Is it the case that the “they” that want a more moderate leader are consistent with the “they” that actually get to make the call?

I think the US has sunk it’s own ship without any particular effort by BRICS frankly.

But what frame of reference?

Or stealing someone else’s spaceship time machine

They will require the requester to prove they control the standard http(s) ports, which isn’t possible with any nat.

It won’t work for such users, but also wouldn’t enable any sort of false claims over a shared IP.

If you can get their servers to connect to that IP under your control, you’ve earned it

Yeah but their violence in Ukraine dilutes NATO military attention, even if they aren’t that powerful a direct military ally.

I suspect the concern is that no one, including China itself knows how strong they would be in a military conflict, since they haven’t been in an at scale conflict in living memory, using economic power instead to great effect.

If they are really wanting to violently assert their view on Taiwan, they want global attention divided.

So your take is that because the US has misbehaved, then Russia should misbehave harder? Not that the nations should behave better in general…

If they marketed on the actual capability, customer executives won’t be as eager to open their wallet. Get them thinking they can reduce headcount and they’ll fall over themselves. You tell them your staff will remain about the same but some facets of their job will be easier, and they are less likely to recognize the value.

The research I saw mentioning LLMs as being fairly good at chess had the caveat that they allowed up to 20 attempts to cover for it just making up invalid moves that merely sounded like legit moves.

I remember seeing that, and early on it seemed fairly reasonable then it started materializing pieces out of nowhere and convincing each other that they had already lost.

Because the business leaders are famously diligent about putting aside the marketing push and reading into the nuance of the research instead.

To reinforce this, just had a meeting with a software executive who has no coding experience but is nearly certain he’s going to lay off nearly all his employees because the value is all in the requirements he manages and he can feed those to a prompt just as well as any human can.

He does tutorial fodder introductory applications and assumes all the work is that way. So he is confident that he will save the company a lot of money by laying off these obsolete computer guys and focus on his “irreplaceable” insight. He’s convinced that all the negative feedback is just people trying to protect their jobs or people stubbornly not with new technology.

Sure, it’s just an interesting challenge for funding development with public money.

You draw funds from people who can’t benefit unless they further will spend even more money to relocate. Hard to get initiatives passed when your tax base is largely not going to benefit. The chicken and egg effect is harsher than just the time it will take.

I might amend that from ‘scale’ to ‘distribution’. Through the nineteenth century population centers built up around the rail lines. In the twentieth century that didn’t matter so you have minor population centers just splattered all over the place.

This is the reality that our area has dealt with as they have tried to fund better transit, that they have to spend an exorbitant sum to serve a relatively small slice of the population because everyone is just spread everywhere… Chicken and egg, designing a transit system around current population distribution is infeasible, encouraging a shift to a more amenable distribution requires that a transit system be deployed to motivate people.

It at least holds true for a lot of people, and is even enforced in some forms of leadership training. Some folks believe the worst thing is to be perceived as ever being wrong and will push hard against that outcome no matter what.

If you weakly hold an opinion, it’s more malleable, but you are also unlikely to express that opinion strongly.

If someone is proactively expressing an opinion or responding, they are frequently pretty attached to the position they take if it is vaguely important.

It’s not universal, but it’s probable that if you make a strong statement towards the Internet, your view is kind of set and certainly some text from some anonymous guy on the Internet is supremely low on the list of things that are going to change your mind.

On the scientific discoveries, we have gotten the low hanging fruit. The twentieth century was remarkable, but the limitations of physics are harsh. A lot of excitement as we went from barely pulling off heavier than air flight to a moon landing in under 50 years. Media naturally imagined space exploration to be just a matter of time. Alas everything is exponentially harder and any further loopholes are supremely elusive.

Probably the one area with a great deal of unrealized potential would be biology, because the ethical easy forward is slow.

The thing is that while people struggle harder and harder for a smaller chunk of scraps, they still have a lot of quality of life improvements over the standard of living back in the 70s.

You almost certainly have decent access to passable air conditioning, which was far from a given back then. Even if you can’t afford decent health care, the sporadic health care you can get is still better than the standard of care then. You can have a 60 inch television and more content provided to it than you could imagine… You can instantly engage with people all over the world.