Jamesbeam

modern conflicts are absolutely nothing compared to what has happened historically.

‎> vs. the send entire generations off to die methods of old.

Feel free to click and zoom yourself through the generational pile of almost a quarter million dead Russians below, armchair general.

https://200.zona.media/

Don’t hate the player. Hate the game.

How would dragging a bunch of executives into the street and tearing them apart actually help? It’s nonsense to go to jail for life or getting the dp because some corporate lackey does his job.

The executives are by design replaceable, even the CEO. OpenAI doesn’t suddenly die because someone murdered Scam Altman, or a bunch of old people sitting on the board of directors.

Their infrastructure is fair game, though. Which means boycotting the data centres to deny them the oxygen they need to survive. These companies are so full of investor money they need to grow, no data centres, no growth, company collapses when investors find out they got scammed hard.

And by going for their infrastructure, I don’t mean with molotovs or industrial cable cutters, I mean the old fashioned way. Find people in your city that want to shape its future for the better and organise. Then force the city council and mayor to pledge allegiance to the people instead of the machines. Once your city is guaranteed data Centre free, look for the next thing to improve.

It works, it’s violence-free, and the outcome is a lot better than spending life in jail.

Retaliation for exposing major character flaws of the chancellor’s cabinet and potentially corruptness of major CDU (Christian Democratic Union) figures close to the chancellor seems a plausible answer.

FoIA requests humiliated half of the chancellor’s cabinet this year, including the chancellor himself.

The agricultural minister (CSU)(CDUs sister party) was especially proud of his nickname "the black butcher".

Someone sent a request inquiring about the hygiene protocols of his butchers shop via FoIA and he rather closed shop to deny access to the protocols than hand them out. This is now in front of a court and the media made fun of him for being the black butcher without a butchery.

Digital Minister (CDU) went on TV and proudly announced no more fax machines in his ministry.

Someone sent his undersecretary a fax the same day with the title "Jäger des verlorenen Faxes" which translates into "hunter of the lost fax" and is a Hommage to the German Indiana Jones raiders of the last ark movie title.

Two weeks later the minister sat in an interview and said he needed to correct himself. If he sees another fax machine in his ministry it’s going to get thrown out.

There was a huge conference that is run annually by a company the culture minister (CDU) is controlling that allowed access to major German political figures including private talks, including the minister of economy (CDU), for a fixed price.

It was only uncovered by a FoIA request. It was so bad the Bavarian prime minister had to pull any funding and recommendations to the conference and had to stay away from it after going there for years.

Just this week the mayor of Berlin (CDU) had to give up his spot as top candidate in the upcoming mayoral race because he lied to the press and even lied repeatedly about phoning with the chancellor during the major attack on the energy infrastructure in Berlin by allegedly left-wing extremists.

A FoIA request busted the lying mayor as well as the lying chancellor, whose ministry couldn’t provide any proof they telephoned at all at the time they both said they had phoned, when a court asked them to deliver proof to the court.

This is only on the federal level, in a single year.

IFG/FoIA busted tons of lying and cheating local politicians over the years. Of course, the party that is involved in most of the heavy cases does want this law to die or be completely ineffective.

It’s very annoying for the chancellor that normal people have the right to inform themselves by whom and how decisions were made as soon as public money is involved.

But he’s also calling every German citizen lazy and cheating with sick days, etc., so I’d say the German people have a huge reason to distrust this cabinet and use the IFG/FoIA as the small man’s nuclear bomb, and the cabinet really doesn’t like that the peasants can fight back with the most annoying weapon in their arsenal, counter-bureaucracy.

The issue is a completely different one.

Ronaldo was getting his red card in the qualifying match. They overturned it in order for him to play the first match of the World Cup, but they didn't remove the penalty.

Qualifiers and World Cups themselves are completely individual tournaments with their own structure. So not everything from the qualifier carries over.

Balogun, on the other hand, is the first player since 1962 that doesn’t have to sit one out after a red card in the running tournament. Interestingly, the red card that was overturned in 1962 was also under public and presidential pressure.

The World Cup regulations themselves say on page 18/10.5.

If a player or team official is sent off as a result of a direct or indirect red card (second caution), they will automatically be suspended from their team’s subsequent match. In addition, further sanctions may be imposed.

