I'm pretty sure they still do, actually. What I suspect happened is that someone high up the food chain put out a broad directive to remove "gender ideology" without thinking too hard about the consequences, and then some relatively unimaginative admins lower down decided to implement it Consistently With No Exceptions. Just doing their jobs "fairly". I expect they'll fix the glitch, frankly, at least the immediate glitch.
Or maybe "good" in the sense of effectiveness is entirely separate from moral "good", and any notion of nebulous other "bad guys" is irrelevant to an assessment of Bill Gates as a manager. I'd argue they're not relevant to assessing him morally, either, but of course that's a very old debate.
I don't know, I think we're just finding that it also applies neatly to a lot of stuff we were already seeing before genAI. Edit: "blogspam", for instance, is almost the same phenomenon.
The prop doesn't seem to have the weird intermittently blurry and inconsistently spaced maze, or at least it's not on the same side. What a weird unforced error it would be if that was the only part of the image to actually be AI-generated.
If it was intentional, they wouldn't be as shy about admitting it.
But as far as your "correction" goes, even if the anti-genAI overtones at its inception are a coincidence, it wouldn't be too crazy for someone making related art today to play up the coincidence anyway. So I think your original idea was still a reasonable guess.
(0) GP didn't mention NATO, (1) NATO exists primarily to defend against Russian aggression, so obviously they're not allowed to join, and (2) besides the incidental details added for flavor, the actual question is why Russia insists on being broadly hostile to the world rather than broadly cooperative.
The logic of 'No of course you can't join us - we're organizing to fight you!' is a good way to create a self fulfilling prophecy. Beyond that, one of the big practical reasons NATO exists is to stop its members from fighting against each other. Europe had centuries of never-ending and ever deadlier warfare eventually culminating in WW2. NATO largely stopped that by putting them under a common umbrella. Of course a practical reality is that history has shown alliances need an external enemy, or they start to turn on themselves. If the US had foreseen had powerful China would be today, I expect Russia would have been 'enlisted' into NATO.
And I don't think Russia is broadly hostile to the world. They cofounded BRICS which comprises near to a majority of the world's population, and also a greater share of the world's economy than e.g. the G7. Rather the "problem", and one that applies to China too, is that they will never behave in a submissive fashion to the US. They want a multipolar world, whereas the political establishment in the US still dreams of a hegemonic world order, akin to what we had after the USSR collapsed. This inevitably sets the stage for geopolitical conflict, and as the saying goes - when two elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.
> 'No of course you can't join us - we're organizing to fight you!'
If only this had a more complicated explanation than something akin to schoolyard drama.
> NATO largely stopped that by putting them under a common umbrella.
You're thinking of democratization, the end of imperialism, and the elimination of aggressive regimes. Helped along by the financial devastation caused by the war.
> I don't think Russia is broadly hostile to the world.
Sure, unless you listen to all of their broadly hostile rhetoric or are on a Malaysian or Azerbaijani airliner or something.
> This inevitably sets the stage for geopolitical conflict
This your way of saying Russia needs to cut undersea cables and invade neighbors?
> You're right, a democratic country would never do anything like that.
Can you point to the place I said this? Does the US shooting down an Iranian airliner somehow make Russia not hostile to the world? These seem like independent things.
"The world"? I don't think I've ever heard the definition of the world defined as narrowly as "80% of Europe and the US with its military allies" before.
"From 6 to 10 August [2025], Ibrahim, the Malaysian King (Yang di-Pertuan Agong), visited Russia at the invitation of President Vladimir Putin. This marked the first visit of a Malaysian head of state to Russia since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1967."
> they will never behave in a submissive fashion to the US.
What does this have to do with both of them repeatedly instigating territorial disputes with their neighbors? Granted the US certainly isn't a saint in that regard but its been quite a while since the Mexico stuff.
Annexing pieces of neighbors and defying US economic interests seem like fairly disjoint activities to me.
That’s because you misunderstand the terminology. They’re talking propaganda and “submissiveness” means something else in their language.
There’s a weird fetishism across Russia: everything is centered around gay sex. There’s no cooperation in the world, either you take it and become “petukh” (cock) or you give it and become “pakhan” (shot caller).
Matches an observation of mine that skips the prison lingo: lack of the concept of friendship without any power gradient that would make it more like a liege/vassal relation than like an alliance between equals. I wonder if that might be an echo of communism, which likely claimed all elements in the Russian language that were related to equal relations and effectively burned them for regular use?
> If the US had foreseen had powerful China would be today, I expect Russia would have been 'enlisted' into NATO.
Lol no, they would not have sabotaged their defensive alliance against a very real, belligerent, immediate enemy for the sake of defending against a potential enemy decades in the future. In any fantasy where the West has that much foresight, they have lots of better options.
