Yes! I've been thinking about placing a tiny camera in the fridge for such a long time. This is especially important if you have a summer house or another apartment — you never know/remember what is in the fridge.
Taking photos of the fridge is a solution, but then phones were too stupid until recently to be able to find those. Even know it's a mixed bag.
We live in a world of dumb devices that could be so much smarter.
It's a typical Russian strategy: gradually increase the intensity of operations, while pretending you have nothing to do with it. That is exactly how war in Ukraine began (way back with the first incursions of "little green men").
What we have been seeing is this gradual escalation. It's like boiling a frog slowly. Each escalation is too small to trigger a significant response, but after a while you suddenly notice that your country is burning.
I expect more of this in the near future. I wish the world stopped treating Russia as "just another business partner".
Ukraine is currently striking facilities deep inside Russia.
Russia could hit back in the same way easily, and to some degree they do. But their problem is that the equivalent weapons factories, refineries etc. often aren't in Ukraine, but in NATO countries supplying Ukraine and giving Ukraine explicit permission to use them against targets inside Russia - until they got that in May 2024, Ukraine understandably did not risk alienating their suppliers by doing that.
There aren't very many new lines of escalation crossed here. Russia views it as NATOs proxy war against them now - many hawks in the west haven't been shy about describing it as such either.
Countries have always had arms supplied from countries not involved in the conflict.
It's a significant step to escalate to attacking those countries.
> Russia views it as NATOs proxy war against them now
It is an interesting argument to choose to invade a country, act with faux outrage when they find allies willing to supply them with arms and then call it a proxy war.
Russia got themselves into this mess. They have an easy way to get out of it.
> Countries have always had arms supplied from countries not involved in the conflict.
My country, Norway, had a long-standing policy of not selling weapons to countries at war - yes even to the attacked party - because of the common understanding that would be tantamount to joining the war, and make us the target of reprisals. This prohibition also was a good shield against accusations of war profiteering or proxy warfare.
That policy which had been standing for 60+ years, was dropped for Ukraine.
Even if you are the most pacifist leader imaginable, at some point you have to draw a line with policies like that if you dont want to fold and hand over control to expansionist neighbors.
I figure a majority in Norway would have been willing to support Finland with more than just arms deliveries had they been the victim (would you agree with that?), so sending some cash + weapons to Ukraine seems consistent policy to me.
The point was not that you should never support a country that was attacked. The point was that you should be 100% above the table if you did that. If you weren't willing to fight yourself (and take the expected consequences, such as reprisals and sabotage), then you shouldn't sell weapons either.
And I'm sure statesmen like the Stoltenbergs would have defended this policy very eloquently, better than me, back when it was official policy...
And sure, it was broadly popular to get rid of this policy for Ukraine's benefit. It wasn't a hard sell to the public majority. Saying "let's take a step back and think principled about this" was the hard sell, as usual.
That's to me the same as saying the policy should never have existed in the first place. Your thinking could easily have been applied to justify the hand-grenade sale to Cuba which prompted the policy (I'm not even sure which side benefited from it, but that doesn't matter, your principles work either way!)
That’s simply not true and a gross misreprestation of the policy, which is still in place.
And it not dropped to cater to Ukraine, as it specifically has a carve-out for legal defensive war, which the Russian war of aggression towards Ukraine is.
Check snl.no/våpeneksport_fra_Norge, which is more reliable than Wikipedia on this.
It gives a list of the changes (or "clarifications") to the policy over the years. To the degree there ever was a carve-out for legal defensive war, it was certainly added after Ukraine.
Actually there were two phases: in 2022 they defend giving weapons to Ukraine in that it was a donation, not a commercial endeavor (that suggests to me that they implicitly admitted, commercial sales would have been against the policy). Then in 2024, they allowed direct commercial sales as well. Of course their defense lawyers will say the policy is still in place, but "realism" again: you can't blame Russia for not being convinced by that.
This is well beyond arms supplies, NATO is running their entire ISR and targeting show and quite vocal about it. Plantar, Starlink on drones etc. and that’s ignoring financing and production. If anything, the Russian response has been quite flaccid.
Yes, there is no doubt that NATO countries (except maybe the US/Trump some days) wants Ukraine to win. They train troops, help with intelligence etc.
There is no argument that they are neutral.
But there's a big distance between being an adviser and being at war.
North Korea is supplying actual troops to Russia, and that doesn't mean Ukraine is at war with North Korea. Belarus and Iran have both supplied arms to Russia and Ukraine isn't at war with either.
Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.
> But there's a big distance between being an adviser and being at war.
> Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.
Is it so hard to see why Russia doesn't see things that way?
