At least for a while, I’m going to mostly be on Bluesky as @sharp.blue and will devote only a limited amount of attention to Twitter and Mastodon.

@CazadorDeWulf @Filbert631 @BenWallace70 Honestly, I’d be in favour of my country becoming the United Republic, but it’s never going to be worth burning the political capital it would require when there are other much better uses for it.

@CazadorDeWulf @Filbert631 @BenWallace70 I don’t think that Britain has had an imperial “adventure” since 1956, just fought to hold onto colonies in Kenya, Malaya and elsewhere and largely failed.

@CazadorDeWulf @tryingattimes @mc19579758 @BenWallace70 Even if he isn’t, he would clearly prefer to be to America what Putin is to Russia.

@CazadorDeWulf @Owl_Pie2 @BenWallace70 None of this is about Russia’s essential interests or any such nonsense. Russia could live in peace with its neighbours, with strong trading and cultural links, indefinitely. It’s all about Putin’s vanity, his desire for a legacy, and his resentment that the Soviet Union lost.

@CazadorDeWulf @Owl_Pie2 @BenWallace70 It’s the truth though. NATO is no threat to Russia but it is a threat to Russian imperialism, and Russian imperialism has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of Russians over the last decade.

@CazadorDeWulf @Owl_Pie2 @BenWallace70 By now, Russia should be begging for Ukraine to join NATO so there will never be war between Russia and Ukraine again. If Ukraine has been a member of NATO in 2014 both Russia and Ukraine would now be in very much better shape than they are.

@CzechiaForever @CazadorDeWulf @BenWallace70 You can cosplay at being a superpower for a surprisingly long time given the economy of Italy and the military stockpiles of the Soviet Union.

@CazadorDeWulf @Filbert631 @BenWallace70 The US Secretary of Defense is saying that a return to the pre-2014 border isn’t realistic, so the Trump administration is starting from a position of bartering land.

@yourowngravity @IAPonomarenko Unfortunately, the signatories of the Budapest Memorandum promise not to themselves use force against Ukraine but their only commitment if someone else does is to go to the UN for a resolution of the threat is nuclear.

@catgyoung This is really two questions: when will it become capable of doing as good a job as humans (sometime far off in the future), and when journals will use it anyway (probably already)?

@CazadorDeWulf @BenWallace70 Yes, like that, and like the impending disappearance of artillery. Different capabilities will disappear at different times but they will disappear, and Russia will struggle to recreate them.

@CazadorDeWulf @BenWallace70 Russia has been achieving extremely limited military success by burning through almost its entire inheritance of Soviet materiel, which it can’t replace except over many, many decades. When it runs out of equipment to pull out of storage, everything will look different.

@CazadorDeWulf @BenWallace70 Because the UK and Norway don’t consider surrendering to a genocidal imperialist-fascist power a pathway to ending the war?

@lathropa My typographic heresy — against all the laws of Bringhurst! — is to put spaces around them.

@lathropa I use en-dashes and em-dashes about as much as I use parentheses, colons and semicolons.

@davidzmorris Let’s hope OpenAI’s rivals don’t realise they can extract all the model weights through the API!

@GaryMarcus The best way to see the chatbots that wrap large corpus models is as interactive fiction generators, which generate fictional conversations between users and artificial intelligences. This has been done by stuffing the training corpus with many such fictional conversations.

@Ayodejirazzak Checking back! Ukraine appears not to have been expelled from Kursk. Do you want to update your prediction?