ship). the worst was when i got too far north-west and had to sail back into settled territory against the wind, which took ages. something else that stuck in my mind was the soundtrack - iirc mostly händel and bach.

ps: years later i found the "mount & blade" series (which i too love), which is roughly the same but medieval and on land.

the ibex install worked flawlessly on the first try while installing windows (on the same machine) failed due to driver issues.

years ago my father got a decomissioned, wiped clean notebook from work and asked me to set it up for him. i didn't want to shell out a hundred bucks for windows, so i suggested trying linux (ubuntu) and he agreed. "intrepid ibex" was installed without issues. a few weeks later i asked him if everything was ok and how he liked it, and he had no complaints, except one: he didn't like the edgy skull on the desktop wallpaper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history#/media/...

> My hope is that in a couple of model generations, we'll trust AI to review MRIs the way we trust it to proofread our emails.

the doctors may have financial motives to suggest unnecessary treatments. but i fear, by the time we'll have models powerful enough we'd be _theoretically_ able to trust their expertise, the financial motives will have shifted to the model creators.

somewhat funny to the immature mind: "fut" - the name of the compiler binary - is austrian slang for vagina, but in the most obscene, vulgar way possible. a bit like "cunt", but worse.

i think what they're talking about is an attacker poisoning the data the agent is trained upon to include functionality/a backdoor that can later, after training and when the agent is deployed, be used to induce unwanted behaviour.

that study is widely regarded as unreliable and outdated.

increased testosterone from working out is probably around 10-30% long time, which is a far lower variance than natural level variance in healthy adults. i think i heard from several (claimed natural) strength and bodybuilding athletes that their total testosterone is at the lower end of the scale.

that said, natural free test levels are at a fraction of what enhanced pro bodybuilders tend to supplement, and there are mass monsters with hair. cutler, yates, ferrigno and golden era bodybuilders like schwarzenegger, zane, columbu all had full heads of hair.

unrelated: https://fossil-scm.org/

yeah, but if you really really wanted to and/or your livelyhood depended on it, you probably could afford it.

good catch

one example i come back to is multithreaded layouting/rendering browser engines. it was mentioned in the servo blog post back then when mozilla worked on it: "we tried it in c++ but it was simply too hard and complicated" (the argument was that they were able to do it in rust). still, as long as rust wasn't avaiable, the problem was considered "too hard" for the team that wrote firefox. in my opinion that's a solid argument for "programming problem that was too hard".

but as simon said, i too consider coming up with "the algorithms, the strategy" as part of programming. saying "it's easy to do if you know exactly how to do it" is somewhat tautological.

which balance? orban was a parasite, trying to embezzle as much money from the EU without getting the boot (hungary as the biggest per-head receiver of EU funds), while probably also getting paid by russia - a hostile actor - for his actions (i.e. sabotaging the union and sowing dissent through propaganda). there was no balance there.

His options were limited. Aside from his tirades against the EU, he was completely dependent on it, as it financed half the country – Hungary was the largest per capita recipient of EU funds. This was also the reason why he never seriously attempted to leave the Union.

He could now take certain steps, such as eliminating press freedom, but election fraud on the scale that would have been necessary to skew this election would have led to sanctions.

yes - i am so relieved. this was a real conundrum for the EU - booting hungary out would have been a huge problem (i.e. opening the door for a russian stronghold right in its mid), but keeping orban in would mean the a) abuse continued and b) it would send a signal to others that this is a winning strategy.

democracy may suffer from the problem that it allows the election of anti-democratic autocrats but it seems that it's definitely able to come back from the brink, even if the deck's stacked against it. i wonder what message it sends to the other countries.

But that's also a fee that's trivial for well funded criminal malicious parties shipping harmful trash but too high for serious open source developers shipping free software.

Celsius?

As always. But it's a first step.

i get a lot of tool call errors with gemma-4-26b-a4b, because the tokens don't seem to match up.

i kinda seem to remember that this is a bit misleading and the rates are surprisingly different than expected. i'm too lazy to check the sources right now, but gemini gives me a 15% daily smoker rate for paris, while it's ~30% for detroit, 21% for philadelphia, 10% for new york, 5% for L.A.