Russia doesn't need to be submissive. All Russia has to do is stop starting violence with its neighbors and around the world. Don't mess with Ukraine. Don't mess with Syria. Try actually making their people's lives better instead. (I can already hear you complaining "but the US--" stop. Tu quoque is a fallacy.)
The bar is embarrassingly low. Even after they annexed Crimea, the rest of the world was willing to pretend Russia was a reasonable actor. But it wasn't enough for Russia, mostly for Putin himself I suspect.
Tu quoque can be a fallacy but in this case it demonstrates that the US not only expects, but demands, that other countries to behave in a way far and away from how it itself behaves. And that is important because it gets back to the point of the US trying to assert itself as having a position of dominance.
And also, I think many people have a rather distorted view of the world. When you say 'the rest of the world' I assume you are speaking as most do when they use this term - the Anglosphere, Europe excluding Russia/Belarus, and then the handful of oddballs like Japan and sometimes South Korea. What percent of the world do you think this is? It's less than 15%, and trending downward.
Truly sovereign nations can be expected to act in their own best interest. Russia responded to the US deciding to expand a military alliance all the way up to Ukraine, one of their most vulnerable points, exactly how the US would respond if Russia tried to form a military alliance with Mexico. I mean we brought the world to the verge of nuclear armageddon over the USSR establishing weaponry in Cuba, which doesn't even have a land route to the US!
That's why you don't do things like this, unless you're actively working to both establish and demonstrate your dominance over another country, which we were. I just don't think the moralizing angle can be argued in good faith. If you want to see 'starting shit' - we just mostly randomly invaded Venezuela and kidnapped their president which is pretty lol. This moralizing angle is just disingenuous or naive.
> I mean we brought the world to the verge of nuclear armageddon over the USSR establishing weaponry in Cuba, which doesn't even have a land route to the US!
Oh I see, you really are just clueless. Do you think missiles need a "land route" to be dangerous?
You're still leaning on tu quoque too. I don't disagree that the US had behaved badly. That continues not to make Russia any smarter.
The point is that missiles are a subset of land logistics (or invasion) of which Ukraine offers both. So the US expanding into Ukraine was substantially more strategically threatening than the USSR expanding into Cuba. And the US response to Cuba was not particularly irrational, nor was Russia's to Ukraine. In the end the only way we will ever maintain a stable world order is when the giants of this world respect each other's reasonable self interest.
Oh sure, giants should respect each other's self interest, but Ukraine and it's people can get fucked as long as it's in Russia's interest. It's pathetic how you try to impugn my moral standing via US actions I don't defend, while you're the one actively pushing a morally incoherent position.
I'm not impugning your moral standing in the least. I'm saying that the moral argument you were concocting wasn't reasonable because you were implicitly expecting a great power to abide a standard which no great power ever would.
I am basing my arguments entire on realpolitik - great powers can be expected to act in their own self interest. It's consistently reliable and helps explain (and predict) things that are otherwise incomprehensible if you try listening to anybody's rhetoric. Countries do not act morally.
When a relatively weak and strategically important country tries to align itself against a giant on its doorstep, that's never going to lead to happy things for that country in the longrun. One of the countries that may be next on the chopping block for the US is Cuba, which I think makes our likely motivation behind this whole thing somewhat more clear.
We had a dog who would pull watermelon rinds out of the compost pile to eat. We gave her nice bones, but it's not enough. Nothing is enough. All is food and food is all.
You can't actually pick real numbers at random. You especially can't do it on a computer, since all numbers representable in a finite number of digits or bits are rational.
It's true that no matter what symbolic representation format you choose (binary or otherwise) it will never be able to encode all irrational numbers, because there are uncountably many of them.
But it's certainly false that computers can only represent rational numbers. Sure, there are certain conventional formats that can only represent rational numbers (e.g. IEEE-754 floating point) but it's easy to come up with other formats that can represent irrationals as well. For instance, the Unicode string "√5" is representable as 4 UTF-8 bytes and unambiguously denotes a particular irrational.
> the Unicode string "√5" is representable as 4 UTF-8 bytes
As the other person pointed out, this is representing an irrational number unambiguously in a finite number of bits (8 bits in a byte). I fail to see how your original statement was careful :)
> representable in a finite number of digits or bits
Isn't "unambiguous representation" impossible in practice anyway ? Any representation is relative to a formal system.
I can define sqrt(5) in a hard-coded table on a maths program using a few bytes, as well as all the rules for manipulating it in order to end up with correct results.
Well yeah but if we’re being pedantic anyway then “render these bits in UTF-8 in a standard font and ask a human what number it makes them think of” is about as far from an unambiguous numerical representation as you could get.
Of course if you know that you want the square root of five a priori then you can store it in zero bits in the representation where everything represents the square root of five. Bits in memory always represent a choice from some fixed set of possibilities and are meaningless on their own. The only thing that’s unrepresentable is a choice from infinitely many possibilities, for obvious reasons, though of course the bounds of the physical universe will get you much sooner.
reply