There is no way in the ruleset to overturn this after the ref made his decision.

https://digitalhub.fifa.com/m/636f5c9c6f29771f/original/FWC2...

The rules are the rules, but the peasant rules don’t count for the King of the free world apparently.

He did what he always does. He grabbed Infantino by the pussy and made a deal. What is even more concerning is that he damaged the whole US Soccer team with this.

They could have won without Balogun. The team is perfectly capable of doing that.

If the players or coach had any spine and self-respect, they would bench Balogun for the game nonetheless. What message does it deliver to the world if he plays?

If they win, the whole world will look at them like, “Yeah, whatever. The US president won that game for them, and however far they might go is not because they worked hard for years to get to that point but because the president had to involve himself.”

How do you expect any soccer fan to have respect for America or the national soccer team ever again after this?

The sad thing is, this president has a track record to ruin sports for the average Joe for a living.

Let’s not forget how he was responsible for thousands of fans not being able to enjoy the NBA outside Madison Square Garden because the King rolled into town and all public viewing within a huge security perimeter around the venue was cancelled on short notice, so the King could have a nap behind bullet proof glass.

Peter Thiel amuses me, the man is going for the full-length ride on the cannonball and is 200% committed.

Wait until he finds out that the space pope is a reptile.

Men like Thiel have shown up in history over and over again, we all know how it ends. Thiel is not worth anyone’s attention, really.

Laugh at the man if you see him, call him an idiot, and go on with your day.

Thiel will learn the hard way that power is a fragile concept and no human has managed to hold onto it forever. He can drink longevity llamapiss lemonade each day, won’t change a thing.

What you can read between the lines is far more interesting than the headline.

I am giving the NYT the credibility that they thoroughly check their sources, so the question is why would anyone from the US Government want this to be publicly available information?

It makes all involved parties look like idiots.

This report basically says that the us administration currently has terrible intelligence relationships with Israel, if they have not been informed officially as a direct strategic partner in the Iran war over the planned operation. It’s kinda important if your ally plans to blow up the people you negotiate your own peace deal with, don’t you think?

It also means that the "we don’t spy on allies", Americans, indeed spy on allies. I’m absolutely shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

How else do you get in possession of information that your war ally didn’t seem necessary to share, if not by spying?

It also says that Mossad/IDF leaks at the highest level because the assassination of government officials who are actively brokering a peace deal is a kind of very high-level decision.

Still, if this actually happened this way, it’s not a power play to make this public, it is dumb. But dumb is the signature move of the current US administration, so it makes the report even more believable.

Will be interesting to see how this develops.

I'm playing monsters in low-budget horror movies.

It’s fun to watch them with friends and family from time to time to laugh about the horrible acting.

Have to give it to Cyber Command. This is cheap and effective propAIganda.

Of course, America is now the only nation on the planet with advanced weaponised AI models that are so good they beat billions of dollars and decades of IT security experience with some of the brightest minds in their fields within hours.

If this were true, you’d see the president yapping and bragging about it on Truth before the NSA director even gets a chance to publicly talk about it. Probably doing a live stream about how he personally prompts his way into an unconditional Iranian surrender. You know it, I know it.

Nice try, William, but unless I see the Senate Intelligence Committee freaking out with you sweating black goo like Giuliani, I ain’t believing it.

This is the same kind of bullshit that was showing a gun on TV that could apparently give people heart attacks with some frozen, untraceable darts.

If the US really was in possession of a technology that could hack into the most secure environments on the planet autonomously within hours, you would see all their partners pulling their access from shared IT systems and blocking all traffic coming from the US immediately.

Especially considering they have been caught spying on allies before:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/cover-story-how...

You know what they say in intelligence circles.

Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, it's open windows season.

None of the partners or adversaries seem to give a fuck about Mythos, so there is a good chance this is just another lying NSA director as usual.

Come on, people. You don’t run the NSA if you’re an honest man. It’s a spy agency.

I don't feel offended the slightest, and I listen to critique. Also, I don't think you should change your tone.

I take an authentic human voice over AI-generated slop any day.

Thank you for spending valuable time out of your day to have a little argument with me.

We are two humans talking to each other so we should be able to make mistakes, and be misunderstood, and if we wanted to, yell at each other, and still wish each other a good day afterwards.

