It's not that easy, in my opinion. George Lucas and James Cameron have both said that their restorations were how they would have wanted to release the movie if they had had the technology/budget.
I personally hate the reworked Star Wars trilogy compared to the original, only because that's what I saw first. If I had seen them in the opposite order, would I feel the same way? I don't know.
As with anything, there is no bright line. For example, translations of The Odyssey are constantly changing the vocabulary. And more recently we've seen changes to novels to conform to modern sensibilities (e.g., Roald Dahl novels).
For me, I guess, my preference is to allow creators to do whatever they want with their creations, but I wish they would make all versions available. Steven Spielberg did that with ET when he digitally replaced all guns with walkie-talkies.
> It's not that easy, in my opinion. George Lucas and James Cameron have both said that their restorations were how they would have wanted to release the movie if they had had the technology/budget.
I dunno about Cameron's films (I don't think I've seen an original and an unchanged from him), but for Star Wars, the constraints helped make the film good. Yes, there's some rough bits, but all of the additions subtract rather than add.
Maybe it's not what his vision was, but we liked it as it was. If you watch ROTJ, you can already see where unconstrained technology distracts Lucas and it turns into too much of a green screen affair in parts. The prequel trilogy is so much green screen and it just feels so sterile and unbelievable; none of the characters interact with the environment at all; they're not hot in the desert or even when having a light saber duel in lava fields or whatever. They don't get cold or wet, etc. In ROTJ, the speeder bike stuff is mostly gratituous, but there's interaction with the environment.
George Lucas had to shoot his Star Wars movie in Englandd instead of California and its what gave us the iconic Empire portrayed by British theater actors.
The counter argument is that once art is released into the world, it becomes a conversation with the people consuming it and no longer belongs solely to the creator.
I empathize with, and see the validity in, both sides.
> If I had seen them in the opposite order, would I feel the same way? I don't know.
This can go both ways. Sometimes you like things because you saw them that way first. Sometimes you're exposed to two versions of something and the second version is clearly an improvement on the first.
Example (A): I prefer the PC speaker soundtrack to The Secret of Monkey Island. I played it on an IBM. Without the exposure, there's no real reason to believe I'd have the same preference.
Example (B): The Swedish dub of the Moana musical number Shiny enjoys the considerable disadvantages that: (1) I heard the English version first; (2) I don't understand Swedish; (3) the English version is more authoritative, because the film was developed in English; and (4) the translation isn't especially close.† But I strongly prefer it anyway; to me the Swedish lyrics (as represented in the English subtitles I found on Youtube) give a very different feeling to the song and the character, one that greatly improves the film.
I'd lean toward taking people at their word if they seem to have a reason for the preference they express. The 2011 Blu-Ray Star Wars release pans down from outer space to a view of a planet more rapidly than the original film does. This seems like an issue where views either won't exist or will be dominated by the idea that whatever it was like before, it should stay that way.
"Han shot first", on the other hand, is a strong point of characterization, and objections to the change seem unlikely to be dominated by conservatism.
† Actually, I spent a fair amount of time listening to various dubs of Moana songs, and my favorite versions all make a significant change to the message of the song as I perceive it. I didn't care too much for the English Shiny, but this was also true of the songs that I liked in the original. My best model of why that might be is: every dub makes some more-or-less random changes to the song, and by methodically searching through a large number of them, I ended up finding the changes that appealed to me.
They have millions of dollars at stake, so it is hard for me to take them at face value.
There is also decades of years between production, so the directors are different people as well. Modern George Lucas doesnt think that Han Solo is the kind of guy who shoots first, now that hes rolling is Disney franchise money. What would 1977 Lucas think if asked?
Here's some quick math, which I wish the article had made more prominent:
If there are 500 million active users and OpenAI is burning $40 billion per year, then at most, each user costs $80 per year or $6.67 per month. That's the upper limit because there are development costs, so the actual operating cost per user is probably half that (maybe $3 per month).
Thus even assuming they don't come up with new revenue models, the $20 per month Plus plan is profitable.
Moreover, since there are 20 million Plus subscribers, each subscriber is currently subsidizing 24 other users. If they can get the ratio down to 1:6 (each Plus subscriber subsidizing 6 free users), the math would work out and OpenAI would be profitable (at least operationally).
