This line of reasoning keeps popping up and something about it bothers me - why go to war when you can get what you want in other, cheaper ways? It seems likely the correlation is real but so far no one has adduced any reasons to assume the causation actually goes the way they assume.
If you note that what Russia wants is Ukrainian territory (first Crimea in 2014 and then a land connection to Crimea in 2022), that was guaranteed to involve some amount of war. That will give you everything you need to infer the correct direction of causation.
They have wanted it since the fall of the Soviet Union and access to the Black Sea has immense strategic value to them. They only had geopolitical (and local political) cover to get it in 2014 and 2022.
So not because ukraine rejected them in 2013? To be explicit, I still have seen no evidence for the premise that '_some_ amount of war' was inevitable. Belarus would seem to be an obvious counterexample.
No person seriously discussing that region of the world would have ever thought Ukraine would give Crimea to the Russians without a fight. Countries, in general, don't give up land without a fight. Crimea is also one of the most militarily valuable pieces of land in the world. Putin, at the same time, wanted to do some "re-unification" of some previous Soviet territories including Crimea.
I'm also not sure why you're citing Belarus here. It was split off from the Soviet union in 1990 and governed itself the whole time despite being essentially a vassal state of Russia. Belarus has not ceded any land to Russia, either.
Edit - I see what you're saying about control or territory. If you want control, directly controlling the territory is better than having a puppet government. While Russia would have accepted a puppet government, as they have in Belarus (since there has been no good opportunity to go to war with Belarus to take it over), they had the opportunity to go to war for direct control and the West made it clear that Ukraine as a vassal state was not an option (see the 2014 revolution). If you think someone wants control, why do you think that they see $0 of extra value in directly owning the territory?
> It was split off from the Soviet union in 1990 and governed itself the whole time despite being essentially a vassal state of Russia.
It's obvious that Russia wants ukraine as a vassal as well. I would note that the invasion of Ukraine was launched _via_ Belarus, despite the fact that Russia does not formally control that territory. So again I ask, if Russia can get what it wants (which is _control_, not territory) without going to war, why would it do so?
Let's be plain - we are ultimately dancing around an empirical question, whether Trump will be hawkish or dovish towards Russia. Ultimately I think he's too chaotic for past behavior to be a good guide. So let's see what happens! I for one hope that you are right, but I think I have plenty of reasons to be cautious.
I'd love to try this against my spaghetti, but I can't send my company's IP to you or anthropic or anyone else. I'll have to try against open source projects we rely heavily on first.
We'd love to have CodeViz run with local LLMs so you can untangle the spaghetti. The call graph is generated without LLMs or servers - any interest in a 'local only' mode so you can still use CodeViz while keeping your code on-device?
> At the time, more than a third of Facebook’s daily active users had opted in to have their faces recognized by the social network’s system. Facebook introduced facial recognition more than a decade earlier but gradually made it easier to opt out of the feature as it faced scrutiny from courts and regulators.
I believe they asked things like “Get notified when you appear in your friends photos” or something along those lines. My memory is fuzzy though. Phrasing it like that would probably get more opt-ins. It’s a lot less scary sounding.
Yes, but the other side is true too. For example, if the prompt just said "Allow Facebook to scan all your personal photos and do facial recognition, and also capture some of that data for future use?" then it's not at all clear why they are asking for this. Also it's going to all be "no" from the users.
Much better would be a compromise, that describes both why and what. Though, that will be a lot of text which isn't good either. Hard problem.
In general, when I come across some sort of opt in I get offered a choice between allowing something to work and it not working and having some sort of a sub optimal experience. I can't even try before I buy either because once I have consented, the data/image/whatever is already "released".
Most opt-in choices, unless coerced by laws, will be heavy handed nudges at best.
I'm an IT consultant and stand more of a chance than most at making an informed choice but please don't wave "opt in" as some sort of laundering procedure. I am deliberately juxtaposing with money laundering.
Many of Facebook's "opt-in" things aren't actually consent, so I'm prejudicially wary of any numbers Facebook gives. (I have no insight into this particular case.)
Real question, how do you audit that data got deleted with certainty, and not just locked away out of reach for the time being? To me this seems like a fact hard to prove.
from the better ap-news article linked by the top comment:
> The company announced in 2021 that it was shutting down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.
> The attorney general’s office did not say whether the money from the settlement would go into the state’s general fund or if it would be distributed in some other way.