You're not my enemy because you come to a different conclusion than I do, and I don’t need to convince you of anything.

Yes, the US would win if they used tactical nuclear weapons on civilians in Iran like they did in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

The straight would be open, there would be no more resistance, and help is on its way would not be an empty promise.

Can't get murdered by the Iranian regime if you got murdered by the Trump regime. Technically, no more suffering. Practically, I hope we can agree that this is not a good solution to the problem the current US administration is trying to solve.

War in the end is just a different form of politics, it's an escalation ladder that is always won by the party who can one-up the other war party into submission.

Mutually assured nuclear destruction freezes the escalation ladder.

It's something both parties can't afford, and therefore, they consider solving their problem diplomatically, as it should be, instead of having an infinite stalemate while bleeding to death in human and other resources.

The thing with the 5% commitment is, I think we both can agree that yes, it's a kind of subsidy, the EU needs to do more on their own to be less reliant on American soldiers defending their freedom, and that the US taxpayer should not be paying for the defence of European countries is reasonable.

But the US bullying NATO into the 5% does not automatically translate into a stronger NATO.

And a strong NATO is also in the American interest because if Russia took over those countries, it would deny the US a market of 2 billion people to sell goods to .

So geostrategically, it makes zero sense what the current US administration is doing. The US needs the EU countries as much as the EU countries need the US.

https://archive.ph/nKL3g

NATO has so called STANAGs (Standard agreements) that make NATO forces interoperable. So smaller countries can pull the same weight in combat operations as their bigger neighbors.

Just throwing more money at the US defense industry to buy equipment is not translating into a better interoperability layer, which is the glue that holds NATO combat operations together.

An example. It's cool to have a bunch of F35a in Germany, great piece of technology, but if they get shot down by friendly fire because the interoperability layer between lets say polands airspace defense and Germanys Air force is not working properly, additional money is not going to help.

Had a good time with Germany winning their soccer match yesterday.

I appreciate the well wishes for my stay and likewise wish you only the best and thank you for the exchange.

I expect them to fight back. Against the military forces.

How throwing grenades into missile bunkers full of frightened 16 year old girls near the Nova Festival or going into retirement homes in the kibutzes and shooting old helpless grandmothers dead or kidnapping them is "fighting back against the oppressor" is something I can't understand and am not willing to accept.

Sir, there are about 50k US Soldiers in Germany. With 80 Million Germans. If every German grabbed a stick in the morning and decided to end the "US occupation" those 50k soldiers wouldn't last until lunch.

There are also 185k German Soldiers in Germany right now.

The reason the EU leaders placate the US President is that it worked getting past his first presidency and we are all part of the rollercoaster ride that is his second coming.

The US would never pull unilaterally from NATO, they just lost massive projection power into the middle east by losing the Iran war and Ramstein Air Base is strategically the most important asset the US has in Europe.

Even if it did happen NATO is still able to beat Russia, the biggest threat in the region without the US. UKs nuclear subs can kill 80% of the Russian population on their own as Russia has highly concentrated population centers and launching nukes right of their coast line, which is extremely long and impossible to fully protect wouldn't allow them to launch counter measures on time. Mutual destruction assured usually means both sides have no interest to pull each other into a all-in conflict.

Also stay feisty, refreshing.

You're wrong.

And a Israeli life is not worth more, or less, than a Palestinian life.

Reading that you compare victim numbers to justify the Oct 7th atrocities as resistance effort in your personal believe system makes me genuinely sad.

It will never be justified to kill civilians, be it Palestinians or Israelis, Russians or Ukrainians or Iranians and US Americans.

May Allah open your eyes and your heart, so that you can see and accept the truth.

most beautiful analogy I read today. Thank you for the laugh.

It did happen and it's important to not deny that it happened.

I will and did call out IDF war crimes before as well.

There is !!overwhelming!! eye witness account and confirmation by internationally recognized bodies of the monstrosities the Hamas cowards did to their victims.

I will not cite the dozens of Israeli reports because we both know even first responders from ZAKA lied. But there were multiple independent investigations coming to the same conclusion.

https://press.un.org/en/2024/sc15621.doc.htm

https://www.un.org/sexualviolenceinconflict/wp-content/uploa...

https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n25/108/72/pdf/n25108...