And that's assuming that they don't unlock the huge enterprise business models that, IMO, are going to be the real drivers of revenue.
The whole article is predicated on OpenAI being unable to find profit, but with the article's own number, it doesn't seem hard to convince investors that profit will be there.
[The usual caveats apply: I'm just a random idiot and not a financial analyst. Also, I'm bad at mathing, so please correct me if I'm wrong.]
Clearly it isn't hard to convince investors that profit will be there, they've passed that (pretty low) bar with flying colors so far. The question on everyone's minds is if investors are nuts (which they frequently are).
By your numbers, the math they have to make work requires converting to Plus at 4x the rate that they currently do. A 4x increase in conversation rate isn't an optimization, it requires a complete overhaul of their business plan, and we've yet to see any evidence of them having a plan for such an overhaul.
Interesting analysis but not sure it‘s correct. The subscribers are likely consuming much more resources than the free users. A 20$/m user might consume much more than that in compute, thus creating a loss.
The article specifically mentions that OpenAI is losing money on all plans, including Plus and Pro. The 500 million number is strongly inflated by those who only use the service on and off.
It does seem to me that if for example OpenAI suddenly could raise no more money they could drop the free tier and raise the paid price and make a profit, if with far fewer users. The Zitron article seems to assume they are forced to provide free service to millions but it seems to me it's a choice to grab market share that they could step back from.
He wrote about Copycat, a program for understanding analogies ("abc is to 123 as cba is to ???"). The program worked at the symbolic level, in the sense that it hard-coded a network of relationships between words and characters. I wonder how close he was to "inventing" an LLM? The insight he needed was that instead of hard-coding patterns, he should have just trained on a vast set of patterns.
Hofstadter focused on Copycat because he saw pattern-matching as the core ability of intelligence. Unlocking that, in his view, would unlock AI. And, of course, pattern-matching is exactly what LLMs are good for.
I think he's right. Intelligence isn't about logic. In the early days of AI, people thought that a chess-playing computer would necessarily be intelligent, but that was clearly a dead-end. Logic is not the hard part. The hard part is pattern-matching.
In fact, pattern-matching is all there is: That's a bear, run away; I'm in a restaurant, I need to order; this is like a binary tree, I can solve it recursively.
I honestly can't come up with a situation that calls for intelligence that can't be solved by pattern-matching.
In my opinion, LeCun is moving the goal-posts. He's saying LLMs make mistakes and therefore they aren't intelligent and aren't useful. Obviously that's wrong: humans make mistakes and are usually considered both intelligent and useful.
I wonder if there is a necessary relationship between intelligence and mistakes. If you can solve a problem algorithmically (e.g., long-division) then there won't be mistakes, but you don't need intelligence (you just follow the algorithm). But if you need intelligence (because no algorithm exists) then there will always be mistakes.
I been thinking about something similar for a long time now. I think abstraction of patterns is at the core requirement of intelligence.
But whats critical, and I think is what's missing is a knowledge representation of events in space-time. We need something more fundamental than text or pixels, we need something that captures space and transformations in space itself.
> In fact, pattern-matching is all there is: That's a bear, run away; I'm in a restaurant, I need to order; this is like a binary tree, I can solve it recursively.
This is not correct. It does not explain creativity at all. It cannot solely be based on pattern matching. I'm not saying no AI is creative, but this logic does not explain creativity
I wouldn't call pattern matching intelligence, I would call it something closer to "trainability" or "educatable" but not intelligence. You can train a person to do a task without understanding why they have to do it like that, but when confronted with a new never-before-seen situation they have to understand the physical laws of the universe to find a solution.
Ask ChatGPT to answer something that no one on the internet has done before and it will struggle to come up with a solution.
Pattern matching leads to compression- once you identified a pattern you can compress the original information by some amount by replacing it with the identified pattern. Patterns are symbols of the information that was there originally; so manipulating patterns is the same as manipulating symbols. Compressing information by finding hidden connections, then operating on abstract representations of the original information, reorganising this information according to other patterns... this sounds a lot like intelligence.
What precludes pattern matching from understanding the physical laws?
