I somewhat agree - not necessarily with your content here, but that the article is written ... strangely.
For instance:
> US forces leave country where 4,500 of them died in worst US war of 21st century
I am not even certain that this war was worse than the Afghanistan war. Perhaps the Iraq war was objectively worse, but since the sudden withdrawal in Afghanistan, leaving the Taliban in charge, I am not so sure which war was worse. I am not even sure how to qualify it, so Reuters stating this was the worst war is ... indeed a strange label to use. Wasn't Reuters indeed more objective in the past? And with that I mean objective at all times, not white-washing or black-washing.
I now finished reading the article and it indeed seems op-ed. The reader now thinks that the war against Iran must continue. I still fail to understand why the USA invaded the area. Other than some making enormous profits, of course. If 911 was used as a rationale, why was not Saudi Arabia attacked?
I also tripped over that line but I think it’s content is very specific and the number of deaths is the clue: in terms of deaths the Iraq war is definitely the worst war of the US in the 21st century. You have to very literally read that line. And in that context that claim makes sense: In terms of deaths the Iraq war was the worst war.
Now, there are certainly other axis along which you can judge a war.
The US had a clear reason to be in Afghanistan. It was a brutal quagmire with thousands of deaths (and many more Afghani deaths), but one could at least argue there was purpose in the beginning.
Iraq was 4500 dead for one Texan trying to imitate daddy while listening to his CEO buddies.
It was red herring. None of the villains on those planes are Afghanis or even Taleban. And the entire 20 years saga fighting there not even against the OBL but more of Taleban and bringing freedom that supposely Brits and Soviet cant. OBL troops morphed into Syria where infamously Obama crossed it with his "red lines" without boots on the ground but tons of CIAs operatives running around. We now know it has nothing to do with 911 but more of diverting the "real villains" attention far away in neighboring countries. But at least we bring freedom right? Unfortunately the Kabul government didnt even last 24 hours after we left in the most humiliating way possible. We surely made Soviet look incredibly powerful and foresighted. Their version of Afghan government lasted AFTER Soviet collapsed on budget while we burnt 10T. And then just like Pikachu surprised, China overtook USA as world most powerful country with weapon that we failed (railgun), own space station, robots, drones, rare earth, and even mbridge currency. Meanwhile we got the stable genius with flappy bird planes. And if you do OSINT way way more than 4.5K American KIA there. Way more. But hey, we cant even audit our Pentagon but we can trust-me-bro those number right?
What military assets? Did that school contain those scary Iran nuclear weapons?
BTW, where did Iraq store their WMD after all? In the oil wells, right?
I liked The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but the post-dub voice of Wallach when he was much older, did not quite fit into the movie anymore; it felt strange compared to his voice when he was younger.
As for Hollywood ruining videos: well, it is time to phase out Hollywood. The movies are cultural heritage and the best quality must be preserved (without artifical AI slop clowning it up and changing things; I see that on youtube every day, it is AWFUL. AI slop constantly lies about things. I can call it lie-slop).
People say we can ignore them but I find the difficult to ignore.
But this is not the only problem with lisp syntax. I found that
reading Ruby or Python is simply, on average, so much more efficient.
I found scheme somewhat readable - see haxima game world,
https://sourceforge.net/projects/nazghul/ it contains scheme files -
but I would not want to write any game logic in it.
Yeah - and also trying to promote it. I watched this lately.
First, the Anthropic master clown babbles about how mankind will be destroyed by AI. I mean, skynet in the movie Terminator was kind of cool; the current AI models just work by slopness. They want to erode us by dragging us down to zero quality.
Then this continued over the last some days. Today I heard at the UN speech a german minister babble about AI building up nukes in a private garden (a large garden), bla bla bla all the information is there bla bla bla AI mass-nuke generation.
Now, they are clearly FUDding many people who don't understand anything here. People will associate AI with mega-danger. Probably there will be laws that ensure that only a few companies can control the AI slopness soon, because IT IS SO DANGEROUS. We saw the same discussion with "omg omg omg terrorists", then "omg omg omg someone protect the children", e. g. as a rationale for everyone to ID in order to access information on the world wide web (starting with the anti-social websites, such as facebook, but it won't be limited here; the computer will hand over your ID to the government; see systemd preparing for this move: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954 - it all comes in small baby steps, until all the final legislation is in place. The same happened before again and again - anyone remembers the DMCA? Corporations lobbied and paid for that - and it happened).
> At their core, current models are essentially predictors of what (expert) humans would output given a prompt.
That's a bold claim.
I do not buy it. Essentially AI acts as random babelfish generator, just with a lot more cross-talk back to check to see that it is not total garbage. But there is a ton of garbage nonetheless, hence the proper term AI slop. You seem to mostly try to promote AI with such a wording.
> The only option on the table is to force regulation to impose open source ban before it catches up to the frontier, buying them time to mature their next generation models and keep their business model alive.
Every time someone claims "the only option" is when I become skeptical. I see many more options - most importantly close down the AI slop. I mean you can require of these companies to excel in quality. If they don't, they must go bankrupt. Easy solution here.
I do not need a model to know that selfish mega-corporations cause a lot of harm.
Can we get our money back here? I mean, just take the increase in RAM prices alone. That should come with a huge penalty they should give us back due to collusion. And that's just one of many more things. Trump's family dynasty also owes us all money - we want that back as well.
I like the idea of TOR, but whenever I used it, I hit a speed penalty.
This, in turn, handicaps me searching for information. If they could fix this problem then I would be more likely to make use of TOR. We really need to think long-term about a future web that isn't ruined by Google etc... while also not being locked down such as via age-gating.
I think it must depend on how far away you are from a gateway into the Tor network. There's a slight delay for getting the network ready when I start Tor on my devices, but after that it's not so bad.
Tor amplifies the problems caused by badly written websites that do a billion HTTP calls (unless you have HTTPS enabled on Tor) which does make it noticeably slower in a few edge cases, but I don't think it's as bad as its reputation suggests. For this particular blog, the Tor version loads maybe a couple hundred milliseconds slower, mostly because of images coming in slower (content is ready almost immediately).
Lots of hidden services seem to be under constant DDoS attack, though.
There are still plenty of issues with TOR (my main gripe is the "domain names" being practically impossible to recognize/trust or tell anyone about in the real world), but I don't think speed is the biggest factor anymore.
> My question is: what's the point of the AI in the search engine if it itself isn't going to use the search engine first before answering?
Because the point of AI slop is to waste your time. You just lost about 30 seconds of your life trying to get a correct answer. AI was lying to you, so you had to spend time to counter the AI slop lies here.
I solved it by banning all AI slopness; in the browser some extensions do that. The world becomes better without AI slopness.
For instance:
> US forces leave country where 4,500 of them died in worst US war of 21st century
I am not even certain that this war was worse than the Afghanistan war. Perhaps the Iraq war was objectively worse, but since the sudden withdrawal in Afghanistan, leaving the Taliban in charge, I am not so sure which war was worse. I am not even sure how to qualify it, so Reuters stating this was the worst war is ... indeed a strange label to use. Wasn't Reuters indeed more objective in the past? And with that I mean objective at all times, not white-washing or black-washing.
I now finished reading the article and it indeed seems op-ed. The reader now thinks that the war against Iran must continue. I still fail to understand why the USA invaded the area. Other than some making enormous profits, of course. If 911 was used as a rationale, why was not Saudi Arabia attacked?