I started with plants, but moved on to birds and occasional critters like chipmunks. Birds definitely take a bit of patience to get nice shots I find. I post some of my stuff on here https://pixelfed.social/Yogthos

I got into doing nature photography over the pandemic as a way to get out of the house, and it’s been amazing for my mental health. It forced me to get out and just live in the moment really paying attention to the environment around me. I’ve realized how little we notice of the world around us normally. I’ve also found martial arts are a similar experience in a sense that you’re really just focused on the moment and forget about everything else you’ve been thinking about.

What all this illustrates is that the US lacks industrial capacity for maintaining its hegemony. They’ve run through their existing stocks over the past three years, and they’re unable to manufacture weapons at the rate they’re being consumed. As a result, they have to make hard choices regarding which proxies have more value to them.

The all-caps delivery really frames your thesis beautifully.

Generative AI is just the tip of the iceberg. For example, Huawei AI targets industry upgrades as opposed to chatbots. This has applications in medicine, robotics, research, hardware design. Letting your biases blind you to what’s actually happening with technology leads to myopia.

I’m just pointing out that it makes little sense to talk about how technology will develop in the next 5 years while ignoring the biggest factor that will drive the direction of technological development.

It makes no sense to think about the future of technology while ignoring one of the biggest technological developments to date. Whatever you think of AI, it’s necessarily going to shape every aspect of technological development going forward.

One example I can give you off top of my head is that user interfaces will likely be going away. There’s no need to have a complex UI when you can just language to describe what you want. You will just ask the agent to find whatever information you need, and present it in a specific way to you. Think of it as having a personal secretary who compiles information for you, and makes presentations.

Here’s MIT Professor and former Pentagon advisor Ted Postol explaining why the Golden Dome is a fundamentally unworkable idea. He views it primarily as a political vehicle lacking genuine technical basis. Existing and proposed systems are easily foiled by the use of decoys, making reliable interception an impossibility. The proposed space-based interceptor system would also require tens of thousands of satellites, with launch costs alone in the tens of billions and total costs potentially reaching trillions, making the system economically unviable.

The real danger of this idea is that even the perception of such a defense system’s effectiveness could lead to reckless actions by leaders and undermine international arms control efforts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Wzlqh7bIs

Same vibes as giving a dog a treat before it gets put down.

Wouldn’t Texas be at the top of the list of states most likely to exit?

The knowledge that western domination over the world is crumbling, that neolibarlism is becoming discredited, and that the capitalist system is imploding. Meanwhile, there’s plenty of positive news coming out China every day. China is building infrastructure, transitioning off fossil fuels, and improving the standard of living for its people. China is showing what an alternative cooperative model of development looks like, one that’s not based on constant war and exploitation.

What’s funny to me is that people genuinely thought this time would be different.

Exactly, moving away from fossil fuel usage is key to having energy sovereignty. Incidentally, this won’t only be true for China because as Chinese alternative energy industries mature, this tech will be exported globally. We’re already seeing this with cheap solar panels becoming prevalent, and western media crying that they’re destroying fossil fuel profits. Soon, we’ll see China start exporting things like thorium reactors as well. The choke hold the US had on global energy is being broken.

I predict that they will keep extending it until the US collapses.

basically this https://elpidio.org/2018/02/12/citigroups-plutonomy-memo-there-are-rich-consumers-and-there-are-the-rest/

indeed

That’s highly dependent on the instance I find.

:)

I literally explained all this to you in detail already. You’re like a chat bot spewing nonsense that is grammatically correct, but lacks any actual meaning upon closer examination.