Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | nl's commentslogin

International reporting was almost all that it was a Ukrainian operation, eg:

> On 6 June 2023, The Washington Post reported that an intelligence agency of an unnamed European "close ally" had notified the CIA of a Ukrainian military plan for a covert attack on the pipeline. The plan was to be carried out by a team of divers reporting to Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, but the Post did not report any evidence that it had been put into action. The US reportedly learned of the plan three months before the destruction of the pipeline, and shared the intelligence with Germany and other allies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage...


Eventually the international reporting pivoted to blaming Ukraine. But that was not what I read every day on my state-run broadcaster as it happened.

It's incredible to _experience_ how propaganda machines rewrite narratives.

No, they are trying to justify actions against countries that supply arms to Ukraine.

As I point out in a other thread, supplying weapons is pretty normal and attacking random infrastructure in a country that happens to be allied to Ukraine is a significant escalation.


Where do you get this stuff? Only thing they’re saying is that Russia can’t attack Ukrainian weapon or munitions factories like Ukraine does to Russia because there aren’t many of them.

Read the context of their comment:

>> It's a typical Russian strategy: gradually increase the intensity of operations, while pretending you have nothing to do with it. That is exactly how war in Ukraine began (way back with the first incursions of "little green men").

> But their [Russia's] problem is that the equivalent weapons factories, refineries etc. often aren't in Ukraine, but in NATO countries supplying Ukraine and giving Ukraine explicit permission to use them against targets inside Russia

That reads exactly like an argument justifying Russia's actions.


You are correct. We should fire all generals who aim to understand the enemy’s thought process. Why would they entertain these evil justifications?! At last victory will be ours when we finally stop making excuses for the bad guys and instead start blindly thrashing at them.

Oh I agree that "know your enemy" is good advice!

But an alternative commentary with the same facts would have been something like "Russia knew there was wide Western support for Ukraine but thought they would overrun the country before Western nations would be able to provide practical support. They dramatically miscalculated and now are trying to deter Western countries by slowly increasing actions."

This was basically what @jwr said that kicked off this subthread:

> It's a typical Russian strategy: gradually increase the intensity of operations, while pretending you have nothing to do with it.


I just don’t see it. They seem to be just saying that these attacks probably aren’t (mostly) about escalating right now because Russia has their hands fully (thanks to Ukrainian sacrifices), but simply about trying to disrupt both NATO internal cohesion and support for Ukraine. Of course, if they can kill two birds with one stone, all the better.

Seems like a completely reasonable analysis of Russia’s motivations. I don’t see any moral justification there.


Countries have always had arms supplied from countries not involved in the conflict.

It's a significant step to escalate to attacking those countries.

> Russia views it as NATOs proxy war against them now

It is an interesting argument to choose to invade a country, act with faux outrage when they find allies willing to supply them with arms and then call it a proxy war.

Russia got themselves into this mess. They have an easy way to get out of it.


> Countries have always had arms supplied from countries not involved in the conflict.

My country, Norway, had a long-standing policy of not selling weapons to countries at war - yes even to the attacked party - because of the common understanding that would be tantamount to joining the war, and make us the target of reprisals. This prohibition also was a good shield against accusations of war profiteering or proxy warfare.

That policy which had been standing for 60+ years, was dropped for Ukraine.


Even if you are the most pacifist leader imaginable, at some point you have to draw a line with policies like that if you dont want to fold and hand over control to expansionist neighbors.

I figure a majority in Norway would have been willing to support Finland with more than just arms deliveries had they been the victim (would you agree with that?), so sending some cash + weapons to Ukraine seems consistent policy to me.


The point was not that you should never support a country that was attacked. The point was that you should be 100% above the table if you did that. If you weren't willing to fight yourself (and take the expected consequences, such as reprisals and sabotage), then you shouldn't sell weapons either.

And I'm sure statesmen like the Stoltenbergs would have defended this policy very eloquently, better than me, back when it was official policy...

And sure, it was broadly popular to get rid of this policy for Ukraine's benefit. It wasn't a hard sell to the public majority. Saying "let's take a step back and think principled about this" was the hard sell, as usual.