You see a ball hit a wall, and it bounces back. Congratulations, you learned the abstract pattern:
Cancer eradication seems like a clear example of where highly effective pattern matching could be a game changer. That's where cancer research starts: pattern matching to sift through the incredibly large space of potential drugs and find the ones worth starting clinical trials for. If you could get an LLM to pattern-match whether a new compound is likely to work as a BTK inhibitor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruton%27s_tyrosine_kinase), or screen them for likely side effects before even starting synthesis, that would be a big deal.
So, how do we solve questions like these? How about collecting a lot of data and looking for patterns in that data? In the process, scientists typically produce some hypotheses, test them by collecting more data and finding more patterns, and try to correlate these patterns with some patterns in existing knowledge. Do you agree?
If yes, it seems to me that LLMs should be much better at that than humans, and I believe the frontier models like o3 might already be better than humans, we are just starting to use them for these tasks. Give it a couple more years before making any conclusions.
Pattern-matching can produce useful answers within the confines of a well-defined system. However, the hypothetical all-encompassing system for such a solver to produce hypothetical objective ground truth about an arbitrary question is not something we have—such a system would be one which we ourselves are part of and hence unavailable to us (cf. the incompleteness conundrum, map vs. territory, and so forth).
Your unsolved problems would likely involve the extremes of maps that you currently think in terms of. Maps become less useful as you get closer to undefined extreme conditions within them (a famous one is us humans ourselves, and why so many unsolved challenges to various degrees of obviousness concern our psyche and physiology—world peace, cancer, and so on), and I assume useful pattern matching is similarly less effective. Data to pattern-match against is collected and classified according to a preexisting model; if the model is wrong (which it is), the data may lead to spurious matches with wrong or nonsensical answers. Furthermore, if the answer has to be in terms of a new system, another fallible map hitherto unfamiliar to human mind, pattern-matching based on preexisting products of that very mind is unlikely to produce one.
My premise is that pattern-matching unlocks human-level artificial intelligence. Just because LLMs haven't cured cancer yet doesn't mean that LLMs will never be as intelligent as humans. After all, humans haven't cured cancer yet either.
What is intelligence?
Is it reacting to the environment? No, a thermostat can do that.
Is being logical? No, the simplest program can do that.
Is it creating something never seen before? No, a random number generator can do that.
We can even combine all of the above into a program and it still wouldn't be intelligent or creative. So what's the missing piece? The missing piece is pattern-matching.
Pattern-matching is taking a concrete input (a series of numbers or a video stream) and extracting abstract concepts and relationships. We can even nest patterns: we can match a pattern of concepts, each of which is composed of sub-patterns, and so on.
Creativity is just pattern matching the output of a pseudo-random generator against a critique pattern (is this output good?). When an artist creates something, they are constantly pattern matching against their own internal critic and the existing art out there. They are trying to find something that matches the beauty/impact of the art they've seen, while matching their own aesthetic, and not reproducing an existing pattern. It's pattern-matching all the way down!
Science is just a special form of creativity. You are trying to create a model that reproduces experimental outcomes. How do you do that? You absorb the existing models and experiments (which involves pattern-matching to compress into abstract concepts), and then you generate new models that fit the data.
Pattern-matching unlocks AI, which is why LLMs have been so successful. Obviously, you still need logic, inference, etc., but that's the easy part. Pattern-matching was the last missing piece!
Several years, ago I started getting cough headaches. The symptoms were just like it sounds: when I coughed, I got a headache, usually lasting for a few minutes. In addition, bending down caused a sharp pain in my head. Lying down was fine, indeed, all symptoms lessened or disappeared after a good night's sleep and got progressively worse as the day went on.
My neurologist diagnosed it as a cough headache, but he cautioned that nobody knows the root cause.
He did say that it had to be physical/mechanical, in the sense that it had to be some fluid (or lack of fluid) that caused a problem depending on your orientation (bending down) or when shocked (coughing).
He suspected it had to do with spinal fluid and he ordered tests, but they all came back normal. He said that in most patients the symptoms go away after several years, and that's what happened with me.
But reading this article, I wonder if there is some connection here. The headaches started when my second child was born and I wasn't getting much sleep. Maybe, as the article theorizes, lack of sleep caused the fluid in my brain to not drain properly or not be cleaned or something. That could be why sleep decreased the symptoms. Maybe they should study cough headache sufferers and compare against normal people.
