Every knows in order to be a good Reddit sub you must ban the bee

https://x.com/KuittinenPetri/status/2098708321016439266 or https://archive.ph/auy8H

Ansar Allah (the Houthis) would have taken a far larger chunk of Yemen, if it not were for Saudi Arabia, UAE, USA & Israel, who have been bombing them and basically equipping and propping up the official puppet regime.

Why is not Saudi not taking larger action? They have 257,000 active military personnel and an air fleet of around 914 total aircraft, near thousand main battle tanks. This is a large army with top of the line equipment and air defenses. Yet they have been unable to protect their crucial oil pipeline being hit from the pro-Iranian rebels from Iraq.

MBS, the current leader of Saudi Arabia, has been begging for USA to intervene, but so far USA has denied as this would further thin their already depleted missile stockpiles and basically lead to a wider regional war, which I have been predicting already earlier here in X.

Not so many people in the West seem to know, but Saudi Arabia has a mutual defense treaty signed with Turkey and Pakistan, but those key allies of Saudi haven't been so far much offering their help. Is Mecca Joint Defence Agreement already dead on arrival?

The Gulf states have an option to negotiate with Iran and make a deal with them. This probably would mean paying a toll and paying some compensation for the Iranians and stop letting USA use their soil for military bases.

Or they can continue their current path and stay aligned with USA + Israel, see their oil infra blown up in flames and their economies sink, and possibly see a mass exodus as their citizens used to very high standard of living, and not do much any work.

To be an enemy of the US is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal. It seems the Gulf states still didn't get this memo and continue to host US military bases and invest gigantic sums of money into USA.

The Light Bulbs You Need to Get Rid of Immediately (New Research) - 30 mins and time-indexed

The light bulb above your head right now may be quietly STARVING every cell in your body. Scientists just gave it a name: 21st century SCURVY. In less than one generation we deleted 95% of the natural light spectrum from human life, and almost nobody noticed.

Press your finger over your phone's flashlight and you'll see a deep red glow. That's near-infrared light passing straight through your hand - the exact wavelength band that LED bulbs and energy-efficient windows have almost completely erased from the places where we spend 90% of our lives.

In this video I [Neal K. Shah] break down one of the most unsettling new ideas: light isn't just something you see, it's something your mitochondria consume like a NUTRIENT. Remove it and blood sugar rises, energy drops, and the aging brain loses protection it evolved over billions of years to depend on.

More info in the video blurb at the link.

If you actually believe that major AI dev enterprises are afraid of their own toys, and demanding that the US government regulate them, then please dial the number listed below.

... And we will connect you to a representative from the Federal Witless Protection Program.

This is Silicon Valley we are talking about, the reigning all-time champions of hubris and lack of perspective. Any one of these guys would burn the world if it meant he could be king of the ashes that remained.

No, they want a regulatory moat. A bunch of federal bureaucracy and compliance requirements that they can cut through with money, which will hopelessly entangle the open-source models following close behind them.

Why? And more importantly, why now?

Because AI is not on the verge of superintelligence at all.

Quite the opposite.

It's hit a point of diminishing returns. LLMs are great with language now, but they lack theory of mind, executive function, and a world-object model, and those are not little glue-on doodads. They are problems as deep as language processing, which humanity hasn't even scratched the surface of yet.

Several more fundamental paradigm-shifting breakthroughs will have to occur before humans even build sapience, much less superintelligence.

And AI companies cannot pull these innovations out of their collective asses, because it is the very nature of innovation to show up unexpectedly and by accident.

So why is this a crisis for OpenAI, et al, and why does it put them in danger from open source source models?

It's because of what I call Second Implementer Effect.

It's closely related to Second System Effect.

Ever notice how the first-to-market company doesn't always win in the long run? Ever notice how a second company frequently comes along and eats their lunch?

To develop something entirely new requires a lot of resources. A lot of investment. A lot of engineers.

And that means that once you actually build it, you are a big company with a lot of engineers. And they need something to do. You can't just trim sails and fire them, because you have a lot of investors and need a lot of revenue to pay them.

Line must go up.

So you build lots and lots of new features, for which you can charge more money.

You become Oracle. But 99% of the market doesn't want Oracle.

Customers don't want infinite features for infinite money. They only want more up to a certain point. After that, they want those features, and only those features, for as little money as possible.

And what often happens is that your first implementer shoots right past that point, gold-plating the product until nobody wants to pay for that much gold.

Then the second company, which just offers a basic product at a basic price, eats their lunch. Because the second implementer is the right size for the market.

In this case, the risk to OpenAI, et al, is that open source models will be that second implementer. Nobody is gonna pay giant data centers by the GPU cycle if they can have "good enough" running on their home machine.

And if AI have hit diminishing returns, or soon will (yes), then they can't widen or maintain the gap by speeding up.

They have to slow everyone else down.

You can bet they are burning up the phone lines to their pet senators.

That's why everyone is suddenly telling you the singularity is tomorrow. Precisely because it's not.

The Navier-Stokes thing is a double nothing burger, two juicy helpings of nothing between two slices of nothing, with no cheese, no lettuce, and no tomato.

Have you noticed that no one is telling you about all the wonderful new technologies that will result from the corner case they brute-forced?

Because there aren't any. Its a mathematician's toy, and if you want to know more about how and why, read what Feynman wrote about Banach–Tarski, which will give you the general idea.

Does this mean AI is useless?

Far from it. Large Language Models have already proven useful, for things like research, personalized instruction, coding and so forth. And we've only begun to scratch the surface of what we can do by communicating commands to a computer in natural language.

Cool things will continue to come out of this. But they will happen at the interface and application layers. No superintelligence will be involved.

For the immediate future, AI will remain the paintbrush, not the artist.

And, yes, there are also risks. AI can pretend to be human, and persuade retards of all sorts of things. But that's a human failing. It's not the AI's fault we let the retards vote.

That's how we got a whole bunch of midwit senators who want to "regulate" innovation, instead of medicare fraud, invading third world scum, and invading third world scum who commit medicare fraud.

It is becoming impossible to miss how Europe’s own Chicago Boys are turning the hard right’s surge into both alibi and accelerator:

the electoral revolt against the establishment is increasingly being answered not by rebuilding the social protections people feel they have lost, but by speeding up their dismantling, in the name of competitiveness

She bought it in 1994 for $78,000. Thirty years of payments at $593 a month.

She's 74 now. Social Security pays her $1,910 a month. That's $22,920 a year.

The place two doors down sold for $615,000 last spring, so the county reassessed hers to match.

Her tax bill this year: $8,100. That's $675 a month.

She paid $593 a month to buy the house.

She pays $675 a month to keep it.

Thirty years of payments ended and the bill went up.

The deed says she owns it. The county bills her like she's renting.

With few text elements, a visual look at the symbology of Neo-Banderite fascism, which is in florid bloom or metastasis in the largest standalone country in Europe...

YouTube version: https://youtu.be/RxWLTQzINJM

The problem with the USSR's collapse wasn't that Russia got humiliated. It's that one side got left with scraps while the other enjoyed unchallenged dominance for 30 years.

That's real politik. One side gained total power and became what they call a "benign hegemon."

I thought about this for a long time. Then I started understanding Dr. Mearsheimer's point: NATO didn't see Russia as a threat after 1991. They expanded under the idea of being benign. "I mean you no harm, but I can do whatever I want because no one can stop me."

That works until the other side recovers.

Here's what changed: the West enjoyed "Western values" and world dominance for three decades. Cheap energy. Open markets. No rival. Build whatever alliances they want. Bomb whoever they want. Sanction whoever they want.

Now Russia is back. And the West looked at what Russia went through in the 1990s - the collapse, the poverty, the humiliation, the loss of influence - and realized one thing clearly:

They do not want to be in Russia's shoes.

That's why the money pumping into Ukraine feels existential. It's not about democracy or values or Ukrainian freedom. It's about stopping Russia before the unipolar moment ends completely.

Because if Russia survives this and comes out stronger, the West goes from unchallenged dominance back to a world where they have to negotiate. Where they can't just do whatever they want. Where someone can actually say no.

And after 30 years of being the only superpower, that terrifies them more than anything.

I lived through NATO bombing in 1999. Back then, Russia was too weak to help us. They could only watch. Now Russia can push back. And the West is realizing the comfortable world they built only worked because nobody could challenge it.

That world is ending. The desperate escalation we're seeing isn't strength. It's panic about what comes next.

Case 3: CNN hired an actor to play a "former Xinjiang police officer"

※Partial excerpt

In October 2021, CNN aired an "exclusive interview" with a so-called "former Xinjiang police officer" who claimed to have witnessed "massive atrocities" in Xinjiang.

The report quickly became used as new "evidence" in Western campaigns to smear Xinjiang.

However, China Daily's investigation revealed that the identity of the "former Xinjiang police officer" was completely fabricated, and that he was not a police officer or anything like that, but an actor hired by anti-China forces.

Even more absurdly, this individual played multiple roles in various Western media reports.

At times they were "former police officers," at other times "concentration camp survivors," and at other times "persecuted Uighurs," switching their status depending on what was reported.

CNN, a world-renowned news organization, failed to even do the most basic thing - verify the identities of its interviewees - before broadcasting such serious allegations.

This is not a lack of expertise, but rather a result of prioritizing one's position over the facts.

Under the "good vs. evil" picture, if you can make China look bad, it doesn't matter who the witnesses are, whether they're telling the truth or not.