"Realism" is a much abused word in international relations, but for once I think the "realists" have a point: That Russia is dismissing these distinctions is entirely unsurprising, and other big powers don't have a leg to stand on complaining about it.
> "Realism" is a much abused word in international relations, but for once I think the "realists" have a point: That Russia is dismissing these distinctions is entirely unsurprising, and other big powers don't have a leg to stand on complaining about it.
I agree that realism is a much abused word, and I think this is an example of it.
The first part of your sentence is realism: it is not surprising that Russia chooses to treat Western help as taking part in the war. That does not make it true. Advising, supplying and sharing intelligence is not the same as fighting.
The second part is not realism. Realism explains what states do. It does not say who is right, or who has the right to complain. "Don't have a leg to stand on" is a moral judgment, with the word realism put on it.
This is exactly how Russia wants the word to be used. Right after the full invasion started, the Russian foreign ministry shared a Mearsheimer article that blamed the West for the war. The goal is to make Russia's actions look like a natural reaction to the West, so that objecting to them looks naive.
Maybe you don't mean it that way, but going from "unsurprising" to "don't have a leg to stand on" does the same thing.
> Yes, there is no doubt that NATO countries (except maybe the US/Trump some days) wants Ukraine to win. They train troops, help with intelligence etc.
There is actually much doubt about that. It rather seems they are content with Ukraine not loosing and draining Russia in the progress with little care what happens to Ukrain except that they keep up the fight.
It is very obvious to me that basically every country in the alliance wants Ukraine to win and Russia to lose, and this is clear because they actively spend lots of money on effecting that outcome.
But NATO members obviously don't want to be spending money on foreign military, so pro-Ukraine spending stays limited to "cost effective" levels.
You make this sound like some nefarious conspiracy by western war-fetishists, when the status quo is basically the obvious outcome given even a little western self-interest.
It seems to be the way they want Ukraine to win: Putin withdraws but keeps his power in Russia at all costs. But this goal is akin to threading a needle.
> Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.
Yeah, no. That is not how it works, American private companies are not just allowed to provide weapons of war without executive approval. If you remember, Trump is the one who removed Biden's ban on providing them targeting and the intel to hit Russia directly. The entire "Zelensky, please stopping hitting Russian diesel production" Trump thing is just an act - the US holds the keys to their (and the UK/EU, for that matter) ISR feeds.
And it is in a way. Ukraine is practically fighting on behalf of East European NATO states against Russian imperialism. NATO’s eastern flank is not immediately threatened only because Russia’s curbstomp invasion turned into a war of attrition.
GTFO, Russian propagandist. If Russia dislikes the state of affairs there's a reallyyy easy solution: don't invade other countries baselessly. "NATO's proxy war" is a really funny way to describe the Russian war of aggression.
Where's the lie? I said they now see it as NATOs proxy war against them, and western hawks are not shy about talking about it in those terms.
Yeah, they probably didn't expect it to turn into that when they attacked - they probably hoped it'd be all over in a week with a regime change in Kyiv. It's now they're thinking, shit, we were goaded into another Afghanistan. Which again, is not a way western hawks are shy of talking about it.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a cakewalk compared to what is going on today. 15k dead in 10 years, and the USSR was twice as big as modern ruzzia, so it is more like 7k dead for ruzzia alone. Now compare that to 4.5 years of the invasion of Ukraine - these wars are on a totally different scale. The Afghan affair was a remote low-profile endeavour; ports and oil refineries weren't burning all over the Soviet Union.
No, they are trying to justify actions against countries that supply arms to Ukraine.
As I point out in a other thread, supplying weapons is pretty normal and attacking random infrastructure in a country that happens to be allied to Ukraine is a significant escalation.
Where do you get this stuff? Only thing they’re saying is that Russia can’t attack Ukrainian weapon or munitions factories like Ukraine does to Russia because there aren’t many of them.
>> It's a typical Russian strategy: gradually increase the intensity of operations, while pretending you have nothing to do with it. That is exactly how war in Ukraine began (way back with the first incursions of "little green men").
> But their [Russia's] problem is that the equivalent weapons factories, refineries etc. often aren't in Ukraine, but in NATO countries supplying Ukraine and giving Ukraine explicit permission to use them against targets inside Russia
That reads exactly like an argument justifying Russia's actions.
You are correct. We should fire all generals who aim to understand the enemy’s thought process. Why would they entertain these evil justifications?! At last victory will be ours when we finally stop making excuses for the bad guys and instead start blindly thrashing at them.
But an alternative commentary with the same facts would have been something like "Russia knew there was wide Western support for Ukraine but thought they would overrun the country before Western nations would be able to provide practical support. They dramatically miscalculated and now are trying to deter Western countries by slowly increasing actions."
