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Cake day: March 22nd, 2024

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  • Every news site is biased. Read them with that mind.

    As an example, one of my usual sources since like 2015 is Axios. Their site is clean, lean, and they are extremely well sourced in Washington. But they recently got a big cash infusion from OpenAI. And, surprise surprise, they post a small but steady stream of Tech Bro evangelism on the side now.

    RT is generally awful, but sometimes their reporting outside of Russia, where they have incentive to dig, can be good.


    Hence, my bucket for Guardian is “high class liberal catnip .” They are clickbaity. That’s they trend so much here on Lemmy.

    They’re well sourced. Their integrity is leagues beyond, say, rawstory or dailybeast that get spammed on Lemmy. So you have to filter their stories with that in mind.


    And this is pretty much what ALL written news is doing to survive, if they can. Because their competition on YouTube/Facebook/whatever is not bound to the same standards they are.

    If they don’t, they die.

    I used to write small articles for a tech hardware site. The owner chose to take the site down rather than chase the clickbait game.





  • I think you’re being abrasive about it, but are making a decent point.

    Yes, lots of clickbait exaggerated Russia’s fragility. Some actual analysts underestimated certain aspects of Russia.

    And Russia won many geopolitical dice rolls:

    • Trump won.
    • Europe is still bickering internally.
    • India bought their oil for a long time.
    • China stayed tolerant.
    • Wagner coup failed, but only barely.

    And so on.


    There are some nasty, ambitious figures in Russian politics apparently “reigned in” by Putin now. If he’s deposed… what happens? Do we get a Russia fractured by warlords armed with Soviet warheads? I’d much rather see it vassalized by China or something.

    And yeah, at the end of the day this is the physically largest country on Earth, backed by the most populous, invading a tiny one. Endless war is utterly catastrophic for the Russian people, but (if the US basically withdraws from NATO and Europe keeps being Europe), they are on an extremely slow track to grind down Ukraine and claim the ashes :(


    Anyway, you should read ISW’s reports on the war:

    https://www.understandingwar.org/

    They have a quite grounded take. And from the even before the war started (when forces massed on the border), they’ve been warning that Russia has the political power to grind on. They tried to warn policymakers about the clickbait.



  • For all the criticism of AI, this is the one that’s massively overstated.

    On my PC, the task energy of a casual diffusion attempt (let’s say a dozen+ images in few batches) on a Flux-tier model is 300W * 240 seconds.

    That’s 54 kilojoules.

    …That’s less than microwaving leftovers, or a few folks browsing this Lemmy thread on laptops.

    And cloud models like Nano Banana are more efficient than that, batching the heck out of generations on wider, more modern hardware, and more modern architectures, than my 3090 from 2020.


    Look. There are a million reasons corporate AI is crap.

    But its power consumption is a meme perpetuated by tech bros who want to convince the world scaling infinitely is the only way to advance it. That is a lie to get them money. And it is not the way research is headed.

    Yes they are building too many data centers, and yes some in awful places, but that’s part of the con. They don’t really need that, and making a few images is not burning someone’s water away.