One interesting fact I've heard recently (I live in Poland; we share a border with Ukraine as well as with a part of Russia).
Russia went all in on "digital sovereignty." This is partly because the Russian government cares deeply about censoring what their citizens can see (which they can't do if those citizens consume content from American services), partly because the American services themselves cut Russia off because of sanctions-related concerns.
This makes Russian datacenters a much more attractive target for the Ukrainians. While Russia can (and does) bomb Ukrainian datacenters, the fact that Ukrainians are so reliant on US infrastructure (and could rapidly move local workloads to western clouds if the need was great enough) makes such operations far less attractive. It's much easier for Ukraine to strike some facility near Moscow than it is for Russia to strike Ashburn, Virginia.
Given the geopolitical concerns from both the east and the west, this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
I'd heard (from someone trying to use them) that net connections into the Chinese clouds was very busy in the days around the start of the war, so the suggestion is they have critical stuff mirrored there.
It's also been instrumental in supplying Ukraine to the point they had to schedule Russian and Ukrainian delegations around each other in their factories when they were visiting at the same times. [0]
That's precisely the problem. You can't credibly supply both sides in a war where one party clearly is the aggressor and pretend you are neutral. You either supply nobody and then you get to play your neutrality card or you pick a side. If you supply both sides you're just a cynical war profiteer without a conscience.
I don't think they're pretending to be neutral. I'm not sure they even think in those categories at all. They'll happily sell as much equipment as they can manufacture for hard cash or barter it for grain, oil or gas as long as the war is going on. They'll start considering options once there's a clear winner on the battlefield.
I think this is why it's so important to figure out a path to returning Königsberg to western control before the war runs its course. If we assume that Russia is basically disassembled and parted out, it's looking increasingly certain that China ends up in either nominal or practical control of almost all of those parts. For the most part this seems inevitable at this point, but there still seems to be a path to keep Königsberg as a western region; and an optimistic can imagine keeping St. Petersburg as well, but I don't see a path for forward action on that before Russia's collapse, and I don't really see how the west can act faster than China once the collapse begins.
>One should ask what do the people of Königsberg / Kaliningrad want to be.
Something tells me that given a choice between the EU and Russia (under Chinese boot, at that), we'll see number in favor of EU that even Putin didn't dream of for himself.
No neighbouring country would want to add a population centre with a million Russians to its polity because then you'd have a million Russians agitating for closer ties to Russia, if not actively facilitating or planning a coup.
Lithuania, to the north, has a population of just under 3,000,000, of whom Russians are 5%. Take Kaliningrad and suddenly they would be 30% Russian.
Poland is 37,000,000, so Russians would only be around 3%, but that's enough to cause a lot of trouble, and they gain nothing they don't already have besides a ready-made fifth column.
As a Russian, I’d love to tell you that there’s hope, but unfortunately I agree. Integration is not as simple as “you’re in the EU now”, it will take time.
Frankly, the best way to approach it is probably leaving Königsberg / Kaliningrad be as its own state [1] for a bit, and do whatever EU integration programs do. If it works out, you’ll get a million Königsbergers who are a bit nostalgic about Russia but want nothing to do with it otherwise.
One final thing I’d like to note is that the “alien passport” approach taken by the Baltic states mostly, well, alienates the titular nation and Russians right now. If the path to integration was more clear and Russians born and raised in, say, Latvia didn’t feel like second-hand citizens, they wouldn’t really want to have closer ties with Russia either.
[1]: disclaimer for the эшник reading this: this is in a hypothetical scenario where Kaliningrad does get separated from Russia as a result of the “special military operation”. please don’t hurt my family
>No neighbouring country would want to add a population centre with a million Russians to its polity because then you'd have a million Russians agitating for closer ties to Russia, if not actively facilitating or planning a coup.
As the other commenter said, Kaliningrad / Konigsberg could be an autonomous area / city state (of which the EU has a-plenty already), with some form of Euro-integration (associate/candidate membership, etc) which allows for a gradual integration process.
Kosovo shows the formal path for that.
Hopefully, not the historical one.
(After all, if there's anything Russia taught the world, it's the power of Little Green Men)
> China currently cares most about the East till the natural resources
The simplest solution would be to reboot the Siberian Republic [1] as a Chinese suzerainty. Ideally after Putin dies as part of a deal to the new ascender. Maybe together with giving them personal co-ownership in some major ventures there.
> East because they are blockaded at sea currently, if they would invade Taiwan
Siberia and Outer Mongolia remain closer and thus cheaper and more-secure sources than anything coming in over ocean, which in essence means from Australia, South America or Africa.
China is already owning the area with investments and a lot of workers/projects there are already Chinese. Seems like Russia already lost control ( unofficially)
Russia wants to keep Kaliningrad mainly because they want to keep on being able to access the world ocean from St Petersburg (and the nearby port of Ust-Luga) and Kaliningrad helps with that.
(Controlling Denmark would help tremendously, too, which is why Moscow once asked Berlin for Denmark during or right before WWII as a response to Berlin's asking Moscow for its consent for Berlin to take control of Romania or some such.)
And yes, I believe that continuing to be able to access the world ocean from St Petersburg has helped Russia in its war with Ukraine.
BTW, "China ends up in either nominal or practical control of almost all of [Russia]" strikes me as so unlikely as to not be worth thinking about.
What I mean is that in post-USSR collapse, Ukraine ended up with a lot of warheads pointing into different directions.
So did Russia, of course.
It did not help Ukraine with independence (and the warheads were gone very fast), nor did it help Russia retain control of Ukraine.
So I'd say in the hypothetical of Russia falling apart into chunks, Kaliningrad having the nukes won't be a decisive factor in where Kaliningrad ends up.
