They never hear about it. And if they do, they assume she did something to antagonize ice and it was his fault for not “controlling his woman”.

And all the heroic men and women in The God Blessed United States Military will just talk about how this troubles them but they serve the flag, not the rapist giving them orders and that if people don’t start properly respecting them then they don’t see a reason to care.

I mean, we watched that happen.

He led a violent insurrection against the US government with the goal of lynching congress and his own VP.

Zero chance.

There is no world in which trump trusts someone to protect him AFTER he gives up his power. Because he backstabs everyone the second they aren’t useful to him.

Pointing out that the US spends massive amounts of money on military spending is just a fact. https://www.nato.int/content/dam/nato/webready/documents/finance/def-exp-2025-en.pdf is the official NATO write up of this from last year and the only countries that outspend the US (as a percentage of their GDP) tend to be the countries that are where The War will kick off Poland) or… countries with other things going on

And keep in mind that is in terms of GDP percentages and how massive the US’s economy was for most of that period.

The “conservative” talking point is not: “The US spends money on war while the EU spends money on healthcare and actually giving a shit about its population”. It is “The US spends money on war so you should do whatever we want”. Its also worth understanding that The EU did not spend that money anywhere near that altruistically but it doesn’t change the situation that the EU/NATO finds itself in.

Because when that military is increasingly likely to be the aggressor? You need to rapidly start making guns and revisiting what is required of your populace. People have exploded over Germany recently more or less codifying a standing policy but… there is a reason politicians are looking at their conscription laws.

Look. We all live in a content bubble. But if you actually want to understand the world, rather than just get angry in ways that are convenient to influencers and politicians, actually look at statistics and respond to facts. Rather than getting pissy and screaming “fake news” because you don’t’ like what you saw.

Because, to be clear, I REALLY don’t fucking like how broken the US is because of how much it spends on the military.

Yes… I said that the US was the military might of NATO. I did not say that was the only reason we have a truly massive military.

If all you are able to do is build tangential strawmen then… do yourself a favor and just go post on chatgpt.

You talk about GDP percentage, as if every country had a similar GDP per capita, and could this afford to spend similarly

Where did I ever say this?

The reality is that the US had more then enough money to both fund its military and fund its social programs, but it chose to instead fund the military and the already wealthy.

Which changes absolutely nothing from the perspective of NATO

Not a one sided deal to the disadvantage of the US as Americans seem to be made believe by Trump and his oligarchy.

Where did I ever say this was a one sided deal?

If you think we ‘happened’ to keep a large standing army just because we were defending Europe.

Where did I ever say that?

Because, for decades prior, the US was the military of NATO. The US pumped massive percentages of its GDP into maintaining a standing military while most of NATO focused more on social programs with comparatively minimal military spending.

And threats like russia wouldn’t attack out of fear of having to fight said militarized nation. Whereas now there is a very clear window where the nations that might stand up against them are rebuilding. “Fortunately” russia is stretched pretty far by a failed invasion of Ukraine but… go read the wikipedia article on how their previous invasions of Ukraine went.

Welp. The Internet as a whole is real broken. But Lemmy is very rapidly taking the cake for THE place where you can never discuss anything and the only responses are people who are incapable of having a conversation and are just angry that you didn’t say what they wanted to hear.

Dead Internet Theory looking increasingly not that bad. Or, better yet, prioritizing different social media where people respond to each other rather than the voices in their own heads. Somehow… we managed to actually leap frog reddit on the way down?

Time to watch him rant after having five gills of meth injected into his body. Again.

Ehhhh.

Yes, there are some fairly revolutionary(-ish) chips. Those are few and far between because they tend to be hyper specialized. Inference but not training or only optimized for a very small input matrix (common for edge computing like cameras).

By and large? They really ARE “traditional” GPGPUs that are optimized to hell and back for vector operations and linear algebra. And a lot of the gains there come from multiplying their floating point performance by 2-4 (depending on if half or quarter precision). They aren’t as good for double precision as something optimized for it but basically only a very small subset of users need that. There will be no issues repurposing the hardware in these data centers.

And the rest is data movement which has always been the real problem.

It collapsed into… 4 or 5 of the most powerful companies in human history.

And that is the thing to understand. These bubbles are less about widespread collapse and more about consolidation. And it tends to be the smaller companies that suffer, not the biggies who were driving much of it to begin with.

“aren’t making a profit” gets into the mess that is book keeping and is a giant rabbit hole people actively avoid because it is just easier to get angry at stupidity rather than complex malfeasance.

But what makes something an “AI data center” outside of the branding?

The reality is that it is a shit ton of computers connected to a really fast internet connection. Preferably through a properly managed set of switches but you do you. And the reason that we still mostly use GPUs for “AI” rather than highly specialized hardware (although, nvidia DID just buy groq a few months back…) is for that reason. They might do linear algebra of quarter precision floats REALLY well but they also do linear algebra of single and double precision floats pretty well too. And the CPUs and mobos (that are mostly optimized for data movement to offload to said GPUs) are no slouches either.

Which is what most of these companies are planning for. openai is, arguably, really fucking stupid. Whereas anthropic have shown decent signs of “diversifying” as it were. And nvidia… if we lived in a world where they could get enough RAM I think they would be fine. As it stands… Jensen (and a LOT of people) are kinda fucked and I expect to see a hard pivot over the next 12 months.

