> The US government doesn't care at all about the thousands who were murdered in Iran. Gaza is the best example of that.
Wait, what? The only people linking Iran and Gaza are the ayatollahs ... and let's be clear: hamas murders more Palestinians than Israel does, which I'm sure Iran actually knows and sees as a good thing.
> There is this belief that the US is a benevolent superpower who is forced by the brutality of foreign regimes to intervene on humanitarian grounds. But history says otherwise.
There's obvious responses (and I'll ignore if that belief is real or not. It's not):
1) the US was indeed forced. In the sense that it's blatantly obvious that current and past administrations would have massively preferred to not interfere. Oh AND when the US says it was forced into action, that's far more true than when Putin says it. Or when the ayatollahs say it for that matter.
2) As for motivations, are they pure? No. The US and the rest of the world, when push comes to shove, is dependent on most countries participating in international trade, and has gone into wars for that. And yes, pushing oil extraction is part of that. Iran is a brutal regime that is not only extremely aggressive against it's own population but is also in a great position and trying to block trade through the Persian gulf. They wouldn't even use that to get some tax out of it. Given the chance, they would use their position to block trade with half the middle east, to conquer it. That's the mullahs wet dream, the goal.
3) And let's be real here: when it comes to US wars, they massively improved the fate of the people in the countries that were targeted. It was indeed brutal regimes that were targeted. So the humanitarian aspect is real, even if the counterargument is true: does the US attack because of humanitarian problems? No.
But compared to the other side, there's the question do US enemies create humanitarian problems as a military tactic? Generally, yes. Especially hamas, of course, and in their case, on a large scale.
4) What are the alternatives? Russia? China? They are worse than the US was at it's worst, centuries back. And the EU countries? When they did care, they had racist, colonial brutality against locals and have now moved to total indifference. Let's politely say "no help there".
5) That the motivations of the US are in question at all, and that we are genuinely discussing them inside the US, by itself, is moral. The motivations of the opposing sides ... nobody even questions how evil they are. Anybody who questions that Iran wants to conquer ... Iran has done that, brutally. Google "plastic keys to heaven", and learn how you can use minority primary school children as cheap demining equipment. Clearly, allah-approved, according to ayatollahs, who I'm told have to study islamic theology for 20 years minimum to get that job.
6) ICE might be bad, but it's not comparable to the ayatollahs. Not even remotely.
7) letting mullahs, who have shown they will use children as demining equipment in a war of aggression, acquire a nuclear bomb does not just seem like morally abhorrent but also a strategic disaster. And in case that argument is not convincing enough, they have made it clear on many occasions they want nuclear weapons in order to use them aggressively.
First, ServiceNow itself is an Oracle imitation. A Salesforce imitation. A SAP imitation (a very bad SAP imitation), an IBM Remedy (dear GOD do I HATE IBM remedy) with as it's one "advantage" that it supports automation a bit better, you could even say these are MS Access/Dynamics imitations.
And at least you could say that (deep) under the covers Oracle and SAP have excellent software. ServiceNow does not.
Second, ServiceNow SUCKS. I mean it's not quite as bad as IBM Remedy, but it really, really tries.
I like to say that most of this software is like mounting a big, heavy metal spike on the wall and then hitting your head constantly, repeatedly, as hard as you possibly can, against the point. With one important difference: unlike with IBM Remedy, when hitting your head hard on a big metal spike, the pain stops after a while.
ONE person was held accountable. One of the kids for cash judges convicted kids for money ... and didn't pay taxes on the kickbacks. He got convicted for "both" factors, excpept PLENTY of people involved in the convicting kids for cash, including lawmakers, didn't get convicted at all.
One can barely imagine what the punishment would be for a private individual kidnapping >2000 kids for on average 3 months each, with several of those kids committing suicide as a result? Kidnapping, because that's exactly what the state did here. What do you think if you or I did that, the punishment would be? I'm thinking somewhere between consecutive life sentences and death, and 100k+ USD per kid.
The state decided NO punishment, except a short house arrest stint for one of the judges that also didn't pay taxes was enough.
Or take the Flint lead poisoning crisis, and compare civil liability to what the government did when it was the culprit, rather than the benificiary. Compare and contrast:
Private company causes lead poisoning? On average $300,000 USD per victim, paid within 2 years of the poisoning. In some cases people served jail sentences of weeks to months, which isn't much but it's at least not zero.
Government causes lead poisoning? Flint water crisis: On average $2000 USD per victim (though some kids got $100,000, though that didn't cover their medical bills), paid >8 years after the case started. And this is purely based on the flint poisoning crisis, and ignores the many smaller cases the government simply got away with it. Not a single person, even the ones who were directly personally responsible and refused to turn up to court saw a single second of jail time.
(and that is ignoring that most of those private companies were convicted of doing what was considered safe, and often not promptly stopping when they knew it damaged people. The government started hurting people and ignored people telling them this would cause lead poisoning)
Strange how things evolve. When ChatGPT started it had about 2 years headstart over Google's best proprietary model, and more than 2 years ahead to open source models.
Now they have to be lucky to be 6 months ahead to an open model with at most half the parameter count, trained on 1%-2% the hardware US models are trained on.
And more than that, the need for people/business to pay the premium for SOTA getting smaller and smaller.