Seems like they did think principled about it:

Killing people is bad

Murderers must be fought back with maximum force

We can supply force

So we should


That’s simply not true and a gross misreprestation of the policy, which is still in place.

And it not dropped to cater to Ukraine, as it specifically has a carve-out for legal defensive war, which the Russian war of aggression towards Ukraine is.


Check snl.no/våpeneksport_fra_Norge, which is more reliable than Wikipedia on this.

It gives a list of the changes (or "clarifications") to the policy over the years. To the degree there ever was a carve-out for legal defensive war, it was certainly added after Ukraine.

Actually there were two phases: in 2022 they defend giving weapons to Ukraine in that it was a donation, not a commercial endeavor (that suggests to me that they implicitly admitted, commercial sales would have been against the policy). Then in 2024, they allowed direct commercial sales as well. Of course their defense lawyers will say the policy is still in place, but "realism" again: you can't blame Russia for not being convinced by that.


This is well beyond arms supplies, NATO is running their entire ISR and targeting show and quite vocal about it. Plantar, Starlink on drones etc. and that’s ignoring financing and production. If anything, the Russian response has been quite flaccid.

Yes, there is no doubt that NATO countries (except maybe the US/Trump some days) wants Ukraine to win. They train troops, help with intelligence etc.

There is no argument that they are neutral.

But there's a big distance between being an adviser and being at war.

North Korea is supplying actual troops to Russia, and that doesn't mean Ukraine is at war with North Korea. Belarus and Iran have both supplied arms to Russia and Ukraine isn't at war with either.

Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.


> But there's a big distance between being an adviser and being at war.

> Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.

Is it so hard to see why Russia doesn't see things that way?

"Realism" is a much abused word in international relations, but for once I think the "realists" have a point: That Russia is dismissing these distinctions is entirely unsurprising, and other big powers don't have a leg to stand on complaining about it.


You wrote:

> "Realism" is a much abused word in international relations, but for once I think the "realists" have a point: That Russia is dismissing these distinctions is entirely unsurprising, and other big powers don't have a leg to stand on complaining about it.

I agree that realism is a much abused word, and I think this is an example of it.

The first part of your sentence is realism: it is not surprising that Russia chooses to treat Western help as taking part in the war. That does not make it true. Advising, supplying and sharing intelligence is not the same as fighting.

The second part is not realism. Realism explains what states do. It does not say who is right, or who has the right to complain. "Don't have a leg to stand on" is a moral judgment, with the word realism put on it.

This is exactly how Russia wants the word to be used. Right after the full invasion started, the Russian foreign ministry shared a Mearsheimer article that blamed the West for the war. The goal is to make Russia's actions look like a natural reaction to the West, so that objecting to them looks naive.

Maybe you don't mean it that way, but going from "unsurprising" to "don't have a leg to stand on" does the same thing.


> Yes, there is no doubt that NATO countries (except maybe the US/Trump some days) wants Ukraine to win. They train troops, help with intelligence etc.

There is actually much doubt about that. It rather seems they are content with Ukraine not loosing and draining Russia in the progress with little care what happens to Ukrain except that they keep up the fight.


It is very obvious to me that basically every country in the alliance wants Ukraine to win and Russia to lose, and this is clear because they actively spend lots of money on effecting that outcome.

But NATO members obviously don't want to be spending money on foreign military, so pro-Ukraine spending stays limited to "cost effective" levels.

You make this sound like some nefarious conspiracy by western war-fetishists, when the status quo is basically the obvious outcome given even a little western self-interest.


It seems to be the way they want Ukraine to win: Putin withdraws but keeps his power in Russia at all costs. But this goal is akin to threading a needle.

> Palintir and Starlink are both private companies, not NATO.

Yeah, no. That is not how it works, American private companies are not just allowed to provide weapons of war without executive approval. If you remember, Trump is the one who removed Biden's ban on providing them targeting and the intel to hit Russia directly. The entire "Zelensky, please stopping hitting Russian diesel production" Trump thing is just an act - the US holds the keys to their (and the UK/EU, for that matter) ISR feeds.


Extremely. It's been top of the App store charts since it came out in the US.

Almost like it is a well funded marketing campaign.

"Everyone loves Meta Muse now, it is organic growth. My social media feed told me so!"


