So long as you don't require deep search grounding like massive web indexes or document stores which are hard to reproduce locally. You can do local agentic things that get close or even do better depending on search strategy, but theoretically a massive cloud service with huge data stores at hand should be able to produce better results.
In practice unless you're doing some kind of deep research thing with the cloud, it'll try to optimize mostly for time and get you a good enough answer rather than spending an hour or two. An hour of cloud searching with huge data stores is not equivalent to an hour of local agentic searching, presumably.
I think that problem will improve a little in the coming years as we kind of create optimized data curation, but the information world will keep growing so the advantage will likely remain with centralized services as long as they offer their complete potential rather than a fraction.
After the USSR fell, they left behind many countries abused by Russia that didn't believe it would leave them alone. Those countries wanted defense guarantees in case of future Russian aggression.
NATO wanted to be deliberate and slow about admitting any new members, but countries that wanted to join felt that anyone who didn't join might get attacked or face hybrid measures from Russia to prevent them from joining next. So they grouped up and 7 countries joined NATO simultaneously. NATO was never begging them to join, they wanted to join NATO.
People push this vision of NATO being some hungry bastard that can't get enough, but it's largely outside pressures pushing countries to want to join it.
Sure enough they were right. Russia invaded both Georgia and Ukraine, which wanted to join already because Russia kept interfering in their societies.
Just so people are clear, these types of models are almost universally naive and basic. If all you have is a single generic neutral message, "Hi, this is Bob.", it will be sufficient in most cases. If you have a pile of data, I am not aware of any PII redaction tool that has factored in all of the risks to identity leakage.
The problem is when companies use things like this and somehow believe they are anonymizing the data. No, you are not.
Still, for scenarios where the processed data isn't being directly published or shared, but used as some intermediate step like moderation enforcement, human evaluation layers or model training it can be useful to filter these things out.
In practice this was about a product that is not targeted at desktop-savvy people. At the same time, you also have people who know "this isn't a hard problem, why do I need go through all this. let me go look for someone who did it better." Not to mention all of their younger tech savvy family telling them, "don't download anything!"
If your product targets a segment that expects a desktop app, do that. Web app, do that. Phone app, do that.
Something like this would have worked if it was still back in the Walmart bargain software shelf where people could impulse buy a CD, put it into their computer and have it automatically start and install, then show up on the desktop. Despite that being less common now, it was more streamlined in a way for many users.
Many of those people probably aren't logged into Steam or Windows Store either, so you have to do your own thing. It makes sense that web is the least friction for those people.
If you have 3 of your developers spending 80% of their time in an area of the codebase that gets no usage and you don't see a path forward that realistically is likely to increase usage, it can be a better use of developer time to focus them elsewhere or even rethink the feature.
The problem I have with a lot of these analytics is that while there are harmless ways to use it, there is this understanding that they could be tying your unique identifier to behavioral patterns which could be used to reconstruct your identity with machine learning. It's even worse if they include timestamps.
Why not just expose exactly what telemetry is being sent when it's sent? Like add an option that makes telemetry verbose, but doesn't send it unless you enable it. That way you can evaluate it before you decide to turn it on. Whenever you do the Steam Hardware survey it'll show you what gets sent. This is the right way to do it.
"thanks to Chinese competition". More like anti-competitive practices. They can force down Chinese wages to keep labor costs down. They can require companies involved in component technologies to share their IP in order to do business in China, then replicate it and subsidize the hell out of it to push them not just out of China, but out of business globally. Then subsidize the whole final vertically integrated manufacturing of the end product so it's all cheaper and harder to compete with.
Not very free market. It's basically military and intelligence budget combined. If you can hurt auto manufacturing, you further consolidate manufacturing inside China. Then if you can get people to pay for you to spy on them through their own cars, that's well spent intelligence budget. If you reduce the portion of global manufacturing outside of China, you reduce the amount of manufacturing that can quickly pivot to wartime production like we saw during World War 2.
I'm glad that we still have sane enough people in the US that we ban these obvious and transparently bad things. It wasn't that hard to see free trade died.
Hopefully people don't still think that China's green energy initiatives are about the climate. Whatever you think about those initiatives, don't let that blind you to the legitimate questions around China's motivations.
Honestly chinese manufacturing doesnt look like the market you describe. If anything it looks like from the outside that working conditions, manufacturing processes and technology are all escalating. EV's in particular, their EV industry used to make terrible cars that were basically just chewing up and spitting out low quality batteries with no range. Now they are making cars that I actually want to drive.