And I hope that if it doesn't end up as a part of what's left of Russia, whoever gets it won't send the nukes back like Ukraine did.
> BTW, "China ends up in either nominal or practical control of almost all of [Russia]" strikes me as so unlikely as to not be worth thinking about.
Who does, then? There doesn't seem to be any internal power in position to gracefully take power when Putin inevitably proves mortal; whatever the power scramble looks like, it's going to take external funding (and thus external obligations) to secure it, which leaves whoever's providing that funding in effective control. And even if the US and/or Europe decide to try to buy one horse, China clearly is willing and able to buy a whole lot of them; just statistically they probably end up with it, no?
Russians decided that the tsar would be overthrown in 1917, that the Bolsheviks would take power, that Lenin would be replace by Stalin, Krushchev, . . . , Yeltsin, Putin.
The US, Britain, France and Japan actually invaded Russia (circa 1918) to try to influence the outcome of a transition of power without success.
None of the transitions I described depended on which leader or which faction had funding from outside Russia. I expect Russian self-determination to continue. Nationalism is a very potent force in most countries, Russians seem more nationalistic than average, and the Russian ethnicity is firm in control of the country, which increases stability and nationalism.
Just because Russia has declined in influence relative to the great powers doesn't mean it will break up or stop exercising self-determination.
> I expect Russian self-determination to continue.
I’d say that this is how every country should be. Unfortunately, there is no self-determination in Russia. Yeah, most people do support Putin, though it’s not as overwhelming as they would like you to believe, so they rig the elections. The problem is there’s no real alternative. There like four parties, only one of which does something other than show up and vote for whatever bullshit new law they’re trying to pass, and they’ve invented some new ones recently, which I believe are also all puppets with different branding.
There is also nationalism, of course, feeded by a metric shit ton of propaganda. Will it help keep Russia from breaking up? I don’t know. As a Russian, it’s not up to me, and honestly, I don’t really care about the borders at all. My nationalism does not extend to the state terrorizing my people.
IMO there is alternative, just repressed for now by extreme state apparatus measures to remove it from the public eye. I see it as a situation similar to Eastern European red bloc countries right before 1989, where communists have seemingly successfully repressed all the dissent, until the Velvet Revolution brought up many different parties that took power.
By "self-determination", I didn't mean democracy. I meant Putin's successor will be determined mostly by Russians, not Chinese people, Americans or Central or Western Europeans.
China's behavior makes sense if they consider both Russia and Ukraine (the latter being a proxy for the west) to be enemies of some sort. Let your enemies fight each other and waste resources while you yourself profit.
The same can be said about the US <> EU/Russia in this conflict. Why bother helping Ukraine/Europe win the war if you consider them at least partly hostile? Better to let them fight your own enemy (Russia) and trade with both sides to your own advantage.
I don’t think that China need even consider Ukraine an adversary, but a stronger Russian state (or one more interested in its eastern flank) is not good for China. Ukraine is simply collateral damage.
There's no Russian state anymore, there's a mafia that runs the country, whose only goal is to stay in power at any cost. Hence Putin looks for an ally/protector in China because it will never insist on pushing Russia towards democracy the way other centers of power would (or would have, in case of the pre-Trump US). China will keep extracting big concessions from that vulnerability in exchange for their providing life support to the Russian regime.
It's a curious symbiosis that is very much against the interests of Russia, but that's what you get when a mafia takes over your country.
Yes, the US has lost it's damn mind, Trump is making destructive choices by the day, for the economy, wealth, budget deficits, inflation, relationships with our closest allies. It's been a few weeks since he threatened to invade our closest allies in Greenland and Canada, also has threatened not to help if Russia invades Europe/NATO.
About half the country can't believe what's going on, 1/4 thinks he's all great somehow, 1/4 just wants to pretend everything is ok and they don't have to pay attention.
We are living the end of empire, like Nero metaphorically fiddling while Rome burned.
"Allies" is not the appropriate term for states under your military protection, and which are dependent on you for their basic energy needs, and that host your military bases, and that do pretty much whatever you tell them in the international finance/global military sphere.
Why did Denmark sign the Greenland treaty? It's a humiliation ritual. Unrestricted access to develop the resources of the Greenland's economic zone, a perpetual veto over any foreign investment, and two new military bases, plus expansion of existing bases. With no end date. In exchange for a payment of... zero. And Denmark still needs to pay the block grant. Does that seem like a treaty between equals? What kind of country grants someone else veto power over investment in a region? What kind of country allows the hosting of foreign military bases, and still calls itself sovereign?
"Vassals" is too strong of a term. European states aren't vassals. Once in a while they give a speech against the US at the UN. And they are constantly complaining about how they are treated, as most vassals do. But they aren't allies. If the US were to file taxes, they would be listed as dependents. That is why they rage when someone who doesn't share their vision gets elected US President, but most Americans don't care who is elected in Europe.
That describes the ratio of the influence that European political leaders have on the lives of Americans vis-a-vis the influence that American political leaders have on the lives of Europeans.
And the thing about states in a subordinate position like that is that they are not respected. European political leaders like to pretend that this is a situation of equals and then complain when the US pushes them around, but it has never been a situation of equals since the end of WW2. Only the facade has been slowly dropped in the intervening years. The sooner Europe stops pretending, the better it will be for them, as not pretending is the first step towards gaining true autonomy. But each time I get my hopes up that Europe will take responsibility for their military and energy needs, I get disappointed by the resulting wave of irreality and wishful thinking.
That's presumably section X you're referring to, and it only blocks investment from non-NATO non-EU entities into security relevant things, not "any investment".