Since I was a child I have been very susceptible to exertion headaches and indeed coughing/sneezing can easily trigger this. They last from a couple of hours to the entire day, being gone when I wake up. The pain is not as bad if I lie down. I'm personally convinced it is directly linked to the pressure of my cerebrospinal fluid.
MRI has of course revealed nothing. Syringomyelia was not supposed to be hereditary (father) and nothing has been detected, but there is a chance that the cavity is so small/narrow that it blocks shut when I lie down: pain subsides, nothing is there to be seen when I'm in the machine. Vertical MRI, anyone?
The "valsalva maneuver" has a 100% success rate of triggering symptoms, and recently (some years) I have begun to observe a high-pitched sucking sound, consistent duration of about a second, originating from somewhere between my right ear lobe and spine. The sound is not uncomfortably loud but could be missed if I was listening to music or having a conversation. I think I have only ever observed the sound when in a sitting position. When detected, the sound might be accompanied with a physical sensation, but it is so minimal that I'm unsure if I'm imagining it.
I occasionally get headache that I think are related to pressure in the skull cavity. I also get light persistent headaches from exertion. In my case it's easy enough to avoid but I would like to limit such symptoms.
My late wife had a brain tumor that put pressure on the sinus veins, causing increased cranial pressure that affected her eyesight.
We learned through the process that many people have significant occlusions in those veins - some 100% on one side. It’s no problem for most people… and until recently there was little to do if there was a problem.
If you ever have a reason to get a contrast MRI of your brain, do it!
How uncanny to find this thread right now, just a day after I had a bizarre case of sinus pain influencing my eyesight and dexterity somehow. Definitely something I should look into ASAP.
My terminology was poor. The venous sinuses aren’t associated with your sinus. They are sort of like the storm drain for your brain, in a sense, not the same as the nasal sinus.
I also have those (along with sneezing). I cannot do anything for the next 5-10 minutes until it goes away. For me it's simply (but maybe not only, who knows when reading the sibling comments) allergies. I don't have allergy symptoms like cough or watery eyes, etc. But somehow my sinuses get "full" and pressure builds up inside. If I take antihistaminic almost daily then my sinuses (mostly one side) don't fill up and I can't cough or sneeze without fear. Since you went to a doctor they probably ruled that out, but maybe not, and it checks out with their "it's probably mechanical" hunch.
The cough headache appearing right after pregnancy is suspicious. Did you get an epidural? I think they are finding that CSF leaks (which can be a complication of lumbar punctures and epidurals) are underdiagnosed. I wonder whether a small leak might manifest as a headache triggered by coughing and bending over.
My only advice is to make it selective--i.e., you need to apply to get your profile on it. That's the only way you will break LinkedIn's network effects.
I didn't read TFA, but does this imply that all encryption needs to be done in a special enclave with dedicated hardware (that isn't vulnerable to this)?
I'm hugely sympathetic to this, but at the same time, I want to say, "snap out of it!"
We shouldn't take on the burden of things we cannot control. I think telling kids that they can change the world is mentally damaging. They could easily come to believe that if the world sucks, then it's their fault for not trying hard enough.
As for how to actually process the news, I remember a scene from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Total Perspective Vortex is a torture device that shows your true place in a vast, uncaring universe. You are revealed to be an insignificant spec on an insignificant dot, thus demoralizing you. But when Zaphod Beeblebrox steps into it, he come out unscathed. "How?" ask the torturers. He replies, "I'm Zaphod Beeblebrox!"
I'm a Gen X'er. We lived through the end of the Cold War, when we expected 30 minutes to say goodbye after WWIII started. We lived through the AIDS pandemic, which made every sexual encounter (rare or not) a life-or-death decision. And we were at the tip of the spear of the technological revolution that is still changing the world today.
As a generation, we are cynical optimists. We believe people are idiots and the world sucks and it's probably only going to get worse, but...yeah...things will work out for us personally.
This only happens because he was inside a computer simulation of the universe created just for him, so the Vortex shows him he actually is important. Had it happened for real it would have destroyed his mind just like everyone else.
While I agree with you that Ukraine vs. Putin is clear-cut, morally speaking, I don't think we can apply pre-Atomic Age logic to the situation. I just watched this scene in Crimson Tide:
XO Hunter: "...I just think that in the nuclear world, the true enemy can't be destroyed."