>Not very free market. It's basically military and intelligence budget combined. If you can hurt auto manufacturing, you further consolidate manufacturing inside China. Then if you can get people to pay for you to spy on them through their own cars, that's well spent intelligence budget. If you reduce the portion of global manufacturing outside of China, you reduce the amount of manufacturing that can quickly pivot to wartime production like we saw during World War 2.
The most dangerous nation on the planet, that threatens everyones national security is the USA. And thankfully we averted this risk by basically demolishing their car industry. Its honestly asias gift to the planet. China cant project power anywhere nearly as well as the US, so on balance, they are vastly the more preferable partner for this data.
>I'm glad that we still have sane enough people in the US that we ban these obvious and transparently bad things.
Lmao. Freedomburgerland summed up in one sentence.
>Hopefully people don't still think that China's green energy initiatives are about the climate.
Chinas green energy initiatives are both soft power, and sustainability for a massive population. They only care about the environment as far as it impacts on them economically.
>don't let that blind you to the legitimate questions around China's motivations.
China is the most stable superpower we have. We are right to be suspicious, but honestly the century of American humiliation is playing out pretty well for them without them having to do much of anything.
> EV's in particular, their EV industry used to make terrible cars that were basically just chewing up and spitting out low quality batteries with no range. Now they are making cars that I actually want to drive.
The cars used to be awful, but it's not surprising that they improved. I didn't say anything about the quality of the cars. If the CCP didn't have an iron grip on that country, maybe I would eventually think about them as favorably as Toyota or other Japanese brands. After all, Japan was an enemy and became a great ally with popular culture pervading the US.
> The most dangerous nation on the planet, that threatens everyones national security is the USA. And thankfully we averted this risk by basically demolishing their car industry. Its honestly asias gift to the planet. China cant project power anywhere nearly as well as the US, so on balance, they are vastly the more preferable partner for this data.
That doesn't accurately represent history and nobody serious will make the argument you're making. Culturally, the US is very isolationist. The reason we expand bases around the world is to reduce war (attacking a country with a US base on it is a bad idea, which is a deterrent) and to react quicker to war when it does happen (logistical efficiency). If nobody pushes back, it makes the next world war more likely to drag us in which costs lives.
If we're militarily involved somewhere, there's generally a good reason. It's like firefighting to prevent the whole thing from being engulfed and collapsing. War has a way of normalizing and spreading. Did we start World War 1? World War 2? Vietnam war? Korean war? What were we reacting to with Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Iran? Do you understand the historical events that resulted in those conflicts? Can you enumerate them?
Do you understand how similar today is to the beginnings of World War 2? Do you know what World War 2 was actually about? Communist Russia was using Marxist communist revolution and political parties in countries around the world to try to achieve global communism, and at the time Russia was doing a massive build out of military that had many countries worried. They had more military hardware than all countries combined including Germany.
Marxism was attacking religion and cultural heritage, which is what spurs these religious racist fascist backlashes. That sat on top of and amplified the industrial trade and power imbalances that remained after World War 1.
Russia's expansion was a combination of weaponized psychological Marxism (it evolved beyond just bottom-up revolution and into a top-down tool of the Russian state). It caused Japan, Germany and Italy to see it as an existential crisis which amplified their race for resource control to prepare to fight back against the eventual final war against Russia. Early CCP members were part of Russia's comintern.
Now we have China creating the most rapid military build-out in history while the CCP is realigning to hardcore Marxist-Leninist purity, on a purging rampage. Russia purged its military not long before invading Poland and Finland.
So, you'll have to excuse me if I don't find your argument convincing that China is the stable power, which is logically incorrect for far more geopolitical reasons than only this.
"The primary rationale for the invasion centered around false claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that Saddam Hussein was supporting al-Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission concluded in 2004 that there was no credible evidence linking Saddam to al-Qaeda, and no WMD stockpiles were found in Iraq."
You said logical reasons but all you did was repeat standard anti marxist rhetoric a few times. Nations run on internal logic, like all things. Chinas demonstrated interests dont include me. the USA on the other hand, has a history of being unpredictable and invading without any real intent or purpose.
You appeal to history but just compare all the aggressive wars started by the USA vs China since WW2. Tell me who to be more scared of.