This was basically what @jwr said that kicked off this subthread:
> It's a typical Russian strategy: gradually increase the intensity of operations, while pretending you have nothing to do with it.
I just don’t see it. They seem to be just saying that these attacks probably aren’t (mostly) about escalating right now because Russia has their hands fully (thanks to Ukrainian sacrifices), but simply about trying to disrupt both NATO internal cohesion and support for Ukraine. Of course, if they can kill two birds with one stone, all the better.
Seems like a completely reasonable analysis of Russia’s motivations. I don’t see any moral justification there.
I am pretty sure every bigger German company has active sales team waiting for the end of the sanctions to fly on the same day to Moscow and continue/start new business. Construction materials, cars&trucks, oil refinery equipment, new deeper bunkers… everything is needed in russia. The west doesn’t see an enemy. Enemy of freedom, free speech and free thinking. Freedom to be a gay or autistic person in public. Euros and dollars matter though.
How are the Russians going to pay us though? Their economy is in shambles, Europe is busy divesting itself from fossil fuels, and their foreign currency/gold reserves are dwindling fast. And Russia as a whole will need to pay serious reparations.
> How are the Russians going to pay us though? Their economy is in shambles, Europe is busy divesting itself from fossil fuels, and their foreign currency/gold reserves are dwindling fast.
First: Gas is gonna stay reasonably valuable for Europe in the near future, even if electrification of personal transport progresses very quickly.
And there are tons of other valuable ressources Russia has: Nickel, copper, aluminium, steel, ...
> And Russia as a whole will need to pay serious reparations.
I don't see that happening at all. Who is gonna enforce that? Ukraine would be happy enough if they just left.
The EU pays more than 1 billion EUR each month to Russia for their fossil fuels (more specifically, 1.2bn in August, 1.5bn in July). Countries leading are Hungary, Slovakia, France, Bulgaria and then Spain. And those are just direct purchases that we know about. Fossil fuels purchased from other countries might include Russian flows as well.
At the same time, much is made of various sanction packages, which are minuscule in comparison to these flows.
In other words, the EU finances the bombs that will be falling on EU countries in the future.
I'm very curious about the downvoting here, which looks suspicious. I do realize that what I wrote might not be popular with a certain country (and its online trolling teams), but it is factually correct.
As a fellow ERP/MRP author/founder (PartsBox, specialized for electronics manufacturing), congratulations. These kinds of systems are very complex, much more so than it seems from the outside. Many people tend to think: "I could whip this up in a weekend." I also thought so 10 years ago when I started writing my own :-)
I do wonder about the value proposition of open sourcing the system, though. Apart from believing in open source and trying to do some good in the world, are there any practical reasons for you to maintain the system as open source? This is something that is very costly
there's a lot of good reasons, but the best is there's no perfect off the shelf ERP. things need to become business specific. open-source allows anyone to make the system specific to their business.
I wish authorities would punish smoking in public areas more aggressively. I'm so tired of inhaling smoke or vape clouds when walking the streets or at bus/tram stops. Theoretically you are not supposed to smoke at bus stops, but it isn't enforced (EU/PL). Entering an office building means inhaling poison, unless you can hold your breath, because there is always a crowd of people smoking.
Aggressive laws and enforcement would do wonders, and also encourage potential quitters.
There are many benefits to doing it this way: reduced evaporation, reduced algae growth, reduced permitting, and also cooling for the panels which improves their efficiency.
> there's almost no reason to use MCPs if you are running a full-blown terminal agent
I disagree. Adding "https://mcp.linear.app/mcp" and having everything happen (discovery, usage, updates to the API, etc) without having to install or configure anything else locally is a big deal.
Funny you mention Linear’s specifically, I just posted about moving to a CLI instead because of the MCP’s egregious token-usage [1]. While this doesn’t discount the points you mentioned, I think the context savings (which can be huge, I hadn’t listed all differences in that post) outweigh them specifically in Linear’s case. It is just too inefficient in that regard.
Edit: this of course says nothing about MCP vs API/CLI in general. It’s just a bad implementation by Linear.
This surprises me a bit. I've found much better token usage with a proper/efficient MCP as even with a deep /skill defining usage, parsing MCP results is generally just better/more efficient than parsing CLI results. I say this having written a CLI tool explicitly for harness usage, and leveraging MCPs for the same.
I'm sure there are bad MCPs and great CLI tools that parse poorly/well via harness, but I'd be curious on an better research study.
Your comment doesn’t contradict mine and mine doesn’t contradict yours. Linear’s MCP is just (very?) inefficient. I explain the source of the difference in the last two paragraphs.
I wonder how these would do filtering my spam. I have been using 27B-class models for a while now, and they are nearly perfect at determining what is spam and what isn't. The only disadvantage is computational cost.