Captain Ramsey: "Attention on deck. Von Clausewitz will now tell us exactly who the real enemy is. Von?"
XO Hunter: "In my humble opinion... in the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself."
I think that's the difference. In WWII, appeasing Hitler was a mistake because it only emboldened him. Even back then, Tolkien had reservations about how far to take the war. While he abhorred Hitler, he initially supported Neville Chamberlain's "appeasement" policy.
But today, a nuclear Russia cannot be defeated the way Germany was. "In the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself."
We cannot allow a nuclear war to happen, even if it means letting Putin have Ukraine.
The question everyone is wrestling with is, how do we save Ukraine while preventing nuclear war? Unfortunately, we don't know the answer, and the risk of getting it wrong is catastrophic.
> We cannot allow a nuclear war to happen, even if it means letting Putin have Ukraine.
As soon as you decide this, and let others know you have, you have lost everything. Because if that logic applies to Ukraine it applies equally to Poland, to Alaska, France, to Washington, D.C., to your hometown. You've committed to surrender everything to any power that has the potential to escalate to nuclear war.
(It's even worse if you don't believe this -- or if you think you do but would think differently if the thing to surrender was closer to home -- and let people think you do, because that makes it almost inevitable that things will escalate beyond your trigger point, resulting in nuclear war.)
It’s only rational to start a nuclear war if a country faces a direct existential threat: i.e. a significant percentage of the population will be killed or conquered and enslaved. The perceived outcome of nuclear war (widespread devastation) has to be preferable to what would happen otherwise.
Conflicts over territories at the far fringes of a great power’s sphere of influence (or desired sphere of influence) obviously don’t meet the bar. If it’s trivial to call your bluff, it’s probably better not to bluff.
Nobody said "start a nuclear war". They said "maybe we shouldn't roll over for the nuclear power just because they want something and make insincere threats involving nukes"
The logical consequence of disagreeing with this is that every country that doesn't want a significant percentage of their population killed or conquered or enslaved should get their own nukes, because nobody else wants to help them. And I'm not sure every country acquires nukes is a safer world than maybe we don't let Putin have everything he wants
Putin’s threats are not obviously insincere though is the problem.
He knows it would be strategically impossible for the US or Nato to respond in kind to a nuclear attack on Ukraine. It can be rational for him to climb the escalation ladder if he knows his enemy will have to back down before he does because they have less to gain and more to lose.
I don’t like this situation at all, and I understand the point about rolling over to threats. Unfortunately, this is just how nuclear game theory works whether we like it or not. You can’t win in a conflict under MAD against an opponent who has more at stake than you.
They are obvious insincere, because they've been idly making them about every minor gesture the West has made in Ukraine's favour. And ultimately it is strategically impossible for there to be any good outcomes of a nuclear attack on Ukraine for Russia, never mind "better than conventional war Russia have marginal advantages in" or even "better than retreat to pre-2014 borders".
If they were obviously insincere, they could just be ignored. But we can see that in practice, US/Europe have been hesitant to escalate too much or get directly involved with troops. Which is part of the reason for making those threats over and over. While each one is most likely posturing, they cannot be blanket ignored, because Putin has an advantage in an escalation scenario. Making those threats is a way of repeatedly emphasizing that fact.
And of course there can be an advantage for Russia in using nukes. They could destroy Ukraine's entire army, kill all its leaders, destroy all its infrastructure, etc. with no risk of (nuclear) retaliation. There would be many negative consequences too, so it's not likely to happen unless the conventional war is going very badly for Russia, but it's certainly a card they hold.
The idea that there would be no nuclear retaliation the moment Russia launches any known nukes is ridiculous. If they actually launch a nuke, any non instantaneous retaliation will be too late.
The reason the EU countries don’t just waltz into Ukraine probably has more to do with the knowledge they’re not dealing with a rational person, but with a bunch of ego. It’s not hard to predict how Putin will respond if his ego is threatened, but how the rest of Russia will respond to the command to launch nukes.
It’s not unlike the US, except it’s currently still fairly easy to predict that any US commander will just say no when ordered to fire on the EU.
If Russia nuked the Ukraine, I would be astonished if the West didn't invade Russia. The primary goal being the end of Putin, and all those who aided him. If resisted, and Russia threatened more nuking, then Russia would need to be nuked.