Berlin is still in a sense occupied by American troops in that we still have bases there, and through NATO subsidize their defense and way of life.

I'm in Berlin for the weekend right now and enjoying my "NATO subsidized way of life".

Can you point me in the right direction where in Berlin i can find those American occupation troops? Seemed to have missed them so far. Would like to take some pictures with them.

It's even better long term strategically for Iran.

They now know they can close the straight whenever they please and the mightiest military in the world is not able to open it back up.

The straight and the confidence in their ability to survive complete air dominance by two of the most sophisticated military forces in the world is Irans new A-Bomb.

Which is a complete disaster for Israel.

Israelis never need to forget two things before the next election, the Oct 7th atrocities were carried out by Hamas, and everyone who participated deserves to be hunted and killed with the same brutality they murdered and raped elderly and children with, but equally important, it was the Israeli PM who allowed this to happen by his inflated ego, creating an "impenetrable" high tech border with sensors and outposts that were beaten by a few caterpillars and hanggliders.

For Bibi not going to jail he has to keep his forever wars up so the people of Israel are distracted and not able to finally mourn the victims properly and asking the important question why did this happen in the first place and who needs to take full responsibility for it.

So Iran trapped the Israeli PM who thought he could control Trump and the narrative and they got completely outplayed by the Iranians.

Iran managed to get Bibi the Zelensky treatment and now the US President is publicly humiliating the Israeli PM into submission by letting trump ramble publicly about how weak, insane and isolated Bibi is.

So either Bibi becomes Trump's bitch and misses all of his war goals which will get him eaten alive by the Israelis asking themselves why they all suffered through this? Or he keeps whatever dignity is left in that old meat bag and can kiss his freedom and legacy goodbye.

Oh and lets not forget the US lost this war using AI. Which speaks a lot against using the technology in a military context. It produced a lot of noise / kills which did not translate into a better strategic outcome, more control or in the end winning the war.

It is ironic that the two operations used American AI, rather than Chinese models, to generate their content about American AI.

Why is that ironic?

They use OpenAI’s resources and models, and therefore cost them money and tie up computing resources, which are also aligned way better with American users than the Chinese models.

Obviously, they are also smart enough to hide their activity from OpenAI long enough to produce what they consider usable assets at scale, and they are able to exfiltrate them reliably, as OpenAI is showing in their own report how propaganda generated with ChatGPT on their own platform makes it into the wild with all their security measures failing.

Ironic is the last sentence.

Industry, governments, civil society, and the public should remain alert for similar attempts to scale these messages and foreign interference activities.

Oh, so I, as part of the civil society and public, need to be alert because your product is basically a national security risk as it allows hostile entities and foreign governments to reliably produce and exfiltrate propaganda assets that are then used against the, in this case, American public?

That is unacceptable.

How about we simply ban you from doing business until you put effective measures in place that prevent those entities from destroying our democracy and societies with ChatGPT-generated disinformation campaigns, so you wouldn’t have a reason to publish these public records of how OpenAI fails to deliver even the most basic protection from AI-generated influence campaigns to the public in the first place?

Why doesn’t AI have the same KYC regulations as banks?

You shouldn’t be able to open a bank account anonymously to finance terror, but foreign adversaries can open accounts with US AI companies, gaining access to frontier LLM models to drive influence campaigns built to damage the glue that holds our society together just like that?

No sense of responsibility on OpenAI’s part. Oh look how smart we are here is a lengthy report to an important problem we fixed.

Fix the damn cause, your platform and product security, instead of applying bandaids and wanking each other off on company time for damage assessment reports like this.

The thing I liked most about the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 I had for a while was that I met a lot of interesting people because of it.

It broke like four times under warranty because the crease got gummed up with their glue strips in the summer or it got brittle when I travelled to Greenland because of the cold in the winter, it felt uncomfortable and often moved in the pocket you put it into in a way that would annoy you every time you sat down somewhere.

But once you pull it out, something magical happens. Foldables are still one of those items you will rarely see in the wild, and it peaks the curiosity of people in a way that will make them come over and ask questions.

You see them touch it really carefully and open it really, really slowly because they are afraid they might break it, and suddenly you have this magical, foldable screen right in front of you that turns this heavy slab into a form factor known by anyone who ever held a book in their life.