I thought that OpenAI was doomed the moment that Zuckerberg showed he was serious about commoditizing LLM. Even if llama wasn't the GPT killer, it showed that there was no secret formula and that OpenAI had no moat.
Eh. It's at least debatable. There is a moat in compute (this was openly stated at a meeting of AI tech ceos in china, recently). And a bit of a moat in architecture and know-how (oAI gpt-oss is still best in class, and if rumours are to be believed, it was mostly trained on synthetic data, a la phi4 but with better data). And there are still moats around data (see gemini family, especially gemini3).
But if you can conjure up compute, data and basic arch, you get xAI which is up there with the other 3 labs in SotA-like performance. So I'd say there are some moats, but they aren't as safe as they'd thought they'd be in 2023, for sure.
>Now they have to be lucky to be 6 months ahead to an open model with at most half the parameter count, trained on 1%-2% the hardware US models are trained on.
Maybe there's a limit in training and throwing more hardware at it does very little improvement?
I think you mean sponsored by the UN, whose largest voting block is the "Organization of Islamic countries" and whose second largest voting block is the "Non-Aligned movement" (that really means aligned with Moscow). There's overlap, for example, Iran is in both camps (fitting since it's a theocracy and both the Iranian government and the parent organization of Hamas, the muslim brotherhood, was greatly grown and sponsored by/with the help of the KGB during the cold war. Perhaps also relevant: the PA's original leader, Yasser Arafat El-Masri (translates to: The wise Egyptian) was an Egyptian KGB spy and was sponsored by Moscow with at least a billion dollars)
On the other hand, there is the opposing side that's also tough to ignore where they're coming from.
Leftists, with Western pro-Khomeini protests, not just in Iran, with the usual involvement from the KGB, and the CIA opposing, brought Khomeini to power with claims that he would bring a communist revolution. As per tradition in a communist revolution, first thing he did once in power is execute communist allies. Of course, Iran is still allied with the KGB (now FSB) and Moscow, currently delivering weapons and weapon designs for use in the war against Ukraine.
You could also point out that Iran is kind-of socialist, in the sense that the state controls, at minimum, 70% of the economy, and all those "companies" are directly controlled by the government.
So socialists are still at it, supporting the ayatollah, for example:
Note: yes, I get what the title says, but read. IN the article you'll find an insane rant about how Israel and the US are really behind the revolution and how despite that the regime really held back, and this popular revolution, if it fails will bring back national Iranian pride, and the revolution failing will be the final push that ayatollah's need to actually bring the communist revolution to Iran
I read the whole thing and you are smoking crack. They are calling for the overthrow of the Islamic regime and (explicitly) for the death of the supreme leader. As far as their theoretical argument goes, it's that the masses in IRan are ready to have a revolution but that they lack the organizational skills and roadmaps that communists beleieve themselves to have. They also argue that external support of a revolution is strategically bad because the incumbent regime will use it to portray the Iranian students/working class as tools of foriegn powers.
Wait, what? The only people linking Iran and Gaza are the ayatollahs ... and let's be clear: hamas murders more Palestinians than Israel does, which I'm sure Iran actually knows and sees as a good thing.
> There is this belief that the US is a benevolent superpower who is forced by the brutality of foreign regimes to intervene on humanitarian grounds. But history says otherwise.
There's obvious responses (and I'll ignore if that belief is real or not. It's not):
1) the US was indeed forced. In the sense that it's blatantly obvious that current and past administrations would have massively preferred to not interfere. Oh AND when the US says it was forced into action, that's far more true than when Putin says it. Or when the ayatollahs say it for that matter.
2) As for motivations, are they pure? No. The US and the rest of the world, when push comes to shove, is dependent on most countries participating in international trade, and has gone into wars for that. And yes, pushing oil extraction is part of that. Iran is a brutal regime that is not only extremely aggressive against it's own population but is also in a great position and trying to block trade through the Persian gulf. They wouldn't even use that to get some tax out of it. Given the chance, they would use their position to block trade with half the middle east, to conquer it. That's the mullahs wet dream, the goal.
3) And let's be real here: when it comes to US wars, they massively improved the fate of the people in the countries that were targeted. It was indeed brutal regimes that were targeted. So the humanitarian aspect is real, even if the counterargument is true: does the US attack because of humanitarian problems? No.
But compared to the other side, there's the question do US enemies create humanitarian problems as a military tactic? Generally, yes. Especially hamas, of course, and in their case, on a large scale.
4) What are the alternatives? Russia? China? They are worse than the US was at it's worst, centuries back. And the EU countries? When they did care, they had racist, colonial brutality against locals and have now moved to total indifference. Let's politely say "no help there".
5) That the motivations of the US are in question at all, and that we are genuinely discussing them inside the US, by itself, is moral. The motivations of the opposing sides ... nobody even questions how evil they are. Anybody who questions that Iran wants to conquer ... Iran has done that, brutally. Google "plastic keys to heaven", and learn how you can use minority primary school children as cheap demining equipment. Clearly, allah-approved, according to ayatollahs, who I'm told have to study islamic theology for 20 years minimum to get that job.
6) ICE might be bad, but it's not comparable to the ayatollahs. Not even remotely.
7) letting mullahs, who have shown they will use children as demining equipment in a war of aggression, acquire a nuclear bomb does not just seem like morally abhorrent but also a strategic disaster. And in case that argument is not convincing enough, they have made it clear on many occasions they want nuclear weapons in order to use them aggressively.
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