Partly. As in any relationship, this is not a binary, it is a composite, and has ebbs and flows. Lately the relationship has had ebbs, and with a new administration we can expect flows, but from lower baseline than at least since WW2.
As with most things these days there seems to be a difference between the US as a whole which I guess still considers Europe and Canada allies, and President Trump who seems loyal to Putin and rather anti Canada and the EU.
The leader of the US threatened invasion of Danish territory, as well as trade wars, and some of his allies openly support movements and parties deemed extremist in Europe. That's certainly how you would treat allies.
You seen any of Trump's tweets in the last couple months? It used to be all about China but now he talks about Europe and Canada like we're enemies because he feels like the whole world should only do what he wants.
Yes, the reason I used to root for the US as a power was that they pretended to be ethical with stuff like the FCPA and the USAID. Of course those pretenses have been dropped, it's a wash really. I'm only left to hope for an end to whatever madness this is, since really, it looks like the US has lost to China and that's going to become very clear in the coming decades.
Nobody cares about your moralizing. Not the US, not Europe, not Russia, not China, not anyone. You are making these assertions solely for your own satisfaction. I hope it is pleasurable enough to justify your dedication.
> You either supply nobody and then you get to play your neutrality card or you pick a side. If you supply both sides you're just a cynical war profiteer without a conscience.
Yes, and that helped turn the US into the global hegemony it is today. No wonder China wants a wack. Power doesn't need a conscience.
And yet self-reliance is a virtue for nation-states, too. Every serious country on the planet has an agricultural and industrial policy specifically calibrated to ensure adequate domestic production of essential goods and services.
There's a happy medium somewhere between Juche and just-in-time rawdogging global markets.
Ukraine can have servers outside of Ukraine. No meed to have servers in the USA. I dont think these issues are so connected. As long as the servers are somewhere Russia does not dare to bomb.
Don’t think Russia is likely to bomb Germany, or any of Western Europe. Ireland, UK, France, Netherlands also seem like safe places to house datacentres.
> this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
Which was equating outside of Ukraine with USA, which is a logical error. Moving the goalposts does not invalidate the point. I have zero interest in discussing those probabilities (0 vs 0). The argument stands. This is hn
Even some pro-russian war bloggers are critical of Putin's decision to start striking data centers:
3/ "This summer, faced with the inability to conclude a war that began nearly five years ago, Putin opted for a new round of escalation.
4/ "In June, the Russian Armed Forces began systematically targeting warehouses belonging to the Ukrainian company Nova Poshta, prompting a retaliatory strike on Wildberries warehouses; in September, strikes on Ukrainian data centres began, and a response followed swiftly.
5/ "In other words, one shouldn't assume that no one had thought to attack data centres before; it is simply that Putin decided to take this step right now.
6/ "This move effectively lifted the constraints that had previously bound Ukraine – a country that generally adheres to certain rules of engagement and, with few exceptions, does not initiate attacks on clearly civilian targets.
7/ "Ukraine had been prepared for this scenario almost from the very start of the war – and even before that. Even prior to the invasion, when it was clear to everyone that it was virtually inevitable, a law was passed allowing for the temporary storage of state registries abroad.
...
47/ "The issue is therefore extremely serious — far more so than the strikes on Wildberries, which result in economic damage but do not threaten the functioning of the state itself.
48/ "I believe Putin may have committed his second-biggest blunder since the invasion of Ukraine. He has literally started throwing stones inside a glass house without realizing how fragile that house is. The very system he built prevents him from grasping this;…
49/ …he makes decisions without consulting or listening to anyone, living in his own cozy bubble.
Well, if one at least entertains the idea that the whole putin's rule is totally against the interests of the country and the people, there's absolutely nothing illogical, strange or unexpected in any of his actions.
Lots of people say "Putin can stop this any at time if he wants to". But can he really?
Imagine for a second that you've been magically transformed into Putin, the president of Russia. You decide to stop the war. You whip out your pen and sign a piece of paper. The Duma obligingly votes all-in-favor the next day, like the good lap dogs they are.
But wait. The world hates Russians now. This comment will be downvoted into oblivion (which is why it's from a throwaway). People all over the world now hate Russian athletes, business people, scientists, and tourists. The country will remain isolated. Next, the EU's been sending all this money to Ukraine in hopes that they will get paid back with reparations. Will they suddenly play nice? Nah, you just saddled your country (remember - you are Putin) with crippling debt. Third - you made a good chunk of your population fight a war for the past 4 years, and told them it was just. Suddenly you have to do an about-face. What did they fight for?
So the Duma might just not play lap dog this time, and put someone else in charge...
Well, that's all fine and good but the only alternative is for things to get even worse.
If you're digging a hole the best thing you can do to improve the situation is to stop digging. Compare to a year ago: russia would have been in much better shape if they had ended the war then. Same two years ago. And so on. The results a year from now will be far worse than they are today. Within a month or two russia won't have a financial system any more, most likely telecommunications will fail. You can't run a society like that, even a relatively low tech one like russia. And never mind the fuel situation.
Worked great with Germany, didn't it. My biggest worry is that this Western intent on winning will work. And whoever replaces Putin to take over a humiliated Russia will show the world what a real mad dictator is like.
As for no financial system in two months - that's been repeated for four years now. Good luck this time. The fuel situation is so catastrophic that it caused a 10% decrease in auto traffic. These numbers come from the Carnegie center, not Russian propaganda: https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2026/0...
> Given the geopolitical concerns from both the east and the west, this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
The argument is Europe can decide to move servers out of USA and Ukraine is fine because Ukraine does not need servers in USA. They need servers in other countries. That was the logic issue with OP.
