Wow, interesting. :)

Not unexpectedly, the LLM failed to explain its own thought process correctly.

The main point: Ukraine has a preference / permission for joining the EU written into its current constitution. The EU has various rules about competition and markets, so…

The European Commission will make an assessment of the text, which could grant a preferential treatment to American companies, once there is a “concrete agreement with letters black on white,” Paula Pinho, the Commission’s chief spokesperson, said on Friday.

Now, if Trump’s team can write a text that adheres to EU competition rules, then Zelensky might give it the green light. But can they? Are they even thinking about it currently?

P.S. Additions / corrections, since journalists finally reached the area and there are photos.

https://www.delfi.lt/news/daily/lithuania/kariuomene-laukiama-i-pabrades-poligona-atvykstancios-zemsiurbes-120096976

The area has peat bogs, but this is a bog lake. The ground is very soft and the bottom is very muddy. Lithuanians are literally building a road there with an ultra-wide-tracked excavator, likely with the goal of getting a heavy construction crane into range of the sinking place. Since the vehicle is 60+ tons, I think they’ll bring a crane rated for 120+ tons.

Since the lake looks like one could climb out (the far side has forest), the men are likely in the vehicle. Since the vehicle is not waterproofed, they’re unfortunately dead.

Since the lake is clearly discernible as a lake, I think they drove in darkness without anyone having their head out, and toppled into the lake sideways by going on “ground” that liquefied and didn’t support their vehicle.

They drove their M88 Hercules tank recovery vehicle into a peat bog. It sank. It’s currently 5 meters deep in mud.

I think (speculation) they likely got out and tried swimming, but had no equipment for a peat bog. You don’t simply swim in a peat bog, you need an inflatable or styrofoam board to rescue yourself or others. It’s not possible to swim through semi-liquid peat. In the old days, one would use several wooden planks, but that puts the rescuer in big danger and their vehicle likely produced no floating debris to help them.

Water is cold like hell. Winter just ended around here, snow is still around in shady places (I’m a bit north, but it’s pretty much the same in Lithuania). Bogs warm up by summer. One can be in perfect physical condition, but hypothermia disables an unprotected person in water pretty fast (20 minutes). After that, drowning kills the person.

Alternatively, they didn’t get out.

Condolences to their families and comrades. :( This should not have happened. Instruction about the dangers of some local landscapes should have been more thorough. :(

Server-wide censorship cannot be allowed. / This eliminates every platform I know of.

Within the I2P anonymous mix network there was an attempt, at some point around 2015, to build a system named Syndie where everyone would have to be their own censor, and servers would host content without the server operator really knowing or caring about what they host.

It failed to take off, but I’m not convinced if the reason was architecture or the main developer leaving.

Indeed, forums are almost gone. In particular, I miss one forum about science fiction, one about aeromodelism, one about electric vehicles (another still exists) and one about anarchism. An interesting hold-out in the country where I live, is a military forum, where rules say that respectful discussion is the only kind of discussion accepted - ironically, the military forum has a peaceful atmosphere. But it could come crashing down much easier than a social media company.

As for why forums disappeared - I think that people became too convenient. They wanted zero expense (hosting a forum incurs some expenses and needs a bit of time and attention), and wanted all their discussion in one place. Advertisers wanted a place where masses could be manipulated. Social media companies wanted people to interact more (read: pick more heated arguments) and see more ads - and built their environments accordingly. Not for the public good.

I think the most urgent job is getting rid of algorithmically steered social media - sites where one can’t know why something appears on one’s feed.

In Estonia, one may not prevent passage along the beach of a body of water (sea, lake, river).

Some land owners try. It’s legal to ignore them and travel along the shore, but if a river valley is densely settled and every tenth person has built a fence too far, it becomes somewhat harder to fish there.

As for dry land - if it’s not fenced in, then from dawn to dusk, without damaging crops or landscape, one is allowed to roam on foot, with a bike or boat, on skis or riding a horse.

Unless the owner forbids:

• by default, it’s allowed to set up a tent for up to 24 hours
• by default, it’s allowed to pick the fruit and herbs of naturally growing plants and mushrooms (not planted or sown) and fallen wood

Making a fire is another matter. For this, getting the agreement of the owner is required. It’s also totally forbidden by fire departments at certain times.

I’m not from the US, but I straight out recommend quickly educating oneself about military stuff at this point - about fiber guided drones (here in Eastern Europe we like them) and remote weapons stations (we like those too). Because the US is heading somewhere at a rapid pace. Let’s hope it won’t get there (the simplest and most civil obstacle would be lots of court cases and Trumpists losing midterm elections), but if it does, then strongly worded letters will not suffice.

Trump’s administration:

“Agency,” unless otherwise indicated, means any authority of the United States that is an “agency” under 44 U.S.C. 3502(1), and shall also include the Federal Election Commission.

Vance, in his old interviews:

“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

Also Vance:

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Googling “how to remove a dictator?” when you already have one is doing it too late. On the day the self-admitted wannabe Caesar crosses his Rubicon, it better be so that some people already know what to aim at him.

Tesla dealerships… nah. I would not advise spending energy on them. But people, being only people, get emotional and do that kind of things.

As an exception to most regulations that we hear about from China, this approach actually seems well considered - something that might benefit people and work.

Similar regulations should be considered by other countries. Labeling generated content at the source, hopefully without the metadata being too extensive (this is where China might go off the handle) would help avoid at least two things:

• casual deception
• training AI with material generated by another AI, leading to degradation of ability to generate realistic content

In my experience, the API has iteratively made it ever harder for applications to automatically perform previously easy jobs, and jobs which are trivial under ordinary Linux (e.g. become an access point, set the SSID, set the IP address, set the PSK, start a VPN connection, go into monitor / inject mode, access an USB device, write files to a directory of your choice, install an APK). Now there’s a literal thicket of API calls and declarations to make, before you can do some of these things (and some are forever gone).

The obvious reason is that Google tries to protect a billion inexperienced people from scammers and malware.

But it kills the ability to do non-standard things, and the concept of your device being your own.

And a big problem is that so many apps rely on advertising for its income stream. Spying a little has been legitimized and turned into a business under Android. To maintain control, the operating system then has to be restrictive of apps. Which pisses off developers who have a trusting relationship with their customer and want their apps to have freedom to operate.

The countdown to Android’s slow and painful death is already ticking for a while.

It has become over-engineered and no longer appealing from a developer’s viewpoint.

I still write code for Android because my customers need it - will be needing for a while - but I’ve stopped writng code for Apple’s i-things and I research alternatives for Android. Rolling my own environment with FOSS components on top of Raspbian looks feasible already. On robots and automation, I already use it.