(I expect a first response would be a single city, with warnings to evacuate.
A show of what's next.)
The goal would be that Russians assist in taking out an out of control, lunatic who will destroy us all.
Understand, this isn't just about today. Over the next 100 years, every country will obtain the capacity for nukes. Every person on this planet needs to see, and know that using them indiscriminately means you lose.
I’m more inclined to think it’d be a direct beeline for moscow with a swarm of jets (kinda like what Russia tried, only successful). Nobody in Russia has any appetite for this war and they’ll take an out when it’s given to them.
At that point, as I stipulated "The West", multiple countries would be boots on ground, invading Russia. If Russia gave an ultimatum to nuke at that point, and was serious, it would make perfect sense to nuke a city of theirs first.
This isn't a game you win by backing off. There is no safety in that move.
Understand, the claim that the Ukraine is "Russian" is an absurd bluff. No one truly believes that, not Putin certainly. There are a dozen other countries in that region that Putin could make the same bluff about.
By allowing this bluff to continue for this long, matters have only gotten worse. We allowed 2014 to happen. Now, we're here. It won't stop a a peace agreement, or at Ukraine in whole.
The insanity is Russian. And you don't leave a rambling, insane man with a gun outside your house, shooting randomly at houses, because they're not quite at your doorstep yet.
Ukraine has crossed many of Putin's red lines, and all that happened was Putin drawing a new red line, or revising nuclear doctrine, or whatever they call it at the time.
The game theory works roughly like this: Putin wins the most if his threats work. If they don't work, he has the choice between drawing a new red line, launching a limited nuclear attack on Ukraine, or full-on nuclear war. The last option is obviously out (guaranteed destruction is in no proportion to the reward). A limited nuclear attack would likely make him a pariah on the world stage and make it even more difficult to find trading partners. So instead he redraws the line.
If he ever went for the limited nuclear attack option Ukraine might give up, and the west would have to choose between war against Russia (high risk, low reward) or just tightening economic sanctions to the max and punishing anyone who dares to trade with him.
If we assume rational actors I don't see how this would ever escalate to nuclear war. And as long as Ukraine doesn't find a way to decisively push Russian troops out Russia has no incentive to climb the escalation ladder. Even as prolonged war leads to internal instability
Sure, but that's irrelevant to the question at hand. In a discussion of cold game theory, morality doesn't apply. I'd even say that explicitly excluding morality from the discussion is much of the point of boiling a scenario down to game theory in the first place.
>You can’t win in a conflict under MAD against an opponent who has more at stake than you.
That's purely a psychological trick, if you take this as true then it would be rational for everyone to place madmen in the negotiating seat. A better example, if I had Trump say to China, if you don't open up your markets and drop your tariffs on us, we will nuke you. If I can guarantee as thought exercise that Trump will fire nukes if demands are not met (and that's not difficult to do in reality), do you think Xi Jingping will concede here?
It has to be believable. Even if it were true in your hypothetical, Xi would not believe that Trump or any other leader would sacrifice their life and the existence of the entire country over an issue that isn’t of existential importance, either to the leader or the country.
That’s, again, the whole problem. You don’t have to view Putin as “mad” to see him taking a nuclear last stand over Ukraine. He is already invested and taking risk at an extreme level to the point that no one can doubt the importance to him and his willingness to make heavy sacrifices to win. There is no believable narrative where a US leader would be willing to gamble at an existential level over Ukraine.
Agreed! That's the key problem: we are not going to blow up the world to save Ukraine.
But what if Putin thinks that unless he takes Ukraine, Russia will cease to exist (or Putin will cease to exist). In that scenario, taking Ukraine is an existential goal for Russa, and he will blow up the world unless he wins.
Unfortunately, I think the rational thing to do is to apply increasing pressure to Putin until he either backs down or proves that he is willing to blow up the world over Ukraine. If the latter, then we back down. Of course, the risks of that strategy are all too obvious.
> But what if Putin thinks that unless he takes Ukraine, Russia will cease to exist (or Putin will cease to exist). In that scenario, taking Ukraine is an existential goal for Russa, and he will blow up the world unless he wins.
Russia's nuclear arsenal is a perfectly adequate guarantee of Russia's security. Putin knows this, which is why he's happy to leave Russia's western border with NATO practically undefended while he pursues Ukraine. (This also disproves the "Putin invaded Ukraine because he's afraid of NATO" lie.)