Take a look at Thomson 1.0-small, which is a variant of qwen 3.6 35b post trained by Thomson Reuters for text analysis. It classifies text content very well.
Are you on the foundation research team for Thomson? (If so, hiya from B!)
Why would you expect Thomson to be particularly good at spam clf? I figured your additional corpus was all news and legal?
I have no connection with Thomson Reuters other than as an end user of a GGUF of the LLM I mentioned. That said, from my personal experience with this specific LLM, it's a decent improvement over a "base" Qwen 3.6 35B A3B Q8, and it does a good job of analyzing and categorizing documents on relatively small resources. It'll run fine in llama-server in pure CPU only on a 64GB RAM system with plenty of room to spare, takes something like 47GB with RAM reserved in llama-server for cache and full context size.
If I saw an Images 2.0 flyer in year 2020? In a world where Images 2.0 didn't exist? I'd be impressed. But if I see it now, today? I'm not impressed at all.
It's the same image, produced by the same AI and seen by the same person. So, what's the difference? What changed over time?
Saturation. "I've seen it all before." AI made that specific flyer style plentiful and omnipresent, and that made it "derivative" and "cheap". What used to invoke "cool" and "wow" was turned into a dreary cliche by repetition. Flaws that were easy to overlook when overshadowed by novelty stand out like a sore thumb now that you've seen them before in the same patterns many times over.
The image is the same - it has the same strengths and the same flaws. But your focus is shifted by familiarity.
It's the same mechanism that drives trends and fashion. AI just supercharges it.
Naturally, you can avoid a lot of it by using careful prompting and steering to guide an AI away from the "cliche" style-space. You can get something with both good quality and good identity that way.
But that requires: being aware of the problem, being really good at prompting, and putting in a considerable effort. It's hard to steer a model away from "AI cliches" if you don't have the eye to spot them in the first place.
Most AI-generated content doesn't have that kind of skill and effort applied to it - it simply uses the "model defaults", and gets the "model defaults". For all the good and bad that comes with those.
If you think about whether it is AI, are good at recognising those tells, an thinking about whether it is AI, then its probable you will spot things like that.
Most people are not that good at spotting those tells, and when looking at a poster they will not be thinking about whether its is AI or not. If its not obviously AI they are not going to even think about it.
Yes. That's the issue: we are looking at the same posters.
It's just that "seeing this poster for the first time, unaware of the workings behind it" is a very different experience from "seeing this poster after you already saw dozens of other AI generated posters that used a similar style and had similar issues, got canny at spotting both the style and the issues in it, and came to associate them with cheap low quality work".
The former impression is "wow that's a good poster". The latter impression is "ew, it's posterslop". The poster, in the meanwhile, remains the same.
AI can often win in art contests - images, short stories, design. But that requires either sharp prompting, or an audience that's not familiar with "AI cliches". The quality is, if removed from the context, fairly good. If embedded in context, it's utter slop. The work is the same. Funny how that works.
Yes, context matters. The greatest painting in the world is just crushed materials smeared on a canvas, it's nothing too special without the context.
A computer (not even an LLM, just something generating random pixels) could randomly generate the exact same pixel pattern as the greatest painting in the world, and it would not be the greatest painting in the world, because context matters.
> The quality is, if removed from the context, fairly good.
IMO that doesn't fully explain AI hate, triggered by simple exposure to AI generated images, unless you'd include all standard educational programs until introduction of AI - which is arguably a part of the context, but if so, IMO, "fairly good" is part of context and is devoid of meaning in absence of context and cannot be said.
Google actually puts effort into security for "normal" people who don't want to earn a PhD in cryptography just to have a damn free email account or watch Mr. Beast
That's why they had powerful and effective account takeover protection even 15 years ago. The kind that will prevent the hacker from taking over your account even though they got access to all your factors, because it shouldn't take expertise to know that if you logged in from Oregon twenty minutes ago, you definitely aren't also logging in from Ecuador.
Which of course makes it all the more stupid that your credit card company, all your medical service providers, and Facebook don't meet that absurdly low bar. Facebook will happily hand control to the scammer in Laos who got one of your factors and somehow that gave them access to change your password and recovery email
The best backup method doesn't need any computer knowledge, it's writing down or printing a few passwords and putting that piece of paper in the same box as your taxes or birth certificate.
> One reason to strongly prefer Apple over Google is that (as I understand it) you can still walk into a store with ID and recover your online identity.
Is this true? If so, in what countries? (Poland has no Apple stores, for example, for inexplicable reasons Apple has been giving the middle finger to this market)
I think Google’s own textbook on SRE has an example in its very first chapter where everyone gets locked out of their bus fleet WiFi thanks to their secure system reaching an unforeseen state
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