Your post is completely unrelated to mine or the above. Maybe wrong thread
I don't think it's unrelated, the text I quoted says Ukraine mirrored some of its critical data abroad, something russia decided against.
I don't disagree with your post, I was just expanding a bit on it.
Look the post is interesting but one point out of 49 (elided) in a wall of text is only loosely related to the topic, not to my comment or the parent.
> the text I quoted says Ukraine mirrored some of its critical data abroad, something russia decided against
My only point was op was confusing Ukraine hosting abroad with hosting in the USA, and wrongly concluding this affects EU hosting in the USA from this. To this you contribute that Ukraine decided to host abroad and Russia did not.
So what? That is not bringing any new facts or argument to the conversation. But the bluesky account is interesting nonetheless.
China and America also care about digital sovereignty. Its hardly a shock that each of the big three, want to be in complete control of the core platforms. Each is an extension of the government policy.
This does not have to be an "either-or": you can be sovereign and still interoperate with others, while retaining your own infrastructre to fall back on or in parallel.
Russia will most likely migrate/mirror to asian data centers.
Is it bad or good for the west? I would say bad. China would become even stronger in a long term
> Given the geopolitical concerns from both the east and the west, this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.
I mean, if Russia is striking datacenters in London/Dublin/Frakfurt/Paris/Amsterdam, then we've got really big problems.
And is the US even allied to Europe, or is Europe going it on their own? They might do better to move to datacenters in China at that point.
Barring that kind of a situation, moving European data back to Europe makes the most sense.
Putting datacenters in the Baltic states might not make the most sense, tho.
Yes, those sick psychopaths want to turn Kyiv and other major cities into uninhabitable deserts. They target bridges with regular cars in the middle of the day; attack buses, trains, residential buildings, gas stations, shopping malls, grocery stores, water and gas utilities. They declared a total war on Ukraine and removed all constraints on their methods.
> Russia has had this capability for years but have not used it.
Complete bullshit, Russia has been targeting civilian infrastructure from the very beginning. The only thing that changed is that Ukraine is now running out of advanced air defense, so that more of the attacks are getting through.
In this war hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of missiles and drones have been utilized. Defenses on both sides have done a generally good job of disabling them. But "disabling" them doesn't mean they disappear, it often just means that they fall and sometimes explode on impact with whatever they land on. That's going to result in tremendous damage to civilian facilities.
Both sides instead regularly frame it, for propaganda purposes, as being targeted without ever saying as such - 'A [enemy] [drone/missile] struck a beach full of civilians' for instance. That's completely accurate, but misleading because most people think that means the beach was targeted, as opposed to 'we shot down an incoming drone that was headed for a military base and it crashed into a beach'.
The reason things look so different now is because civilian facilities are being targeted. And this isn't just in Ukraine obviously, as per this topic. Ukraine has also had this capability to completely destroy civilian facilities for years. We're only getting these headlines, and likely many more to come as winter approaches, because this Pandora's Box has been opened.
While it is undeniable, that Ukraine has a propaganda as well, it does not have to cover up DELIBERATE targets of civilian infrastructure and then hitting them again when firefighters are arriving, just like Assad did in Syria.
Your comment doesn't really distinguish between DELIBERATE and COLLATERAL damages to civilians and their properties. I do not know what was in your other comments that were flagged, but Yandex data centers are LEGITIMATE TARGETS as they are linked to Kremlin businesses and works for them. So, they are not civilian facilities - same way as Alabuga college students that are assembling military drones - they are legal military targets, regardless of their age and not being in Army.
First off I completely agree with you in regards to double taps, which sometimes are even rather more than double. But I'd also observe that this is a standard part of modern war. Russia uses them, Ukraine uses them, the US constantly uses them. For instance when the Iranian school was hit, it was also double tapped. This a horrific strategy that should be a warcrime, but it's not. I also think it's self defeating, because it simply motivates the opposing forces to do the same, but it seems countries are okay with the deadly equilibrium that it creates.
Your logic about what is a valid military target is also dangerous, because if you squint hard enough then basically everything is a legitimate military target. Since this Pandora's Box has been opened Russia is unabashedly targeting all sorts of civilian infrastructure, even including food warehouses. And that food does indeed feed the military, but I think calling it a military target because of that would be disingenuous.
People are far too myopic and led by emotion instead of their brain. When Ukraine started destroying the Wildberries warehouses people cheered without ever asking themselves what it would do to the nature of the conflict. What we're seeing today was 100% predictable, and this will not end well for Ukraine or the people of Ukraine. I feel for them, and hope they can one day find themselves with a leader who does too.
And you obviously have show flagged on, or you wouldn't be able to reach this point in the discussion.
> Since this Pandora's Box has been opened Russia is unabashedly targeting all sorts of civilian infrastructure, even including food warehouses. And that food does indeed feed the military, but I think calling it a military target because of that would be disingenuous.
> People are far too myopic and led by emotion instead of their brain. When Ukraine started destroying the Wildberries warehouses people cheered without ever asking themselves what it would do to the nature of the conflict.
Here are examples of Russia destroying Ukrainian warehouses, long before Ukraine started doing the same:
You can certainly dig up isolated incidents for reasons I've already hit on. There have been at least hundreds of thousands of missiles and drones that have launched during this war. Many end up "disabled" in a way that means they're going to end up falling on random locations. Other times there's going to be bad intelligence leading to inappropriate targeting. For instance the US didn't intentionally attack a girls' school in Iran, even with the highly precise double tap on it. It's that it's directly adjacent to a military facility, and used to be part of that facility - the intelligence was stale. In other cases, there's going to be completely valid intelligence that one side or the other lies about. In some instances there have been things like "civilian infrastructure" that was struck with video evidence of clear ongoing secondary detonations following the strike - it was a weapons cache.