China hasn't even done much more than pay lip service to Marx since Deng anyway. They are just the most stable, reliable capitalist superpower right now.
You mean, since the US defended China from Japan? Since the US defended South Korea from North Korea and China? Since we made the decision to allow China into global trade to lift it out of poverty and potentially liberalize its government despite the risk communism posed?
Just because you were told that the US has no intent or purpose behind its actions, doesn't mean it's true. Do you somehow believe that every country has reasons for things, except for the most powerful country in history? If so, that is a very unreasonable belief.
Some people are taught to hate the US, some people are taught to love the US, others are taught to think for themselves.
Marxists were openly interested in global imperialism, it's just that it was psychological imperialism backed by military follow-up.
Vietnam is communist too and they aren't always treating their people the best either, but they haven't been showing a lot of obvious signs of trying to expand physically or ideologically.
> China hasn't even done much more than pay lip service to Marx since Deng anyway. They are just the most stable, reliable capitalist superpower right now.
Reformists have been getting purged. There was a time where we could imagine China giving up on Marxism, but that may be less likely now.
>You mean, since the US defended China from Japan?
Is that what happened? That feels like a massive stretch considering who the US backed in the Chinese civil war.
>Since we made the decision to allow China into global trade
Thats another great example. The USA only ever serves to damage global trade. Really good point well made.
>Just because you were told that the US has no intent or purpose behind its actions, doesn't mean it's true.
Lmao.
> Do you somehow believe that every country has reasons for things, except for the most powerful country in history? If so, that is a very unreasonable belief.
The USA has reasons, they are just usually incredibly sucky reasons. And then hawks come in after the fact and make up retrospective reasons to try and justify further dumb interventions. This process is what makes the US extremely dangerous to world peace.
>Some people are taught to hate the US, some people are taught to love the US, others are taught to think for themselves.
Real "I am a dangerous free thinker" shit.
> Marxists were openly interested in global imperialism, it's just that it was psychological imperialism backed by military follow-up.
And you see that ideology as a threat to US Global Imperialism, and you have internalised US Global Imperialism as part of your personality, I get it.
The difference between this and something like the US All Writs Act, or Australias Access and Assistance bill is super negligible. Just the overt trappings of single party politics really differentiate it. The US, and its allies are equally capable at compelling corporate action. I know its scary when the red guys do it, but if you want me to care about this, you would need the US and friends to not be leading the charge.
>Reformists have been getting purged. There was a time where we could imagine China giving up on Marxism, but that may be less likely now.
I could literally sit down, go through every single piece of Chinese history for the last 20 years and recontextualise it for a US audience. The problem is largely that you dont believe in their legal system. And fair cop, just like the national security courts in the USA theres literally no oversight. So when they disappear someone in the government, and claim they were a traitor, you say that's bad. Fair enough. But thats just noise to me. Because I dont trust the US legal system either. The purges are sold internally as fighting dissent and corruption. If the US government took precisely the same action with precisely the same justification you would be clapping like a seal, and trying to convince others using your "dangerous free thinker" powers.
Reality is Xi is getting rid of his internal enemies. He is very good at this. This isn't necessarily leading to more or less marxism, just determining how long we will be dealing with Xi.
> Is that what happened? That feels like a massive stretch considering who the US backed in the Chinese civil war.
China, the US, Germany and Japan were all fighting against cultural genocidal Marxism which had global domination ambitions. It's a matter of historical record. There were dictators on both sides, but not all dictators are created equal. Both Germany and the US were helping provide supplies. The problem is that Japan and Germany got so fanatical and expansionist themselves that they became the bigger threat.
We are lucky that there are incredibly incompetent people in charge of Russia and China, but if Japan and Germany had sufficiently expanded into Russia and China to gain the resources they needed, that would be too much geographic power to allow their respective ideologies to have.
My point in this thread is essentially that the CCP has never ended its war in support of communism and while the era of the tank has largely ended, we now have EVs rolling straight through the middle of cities unopposed. Arguably every bit as useful as rolling a tank down to the capitol.
> And you see that ideology as a threat to US Global Imperialism, and you have internalised US Global Imperialism as part of your personality, I get it.
People knew what life was like inside Soviet Russia. It wasn't free, life sucked. Nobody wanted that to happen to their country. If Marxists gained control of enough global resources and continued to build giant militaries to expand with then they posed a legitimate risk of erasing freedom worldwide.
