OK, yeah, I can definitely see your argument there.

What a weird take.

Like, I actually broad agree with you on the idea that the laws of war can serve to sanitize warfare as a concept in the public mind. There’s a real danger that in creating these largely meaningless constraints for ourselves we make warfare seem more appealing as an option. “Our wars will be good wars, only bad people will get hurt.”

But “tricks unsuspecting soldiers into engaging in more warfare” is a take so bizarre I can barely parse it.

Do you think that soldiers just, like, group up in platoons, hold a quick vote and decide together to invade Iraq?

Wars are political decisions. They’re made by national governments, most of which are elected by the citizenry of those nations. Soldiers don’t decide to start wars, any more than they decide to end them. We do. The people. And we get to make that choice with the luxury of being largely isolated from its consequences, while our soldiers are forced to face many of those consequences head on.

I’m not gonna sit here and say that everyone who ever joined a military is a saint, but the idea that soldiers are the ones starting wars is just plainly absurd. Militaries don’t start wars, people start wars. All of us, collectively. We don’t get to shirk that responsibility.

You need to look at what they’re actually saying, not what you think they’re saying.

3abas is completely correct when they say that - in terms of their immediate, short term, strategic goals - the US got what they were after in Iraq.

Whether or not those goals were moral, or desirable, or beneficial, are not the questions that were being addressed.

If I say “That car is red” why would you reply with “No, it’s a Ford”?

I hope it was clear I was not complementing the US on their destruction of Iraq

Oh, 100% clear.

My only point of contention here would be with your assertion that drones mitigate air superiority. That’s not my read on what’s happening in Ukraine, as an example.

In some specific aspects, drones allow long range strikes in areas where air dominance might otherwise prevent them, but we already had that capability with missiles. Modern drones just make it much more economical. But air power still matters. The reason Russian air power has been such a limited factor in Ukraine isn’t because of drones, it’s a combination of very effective Ukrainian air defence and limited Russian resources. Basically Russia can’t afford to lose expensive aircraft and Ukraine has gotten very good at shooting them down.

More broadly, however, we’re increasingly learning the limits of air power as a whole. This isn’t something that arose from drones so much as something that’s been naturally coming together for decades. In the advent of a full invasion of Iran, for example, much of the fighting would take place in the mountains where caves and geography make close air support and strategic bombing highly ineffective. That same terrain would also limit the use of armour and artillery, robbing the US of most of their force multipliers. The same thing happened in Afghanistan

Essentially, I agree that American air superiority is often over valued, but I don’t think I agree that drones are the reason for that.

Not 100% sure that I agree with your point about Iraq, but I’m not saying I completely disagree either.

You’re absolutely correct to call out that Iraq is not the abject failure - from the perspective of US leadership - that people often describe it as. This is one of those difficult conversations to have around a lot of well intentioned but thoughtless leftists who will go off on a hair trigger as if this means you somehow think Iraq was either a good thing, or a good decision. It was neither. But, strategically speaking, it was broadly a success. As you say, the US wanted to a) remove Saddam from power, b) establish a friendly satellite government, and c) gain access to the country’s oil reserves, and they achieved all three of those goals.

I guess where I would differ is that while they achieved those short-term goals, I think it can be strongly argued that none of those goals adequately served the US’ long term geopolitical interests. In that sense, I think that Iraq can still be considered a strategic misstep, even though they accomplished their immediate objectives. First, obviously, the cost they paid for those objectives was arguably far too high. I don’t think the US actually meaningfully benefited from any of those goals to a degree that made it worth the lives, money, political capital, and damage to their global trust, reputation and moral standing. And I think that the destabilizing impact on the region and the galvanization of nascent movements like ISIL were pretty much inevitable.

I would tend to argue that the US could have done far more to further their geopolitical interests in the region by not choosing to invade, so in that sense I’d still consider it a poor strategic decision (and this is, of course, putting aside any question of the moral dimensions, on which it was obviously horrific), even though they were, in the limited sense you describe, successful.

