> I worked in retail loss prevention

Your salary was the exact kind of thing that needs to be balanced against the cost of fraud; if it was larger than the amount of fraud you prevented, then the company would have been better off just accepting the fraud as a cost of doing business. The closer you get to zero fraud, the more expensive it becomes to reduce it further (and the more likely your countermeasures will negatively impact the business in other ways), so there definitely is an "optimal" balance to be struck between fraud and preventive measures.

This is what I do—it can even be a detailed slack message. I start writing the message with the goal of asking for some guidance, but in the process of carefully outlining the problem and what I’ve already attempted (in order to respect the time of my colleague) I usually arrive at the correct solution. I then delete the email without ever needing to send it.

Putting it into words, methodically, structuredly, seems to do the trick eh

They are clueless kids at their first job, following the orders of their hero. You think they’ll resist when the boss tells them, “cut everything”?

It's a much lower bar to sow discord and chaos vs. being able to maintain a stable, functioning, low-corruption society. Just because a country is capable of one does not mean that they are capable of the other; also, the characteristics that lead a country to be effective in the former may prevent them from being successful at the latter.

There are several theories in this, which may feel plausible but ignore some other possibilities.

First, the assumption that Russian propaganda works on the West. There are no signs of that.

Second, that Russia does have those capabilities. Their main problem is that they don’t understand the modern West and still think in categories and definitions of XX century.

Third, that West is vulnerable. Western domestic propaganda is much more powerful and it’s budgets are much bigger.

> First, the assumption that Russian propaganda works on the West. There are no signs of that.

Wow, that is the statement. I would say that Russian propaganda is the mainstream now in conservative media and among republicans. Half of Joe Rogan's talking points is spreading russia propaganda, half of Lex Fridman opinions - is russia propaganda. Elon Musk retweets and amplifies russia propaganda all day every day.

The problem is - you just don't know when you hear it since you don't have a frame of reference.

It is the same as I don't recognise Chinese or North Korean propaganda. Sometimes I see an obvious example of it on reddit, but in general, I cannot immediately recognise it when I hear it (since half of the top reddit commends are bots - I have problem to sometimes understand what their goals are).

I don't know whether they understand the west or not, but my intuition is that the understanding is not required. With modern social media you have enough feedback to perform complex information operations and have the desired outcomes.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I wish there were an similarly popular vector drawing format that did much much less than SVG. Any time you want to support vector drawings in a project, the obvious approach is to support SVG...which basically means you have to bring in the equivalent of a browser. What is the minimal alternative?

Unhinged comment. Is the Parthenon not architecture because it’s not ADA-accessible? If someone installs an elevator does it become architecture again?

I used “architecture” to refer to the discipline not as a synonym for “a building.

It would be very surprising if the results from this approach were superior to simply machine-translating the entries from another language—because e.g. English already has so much content and contributor activity, and LLMs are already very good at translating. I can’t imagine you’d get more than a fraction of people’s interest in authoring entries in this abstract language.

LLMs are good at translating between languages that have significant amounts of written content on the internet. There are few languages in this category that do not already have correspondingly large Wikipedias.

There are plenty of languages with millions of speakers that are only rarely used in writing, often because some other language is enforced in education. If you try to use an LLM to translate into such a language, you'll just get garbage.

It's very easy for a hand-crafted template to beat an LLM if the LLM can't do the job at all.

Meta is a funny one, because there doesn't really seem to be a "pro-Meta" contingent. They have lots of users, but not a lot of people who feel warmly about them as a company.

Can you point to any actual real-world cases where something like this has happened? It sounds like a movie concept; we're letting real-world policy be determined by a fantasy people have about a lone gun enthusiast killing a bunch of drug cartel members?

Warsaw ghetto uprising bought some people a few extra days (and a couple women their lives spared), which is better than nothing.

I really hope your example remains a straw man argument, and not something that Americans are going to have to face up to in the next few years.

Nope! I agree it's something out of a movie, but real world people do actually have such arsenals. I'm not embedded enough in gun culture to have any personal stories/know of any news reports, but not everything makes the news. I'm not making a comment on policy, just that such individuals exist.

What are the odds that Goldberg was included in the Signal chat intentionally by a whistleblower? I.e., someone who had reservations about what was about to take place (either the bombing action itself, or the intentional avoidance of government recordkeeping) and so included him as a witness?

Sounds like youre desperately searching for competence where none exists

I'd give it about 10%