Have you tried it? It's pretty good!

No, I try to avoid products that continuously show a lack of respect for their users.

That means nothing, see

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662990

> I spent $220 on Google app ads. 60% of the installs were robots


It also tops Apple App store. Any similar tidbit about installs being bots for Apple?

don't trust this we've spent hundreds of dollars without any effect whatsoever in the statistics

My point is not the money spend but that bots not only create traffic on web sites but also app stores

5.5 is higher for max effort, slightly higher for xhigh and lower for high, medium and low effort.

The biggest proportional difference seems to be at max (5.5 is 38% more) and at high (5.5 is 21% less).

I think most people run at high and xhigh. At xhigh it is close enough to be task dependent and I don't think most people will notice. At high effort I think it looks like it will be an improvement for most people.

5.5 Max should probably be compared to Fable - it performs a lot better than 5 Max.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/claude-opus-5-5?models=...


Originally it was because Anthropic was so compute constrained they relied on the extra care the Claude harness took with caching (heavy use of cache breakpoints etc) that other harnesses didn't.

I think that is less of a factor now, and I think Anthropic have backed off some on being as strict (eg, AFAIK they never implemented the two-tier "claude -p" pricing model they were planning)


I believe most speculation is that Opus is 5T model, Fable a 10T

Elon claimed Opus was 5T in April, and I think it's fairly likely this is accurate: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2042123561666855235


This isn't necessarily true.

While every formal proof can be encoded mathematically that doesn't imply that the grammar of lean or rocq is sufficient to encode every potential proof.

However the core of what you are saying: that every possible proof exists in the space of all mathematical statements is correct.


You are correct, but in trying to get the point across I attempted (perhaps fruitlessly) to use concrete concepts today of a system where the search space is calculable yet whose span does not imply the 'knowing' of all calculable things.

> The MySQL purchase. WTF, this was horrible and stupid. The only interesting effect of this was to make Sun a target of acquisition for Oracle.

Strong disagree with this!

The MySQL purchase wasn't a lot of money and was a move towards becoming a systems company (like you suggested they need to be)

Oracle bought Sun for Java, not for MySQL.


> The MySQL purchase wasn't a lot of money

IIRC it was $1bn or so, and Sun only had like $6bn in the bank. It was a desperate play when Sun needed help.


My memory is that Oracle bought Sun for the Java lawsuit, not Java itself.

Oracle sued Google over Java - it wasn't some previously existing case.

Yes, it is Oracle so there's a great chance they were considering this when they bought it.


The disagreement had been going on for years (at least since Google launched android, perhaps before that), Google and Sun had been in “negotiations” that were publicly documented as going nowhere. All that had happened is Google implemented more “workarounds” to use less of Sun’s IP.

I actually remember media speculating that Sun didn’t want to take the next step and actually file a lawsuit, because they didn’t have enough resources to go up against Google in court.

Then Oracle bought Sun, and suddenly the unproductive negotiations transformed into a lawsuit.


And thanks to that lawsuit, we got to see Oracle lose (always nice!) and SCOTUS establish that using APIs constitutes fair use (awesome!)

My problem with this is that yes, looking at the species level from our sample of ~1 the most intelligent species wins out (although there seems to be a lot of debate as to if Neanderthals were more or less intelligent than humans).

But within the sample of the human species it is more common for less intelligent people to control more intelligent people.

This happens within political systems (political leaders are usually above average intelligence, but hardly the most intelligent) and within companies and other economic systems.

I don't see this fairly obvious point discussed, and not really sure what it shows.


> not really sure what it shows

it shows that you don't get anything for free. If it was without any cost in other areas to make a human massively more intelligent, it would presumably happen over time via the same processes that led to us.

As it is, the higher (and lower!) ends of the distribution tend to be highly correlated with other issues (mental+physical), and the further you go, the more unfortunate things which make it harder to do stuff in general start to crop up like psychosis, autism, ocd, anxiety, addiction etc


I'm not sure.

Maybe there are other things ("leadership", "likeability", "appearance" etc) that are more important in the pursuit of power than intelligence.

I think it's telling that it is usually conventionally intelligent people making the claim that intelligence is what leads to power.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: