Unless you think Russia is capable of hacking google maps...
Here's an oil field owned by Halliburton in Ukraine. https://g.co/kgs/F7e761g
For those of us not old enough to remember, Halliburton got famous for being deeply connected to George W. Bush's Vice President, Dick Cheney, and profited massively from the Iraq war.
also, I think most of their competent hackers leave. I work with a three Iranian systems dudes (not in Iran, despite the suggestion of another user here). If your choice is between working for the IRGC (becoming the target of western sanctions and security agencies) or a $250k/year job at Google, the choice is usually pretty easy.
Lol. you should check out that keyboard again. It's a Qwerty AND Cyrillic keyboard which clearly shows the the Cyrillic letter ж uses the same key as the ;/: button on qwerty.
In before this person uses the fact that I know how to type a Unicode character as "proof" of my bot-ness.
I think you'll find my post history about Linux, volunteering with refugees, and pictures of museums to be consistent with my anti-war stance and offer a hint as to why I know a bunch of historical facts.
lol. nah, homey. it's a 7 month old account from the reddit exodus. Ukraine discovered natural gas in Crimea in 2014, threatening to box out Russia from the EU energy market, which is why it's an existential threat for Russia if Ukraine pivots west. Consequently, Russia invaded. Here is a Wikipedia article that discusses the Shell-backed exploration of the gas field off the coast of Crimea.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skifska_gas_field
Who the fuck said anything about supporting Russia? Genocidal regimes focused on the extraction of fossile fuels are fucked-- whether you're talking Saudi Arabia, The US, or Russia. For the love of god, please educate yourself about the hypocrisy of US foreign policy. I'm really sorry that you can't see beyond the binary worldview you've hinted to here.
If I was a pro-Russia bot, why would I post this on an article, I posted, mocking Iranian hackers?
Do you not realize that Iran is selling drones to Russia to bomb Ukraine?
Do you not realize that Iran only has said drone technology because they captured a US drone flying over Pakistan and reverse engineered it? Seems like if the ill-informed war of terror never happened, Iran wouldn't have drones and Russia wouldnt be using them in Ukraine to murder civilians. The world is way more complicated than the black and white worldview you've alluded to.
Fuck Putin, fuck the us department of defense and fuck the police (just for good measure). Is that clear enough for you?
adding to this list:
Oil companies are definitely known for their altruism and opposition to dictators.
Yeah. Agreed. I just thought the Iraq war would be a great example because it is now pretty universally recognized as a major fuck up in US policy that lead to the deaths of around a million people and the eventual rise of the Islamic State. I mean, if you look up civilian casualty numbers in Ukraine vs Iraq and account for the shorter timeline (at least, since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine), the US is worse than Russia by a wide margin. And let's not talk about Gaza or how to the US funnelled arms and funds to right wing nationalist groups in the former Yugoslavia before bombing civilian infrastructure in Belgrade in the name of preventing the genocide that the US helped to inflame and escalate. Hell, the shells that were dropped on Sarajevo in 1996 by the Serbian militias were given/sold to them by the US (during the cold war) and then they also sold arms to National separatist groups that are themselves accused of acts of genocide.
Oh. Yeah. I work as a systems guy on AI related tasks, but I have a strong mathematical background (my degrees are all in math), so I understand the AI stuff well. I just find the management of clusters and reliability engineering to be far more interesting than getting a computer to hallucinate nonsense. Anyway, the systems people are always dunking on the AI people for not knowing the basics of software like using ssh, setting up a firewall, or using version control software. We say things like, "yeah, but remember that the AI guys are the users, so we have to make it idiot proof" and "what's the difference between malware and a neural network? Not much, but one only runs on Nvidia"
Previously, I was the platform engineer for a self driving car project owned by a very large vehicle OEM. I would never get in a Tesla using "full self driving" and neither would any of my colleagues then or now. By the way, that self driving project collapsed because a very capable car manufacturer that produces more vehicles in a day than Tesla produces in a year realized it would never work at the consumer level and we had the benefit of a half a million dollars worth of military grade localization equipment, while Tesla is trying to get by on webcams and magic.
Hell, you can pull up countless, peer reviewed papers in the AI field that don't have error bars or any statistical hypothesis testing at all, authored by labs at MIT or Facebook. It's terrifyingly bad.
tl;dr AI people are generally the least competent people I've met in my field-- which is AI.
well, for other security research, they often rely on things like timestamps (even state sponsored hackers have nights and weekends), typos that only make sense with certain keyboards, and who is targeted. For example, Russian keyboarss don't have the : symbol, so the :) emoji is usually typed as "))", which can be a dead giveaway that the hacker uses a a Slavic language keyboard.
However, let's not pretend for a second that disinformation and propaganda are only pushed by the listed countries. I'm old enough to remember when lies pushed by the Bush administration to the New York Times that were used to manufacturer public consent for the Iraq war.
Or how NATO promises they're supporting Ukraine out of the goodness of their hearts and that it has absolutely nothing to do with their abundant natural gas supplies that are currently being sold off to oil companies based in NATO countries. (Slava Ukraini, for the record, but fuck the oil companies).
OpenAI (like many other tech monopolies) dissolved their trust and safety team months ago:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/17/openai-superalignment-sutskever-leike.html
Be 18. Get scholarship. Study literature. Drop out. Run away. Join a protest movement. Be homeless at MIT for a while. Find job. Get hurt at said job. Get workers injury insurance payment after 2 years of recocery. Go back to school for math. Be good at math. Found tech related non profit. Spend 6 months in Kurdistan, setting up wifi. Finish math school. Fuck it, get masters because good at math. Get hired by foreign company oversees to work on self driving cars. Doesn't work. Won't work. Quit. Go to Greece, teach refugee kids how to us MS office. Watch neo Nazis burn down refugee school and computer lab. Suddenly it's March of 2020 (COVID) and nothing to do because Nazis and no more computer lab. Oh fuck. Find PhD program in "trustworthy ai" to figure out why car not work. Prove car never work. Get PhD. Get paid to critique AI and play on super computers while working from home and having zero day to day oversight. Get paid to travel the world. Get paid to shit on Google, Facebook , Openai, and Tesla.
I went from homeless to visiting my 40th country in 10 years, while having a PhD.
No regrets.
share a picture!
You can't just mention that and not share!
Yeah. Many pigments were hard to access or otherwise very expensive. Tyrian purple, for example, was made by boiling a massive amount of rare snails, which is why deep purples were reserved for only the wealthiest of people. In the 1800s, ground up mummies were a fairly common way to make brown pigment.
We tried that too. That was the USSR. It famously didn't work out so well either, despite the superior working hours, vacation time, and education level when compared to the west. Even with well intentioned people acting on the best of intentions, there tends to be unpredictable side effects.
How Amsterdam accidentally created a violence and crime ridden ghetto by building consolidated public housing:
https://youtu.be/sJsu7Tv-fRY?si=1xAsX2Ipvu6L6ybN
Same idea, but Chicago:
https://youtu.be/_CogQmmBL9k?si=pSuz9dvf6G4vC8Qk
Yugoslavia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_City_Gate
Granted, that's not always the case. The "Kruschevkas" (commie blocks) from the middle period of the USSR are still in use across the former USSR and seem to be working well enough, especially since they were intended to be demolished in the 80s. But there wasn't really income disparity like we see the west, so it's hard to compare directly. We do know that over the long term, people got demotivated by shortages of luxury goods, tvs, chocolate, etc and this lead to a vicious cycle of shortages, being corrupt to circumvent the shortages, and demotivation because even if you worked really hard and saved your money, there wasn't really anything to buy.
By the time they opened the borders, it was already doomed because, unfortunately, the average society citizen liked chocolate more than they liked the ideal of not relying on slavery and child labor to make exotic candy.
I agree with the platitude, but subsidizing interest isn't giving money to poor people-- it's cutting a check to a bank, using tax money that rich people avoid paying. If you want to increase the supply of cheap houses, you have to build cheap houses. If you want to lower the price of housing, artificially injecting a bunch of money into a market is going to raise demand and do nothing for the supply. Nevermind that in the US in particular, the problems exacerbated by a massive demographic shift towards dense urban centers that were not bombed out and rebuilt in the mid 20th century and therefore do not have housing stock appropriate for the lifestyles of today.
You also ignored the comment that subsidized interest is already an existing thing in the US and that the last time they tried giving houses to poor people that they could not afford to maintain, it crashed the global economy and was the single greatest wealth transfer towards hedge funds in history. NYC's newest policy (after moving away from the structural failure of consolidated public housing) is that all new construction must have a certain number of low income, middle income, and high income units. That's an actual supply side solution and the ratios and income thresholds are determined by the already existing demographics of the neighborhood as a way to fight both gentrification and white flight.