When it snaps open or shut with the satisfying noise and haptic feedback, it makes them genuinely happy and smile, and watching different people having the same experience over and over again is kind of satisfying and in a way justified the price for me alone.

I am sure the Apple foldable will have its downsides and is heavily overpriced, and if you buy it in the EU, you won’t be able to use half the features, but I am still going to get one because I will have a lot of joy watching people interact with new technology for the first time when I travel, and I love listening to how they think it could improve their life or how and for what they would get one themselves.

Nice try, FBI, but as I said, those drones are for smashing car windows in an emergency, not to damage government / private property.

Also, theoretically, unlike with a smoking car wreck, you would have basically unlimited chances to find the right angle for the lens if you tried.

Who’s going to stop you? The campus security drone defence squad?

Most likely, some middle-aged dude will try to angrily yell at it and hit it with a mop, miss it a few times, then yell some more, and it goes viral on TikTok. But doing crime is bad, so don’t ever destroy an AI camera.

The cheapest DIY drone that is able to effectively carry and use a glass breaker is like 25 bucks in material.

Why would anyone carry a palm-size non-traceable drone with a glass breaker on campus you might ask. Are they going to break the cameras? Of course not, that’s highly illegal.

Students care deeply about the wellbeing of fellow students and professors, just like the University seems to care so much that they installed AI cameras for 1.3 mil USD. Safety first.

What if one of your fellow students crashes their car on campus and needs to be rescued in style? Evaluate explosion risk, decide to break glass with the drone from a safe distance, then quickly move in to cut the seat belt and extract the crashed driver.

Drones are cool tech, students at SDSU should experiment with them way more and establish their presence on campus. Maybe even make a nationwide university sport out of it. National Drone Rescue Championships anyone?

I respect the work, but for most of the world, this paper is absolutely useless.

And the scientists don’t seem to be aware of this, because later on in the conclusion they talk about what other governments can learn from this, policy-wise.

The severe flaw in this logic, unless with other governments they mean state-wise within the US, is that it only looks at US Americans, who have a very own subset of unique variables you hardly see in other parts of the world and populations that do influence the outcome.

America is a pill-popping nation.

https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/americans-will-spend...

And the health education of the average American is rather poor, with over 60% of U.S. adults demonstrating inadequate health literacy in this study from 2025.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133552...

What surprises me here is the shortsighted conclusion.

How can you conclude this:

"Although a large body of research finds that workers want to work remotely, our findings suggest that workers may not realise the costs of remote work for their well-being, which may take time to accumulate. Understanding remote work’s impact on mental health is important for workers deciding where to work and for firms and governments setting remote-work policies."

Rather than, obviously, we have to deal with a highly health-uneducated overall population in the US, that is overall less resilient to mental distress, tends to look for quick fixes (pill popping) rather than eliminating the factors causing the need to take pills in the first place, and that is largely unable to develop strategies on their own to deal with temporarily forced isolation and has severe problems adapting to rapidly changing external factors and the mental load they put on the individual.

How can we teach the average American to be more resilient, have better health education so they can make better decisions and get them off so many pills?

I know. This study examined how remote work affects isolation and mental distress.

And therefore not the root cause of the underlying systemic problems.

But it is annoying to see smart people who should know and see the root of the problems, rather looking for grant money than for solutions.

Must be true. I have seen Dutch and Italian parents teaching their kids valuable social concepts with the exact same swift motion of an open hand.

What if you’re basically living ON a golf course? Asking for a friend in the White House.

It’s funny to see how "normal" people talk about 40 million in gold and like a few million in foreign currency.

That’s really nothing in the theatres the CIA operates in. They simply gave it to him and followed up only after the agency’s bureaucrats couldn’t find it during auditing half a year to a year later.

To bribe a nation-state, you’re in the billions. https://www.jfeed.com/middleeast/qatar-iran-bribe-deal

To gain at least some loyalty from a warlord-based Middle East militia, the US was willing to spend 500 million in cash, plus another 200 million in weapons.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-blocks-iraqs-dollar-shipmen...

If you wanted to bribe a high-level drug trafficker, 40 million would get you laughed out of the room or put in a barrel and shipped around for other associates to laugh at.

According to the 2012 annual report of Sos Impresa, the total annual turnover of money by criminal organisations operating in Italy would be valued at €138 billion, with a net profit of €105 billion.