The US has never been about imperialism in the way you think of the British Empire, the Russian Empire or the Chinese Empire. You're only applying a naive filter by suggesting land empires aren't real empires, only ocean empires are real empires. All of the other empires have been actually imperial, with kings, emperors and so on. It's not really accurate to call the US a religious empire even, but it was a country formed anew with deep understanding of the problematic cycles the world has faced for thousands of years.
There are scenarios where we have critical interests like Panama, Hawaii, Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Greenland, etc, but it's not like we're in these places enslaving their populations and preventing them from knowing the truth. If we were a true British or Russian style empire with endless ambition, the US could have wrecked Germany and Japan, then gone on to finish China and take over Russia, capture all of the middle east, steamroll south america and so on. If we are an aggressive empire, then we have been extremely judicious relative to the amount of projection power we have.
After World War 2, we invested in the rest of the world to help it recover. Why do that when we could've just steamrolled a weak and battered world? Because that's not how we think.
The only reason we're using more of our leverage lately, is because we're countering the things Russia and China are already doing and we're not being ignorant about the threats that are being posed.
> The difference between this and something like the US All Writs Act, or Australias Access and Assistance bill is super negligible. Just the overt trappings of single party politics really differentiate it. The US, and its allies are equally capable at compelling corporate action. I know its scary when the red guys do it, but if you want me to care about this, you would need the US and friends to not be leading the charge.
The US does not require companies to hire political and intelligence minders. It would be like the US requiring a company to align with Republican politics, even if their company wasn't politically minded. We see this kind of wild stuff in radical Islam, where the religious law must be enforced, so religion and state are one. In China, it's more than nuance around a one party state, it is that the politics and the state are one, because Marxists believe that all social action is political action and so social action must sufficiently adhere to Marxist principles. It's just not realistic to enforce this at the lowest levels, so some version of CCP interests are imposed at the company level.
You can point to various laws, but it depends on the spirit of the law and how those laws are actually being implemented in practice. Next to Iran, China leads the charge globally in sociopathy around this particular issue, I'm sorry to say. So, no, you can't normalize it like China is just doing it, because the US is doing it. We're absolutely not doing it the way you are imagining.
The closest thing is when there is military-civil public/private fusion, which is for defense purposes in specific critical areas, but it's not about political compliance as much as it's about national security.
The CCP thinks the survival of the CCP itself is national security. In the US, if you got enough support you can make a new political party.
We do have scenarios where organizations that get a lot of public funding can be required to change some of their policies which can be close to political enforcement, but it is optional for organizations to receive public funding. They have to decide if they're committed to whatever their political thing is enough that they like it more than the money. It makes sense that if public funding is going towards anything that is considered political, it needs to be evaluated whether the state should be doing that since it risks a self-reinforcing cycle that can politically weaponize the state against itself into some kind of one party system.
I've never said the US is perfect, but it's very cheap to point at some random thing in the US that looks vaguely duck-like and say look, you taught us about ducks! It's especially weak when you're trying to defend the goodness of your country and think of the US as bad, but then you use the US as an example for why you're doing something? What China does is much closer to the political radicalism of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union than the US.
> I could literally sit down, go through every single piece of Chinese history for the last 20 years and recontextualise it for a US audience. The problem is largely that you dont believe in their legal system. And fair cop, just like the national security courts in the USA theres literally no oversight. So when they disappear someone in the government, and claim they were a traitor, you say that's bad. Fair enough. But thats just noise to me. Because I dont trust the US legal system either. The purges are sold internally as fighting dissent and corruption. If the US government took precisely the same action with precisely the same justification you would be clapping like a seal, and trying to convince others using your "dangerous free thinker" powers.
Of course when you've been immersed in the kool-aid of any given system you get used to it and start to rationalize things like "well, the world didn't end after this and it happens a lot, so I guess it's ok". Being desensitized to it is a risk.
The difference is that our justice system succeeds far more than it fails. Journalism can get a little warped, but when one journalistic outlet goes crazy and becomes useless there are others you can look to instead. In China, so many political things are considered national security that you don't have the right to even be accurately informed about political things occurring. Essentially, this is like if Democrats started jailing Republicans for basic vanilla conservatism, but then also jailed any journalists that reports on it in a way that was not aligned with the Democrat party line.
Look at what Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and Russia do with their political opponents. China is that with a little more sparkle at a much larger scale with extreme censorship. When you are raised in a system like that, your ability to even know what is true is degraded significantly since it has been curated in advance to be more favorable to the CCP.
