Nope. Even if you don't trust the reporting and information coming out of Russia, it's pretty self-evident that Russia thought they won't have much of a war to fight. Half of the attack on Kyiv was done by Rosgvardia (riot police), with parade gear and musical instruments in their logistics.
You don't do that if you think you'll have a quick victory, you do that if you're certain there will barely be any war.
> For the US and friends is terrorizing the enemy, his forces, his civilian population into giving up
The US has tried to do it a few times (most notably Vietnam), but it isn't the strategy in the slightest. The goal is always an Iraq style campaign with heavy air attacks to destroy/confuse most enemy capabilities before a swift invasion.
Terrorising the population in submission has never worked. The US Air Force's own study of strategic air power after WW2 concluded so.
> That’s absolutely not what’s missing in Ukraine
> and then push forward with your own armour
If you rule the skies, you shoot down most attacking drones / it becomes too dangerous to launch drones from short to medium distances (because you'd be found out and destroyed ASAP). It's important to remember that not all wars are the same, and a competent army from a strong military power wouldn't have gotten bogged down to trenches in the first place. Mobile warfare is all about speed and unpredictability and the enemy being unable to react in time
You establish air superiority first by doing supression of enemy air defences, then destroying any offensive capabilities they might have (air bases, fighters), and then you rule the skies.
Yes, it did. Over both of those the US had, mostly, control of the skies.
Hanoi had extremely heavy air defences and was left mostly alone (both because of that and because it wasn't considered a politically appropriate target).
Yes, but the point about Napoleon is that there was so much more about him than just military talents. The environment in which he flourished wasn't of his making, but he managed to grow in it and ended up impacting the whole world. Either directly by bringing the Napoleonic legal system to them with an army, or indirectly by inspiring or enabling nationalism, democratic ideas (power coming from the people, not deity), allowing the whole of Latin America to break free from the Spanish Empire by keeping the latter busy, etc etc.
Many people became successful militarily and even seized power afterwards during tumultuous times. Very few actually ended having such an impact worldwide.
And before any Brits come in with centuries old grudges, of course he did plenty of bad, most notably how he treated Haiti (which he at least acknowledged later in life).
Ah, yeah, he almost strangled Britain with his Continental Blockade. Would probably have been his greatest gift to the world, if he actually managed to pull this off. Oh well.
The gist of it is very simple - depending on the risk of what you're doing with AI, you have to document why it did what it did, and be able to explain it; or you can't use it at all. So if you're using AI for mass surveillance, you can't; if you're using it for treating loan applications you need to be able to explain why it approved/denied; if it's a customer service chatbot, do whatever, nobody cares.
Not only is burden of the legislation fairly low (and a lot of it hasn't come into force yet), it is extremely reasonable. No, sorry, we don't want a UnitedHealthcare using a broken algorithm on purpose to deny as much care as possible and hiding behind computer says no.
> This is a race and nobody will care or remember how the winners got there.
For consumer AI, yes. For coding assistants, probably.
For specific application "business" AI like the things Airbus announced the other day? Not at all. What matters for an Airbus using Mistral to build compliance documentation based on AI generated physics simulations is the enterprise relationship, reliability, compliance, forward deployed engineers helping with the fine tuning, quality, predictability, support. A Chinese lab having a better at benchmarks model that is cheaper is just irrelevant for that.
And IMO, the real money in AI is this type of "business AI" deployment. Developer tooling tends to converge on becoming commoditised. Once you're a core supplier for a big bank and embedded in their processes, you're there untill you screw up with the pricing (like Broadcom), and even then.
> So the current situation is basically that I used Claude to write an MCP server on top of our API. And then I need to occasionally tell it update it match the public doc.
> And my reaction is: really? It is not like our API docs are not public. Claude Code created our MCP server with zero instructions beyond what is publicly available. I just told it to read the docs from the net.
My reaction to this is.. really? Presumably your API and API docs have a release process. Hopefully an automated one. Why isn't the "hey Claude, update the MCP server" step a part of it?
> It's 100x easier to write SQL than writing jq and... dear god if I have to use grep -A or -B, I'm doing something wrong. Constraints are actually a good thing!
As an occasional consumer of JSON/CSV, that's why I really like DuckDB, it's just SQL for such file formats. And it manages to be super fast at it too.
> The LLM sameness in web design is good. Most sites shouldn't try to be idiosyncratic. The best design for a site with real utility is legibility, and LLMs are better at that than the median developer. Always laying out the same buttons? Always using the same type scales? Good! If it looks good to you, you weren't going to do better on your own, and you were very likely to do worse.
See, I disagree. Having seen plenty of Claude generated websites and slide decks, to me it just screams "no effort whatsoever". AI sloppypasta for content, if you will.
If I can see within a few seconds that your website or slide was obviously AI generated, I will doubt its content, how much effort (if any) you've put into it, if it won't have hallucinations, and (especially for websites) if it's even real or a scam farm.
I'm not saying every website has to be unique, but at least tell your prompt to use a font or colour scheme or something specific to you that will make it seem like you've put in some effort and make the result stand out from the slop.
I'm going to play devil's advocate, who cares if it all looks generally the same? I grew up before everyone had dial-up, and I remember back then, when Web surfing on Netscape Navigator, all the websites also had a similar structure. Homogeneity in this context, to me, signals a design system that works best in the moment.
Uniqueness is a costly signal in a sea of information that is all calling for your attention. It signals that you as an author have spent real time on your web page to make it yours.
Maybe here lies the crux; for some of us, the web and by extension the internet is about expression and individuality in a way, but all together all accessible by everyone. Everything looking the same instead looks conformist, and ultimately boring, which I guess is what many of us don't want day after day. We want new ideas, presented by the person/group who came up with it, in the way they would express it. The LLM kind of trashes the parts that add up to something interesting.
If you're doing art, do art. Nobody's stopping you. If you're trying to solve a problem for other people, be legible. Legibility and individual expression are goals in tension.
It's not just about being the same, in which case the worst is that it has less to stand out with.
It's about looking the same as the other AI generated slops out there, which is a strong signal that the content is probably AI slop too, which doesn't merit time being spent on it and trying to understand if it's slop or a human that just used AI generated UI.
This has been a bugbear of mine (and many other people) since long before the advent of LLMs. It is not an intrinsically virtuous thing for a web design to be "effortful". Some of the most well-regarded UX systems in the industry are defined by rigorous sameness. If the baseline is good, departing from it is as likely to reduce legibility as increase it.
You don't do that if you think you'll have a quick victory, you do that if you're certain there will barely be any war.
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