FaceDeer

Clearly what we need to do is ban plastic straws some more.

The image’s caption:

Bret Adee, one of the largest US beekeepers, has 55,000 hives used to pollinate crops. As monoculture farming spreads, bees have to be moved across the country, especially for almonds, blueberries and cherries. He lost 75% of his bees over the past year. Photograph: K Brinson/New York Times/Redux/eyevine

A quick Google search reveals that his operation, Adee Honey Farms, is in South Dakota. here’s another article on this subject with a different photograph of the same place. Their web page doesn’t have many photos of the field in question, but there’s a couple.

This is not an AI image.

I’m not trying to argue for or against this position. As I said all I’m doing is explaining a misrepresentation of the position that people are holding, namely that “a machine that can’t think straight will do it for us.”

I don’t see what it’s going to conclude that we haven’t already.

Well, that’s the point of trying to build ASI. To have it think of things that we haven’t been able to think of.

I really, really, can’t picture a scenario where we actually listen.

Of course not, you’re not an ASI.

That’s fine, I’m just correcting the misrepresentation of the view that was in the headline.

Nobody’s expecting a “machine that can’t think straight” to do it. Some people are hoping that a more competent machine will be developed.

Maybe this is because China just said they needed Russia to win? Trump’s got an obsession with opposing China.

Or maybe it’s just the way the mush inside Trump’s skull happened to flow this particular day.

Next headline up: Taliban sends troops to Kursk to support Russian defenders there.

This timeline just keeps getting weirder.

Now make the exact same meme but substitute “AI training” for “piracy” and watch the downvotes flow in.

Israel: “Hang on, we’re not done killing everyone first.”

Okay, but not sure what that has to do with my point. It still supports the notion that giving weapons and similar supplies to a party fighting a war involves you in that war.

Iron, aluminium, titanium, oxygen, silicon, phosphorus, potassium, I could go on listing elements at great length. There are plenty of resources out there. Celestial bodies are made of resources. You name it, you can find it out there in various abundances.

Helium-3 is just one of the few things you can find out there that is basically unavailable on Earth. It’s myopic to focus solely on that.

I don’t care about what international law says, this is what world war means as I understand it. I said that to begin with. International law is often even more nebulous and open to interpretation than most national law given there isn’t really a universal framework for adjudicating it.

I’d be curious for a citation, though. I looked for some and found way more instances where international courts and laws held that supplying weapons counted as being involved in a war than the contrary. For example:

• The law of neutrality (Hague V & XIII of 1907) prohibits neutral states from furnishing “supplies of war” to any belligerent. Violating that duty strips a state of its neutral status and exposes it to lawful countermeasures by the aggrieved party.
• Under state-responsibility rules (ILC Articles on State Responsibility, Art. 16), a state “aid[ing] or assist[ing]” another in committing an internationally wrongful act—armed force included—is complicit, provided it does so with knowledge of the circumstances.

I think you’ve got an overly narrow view of “direct involvement.” If I’m in a war with someone and a country tells me “here, take these weapons” and I say “you know I’m going to use these weapons to kill soldiers of the country I’m at war with” and they say “yes, we know. We actually have some specific conditions about how and where you can use these to kill them, and some satellite photos to help you target them” then I’d call that direct involvement. Flesh-and-blood soldiers are only one small part of a nation’s military these days and not every part of a military needs to be involved for the military overall to be involved.

I think we’re already in it. A world war, as I understand it, is basically just a situation where a variety of alliances and tensions build up until when a war erupts in one spot it rapidly spreads around to involve a large number of countries world-wide. That seems to be the case already, you can easily build a Pepe Silvia wall-of-crazy showing all the connections between Russia and China and Iran and Syria and Israel and Hungary and Ukraine and Belarus and the United States and Taiwan and on and on. The actual shooting pew pew warfare is still relatively confined (though bear in mind that literally a million Russian casualties have happened over a thousands-of-kilometers-long front line riddled with trenches and minefields, which is pretty significant) but all these countries are throwing their weight in on those fights and it’s easy to imagine them branching out quite quickly when conditions change.

Did you read the actual order? The detailed conclusions begin on page 9. What specific bits did he get wrong?

It’s the Register, ranty articles written like a teenager is kind of their brand.

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

– James Nicoll.

That Arabic word, “Jihad,” sure looks handy for situations like this. Yoink! It’s an English word now!

Yeah, all this speculation about senators and electoral balance and whatnot skips lightly over the more immediate effects that would come from an American attempt at annexation. If the Americans thought trying to occupy Iraq or Afghanistan was bad, well, this would be like that, except that Canadians can pass for American and can access America’s home soil quite easily.

How would rampant assassinations and terrorist attacks against Republicans (and the particularly spineless Democrats that enabled them) affect the electoral balance, Forbes? Ever hear of the FLQ, by any chance?

Americans still have this basic delusion of being “welcomed as liberators” when their Freedom and Democracy rolls in to town, even after all the times they’ve stuck their hands into ovens and been burned.