Because if we banned ALL generative AI tomorrow? The people who think you can’t use a computer without installing litellm first are gonna be fucked. But everyone else will just put other workloads on there and be… “fine” is a strong word but they won’t go bankrupt. And the data centers themselves will still be incredibly valuable.

Think about the dotcom bubble. We went from having all of these businesses that shot to the moon for valuation… and then it collapsed.

Amazon and Google and basically all of FAANG/MAMA beg to differ.

And basically every company still has a website and ecommerce in general is still massive.

The Dot Com bubble was brutal. But it was not a collapse of the industry. It was much more of a correction after so many companies blew up to sell services like “rate my dog” and many of the smaller ecommerce sites were absorbed by larger ones.

And that is likely what will happen with generative AI. I expect a MUCH bigger bloodbath for openai but anthropic seem to have scaled a lot better (although they also are going into their IPO with a massive data breach…). But expect most of the smaller companies to similarly get gutted.

But

Makes sense. It takes years to complete construction projects and budgets always overrun. AI is a fad for most companies trying to get into it.

Data Centers exploding… honestly have little to do with AI. No… not the way they explode in the UAE… metaphorical exploding. The reality is that data centers are GOOD money. Basically every company needs data hosting and offloading internal infrastructure is… honestly a really smart play. Same with the massive push for streaming of basically everything so that nobody owns anything and subscribe to everything. You want regional data centers and… this is how you get them.

Gun “finerprinting” is and isn’t bullshit.

The reality is that for a given configuration of a gun, you do get some rather distinct markings on a bullet. It is less “We can 100% determine this bullet was fired by this bigoted dipshit’s gun so let’s hand it to him so he can dramatically show he took the firing pin out” but you can get within a pretty high level of confidence.

Unless… the shooter cleaned their gun. Even just field stripping can often be enough. Let alone if they actually remove the firing pin and reinstall it (not even replacing).

So it is not useful if someone escaped for days and nobody could find them until they got narced on. It IS useful if you catch them on their way home and they don’t know to do this.

But also? it depends on the bullet being intact. Which, as mentioned above, is not often the case for stuff like 5.56 in soft tissue.

Friendly reminder:

You don’t know the admins of any of the lemmy instances you interact with or how likely they are to “have your back” if they get a Letter. Or if they might even report you themselves.

Not sure why I bring that up.

Especially for 5.56/.223 where one of the major selling points is the cavitation it causes in soft tissue. “cavitation” being a polite term for “makes fucking explode”.

Its why actual footage of mass shootings is so horrifying. Media (and video games that glorify it…) like to paint it as neat little holes when the reality is you have one neat little hole for the entrance wound and a giant fist sized one or larger for the exit.

And all of that does a number on the bullet itself.

Many of those problems are the kinds of things that will just never get critical mass amongst a domestic population. Because… it genuinely doesn’t impact them. Like, let’s take the Genocide in Palestine? If you were to believe online lefties? It is the greatest sin ever and THE most important topic on the planet. But most of them never even knew it was a thing until the attack a few years back. And they STILL mostly just know it because their favorite celebrities started talking about it (which is why they still actively ignore all the other genocides…).

But the “good” news is that things are RAPIDLY boiling over due to oil prices. But that will likely manifest more as protesting “the price at the pump” rather than whether we do or don’t send the marines to die in Iran.

But yeah. I strongly encourage going to local protests and talking to the organizers. No Kings… I mostly checked in on a few buddies and dipped. Because there are plenty of people who are thinking beyond filming a tiktok of singing a Hamilton song. They just aren’t really advertising on social media.

I would very much argue that the anti-ice protests were the reaction and escalation. And what “No Kings” should have been in the first place.

There was a problem. We had very specific demands. Folk got out. They stood in the face of violence. They showed they were willing to protect their fellow humans. Hell, they even showed they were willing to engage in a (limited) general strike.

And guess what happened? Ice bitched out and ran away from Minneapolis and Chicago and so forth. Yeah, they are still there to a lesser degree. But the occupation ended and we are back to just a moderate hellscape rather than constant terror of being outside while brown.

Contrast that with No Kings where… there is no actionable anything or even unified message. It is just people standing around dancing and putting on costumes.

Its a cliche but “What do we want? X. When do we want it? Now, but really within N days is fine” is such an effective chant. Because it provides a clear deescalation path that gives the protestors what they want.

The No Kings protests are… I have a lot of issues with how much they feel like controlled opposition and pageantry. Also, weirdly, an excuse for camera nerds to flex (good luck taking that giant DLSR to a “real” protest where you will get tear gassed and people will panic and shove while trying to get away). And I forget if we ever came down on whether the national organizers were shady as hell or not?

But understand that the main point of “protests” like this are to get that list of names and to get people used to actually getting outside (which is also a complaint where it is a twice a year parade on a Saturday morning…). Those names equate to funding and getting more bodies for other protests.

And… the official line is going to be what people can do. And that is very much getting involved in local politics. We can’t fix this hellscape through voting but we CAN do harm minimization at home. And understand that voting in local elections is how the christofacists got so much power. When everyone else ignores the school board, they are stuffing it so they can kill LGBTQ+ folk. When everyone else was laughing at not knowing what a comptroller even is, they were getting their people into a position where they can actively kill budgets and social programs. And so forth.

But also understand that a huge part of these kinds of protests is networking. Get to know the community organizers and spend enough time talking with them that they don’t think you are a cop. At which point they obviously tell you to vote locally and nothing else.