It's more plausible that Putin's survival depends on the outcome of the Ukraine war. But "mad Putin blows up the world" is as much a problem for the Russians as anyone else.
Ukraine didn't have nuclear weapons. America does, as do many others, which is largely why none of them have put boots on the ground beyond "training". If they did, they would actually be entering the war, and nuclear weapons are back on the table.
That's also the reason why Alaska and France are safe, why Iran wants nukes, and is the best argument against disarmament you can find. The cat is out of the bag, and the attempts to put it back are starting to leave scars.
Ukraine did have Soviet-era nuclear weapons at the time of their independence, which they let go of in exchange of US, UK and Russia security guarantees in 1994. It is amazing to me how this fact is being memoryholed.
The only assurance of assistance built into the agreement is that parties would complain to the UN security council.
The Obama administration let Russia violate the agreement when they took Crimea. Putin's justification that Ukraine isn't a nation but a historically Russian territory only works if Russia pretends it was never a signatory, since recognition of Ukraine as an independent and sovereign nation was a part of it.
In short, pieces of paper do not trump the fear of nuclear weapons.
It's also the best argument for nuclear weapons you can find. If every country had nukes, invasions wouldn't be very likely for states with any semblance of rationality.
> Ukraine didn't have nuclear weapons. America does
So? If nuclear war is always an intolerable choice for America, then America's nuclear weapons will never be used in any case, and any aggressor who can plausibly threaten nuclear war is free to seize anything from America with that threat.
If nuclear war isn't always intolerable, then, well, we've eliminated the premise off the upthread argument about Ukraine, and are in a different discussion.
The intolerability of nuclear weapon usage is not a simple binary. We didn't have the same kind of security agreements with Ukraine that we do with NATO countries, hence we are not at war with Russia.
Had Russia invaded a NATO country, we still would not have launched first, but rather used conventional weapons, given the fallout (literal and metaphorical), but actually using them to prevent greater numbers of casualties from protracted war is not fully off the table, so to speak.
A good refresher on deterrence seems necessary here.
https://www.ndc.nato.int/news/news.php?icode=1570
There's a very real, game theoretic reason why nuclear riposte is fully automated with no way for even commanders to cancel.
A rogue actor _menacing_ nuclear attack as a tool of invasion and war of aggression is an obvious case study for this.
And finally:
"We cannot allow a nuclear war to happen, even if it means letting Ukraine win the war" is foremost in russian minds, no?
It has become very clear over the last couple of years that Putin doesn't want nuclear war either. Lots of nuclear threats, all of them backtracked. If we marched on Moscow the way we marched on Berlin that might change his mind. But If we push Russia back to Ukraine's rightful border and build a line of fortifications there, Russia has no point where launching nukes is actually advantageous to them.
If anything, nukes only remain an option because of the lack of Western troops in Ukraine, allowing Putin to make a limited nuclear attack that hits Ukrainians but isn't worth war a nuclear war for the West. And even that is a trigger Putin has repeatedly refused to pull, preferring to win the war the conventional way even if that takes years
This is exactly how you make sure EVERYONE will get nuclear weapons.
And it was just so simple - provide Ukraine with all the weapons necessary to help them defend itself from the clear Russian agression. Or, you know, do that before the Russians started their main war in 2022, there was long enough warning from 2013, including hundreds of inocents murdered in an airliner the Russians show down...
> including hundreds of innocents murdered in an airliner the Russians shot down
As much as I felt the Dutch marines should have marched in there to retrieve the bodies when the Russians were faffing around, I do think the shooting down itself was an accident. Zero upside to doing that.
That's assuming Putin would use nukes in case Ukraine succeeds in winning back their territory.
Which he won't do if mutually assured destruction is credible. He's not going to destroy the world including himself and everything he loves for Ukraine.
Once there are doubts that use of nuclear weapons will be punished, then all bets are off.
The problem is that it’s simply not credible on its face. No matter what is said, there is no possibility of US leaders launching nukes over Ukraine.
It’s a bad idea to bluff in situations like this, because when the obvious bluff is called and you are forced to back down, it makes enemies more likely to test all your commitments and “red lines”.