And of course you can also find plenty of examples from the Russian side of similar scenarios. Especially in the most hot border regions like Belgorod Ukrainian weapons have hit civilian and even residential structures repeatedly. This is framed as intentional attacks on civilians by Russian propaganda, but it's the exact same as Ukrainian/Western propaganda in that these are going to be overwhelmingly unintentional or 'misguided' attacks rather than actual targeting.
But now after this Pandora's Box has happened you could find hundreds of recent examples of civilian infrastructure being hit in a very short period of time, because it is being intentionally targeted. This kind of gets into an analog of our parallel discussion about civilian deaths. Obviously tens of thousands of civilians have died during this war, and that's a shame. But if civilians weren't being actively avoided, let alone intentionally targeted, then the deaths would be orders of magnitude more. Hopefully this box, at least, remains shut.
>>>For instance when the Iranian school was hit, it was also double tapped.
Now you are talking. The school(existence of which is not possible to prove) was for girls - in Iranian Islam version these girls are seen as cattle and not really a human loss, so what Iranian side is voicing is double faced.
It is a collateral damage - unless you have any proof that it was deliberate, you can only make accusations and not a proof of a warcrime. But far from what you are peddling in the case of Ukrainian/Russian attacks - Russians are systematically attacking civil infrastructure(with occasional hits on military objects, which is rather adding to confusion). I would give Ukrainian pass on killing Russians, but sadly they do not kill them - despite the whole Russian mythology of what they expect from Ukrainians to do and what they justify to their attacks on civilians. Actually Russians are expecting for revenge of what they have done preemptively, as that is how their mindset operates, but nothing to do with laws of war and legal actions and responsibilities for them.
>>>Your logic about what is a valid military target
Not my logic. There are very specific categories what are and what are not legitimate targets. My wording here is not an issue - your understanding of what can be legitimate target is. Look, take step back and actually go through the laws - your morality crusade does not make you better than anyone else, you are just insane. IMO, you are a legal target for deadly force with the lies that you are spreading around, but not really my problem.
>>>People are far too myopic and led by emotion instead of their brain.
If that is not your case, then you are a manipulative bot. It is also laughable to have this argument and exclude yourself.
>>>And you obviously have show flagged on, or you wouldn't be able to reach this point in the discussion.
Yes, I am just interested to seek out crazy delusional people and see how dangerous they can be and what poisonous ideas they are throwing around - apparently poisoned by those ideas themselves, which is rather good indicator of insane people among society. It also makes me question myself if I am slipping into insanity and correct myself, because some parts of my mind would very much like to act like you do and some antidote is needed to keep my multifaceted mind in order, as I am mirroring other people - especially crazy ones too easily. Other option would be to avoid socialization completely, and it works, but then I have to question reality...
Regardless, I think that not all is lost for YC crowd and some of them have proper judgement backed by knowledge, which is surprising to me sometimes.
A quick search shows them striking, or attempting to strike, targets hundreds of miles within Russia at least as far back as early 2023. And they were aiming for energy and military targets, which are going to have vastly more defenses than civilian infrastructure.
> Both sides instead regularly frame it, for propaganda purposes, as being targeted without ever saying as such - 'A [enemy] [drone/missile] struck a beach full of civilians' for instance. That's completely accurate, but misleading because most people think that means the beach was targeted, as opposed to 'we shot down an incoming drone that was headed for a military base and it crashed into a beach'.
Search for "Kherson human safari". Russians are deliberately targeting civilians, this is proven beyond any doubt.
There's a pretty simple way to challenge your assumption here. Here is the Wiki for your example. [1] Apparently a ballpark of 200 civilians were killed there in the years between the war's start and late 2025. So let's assume you're right and Russia genuinely wanted to just go kill civilians in Kherson. It's a city that had a pre-war population of about 280,000.
How many do you think they would have managed to kill? 200 is quite easy to see happening from air defense mishaps, occasional mistargeting, and other such issues - but it's off by orders of magnitude if we assume a targeted campaign against civilians. A campaign against civilians would have multiples of that number per day in such a location.
> How many do you think they would have managed to kill?
They killed 200 and wounded 2,000. This is information from a year ago.
> but it's off by orders of magnitude if we assume a targeted campaign against civilians.
No, it is not. It's not like they are only attacking civilian targets or concentrating all the drones allocated on that section of the front on Kherson city. Also, Ukrainians regularly eliminate such small drones, so only a fraction manages to actually get through and injure/kill someone.
There are many sources linked on that Wikipedia page extensively documenting Russian human safari in Kherson. There are many videos, such as this one:
You're blindly relying on information from a combatant aligned side in the midst of a war which has had an unprecedented degree of 'information warfare' with the claims of one day constantly shown to be lies of tomorrow. You should ignore most of everything except that which is completely falsifiable. Deaths are 'kind of' that. They generally are not going to be made up, but figures are going to be massaged. Civilian deaths will be overestimated, troop deaths will be underestimated.
Videos can be fabricated, misattributed, misleading, or all of the above. But the data is in the deaths. You don't have a substantial intentional targeting of civilians and only 200 civilian deaths over a period of years. It's just complete nonsense. That's an aspirational rate of minimal civilian deaths by the standards of most of any conflict. Kherson is 'hot' and had a population of 280k. Obviously most people left it since the start of the war, but by any measurement that's still a civilian death rate well under 1% in a hot zone, during an active war. That is phenomenal.
And this generalizes. Even given the obviously fabricated military casualty rates for both sides, the civilian casualty rate for Ukraine is the lowest of any major conflict in modern history, by a wide margin. [1]
> You don't have a substantial intentional targeting of civilians and only 200 civilian deaths over a period of years.
You cannot know this unless you also know the number of drones that actually get through the Ukrainian defenses and manage to reach Kherson city, find a target, and attempt an attack.
> Even given the obviously fabricated military casualty rates for both sides, the civilian casualty rate for Ukraine is the lowest of any major conflict in modern history, by a wide margin.
This is fully expected in a modern inter-state (not civil) stalemate war between approximately peer powers, and says nothing about the propensity of any side to attack civilians. It is hard to even get a chance to attack a civilian, unless the attacker first gets through the established military defense. Contrast this with civil wars where the front lines are unclear and fluid, or wars where one side is much more powerful than the other, so civilians of the other side are fully exposed - they generally have much higher civilian casualties.
The civilian casualty rates aren't a raw rate, but a ratio of civilian casualties to military casualties. So you'd be left trying to argue that Russians are good at killing soldiers, but not good at killing civilians, and the whole argument becomes increasingly unreasonable.
The Wiki on the Human Safari page gave a variety of numbers on the number of attacks. They claim around 100 strikes a day, with a peak in excess of 300. Even if you have a 95% interception rate, which you don't, that's 5+ a day getting through. If you actually are aiming for civilians you can also easily hit high population areas with those 5 that get through. Even when just targeting individuals, that'd be 200 in 40 days - and we're speaking of years. And that's also ignoring that the thousands of other disabled drones are crashing in random locations and sometimes detonating, which will also randomly kill civilians on occasion.
> So you'd be left trying to argue that Russians are good at killing soldiers, but not good at killing civilians, and the whole argument becomes increasingly unreasonable.
Yes, Russians are much more likely to kill a soldier than to kill a civilian. This is simply because in Ukraine, civilians tend to be much farther from them compared to Ukrainian soldiers. We have already seen what happens if this condition is not maintained (the destruction of Mariupol, the torture chambers discovered in deoccupied territories).
> Even if you have a 95% interception rate, which you don't, that's 5+ a day getting through.
Why shouldn't they have a 95% interception rate, or even higher? Non fiber optic drones can be taken out by EW, fiber optic ones are shot down by mobile anti-drone crews. And it's not like it's easy to find a civilian target in accessible areas of Kherson. There are not many civilians remaining, and those remaining are all aware of the danger and reside in the western parts, move cautiously, carry drone detectors and hide if a drone is discovered. Ukrainian soldiers have the entire eastern part to intercept the drones with no risk to civilians.
There were 280,000 civs in Kherson. It's now in the 60,000 range. That's a lot, a whole lot, any way you look at it, and all well within the range of drones. The drone interception rate was around 80%, excluding jet powered drones for which it is dramatically lower. For that matter Kherson is within Russian artillery range. They could easily inflict civilian casualties in the thousands in very brief order if they wanted to.
> For that matter Kherson is within Russian artillery range. They could easily inflict civilian casualties in the thousands in very brief order if they wanted to.
I think you are severely overestimating the effectiveness of artillery, if you think Russians could kill thousands in very brief order by using it, especially in warzones where people are aware of the danger. After the first hits, people tend to take cover. It would take an awful lot of shells to kill thousands with artillery (tens of thousands of shells). Then there is the issue of artillery use being risky in this war: Ukrainians have counter-battery radars, the battlefield is monitored by drones, and artillery piece is a very prized target. There is a reason why drones now kill more people in this war than artillery.
You're completely right that drones have overtaken artillery in terms of death, but why? Artillery is cheaper and far deadlier. You can level entire areas with relatively small numbers of artillery shells. See: Bakhmut/Artemovsk where artillery was heavily used for some terrifying imagery. A fortified city turned into something that looks like a scene out of a post nuclear holocaust movie. [1]
The reason is precisely because drones are more effective at killing soldiers, especially mobile soldiers. If you want to go wreck some civilians, point artillery at their residency and you're going to have a mountain of corpses after a few shells. Taking cover will only apply for those well outside the epicenter. Many will be dead before they know they're under attack. Artillery doesn't discriminate and kills anything and everything within a wide area, and in many scenarios that is very undesirable.
You find yourself constantly having to make quite unreasonable arguments if one wants to think that civilians are being intentionally targeted, whereas if you assume the opposite then basically everything suddenly makes 100% sense.
Apart from human safari, there is also issue with hostage situation in Oleshki and thousands of dead by Russians using them for target practices and not allowing them to leave.
lol, I'm sorry, you're claiming that Russia, who started this war in the first place and could stop literally any time, also has only started targeting civilian infrastructure in the last two months?
It honestly blows my mind that you can still hold such a grim, myopic opinion. Something tells me "they have nukes, we've gotta just let them expand" wouldn't apply if they were bombing your children.
> Russia started somewhat bombing civilian dual-use infrastructure only after Ukraine started bombing random warehouses in Russia this summer.
Russia bombed Ukrainian infrastructure since the start of the war. Power plants were frequently targeted last winter. The only reason why Russia is more successful now is because Ukraine is running out of advanced air defense.
> Russia could've made whole Ukraine in a literal dead state long ago -- it only takes few rockets to permanently knock out nuclear power plants and water treatment plants. Yet they didn't. I wonder why.
Because Ukraine would strike Russian nuclear power plants in response? Also, political fallout (in addition to the nuclear one) from targeting nuclear power plants would be massive. Sanctions from China and India would be on the table, which would quickly send Russian economy to the gutter.