I'd be happy to have an actual policy discussion rooted in facts, but you can't wave your hand over a stack of tax revenue and solve structural problems about housing stock, centuries of segregation, and the horrors of capitalism simply by wishing it away. There's a lot of actual work to be done, and some of that might mean replacing historical housing districts with high density, mixed income developments. But that won't ever happen, because the generations before us relied on home ownership as an investment vehicle for retirement and have spent decades campaigning against stuff like public transit, low income housing, and the existence of homeless people anywhere near them.
Feel free to diagree, but I'd rather give my money to a homeless person directly than subsidize the actuarial risk of a billion dollar investment bank via the coervice use of state violence if I decided not to pay my taxes.
Like, if you can't come up with 3% of the value of a house (the down payment standard for subsidized homeowners in the US) how are you supposed to repair a roof or replace a major appliance? More government grants? From what revenue?
if the proposal is to disposses all the property owned by billionaires and use that to fund a reimagining of our cities such that they're built for people and not cars, I'm game. If your idea is to raise taxes on working people to subsidize other working people while the banks, the construction firms, and every material vendor takes a profit, then fuck that.
Most of Sweden's housing is owned by local governments (kommun in Swedish), but it's also a 5 year wait list to get anything, impossible for immigrants/students to find anything because they don't qualify for the queue immediately, and tied to a specific place. So, if you get a better job somewhere else, you're still fucked because you would have needed to get on their queue 5 years ago or pay the inflated "market" rent because the supply of non-state-owned housing is so low. Denmark and the Netherlands have the same problem, but perhaps that's more understandable considering their absolute size and population density.
As a side point, are you aware that the government has relied on deficit spending for more than a decade and that every new dollar spent is a dollar + interest that must be paid back to an investment fund?
For example, every time you ride the subway in NYC, you're paying something like $.30 to Chase bank to service debt the MTA used to renovate the system in the 70s.
can you explain how that last point follows from the others? First time home buyers with 3% available for a down payment already get subsidized loans from Fannie Mae, which are then packaged into investment products and sold on the open market. When this went bad in 2009, it crashed the global economy. Are you suggesting that we do more risk reduction for multi billion dollar banks? Why not just cap interest at some fixed % above inflation like civilized countries do instead subsidizing predatory lending practices and guaranteeing said loans with tax money mostly raised from working people?
Let me preface this with:
I am 100% on board with treating housing as a human right, but this proposal misunderstands the point of interest rates.
Interest rates are a best guess by financial institutions about your likelihood to repay and their expectations for inflation over the course of the loan. Interests rates are higher for poorer people because the risk of them not paying it back is higher. Google the "sub prime lending crisis" which is exactly what crashed the global economy in 2009.
One other commenter notes that an alternative would be to build state owned housing and rent it at reasonable rates. Unless it's mixed income housing, that model has failed everywhere it had been tried-- from Cabrini Green in Chicago to the commie blocks of eastern Europe. Why? because it creates specific areas in a city where a business is essentially guaranteed to have less revenue than anywhere else. This is why urban centers have food desserts and why people who live in the massive public housing blocks in Coney Island have to commute 90 minutes to Manhattan -- why would you open your business in a poor neighborhood rather than the financial district?
Even with the mixed-income model popular across Scandinavia and the Netherlands, it's not like they solved the housing crisis as this does nothing from stopping the investment properties and the airbnb-ifcation of city Centers.
Here's a congressional report on how increases to student grants (Pell grants) are highly correlated with increases in tuition.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R43692/4
Again, I think everyone should be able to afford a home, but this policy is as ignorant of history as it is ineffective at addressing the root cause of the housing crisis.
I used the old 360 dongle and controller for years. I'm not sure the driver needs to be updated regularly. It's just buttons?
https://www.theverge.com/24066646/ai-electricity-energy-watts-generative-consumption
Scandinavia often has these three-walled cabins available on a first-come, first-served basis. In Swedish, they're called vindskydd, or wind shelter. This particular one is northeast of Umeå, Sweden. No guarantees on what they're called elsewhere, but I have seen them in Finland as well. And I have heard of but not seen of them in Norway. In general, the freedom to roam is quite strong in these three countries as long as you are respectful and stay out of obviously private spaces like personal gardens or farm fields. Happy travels!
https://timesofmalta.com/article/camping-on-comino-these-are-the-rules-for-the-tal-ful-camping-site.961601
Camping opportunities are relatively rare in Europe, but this island in Malta has cheap camping. on the other inhabited islands (Malta and Good), public transit, restrooms, and wifi are plentiful and local food is extremely cheap. You can get local tfira for a couple euros or a passtizzi filled with peas or cheese for even less. With an ultralight pack, all of Gozo is walkable, though the island of Malta is split by a largely impassable highway. I'd recommend the bus for €2.50.