What’s 40 million to someone moving billions in product?

https://unicri.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/UNICRI_Organi...

You’re also wrong about the gold. Gold is easily moved in the hawala system. You give the gold bars to a hawaladar in the US, they give you a piece of paper with a few numbers and you can take it out of the network minus the agreed fees at a different physical location within the network within a few hours in local currency or gold.

https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/AOTP/Hawal...

There is a good example in that report.

Witnesses testified that the trafficker kept track of his drug transactions using relatives who were hawaladars and who recorded the drug transactions and profits in ledgers.

The ledgers were seized and presented as evidence at trial. One ledger, covering the year 2006-2007, contained a series of money transfers linked to opiate and precursor chemical transactions. Another contained financial records of heroin transactions, arranged by a trafficker, covering the period March 2006 to March 2007. Analysis of the ledger determined that the defendant produced and sold over 123,000 kg of heroin, worth more than USD261,000,000: this represented over 19 per cent of the total amount of heroin produced worldwide in 2006, based on UNODC figures.

My bet is he is probably responsible for Middle East-related activities and saw an opportunity in this Iran mess to gain some pocket money while simply squeezing his contacts in the Middle East for whatever favour the CIA needed and keeping the money for himself. Not the first time this happened.

This usually either surfaces because the contact tells someone on a tapped phone that he got his balls squeezed by the CIA and not even got any money for it or when someone in CIA finance says, “Hey Lisa, I need to make this report where the billion for the Iran stuff went and how much we spend and for what and we’re missing six paperclips and 40 million in gold and a few mil in foreign currency. Did someone take it home with them again to make Breaking Bad Ka$h bed photos for their Instagram?”

I think that someone gets an overall tax rebate when they have children is a reasonable decision for a society to make.

But the real problem here is that there are a ton of adults who would love to have kids but are medically not able to for a bunch of reasons, from autoimmune disease to genetic differences to the simple fact that young people get cancer too and infertility because of treatment or the illness is a thing too.

Is it really wise for a society to treat them as if they willingly deny the society additional benefactors and valuable younger members?

It feels wrong for me that you get treated unequally by the law because of circumstances that are not choice-based and your decision to make in the first place.

I had a rather pleasant conversation with Mike Tyson on a flight a good while ago and asked him, “Mike, how did you deal with all this trash talk before you’re stepping into the ring?” And the man said, “You look at what they do with their hands, not at what they do with their mouths.”

I will tell you the same. Look at what Altman actually does to make the life of the "replaced because of AI workforce" a good life, not at his mouth.

Altman is a liar. It’s his profession. He hypes up the product in order to sell it to investors. Of course, he told everyone whose loyalty is to their shareholders and their own bonus payments that you will become exponentially more wealthy after replacing those pesky workers and their hard-fought rights with machines that never complain about working for too long or too hard and that he is selling such soulless Tinmen to the evil Fortune 500 witches at scale if they are interested.

You can’t trust the man on a single thing he says because his actions don’t line up with the words that leave his mouth. They never did.

Now he is lying again because he is unfortunately afraid of him and his family getting murdered, and AI can’t solve the problems he created by making the statement that AI will be able to do and replace most of the jobs employers pay humans for.

And now people actually see this, their friends and family members getting laid off by email, by AI or because of AI and suddenly their lives get exponentially worse instead of better.

Betting on AI is a losing bet either way. It’s a “dehumanising" technology, controlled by a handful of people at currently zero overall value for humanity itself, because the base of this technology is flawed by design. Hallucinations are not a bug, they are a baked in feature. It’s like building on sand.

This whole AI displacement of human values and creation won’t go down without a fight, what we see are just the first ripples of human collective anger and unlike in the movies, my bet is on the humans.

We will just add an "if it uses energy, we can shut it down" to the "if it bleeds, we can kill it".

Don’t forget to give it the cheerful personality of Jamie Oliver afterwards to recommend you a death row meal that is nutritious and will make the experience more pleasant.

No, it’s not.

It’s all about adoption and the bigger picture. The US is an untrustworthy, isolated island in the AI future if you vote another idiot into office in a few years. If you’ll still be able to vote at all, that is.

The largest part of the world is not the US. The cutting-edge US models are way too expensive for most parts of the world, and that also shows in adoption.