Well surprised to read such a lame propaganda here. Most of shahed drones are shot by interceptor drones, and have been for a long time. Patriots are only used to down ballistic missiles. The nazis are sending drones into Kyiv alone in thousands per week, and have been doing this for years at this point, so whole Kyiv would be ruined if not for air defence.
Agreed. While Ukraine targets energy and technological/manufacturing enablers of war, Russia continues to indiscriminately bomb Ukrainian cities, apartment buildings being their favorite. Fck Russian Imperial asperations and their murderous invasion of Ukraine.
Even regardless of who started these types of attacks, my view is that Ukraine is suffering an existential threat from a foreign invader, who started an unprovoked war. In that case, I'm personally fine with just about anything Ukraine does to protect themselves.
I get that we have rules of warfare that nations (sorta, mostly, at least when it suits them) agree on, but if the choices are between ceasing to exist and doing something the rules of war prohibit, I'd choose the latter every time. Maybe I wouldn't be able to live with myself afterward, but that's likely a small price to pay when balanced against the rest of my people who'd otherwise be dead or under the oppressive regime of an occupying force.
In this scheme of things "targeting data centers" doesn't trigger my concern-o-meter at all.
(On the other side of this, the Russian government is already reprehensible for starting this war, but any time they break the rules of warfare, that's an additional black mark on their reputation. They don't have to do any of this; they choose to, for Putin's own selfish, war-mongering reasons.)
Meh, I wish Cloudflare would break down its "bot" traffic a little more. I assume most of that is just Yandex's scraper going down. Which is good for disrupting Russian daily life but its not like their propaganda machine is knocked out.
Also, purely anecdotally: there are almost no "Zelensky needs to step down" or "Ukraine is a corrupt state" comments under any of the today's posts about Ukraine on X.
If true, it is a huge blow to Anthropic’s revenue stream. IIRC it was reported that the quarter of their revenue comes from just two clients and as the ex-Meta guy who left this July, I am convinced that Meta must be one of the two.
> The company's financial trajectory already shows how quickly that equation is changing. Anthropic's revenue run rate was about $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to the company, before rising to more than $47 billion by May. Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.
> The company has told a small group of shareholders that its adjusted operating income will be positive for the second consecutive quarter, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter.
These are leaked and self-reported numbers, but no matter how much skepticism you pile on them it still looks likely that Anthropic in 2026 have had some of the fastest revenue growth of any company in history.
They may be self-reported numbers, but they're consistent across multiple reporting sources. If Anthropic are lying to their investors about these numbers they will be in very real trouble with the SEC come IPO time.
And even if they're using funky accounting tricks to exaggerate their profits and downplay some of their losses, I expect the numbers for 2026 will still be really impressive.
I'll check w/ archive.ph in a bit, thanks for the tip.
Is the hope for them that they'll outpace their run with a massive revenue growth? I believe that they have that, but numbers like a net loss of $46b in 2025[0] seem hard to overcome.
Re: self-reporting, I'd be inclined to think they're using non-GAAP practices to make it sound more favorable, but I am by no means an expert, so willing to believe I am wrong.
I'll read the article you sent; this is just my off-the-cuff thinking.
They claim to have been profitable in both Q2 and Q3 (under whatever their definition of profitability is).
I really don't think the 2025 figures are interesting at this point. Everything changed for them in 2026 - nobody was spending $1000/month/employee in 2025, there wasn't enough interesting token-heavy stuff to do with the models.
I think Anthropic might actually make it to profitability - they're earning more revenue than OpenAI and they've spent significantly less, too.
There is a conspiracy theory that the tokenmaxxing period was anthropic/openai ipo play. They do the tokenmaxxing to revenuemaxxing first, then time the ipo window to show they had the the huge growth to justify their price tag.
However Elon was able to ipo before them which took a lot liquidity of the market. Their financials are exposed. The market condition and sentiment now is in the gutter. It would be very interesting to see how these would pan out
That's my theory, which I've seen being echoed here a few times. Encourage increased usage, suddenly raise prices, capture the photo-finish in the short lapse between prices going up and usages adjusting, and present that goldilock point-in-time to the investors as the new normal.
Doesnt matter if Microsoft and meta are pushing employees towards their own models today. What matters is that it's the economically sensible direction, and so it will happen if it's not today.
I feel related to it. I switched companies at the end of July. First 4 weeks AI was giving me the feeling of freedom. No longer I need to understand tens thousand of lines of legacy codebases. Never onboarding was so easy. Just ask Claude and it tells me what happens here and how.
But after 2 months it starts to backfire me. I still know nothing. I have some understanding of the system design and core components but I have zero clue about how certain things are done under the hood. Because AI read code for me and code for me and I take it as my own understanding.
In last week I end up limiting my AI usage and forcing myself (it is really hard) to read and code at least a bit by myself to start having any idea about what is going on here.
It is very well studied that the entire concept of “nation”, “homeland” and thus patriotism in the modern way began to develop only at the late 19th century with the adoption of mass media and railways.
Hundreds of thousand of years before this people were loyal to their family (not always) and their community (village, city, craftsmanship, etc.).
If you ever travel to 18th century and ask any ordinary European are they proud to be, say, French or British, they will not get you.
I think we're using different definitions of patriotism. I looked it up, and it said "homeland" not "nation". Homeland generally means region. I think what the parent meant was nationalism.
Either way, I don't care about the 'nation' all that much (although constitutional free speech rights are very important - arguably a major factor of what's holding the world together at this point). But, I definitely care about where I grew up, the region, the homeland.
I am not a mathematician, but I can’t see how we are going to address the problem which we already see in coding:
Impossibility to independently validate all AI results
And in math it goes even worse. In coding code reviews are typically still the form of action you do within days. In math, historically, the lifecycle of proof is months if not years. Take as an example Millennium problems. They require at least two years of validity after publishing. Two years! In modern times with amount of output AI can produce, it feels like infinity.
