Mainstream narratives for the first year or two of the war were:
- Russia was a paper tiger and weak
- Ukraine was going to win against a corrupt/unmotivated Russian military so it should keep fighting
- Putin had made an error and he would get overthrown
- The Russian economy was going to collapse due to sanctions
- Russia oil pipelines would freeze and never come back online without western help (this was a Peter Zeihan favorite)
- Europe would come to Ukraine's defense
- Etc.
He threw cold water on every single one of those narratives (specifically) from the beginning, meanwhile western media was busy spinning false rah-rah propaganda narratives like "the ghost of Kiev" etc.
Basically he was correct that we should not have cheered on this war. If a settlement and concessions were reached much earlier it would have been better for Ukraine (they likely would have kept more territory) and we wouldn't have 1+ million casualties and EU economies like Germany death spiraling and turning far right due to cutting themselves off from Russian energy.
My layman definition is it’s the people writing in major newspapers, the people getting paid by CNN to sit in a half circle on their news analysis shows, etc.
Is Peter Zeihan “mainstream”?
The only time I remember anyone speculating that Russia was in trouble was the short lived Wagner Rebellion - because nothing like it had happened before. But that lasted … two days?
Going on Joe Rogan and having a million YouTube followers is absolutely the modern definition of mainstream.
Also you appear to have been living in a different algorithmic bubble. Joe Biden was literally on stage multiple times saying everything I listed. If a democrat US president isnt mainstream, I don’t think your assessment of reality is accurate.
No wonder this account is such a font of idiocy and backwards takes — it considers "Joe Rogan" to be a serious mainstream source of information.
If "mainstream" counts as having lots of viewers, fine.
But no one who is serious about information, especially about geopolitical information would ever mistake a numerous count of viewers for the serious multi-layer vetting and double-checking of information that happened in a serious old-school newsroom, or give them anything like the same kind of credibility.
Yet this account clearly gives such massively biased and uninformed podcasters the kind of credulous belief formerly reserved for the the likes of Chet Huntley and Walter Cronkite, which no longer exists in any newsroom today.
So, a great example of Dunning-Kruger, where the most ignorant spout the most nonsense with the greatest confidence — explains the plethora of nonsense in the posts.
And NO, those were not the narratives of any actual serious reporter or govt figure. I've followed this very closely from before the 2022 invasion; some I'd heard of as remarkably optimistic takes, and some I literally never heard of.
The entire world, including Putin, was stunned Ukraine did not fall in three days. It was pretty much universally accepted that Russia was the second best military in the world. Of course, it was also soon shown that RU was not even the second best military in Ukraine.
Only recently, since the Operation Spiderweb and the 'long-range sanctions' making serious strikes deep inside Russia disabling military targets, oil production & transport, and dual-purpose logistics, and since the RU casualties have exceeded 1000 dead/month and RU started LOSING land, have any serious people started speculating about cracks in RU's ability to continue, and those are still tentative.
Go read the writings of people with ACTUAL knowledge of Russia and Ukraine, such as Garry Kasparov, Bill Browder, Volodomor Zelenskyy, all of whom are on Xitter or Substack, since you get your media from that type of sources.
You get your information from clowns, it is no surprise you post like a clown (no insult meant to professional clowns).
It appears you are living in a different algorithmic reality.
The root cause of everything going wrong in Germany is the war and cutting themselves off from Russian energy.
The rapid de-industrialization, economic stagnation, ballooning deficits, removing the debt brake, new massive military debts, etc.
All of it is being economically felt by normal people and they’re scapegoating brown people (immigrants) as a result. If Germany still had cheap Russian gas and was still growing its economy 3% per year you would not be seeing any of this go mainstream.
Here are the natural gas prices for Europe: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eu-natural-gas If you look at the price from summer 2021 on you will see a sharp rise in prices. The reason was that Russia stopped supplying the spot market. https://www.martenscentre.eu/blog/how-gazprom-manipulated-th... Russia also bought European gas storage capacity to let it sit empty and worsen the situation. All of these actions did not make much economic sense. They did however make a lot of sense when Russia invaded Ukraine and tried to use the gas supply for black mail. Their bad luck was that their hegemon China did not give Russia permission to invade till the end of the Chinese winter Olympics. Olympics ended on the 20th and invasion started on the 24th of february which made the gas threat far less potent.
I know Lenin said: "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them" but to suggest continuing the business relationship with Russia is beyond silly. It would show that Germany has no rudimentary survival mechanisms and put its viability as a political entity in serious doubt.
WTF? I remember the exact opposite. Everyone on social media and in the mainstream news said Ukraine was toast and the war would last a few months tops.
See the endless PCI compliant companies that get hacked. Any standard that has a threat model accepting trust in any single human or computer is security theater.
PCI enforces some good practices, but for instance has no defense against supply chain attacks such as code signing, review signing, reproducible builds, full source bootstrapping, etc etc.
I think that the incident itself is a stunt, even if it may not have originally been a deliberate choice on OpenAI's part. Never let a good crisis go to waste.
I disagree. As the saying goes: never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence. That goes for both OpenAI and HF (but mostly the former, as the latter was the victim).
You need more safeguards for sure, but also it tends to fly off down rabbit holes, rebuilding things in dumb ways, hacking around things, making assumptions etc, it seems very eager to go 'ta da! I did it look how quick I was', sometimes it nails it other times it created a lot of tech debt.
Also if it ever says, "I've found the root cause of ..", it definitely has not found the root cause and is making a non evidence based guess as it has run out of ideas.
> but if, in 2026, you aren't able to have an LLM generate decent quality code... IDK what to tell you.
I think the author's point still stands. At some point you need to determine whether the output is of decent quality. A lot of people don't have the ability and experience to do that.
What's specifically?
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