China is building an ecosystem of open-source models that are both cheap and good enough for most use cases. While most of the US AI sphere will collapse under the pressure of making profits, which means having their models and infrastructure adopted by as many enterprises and individuals across the world, China’s models will have become global standards and hard to displace.

If Beijing’s AI pitch centers on universal access and cost-effectiveness, then Chinese AI firms do not need the latest chips to win the global AI race. They also don’t need the expensive US-run infrastructure. If you watch Chinese AI adoption closely, they already want as many Chinese people as possible to be able to build and try with AI, whereas for most Americans, US models for productive use are already too expensive.

Kimi K2.6 sits within touching distance of Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 while costing about $4 per mil output tokens. That is six to eight times cheaper than cutting-edge US models. If you run hundreds of agents, that’s a significant opportunity to get the same work done for a lot less.

Even early adopters like Singapore, ditching US models, the government kicked Zuckerberg in the nuts and went for Qwen instead to build its sovereign AI models.

To understand why the US is at a severe disadvantage in this race, you need to understand China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). BRI entails Chinese firms delivering fully financed infrastructure projects in a bid to lock third countries into China’s economic orbit. They use the same approach for their open source ai models, but this time the infrastructure is both invisible and free.

No need to build power plants or buy /build ports. AI dependency is invisible to both policymakers and the population, limiting pushback. No pesky activists in Germany nagging about China buying parts of ports. No African nutbags questioning why the humble Xi is building hospitals in areas Chinese mining companies take things out of the ground for pennies on the dollar.

China is going for a marathon here while the US tries to push their ai tech by sheer force into the throats of the world. As soon as Chinese ai models have become global standards, it’s game over for us ai companies. And China is way better at this game than the US. They have proven this over and over again in the past 50 years.

I recommend reading the China Standards 2035 strategy to get a better understanding of their approach and how smart this is.

https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-standards-2035-str...

AI is not as revolutionary as you think in terms of our experiences with previous technological advances in terms of trade and economics.

Western economies are locked into U.S. models, while China runs on Chinese ones. It’s the age-old game. But the real war of the AI race will be fought in the global south.

I will give you three examples.

Can you really imagine, if you look at what AI needs to cost to make a profit, that even at the current prices, US models and infrastructure, which are heavily subsidised already, being used in cost-sensitive countries? I am not talking about coders, think really big here for a second.

Secondly, US ai models are trained on Western data. How do you expect them to grasp local contexts in the Southern Hemisphere? Chinese open-source models, on the other hand, can be downloaded and finetuned with country-specific data.

Want an example? Check out AfriqueQwen-14B, which is adapted to the top twenty African languages.

So I think this author is wrong. The ai race to be won is not hardware or cloud infrastructure, my money is on it will be a contest to decide which models and standards become the default infrastructure in countries that are up for grabs.

China neither needs the best models nor does it need the best cloud infrastructure, it just, like so often, only needs to be affordable and good enough to become the default choice in emerging markets.

The right choice would be for everyone to step off the gas pedal and think about whether we are willing to become China in order to beat China. Our ancestors worked really hard to get us here, our rights, our ways of life, culture, all the blood, sweat, and tears.

AI better be worth it in the long run for all of humanity if we go back to survival of the fittest. Because that is what it will take to beat China at their game.

The Americans still have plenty of options, but none of them are good in a long-term strategic sense. The US military needs to plan beyond the four to eight years of a sitting president.

I think what will happen after this war is that we will see the Gulf states taking away projection power from the US military, which will also significantly lower the chances of a more and more unhinged Israel projecting power into the other Gulf states.

Also, Iran did not even play its best cards yet.

That the leadership of Iran, who is still a murderuous regime, seems to be the more sane party in terms of answering aggression with "adequate measures" while mostly trying to prevent civilian loss of life is absolutely mind-blowing for me.

It’s like a rabid dog (US) hunting a fox (Iran) and now the dog got its head stuck in a hole and gets bitten in the nose once in a while until it learns its lesson.

What is way more important than oil and the Strait of Hormuz in this conflict is actually (drinking)water.

The Gulf region, with its desert climate, is among the most water-scarce in the world. The six states, which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, use desalination to provide water to a combined 62 million people.

