> Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gutted a program that's designed to limit the number of civilians killed by American forces. He did that over unanimous objections from top commanders after polling them, according to reporting from ProPublica.
Any given policy choice we make results in bad things happening to someone. War is just politics by other means. If we stand around and do nothing, maybe Iran kills 5000 kids for being homosexual over the next few years? If we close all the coal mines a whole entire state goes on an opioid addiction. If we don’t close the coal mines the environment suffers and people die from pollution. If we don’t kill millions of Japanese soldiers maybe China is still a Japanese colony.
Life is tough. There aren’t perfect answers. Cackling criticism from the safety of the couch doesn’t solve anything.
"We got rid of the people who prevent civilian casualties and a bunch of civilians died shortly thereafter" isn't the unpreventable random act of God you're trying to make it out to be.
There are often not perfect answers in life. But there are definitely some wrong ones.
They aren’t the only people who prevent civilian casualties though. It also doesn’t prevent civilian casualties generally given that civilian casualties have occurred prior to this organization being disbanded.
Anyway let’s talk about the 30,000+ people Iran has murdered. Should they set up a board that prevents their military from killing protestors in person with machine guns?
Whataboutism is a sign that you've lost the argument in the best of cases, but it's particularly disgusting to attempt to use it to distract from the blood of a hundred murdered children on your own country's hands.
Hilarious that you don't see the hypocrisy in your own post. I have plenty of judgment for Iran's regime, it's a pity you can't bring yourself to condemn child murderers who happen to be from your own country.
> Anyway let’s talk about the 30,000+ people Iran has murdered.
Iran is already one of the most heavily sanctioned countries on the planet. Do you want us to bomb them? Maybe kill their leadership? I'm sure it'll help.
If you're genuinely interested in preventing mass civilian casualties, I can think of a country doing such a thing we've got a lot more leverage over, with quite a bit of weaponry we supply. The casual dismissal of Hegseth's clear actions to deprioritize civilian protection hints, I think, at how genuine that is.
> Anyway let’s talk about the 30,000+ people Iran has murdered
If America wants to play World Police they need to be squeaky clean. Nobody likes a dirty cop. That is the point that's being made, that is the standard America is falling further away from, and that's why Whataboutism isn't the strong argument you think it is.
We criticize what we control, rightly. I think heads should roll for this massive fuckup. Instead we get whataboutism, jingoistic compliance, and the default, helpless apathy. We hold ourselves to a higher standard than Hamas terrorist and Islamist mullahs, and we should. But because that's not happening it's undermining the very justification for such conflicts. It's just one monster versus another now.
I don't care about whataboutism much, so I won't argue with you on your points, but know that it seems a large part of the 1200 killed during October 7th were killed by the Hannibal doctrine, which for the first time was applied to Israeli civilians.
So, on a crude calculation, for a 3090 with 936.2 GB/s, a model that has 20 GB of active params would run at 45tps and one with 3GB active params at 300tps?
In practice, I don't think I saw over 100tps on a 3090, for a local 20-30B model, be it MoE or not.
Also “ethnocentric”. But as usual, we first need to have a shared definition of fascism. If we use Eco’s Ur-fascism, many aspects are there (the moral and cultural decadence of the West, which is both too strong and too weak)
For not being fascist, the propaganda and general 'optics' and messages coming out of Russia sure look a lot like Germany in the 1930s, and Ukraine is basically the same playbook as Sudetenland - both started with a claim that a suppressed German/Russian minority must be protected from atrocities by the Czechoslovakian/Ukrainian 'aggressors' by integrating those lands into the 'Reich'. Thankfully Putin is by far not as successful bringing a much smaller country to its knees than Hitler was.
the guiding intellectual stream of the Russian government is Dugan, as best exemplified in Foundations of Geopolitics.
Dugan is unambiguously hard right and has intellectual ties to other openly fascist types. His ideology is explicitly ethno-centric and has a strong resemblance to classical Fascism (in the Ur-Fascism sense), and a looser one to German-style National-Socialist thought, esp. as it relates to Russian ethnic domination of Europe
Also, most recent developments on the battlefield are driven by Ukraine's own innovations - better drones, interceptor drones, their own cruise missiles, etc. All the lessons are being absorbed by Europe and the US.
By far most credit should go to the Ukrainians. They are the ones under attack, they are the ones defending democracy and freedom, and they are the ones who are resisting the Russians against all odds.
The US is providing some help but less so than Europe and much less so than what Ukraine is contributing.
And by saying "to the last Ukrainian" you're spreading a Russian-propaganda narrative. This slogan has been repeatedly used by Russian officials (including Putin, Peskov, Zakharova, Matviyenko), it's a recurring theme in the Russian information space and it's used by Russian bots.
Yes, but he has access to free information, so can easily check what is the current and historical Russian contribution to the world. At that point, siding with Russia is of course an active stance of supporting the crimes of Russia. Patriotism is not a valid excuse if your motherland is always the aggressor.
Well, true, Russia has a long history so I was overly broad. Aggressor in almost all conflicts is more accurate.
In WW2 it was the second major aggressor of course. WW1 Germany declared war before Russia invaded, so debatable. Wasn't an aggressor in the Napoleonic wars as far as my history knowledge serves me.
I don't think Demis wants to be CEO of all of Google. He wants to focus on DeepMind and AI. He has a life goal of inventing AGI and using that to solve the world's biggest problems. Leading Google gets him further not closer. He doesn't give a shit about ads and ads is Google's biggest money maker.
I think, for some definition of “banned”, that’s the case. It doesn’t stop the Chinese labs from having organization accounts on HF and distributing models there. ModelScope is apparently the HF-equivalent for reaching Chinese users.
I think in the West we think everything is blocked. But for example, if you book an eSIM, when you visit you already get direct access to Western services because they route it to some other server. Hong Kong is totally different: they basically use WhatsApp and Google Maps, and everything worked when I was there.
But also yes, parent is right, HF is more or less inaccessible, and Modelscope frequently cited as the mirror to use (although many Chinese labs seems to treat HF as the mirror, and Modelscope as the "real" origin).
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