While Putin might not be willing to risk MAD either over Ukraine, it’s a lot more believable that he would than that the US would. There have been direct kinetic attacks on Moscow and parts of Russia have been invaded. There have been assassination attempts against people close to him. This is not some far away conflict for him. He’s already taking on a huge amount of risk, a lot more than the US has taken on in a long time—even in WW2 there was no direct attack on the continental US.
If it's not such a far away conflict then why isn't Putin looking for a way to stop? If anything the war shows how little Putin cares about his own people, even those close around him and how willing he is to spend their lives to burnish his legacy. In that case why would you think that any backing down on Ukraine leads to anything other than him or his successors wanting to swallow more?
Personally I don't see any real chance of nuclear escalation over Ukraine on both sides. The war needs to end but to do that Putin needs to be given a way to deescalate and claim a win at home. But that can only be allowed to happen if Ukraine is made safe and secure once again and if Putin is willing to swallow that. And I see no evidence of that being true.
There's definitely a chance it does lead to Russia wanting to "swallow more", which is a terrible thing, but that doesn't really change the strategic dynamics. Until they try to swallow territory that is as important to a nuclear-armed enemy as it is to Russia, they will have an advantage and it will be difficult to stop them.
Putin created a system of carefully balanced violent psychopaths around himself. Showing any weakness (like losing against little Ukraine) can quickly lead to a coup there. I can very well imagine Putin think "if I'm going to die, I want the whole world to die with me".
Fortunately, unlike the US, Russia does not give a single person the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Putin would need one of those other psychopaths to go along with him.
In the case of nuclear war, everyone loses everything. For most of us in the US, and I'm guessing most people not directly impacted by the war, that's not an acceptable outcome (not that Russia seems to be able to take any more than already have anyway).
I'm sorry, but when you argue that Ukraine losing some territory is bad enough to call for the extinction of the human race, I can't help but think you're not sane enough to be taken seriously.
I think what the GP is saying is that it never stops with losing some territory. In particular, "some Ukrainian territory" is not what Russia wants. They may settle for it for now (like they sort of did with Eastern Donbas in 2014), but sooner or later they'll come for more. Yes, even after they have all of Ukraine, they will come for more. Look up Russia's ultimatum of Feb 2022. Or the appeasement of Hitler at the onset of WW2. Or just watch some Russian TV... just kidding, I wouldn't hoist that upon anybody :)
Russia has 1.5 million active military personnel. So you're basically saying that the entire EU+UK is militarily smaller than a country (Russia) that has a GDP less than Texas.
EU+UK aren't conscripting at this time and also have much better training and equipment than Russia, so the comparison isn't apples to apples, I was just saying that we do in fact have "warfighters".
EU+UK don't/can't/won't "conscript". They will have a volunteer military (or possibly deals with mercenary armies, or foreign recruits in exchange for citizenship) unless and until something catastrophic happens. If it comes conscription, it will have been a unconscionable failure of leadership.
In the EU, right-wing parties continue to grow. AfD, National Front, and others have all recently scored their highest levels of support. It is not impossible to imagine that they will eventually cross the threshold to actually governing, and at that point, the EU and Trump will be much more aligned.
That's what Trump is betting on, and I'm not sure he will lose (as much as I would like him to lose).
> In the EU, right-wing parties continue to grow. AfD, National Front, and others have all recently scored their highest levels of support. It is not impossible to imagine that they will eventually cross the threshold to actually governing, and at that point, the EU and Trump will be much more aligned.
Thing about nationalist parties, the defining characteristic, is they're interested in their own nation first, not spreading nationalism as a global ideology.
If all of Europe elected nationalist parties, none of them are going to be aligned with the USA — nor, for that matter, each other — except by coincidence, and then on small and limited domains.
I personally hate the reworked Star Wars trilogy compared to the original, only because that's what I saw first. If I had seen them in the opposite order, would I feel the same way? I don't know.
As with anything, there is no bright line. For example, translations of The Odyssey are constantly changing the vocabulary. And more recently we've seen changes to novels to conform to modern sensibilities (e.g., Roald Dahl novels).
For me, I guess, my preference is to allow creators to do whatever they want with their creations, but I wish they would make all versions available. Steven Spielberg did that with ET when he digitally replaced all guns with walkie-talkies.
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