cosmicgadget

The geographical differences between Afghanistan and Ukraine means they can't achieve a similar armistice? Lol. "War has zero relevant factors other than hills." "The plains of Ukraine are a ripe target for Russia's five remaining T-72s." "Any moment now Russia will achieve a breakthrough."

> they swallowed their own cold war bullshit

You're thinking of the actual cold warrior. The one who worked in the soviet intelligence services and became a dictator. The one who initiated the invasion.

> Ukraine was just the nearest opportunity to do so, even if it meant fucking over 25 million people for no clear benefit.

When the US... rolled tanks into Ukraine? You're approaching self-parody my man.

Sort of glad I wasn't tempted to buy a Tesla yute.

> Anyone who claims there is an alternative path to victory is a liar.

The liar is named Afghanistan.

> I won't ever forgive the west for throwing ukraine under the bus to express their anxiety about russia

What does this even mean?

> Russia will just replace him with someone on the right wing of russian politics. That's actually a worse scenario in every way.

Amazing. Russian voters will look at their economy, their dead, their global image, and choose someone even more inclined to continue the five+ year SMO.

I'm not so sure the succession will be smooth though. If anyone was equipped to seamlessly take the reins they'd be a threat to the current guy. Any internal struggle means less commitment to the war.

> The only victory path is to collapse russia. We have no way to do that and there are no domestic pressures indicating this will happen any time soon. And in every way Russia is hurting, Ukraine is suffering harder.

Don't need Russia to collapse, just need it to decide there are more important uses of their fighting-age men and money. Putin is committed, others need not be. Economically, things will continue to decline for Russians and while it's possible to fake it by printing money, reality eventually catches up.

Great comment.

I guess of you're going to describe a meaningless war of aggression as "international relations" you've decided it's geopolitics rather than crime. I can't really help you there, sorry.

Trump brags about a lot of things. He's constantly the greatest, most xyz in history. Everything is amazing right now and was a catastrophe under previous administrations. He claims he will annex Greenland and Canada. There's no reason to believe his third term ramblings are actually honest, much less practical.

I won't bore you with the details, but I fully believe he only ran for president in '24 because it was his only way to avoid prison. He was staring at two slam dunk convictions and his only outs were fleeing the country or taking over the department prosecuting him.

And even if he were to somehow circumvent the Constitution and fool the electorate that has, just this week, overwhelmingly told him he sucks, he's still not the dictator/mob boss that Putin has been for 30 years. He aspires to be that but Americans just aren't Russians.

> things are still looking really bleak internationally.

Yeah, it kind of sucks when the hegemon becomes this dumb hydra of isolationism, extortion, and military adventurism. Europe is doing a solid job of insulating itself from its mercurial western ally, I hope things will return to normal before too long.

I would consider sending funds and arms to the unambiguously right side to be the ethical course of action. Entering the war with troops would be escalatory, anyone who claims to know the result of that hypothetical escalation is a liar.

The Biden administration and western leaders chose monetary and logistical assistance with which Ukraine has fought Russia to a stalemate. That's not a terrible outcome if the alternative is Russia actually following through with their mad man nonsense.

Oh yeah, and winning isn't accomplished with overwhelming force. The West marching into Moscow was never a possibility, despite what Alex Dugin will have you believe. Winning is Putin backing down, being deposed, or doing the swan lake thing.

You are completely right but also I can't escape the desire to review and revise. Ultimately it is a good thing and an exercise in persistence but sometimes it's a grind.

Been blogging almost monthly since the late aughts, I am just being a complainer.

Wait, I thought you already had that information. You seemed to imply that you did and I needed to be enlightened.

Specifically due to one of their content rules, type 'substack nazi problem rule 34'.

The real cost is the hours spent staring at something I just wrote and hating how poorly it is written.

Okay do you want to add qualifiers or just accept my point because Russia's invasion happens to be the most bloody and pointless war currently and in the past 40 years?

You should be able to remember China invading other places historically. Recently, of course, China doesn't compare to Russia or the US in terms of direct conflict. On the other hand, they're the country that is the most vocal about an imminent occupation.

> I find this performative

I guess because a web-based search is fundamentally one or more API calls so everything before and after it is expense. Maybe it's very near zero.

> Browsing some of the forums where people discuss their search setups is enlightening.

Interesting, is this for personal use or is it some business application? In any event I'd imagine the same can be done via agents using a browser.

> AI agents typically don't care. They may sign up for a trial, use the trial, and then when the trial runs out they might get creative and create a new account, or silently switch to another service to avoid bothering the user.

That is a crazy amount of compute just to conduct a search.

America's present conflicts aren't remotely on the same scale. America won't continue to overwhelmingly elect the same leader until he dies.

Can we get a summary of each? I'd like to see various metrics on the scale and brutality of the war compared to state ownership of the company, direct monetary contributions, and indirect monetary contributions to the war effort.

There's nothing political about not wanting to contribute to the aggressor in a terrible war.

My workflow (return on success):

1. DDG

2. Google

3. Whichever LLM is closest at hand

4. This is information the world was not meant to know

> Only in the trivial sense that they also cost.

I don't get it, what other sense is there? Seems like 50 daily API queries would be lighter weight than 50 browser queries. And with an API you can require a key (aka subscriber).

> But those are an offer and are used to advertise and get more users.

"Try our search engine from your browser" / "Try our search engine from your agent setup" These both seem like user acquisition pitches. The real difference with programmatic access is that you'll likely get users hitting the cap and paying for more usage if they like the product.

> as the "50/100" says, they're capped.

... which is exactly what I was suggesting for API use.

Insurmountable then.

Is the same not true of 50/100 free browser-based searches?

What's your point?

Agentic AI users are familiar with usage caps and rate limiting.

It's been flagged. HN has always been in bed with big pineapple, everyone knows that.

That's actually a pretty good reason. If you are going to put him away for life anyway*, maybe you can hold off on the one which would drag victims into court.

*An inevitable outcome, slowed by the immunity ruling and Aileen Canon, that could only be permanently derailed by the unthinkable scenario where voters re-elect him.

Still holding out hope for the tariff dividend though!

Primary voters seem to disagree.

What if those pets are lions and their preferred food is people? Ever think of that???

I'm afraid the US Constitution, as interpreted by the sitting Supreme Court, gives the executive a lot of power.