>My point in this thread is essentially that the CCP has never ended its war in support of communism and while the era of the tank has largely ended, we now have EVs rolling straight through the middle of cities unopposed. Arguably every bit as useful as rolling a tank down to the capitol.
If there wasnt already enough, this is the cherry on the top of you being too silly to take seriously.
> What were we reacting to with Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Iran? Do you understand the historical events that resulted in those conflicts? Can you enumerate them?
With Iran specifically, it was Epstein files and wish to look masculine. Operation masculine insecurity, if you want. With Venezuela, it was wish to get some extortion money for Trump and wish to look like cool manly man.
From those four, only Afghanistan we reaction to outside world rather then deranged internal politics that just must have war.
> Do you understand how similar today is to the beginnings of World War 2?
It was about gaining living space for Germans at the expense of other countries. It was also about gaining world domination by Germans, extermination of all Jews as fast as possible and eventual extermination of eastern Europeans in about two generation (the plan was to prevent their breeding).
He says basing is a problem, but doesn't mention that we have answers to basing problems. He says F-35 production doesn't scale. Then he says F-35 production doesn't need to scale.
The F-35 is a multi-role jet. It wasn't built for what it's doing in Iran, it's just that it can do it. There are other older jets doing similar things in Iran just fine. Compared to past jets we lose fewer of them, so that has to be factored into the overall cost.
If we say, ok, let's just put fewer of them on this base to reduce concentration. They are still there. He didn't get rid of the F-35s, he didn't get rid of his argument that bases are vulnerable. So what is the point? Now if a successful attack gets through and takes out some F-35s....you now have less spare F-35s to do the critical mission you wanted, because you put fewer there to start with.
We have other solutions for this problem, but in peace time it's more efficient to concentrate things. The nature of escalation tends to mean you have some time to reorganize before the real battle comes.
We're still going to have F-35s _and_ drones _and_ missiles. If the enemy has anti-missile and anti-drone defenses, it won't necessarily be the drones and missiles taking those out.
I'm not the person who responded to you, but I think of a brute force attack as essentially translatable into brute (dumb) force (effort). No thinking, no decision making, but the process is known. Here is a pile of stones, move that pile of stones from here to over there. In the case of most brute force, you think of it like cracking passwords. You have an algorithm or you have a giant pile of passwords. Move those passwords over to try them on this hash. The processor is doing the heavy lifting on the simple task.
Philosophically you could try to differentiate between the human side of the effort versus the computer side. You could also differentiate from a really dumb model and a really smart model. A dumb model just spinning its wheels and hoping it gets lucky, versus a smart model actually trying intelligent things and collecting relevant details.
In these cases I think we're assuming a sufficiently smart model making well reasoned headway on a problem. Not sure I would fall on the side of the camp that would label this as brute force by default in all cases. That said, there may be specific scenarios where it might seem fitting even when using a smart model.
Climate change policy was a valiant effort to de-influence authoritarian petrostates and prevent Russia from achieving its multi-century goal of expanding its access to actual warm water ports. The major conflicts between Russia and Japan were essentially over that. It's why Japan even attacked Korea, because Russia was trying to gain influence there and it was an essential launching off point if Russia was ever going to attack Japan.
If climate has already changed so much that Russia's ports are no longer going to freeze, then green energy initiatives may just put us at a disadvantage since we don't manufacture most of the products. Solar panels, wind turbines, we don't control a lot of that supply chain which isn't healthy.
There are other advantages to renewable energy, but at the moment the USD benefits from oil reliance and transitioning away from oil while maintaining USD influence is an important goal.
At the same time, oil infrastructure does tend to have a lot of weak points, where renewable energy can be easier to spread out. Eventually I think it will be relegated to military and byproducts more, but for now there is an abundant supply.
This game came out the same year the original Castlevania did. They're different enough games, but there are a few similarities that do make you wonder if they had any particular shared influences.
In practice unless you're doing some kind of deep research thing with the cloud, it'll try to optimize mostly for time and get you a good enough answer rather than spending an hour or two. An hour of cloud searching with huge data stores is not equivalent to an hour of local agentic searching, presumably.
I think that problem will improve a little in the coming years as we kind of create optimized data curation, but the information world will keep growing so the advantage will likely remain with centralized services as long as they offer their complete potential rather than a fraction.
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