For the GCC countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, UAE, and Saudi Arabia), most of their freshwater supply comes from a constellation of groundwater aquifers. Many of these, however, are severely over-exploited, depleted at rates far exceeding what nature can replenish. The total renewable surface and groundwater resources of the six GCC countries together amount to 7.21 billion cubic meters (m3) a year, less than the annual flow of the Potomac River for a population of 62 million.

Water managers generally consider that societies require 1700 m3 of renewable freshwater per person each year to meet their populations’ water needs, from drinking, cooking, and washing to the demands of agriculture and industry.

By this metric, the members of the GCC exhibit “absolute water scarcity.”

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Oman enjoys no more than 296 m3 per capita of annually available renewable freshwater resources, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia each possess only 75 m3 per capita per year, Qatar has 20 m3 per capita per year, while the UAE and Kuwait receive just 15 m3 and 4 m3, respectively.

From 1990 to 2022, annual desalinated water production soared by 314 percent across the GCC, rising from 1.4 to 5.9 billion m3. The six Gulf states now count some 3,401 operational desalination plants, comprising 19 percent of all desalination facilities worldwide.

Collectively, these plants can churn out 22.67 million m3 of desalinated water each day, enough to fill over 9,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, representing 33 percent of global daily production capacity.

For the GCC countries, extensive desalination systems constitute indispensable critical infrastructure.

Desalination fulfills 77.3 percent of total water demand in Qatar, 67.5 percent in Bahrain, 52.1 percent in the UAE, 42.2 percent in Kuwait, 31 percent in Oman, and 18.1 percent in Saudi Arabia. Desalination plants are especially important for meeting drinking water needs. Qatar derives 99 percent of its drinking water supplies from its network of desalination facilities, and Bahrain over 90 percent. For Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, the figures are 90 percent, 86 percent, 70 percent, and 42 percent, respectively.

The GCC’s desalination plants are large, fixed, open-air industrial complexes. Mostly concentrated along the coast within 350 kilometers of the Islamic Republic. So well within Iran’s drone and precision ammunition’s striking range.

Desalination plants are also essentially linear facilities, meaning that the seawater-to-freshwater transformation takes place through an ordered sequence of stages. Damage to sensitive parts of the system, such as high-pressure pumps or membrane buildings, could disable production entirely.

So the real bargaining chip for Iran is not Oil. It’s water.

This scenario has unfolded before btw. In 1991, during the first Gulf War, Iraqi forces purposely destroyed most of Kuwait’s desalination capacity and dumped millions of barrels of oil into the northern Persian Gulf, jeopardizing water intakes for plants in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

After coalition forces retook the country, water shortages forced Kuwaiti authorities to cut household water services to four days a week while relying on contracted tanker ships and hundreds of tanker trucks to deliver bulk water for the population.

Article 54(2) of the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions expressly prohibits attacking or destroying “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as drinking water installations and supplies.”

But if the US keeps threatening Iran openly with annihilation/genocide, I think it’s reasonable that from an Iranian position, a retaliation strike will go on the desalination of the Gulf countries, which means millions of people will die and all ties to the US will be cut off as they are essentially responsible for this outcome.

You’d think the president wouldn’t be stupid enough to go through with his threats, but nobody thought he would be stupid enough to turn a beheading strike into a months-long war, plunging the whole world into chaos, and even if the Iranians gave up the nuclear material, the damage caused by the US Administration with allies and to the global world trade will outweigh Iran not having a nuclear weapon.

We see North Korea having nuclear weapons as well as a supreme leader, but you’d need to search long and hard to find a single serious expert who says they would use them in a first strike even against their direct neighbour, South Korea. They also more or less take the sanctions put on them without threatening everyone with nuclear annihilation.

Instead, their supreme leader used the killing of Khamenei senior to update the North Korean constitution to retaliate with a nuclear strike if he ever got assassinated by a third party. Something that wasn’t necessary in a pre-trump era.

This whole conflict is FUBAR and at the whim of a person that is known for not being able to admit defeat, we still frequently hear about the "stolen election".

Might be Checkmate in Iran.

But if the person starting the war doesn’t understand the rules of chess to begin with, what is the expected outcome here?

It’s such a crazy world. Some days I can only deal with it with a big swig out of a whisky bottle and sarcasm.

Thank you for understanding me.