I also do want to note that I think there’s a sense in which Jhex is actually correct about Iraq; while the US did succeed, operationally, in achieving their strategic goals, Iraq also demonstrated some long-standing issues with the US military that have only worsened with time. Something that’s not talked about enough in regard to both Iraq and Afghanistan is that there were multiple units that were activated for those invasions only to repeatedly fail their workups and ultimately end up sitting out the initial stages of those wars. That’s shockingly bad. When you have whole divisions that are so incompetently trained that they are literally undeployable… Well, what are they even there for? The US military is huge, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that it’s also extremely badly managed, and that these issues are not new. I know people who work alongside American soldiers, and the general consensus is that they are some of the least professional, most poorly trained in all of NATO. That’s unbelievably bad for a military with that kind of budget and history. The US throws a lot of money at its army, but doesn’t get a lot of bang for its buck. The fact that they’re now struggling to maintain a single regional conflict has its roots in the struggles they experienced maintaining two simultaneous conflicts back in the early 2000s. These recent issues didn’t come out of nowhere.

We were doing DNS challenges for an isolated system and our provider didn’t support that.

Yeah, same, this is news to me but very interesting. Would have solved an issue we had at work that ended up requiring us to move our whole DNS over.

Even putting aside that it’s not nearly enough of a bribe to be worth keeping the GOP in power, there’s literally no chance of this actually happening.

$5,000 to every US adult is about $1.5 trillion. The entire US government budget deficit for 2025 was 1.85 trillion. They’re already cutting into the core entitlements like Medicare, while at the same time trying to find another half a trillion for the military. Where in the actual fuck do you think this money is going to come from?

The only realistic option is to add it to the debt, which would mean a bigger deficit than in any year of the pandemic spending.

There is literally no chance that any Republican or Democrat votes to approve a budget like that. Trump cannot do this on his own. He can fuck around - often illegally - with existing spending authorized by Congress, but he cannot unilaterally authorize new spending. And Congress will not authorize this. Not a chance in hell.

Completely correct.

Been using Seafile for years, it’s fantastic.

Oh hell yes! Awesome update.

I’m curious about what the client would be in this context. Does it require a desktop environment, or just an X server? Are you using an existing web browser, or are you rendering web content directly in the app?

“Now please stop asking us about Iran and Epstein…”

I’ve been using it for years and this has never been an issue for me.

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Absolutely there’s a difference. LLMs, when it comes to this specific task, are better. That’s why they’re being used here. It’s a job they are uniquely well suited to. They do indeed come with high hardware requirements, which is why you’re not forced to use them, and why they provide the option to offload the work to a cloud service.

Personally I would absolutely not want to ever feed my documents into an off-device model, but the point of self-hosted software is that it does what you tell it to and they absolutely should include letting you make bad decisions.

I think you’re under the impression that the difference between those things is far greater than it actually is. Large Language Models work by developing statistical maps of associations. That’s discrimination. They’re a direct evolution of categorization models. The ability to associate a hash of a JPEG with “cat” is the same as the ability to associate “How are you?” with “Great, how about you?” It’s all associative mapping. LLMs are just the current leading edge of that technology. If you want to, for example, generate a list of tags that describe a document, an LLM is the best tool we currently have for doing that.

To put it another way, what you term “discriminative AI” is “generative AI.” It’s generating a category or list of categories in response to an input. That’s not functionally different than generating a sentence in response to a sentence, it’s just an order of magnitude less complex. You can argue terminology but the technology exists on an evolutionary curve, with no real hard boundaries.

Paperless and Papermerge have always done a lot more than just OCR. If that’s all they were, most people can do that already on the software that comes with their scanner. The core selling point of these applications is automatic categorization, sorting and tagging, and those have always relied on machine learning tools. Literally the first thing you do after setting Paperless up is start training the AI.

what’s the best alternative?

You’re asking for suggestions for an automatic document categorization tool that doesn’t use any automatic document categorization?

It reads as especially hysterical in this context, because Paperless is an automatic document categorization system, and I’m really sure what they think the automatic part of that is if it’s not “AI” of some broad description. Paperless, Papermerge et al are basically wrappers for machine learning tools and have been for as long as they’ve existed. LLMs are a natural and obvious fit for the kind of work these applications exist to do.

This just feels like someone reading “Improved AI pathfinding” in the patch notes for a video game and screaming “OH MY GOD IS NOWHERE SAFE?!”