It’s news because of the context of the negotiations that are currently happening. There is no delusional gotcha here. Russia is defeating NATO in Ukraine. As a result, the US, the main sponsor of NATO, wants to cut its losses. That’s why negotiations are happening in the first place. Russia reiterating the root causes for the conflict shows they’re not going to make concessions. Now the ball is in American court, they either have to keep allocating resources towards the proxy war, or accept Russian terms. Let me know if any of this was unclear for you.

When you definitely know what the word expand means. And yes, Russia wants to stop NATO expansion, they haven’t exactly been hiding this fact.

yeah zero chance

and make itself entirely dependent on the US for energy

Absolutely hilarious how US companies bet the farm on subscription based AI products, and now the whole business model is falling apart. This might be the first time that Silicon Valley is facing direct competition with some new tech it’s developing. And the interesting part here is that they’re facing a different business model, Chinese companies aren’t looking for direct monetization. They’re treating models as shared infrastructure, sort of what we already see happening with Linux. Most companies don’t try to monetize it directly, they build stuff like AWS on top of it and that becomes the product. I expect American companies are just going to run out of runway in the near future because they’re getting squeezed by open Chinese models which undercut their entire business model.

It’s really incredible to see how Quake engine is still alive and actively used. And honestly, it still looks great. Really shows how much you can do with a decades old engine.

That’s exactly right, the New Deal was the concession to organized and militant labor movement that saved capitalism. No such movement exists today, and therefore there is no organized threat for the current ruling class to worry about. I think it’s also worth noting that the rich absolutely know they’re fighting a class war here. The plutonomy memo from citi group basically lays it all out. It’s kind of ironic that these people have far better understanding of Marxism than most of the western left.

what comes next is fascism

That’s basically what Sanders was trying to do with the Green New Deal. And apparently, even these minimal and necessary reforms needed to save the system were deemed to be too much by the oligarchs.

Not gonna happen under the dictatorship of capital.

O7

literally this

obligatory quote from This Soviet World by Anna Louise Strong

the west doesn’t like to cover peasant uprisings, don’t want to give domestic peasants any ideas

I’m not really sure what critical areas China needs to catch up in at this point. The chips they produce are already good enough for any practical applications. It’s also worth keeping in mind that improving software is much easier than hardware. Western software stacks are incredibly bloated. For example, Huawei starting fresh with their HarmonyOS can make a much leander stack by cutting all the cruft and backwards compatibility out.

I also don’t see China being decades behind in chips. They can already make 7nm, they’re prototyping EUV machines, it’s not going to be long at this point. On top of that, China is investing into research of alternative substrates like graphene, spintronics, etc. Any one of these could make silicon look like vacuum tubes overnight if they can scale them up to mass production. There’s no new fundamental physics that need to be discovered here, we know these these things work in a lab. It’s just a matter of scaling up production. And that’s precisely where state driven development comes in.

Can you explain what this tide of reversal you’re talking about with BRI? Last I looked, the investment is record high https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3340442/china-signs-record-us213-billion-new-belt-and-road-deals-2025-report

The Epstein files are the biggest scandal the western system has faced to date in my opinion. This is bigger than stuff like Watergate because it spans multiple administrations in the US, as well as other western regimes. It’s a total indictment of the idea that there’s any sort of a democracy in the west. It’s now plain for everyone to see that the west is ruled by diabolical monsters who are accountable to no one. And this comes at a time of a rapid decline in the living standards which makes people angry and politically engaged. Things that might’ve been ignored before cannot be ignored any longer.

Finally, it seems to me that the west is headed for a massive financial crash. While people keep playing games with the numbers, it’s pretty clear that all the tangible metrics like job numbers and cost of living are doing very poorly. The only question in my mind is what the catalyst will be. It could be the coming war with Iran which might drive oil prices through the roof.

There might actually be a direct relationship there as well. Taiwan being the chokepoint for western chip production puts them in a perfect position to insert backdoors into all western tech. There’s a reason the US was freaking out over Huawei tech spreading in the west. The problem with it isn’t that there’s some Chinese malware in it, but rather that western agencies can’t use it for spying.

China is not a net fuel producer, they import a large portion of their energy themselves. They have been donating solar panels however, and hopefully they ramp that up. However, Russia being one of the biggest fuel exporters is stepping up.

Zulip pretty easy to self host. I ran a server for a group of friends a little while back, and it worked great. The UI takes a bit of getting used to, but it is great once you do because everything is a thread by default. And that makes it really easy to catch up on things.

I’m sure there will be more follow up research. In the meantime, seems like fast paced games are likely a good activity to engage in.

The article specifically mentions speed training as the activity that actually produced measurable results while memory training or reasoning training did not. The theory is that this type of activity engages different brain structures.