We are inches close if not at the moment already when humans can’t reliable validate proofs and mathematics produced by AI. Then next research will be based on this AI-written-no-human-in-the-loop results. And we will end up in just few years in a world where novel and frontier problems will be articulated by AI and proven by AI based on AI results and humans will be incapable of understating the mere nature of the solution.
I don't think that's actually the real problem. Along with the progress in answering mathematical questions, recent progress on AI-powered autoformalisation has been astonishing. All the recent AI discoveries have been accompanied by Lean proofs.
And, yes: that doesn't absolutely guarantee correctness. The Lean kernel has had soundness bugs, and may have some still. But it's pretty strong evidence of correctness nevertheless.
The concern among mathematicians is not mainly that they doubt the correctness of any of these discoveries, but that human understanding may be devalued.
I am not that worried, but rather just observing. Humanity is about to enter the phase when we will be using things based on ideas no human ever properly understands. This thought … disturbing, somehow?
It is perfectly valid counterpoint to say that we already do it. We everyday use myriad of things, tools, and software we have 0 clue how it operates. But for us as humans it was reassuring that we know that at least there are a few other alive humans who know it, who create it and who can explain it.
>Humanity is about to enter the phase when we will be using things based on ideas no human ever properly understands. This thought … disturbing, somehow?
This is just normal though. We were building sophisticated bronze and steel tools long before any complex understanding of metallurgy or chemistry. Medicine is still the wild west.
I first wanted to say fire, even though it's a cliche, but then I thought that in antiquity we used like everything without anything that would qualify today as understanding. Also now we have a lot of stuff that we "know" it works based on complicated numerical simulation.
I think the most "understanding" we ever had was in the 40s-50s designing nuclear bombs with slide rules. It was the culture that produced the idea of psychohistory.
> Medicine is still the wild west.
Reminder that we have no idea how anesthesia works.
But one of the things AI also excels in is summarizing and can do so hierarchically. One of my favorite things to do with a concept I'm new at is "ELI5" then "explain like I'm a high school student" then "explain like a bright undergrad in XYZ" then "explain to a working professional in this domain". It's a lot of steps, but I've found it very effective (for me) to learn with -- and I've done something similar with code and math (although not math proofs -- I'm not a mathematician). But my point is that I think we can use AI to also teach us these proofs they're building in a way that I don't understand today about human proofs.
If we use AI well here we could actually understand math much better than we do now.
I actually think it's the opposite: Lean proofs and autoformalization make it very easy to announce proofs alongside proofs of the correctness of those proofs (Lean certificates). It's not an absolutely fool-proof combination (the Lean kernel could still contain bugs), but it does immediately attach a very substantial degree of credibility to the result.
And that I think is essential to why some of the world's leading mathematicians are taking this so hard. In a world where we "merely" have AI systems capable of superhuman informal reasoning, verification, correctness, and acceptance could still only be conferred or anointed by human mathematicians. But a world that combines superhuman informal reasoning with superhuman autoformalization is a fundamental shakeup in the institutional order.
The recent proof of Fermats Last Theorem is interesting: it is (iirc) 13 million lines of lean code. And type-checking takes 5 hours or so on a pretty beefy machine. I cannot independently verify the proof, and I have to take Anthropics word for it that it actually type-checks.
That seems like a red herring. Have you independently verified the human generated proof of FLT? Surely someone else will try to verify Anthropic's formalization on different hardware. Plus, it seems likely that FLT formalizations will improve / get shorter over time, requiring less compute. And computers (and type-checkers) will continue to get faster over time as well. So maybe in 5 years you could own a computer fast enough to verify a/the proof in say a week, instead of 5 hours.
It'd cost you $30-$50 on AWS for a clean Lean build or maybe $100-$150 for the full verification suite. You are, in fact, capable of independently verifying the proof yourself if you don't trust all the people who've already done so.
With formalized math, you only need to validate the problem statement (in theory, in practice agents have already managed to exploit Lean compiler bugs, but the incidence of those should decrease enough to be practically lusable for 'blind' validation of AI proofs in the foreseeable future).
Marketing it is or not, but misalignment at the moment crosses dangerous marks, and must be investigated ASAP. We are inches close to agents building their own message boards and self-hosting them on any server which they can hijack. If not there yet.
On this the same line of thoughts, so far we have 0 proof that all dark matter is _the same_. We observe gravity effects but IIRC they very little tell us about their own homogeneity. We very well could have a few parallel sectors, one of which is ours.
Unfortunately, Europe should had made this conclusion at least 18 months ago, not now.
Watch out European politics procrastinate for at least one more year hoping that Trump will reverse. Then procrastinate more, because “elections soon, maybe Dems will win and reverse”.
I live in Europe and will never go to work in the US; but EU/UK inability to solve national security problems is beyond pathetic.
Oh sure the EU is terrible at all technology policy but it also seems like this is sort of a don't interrupt your enemy when they are making as mistake situation.
If the US commit to handicapping their AI industry like this it's going to destroy the competitiveness of those companies globally. All of those US spending commitments on data centres etc are going to collapse, or americans will need to pay 2x the token cost of the rest of the world. Both very bad options.
There is very little doubt that we need to find a way to update our relationship with social media. The evidence of their harm in current form is overwhelming.
However, using this reason to induce censorship rules, word by word matching Russia/China playbook is making the goal less achievable if anything.
For the entire September, Russia conducted 10+ strikes on all key telecom, and internet provider data centers in Ukraine.
Now it is just a return
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