I think we got very different reads here. I understand the comment on the author to be judgemental to be very gentle. Dillydog is a person who affords everyone a rich and deep hidden inner life, so much so, that assuming people are so shallow to be read by a glance makes them angry on their behalf. I think they are in a good place already, emphasizing deeply with others.
Indeed! But haven't we now hypothesized dillydog here to be "a person who affords everyone a rich and deep inner life"? Or more provocatively, haven't we made a character judgement?
In the same way that we perform root cause analysis via guesses and validations, I think it's natural, and perhaps unavoidable, that we also make guesses as to a person's personality.
Of course, we usually call someone judgemental for making negative assessments, but I think it's important to allow a person whatever possibilities, regardless of moral judgement.
My read of the article is that the author ascribes negative traits without judgement and just as easily as positive ones. Heck, as I see it, big part of empathizing with someone is recognizing how all their conditions and traits are natural and operate similarly inside ourselves to one degree or another.
None of us chose to be the way we are in the situation we're in. Like, 3+1 dimensions and mostly Euclidean space. Who ordered that? Modus ponens?! Glaciation periods! All these deeply affect our day to day experience, obviously or not and at the behest of no one.
My best interpretation of their comment would be that to ban owning ninja swords or rape does not prevent either from happening 100% of the time. But it's still the 'right' thing to do and prevents it some of the time.
Farms without immune pigs can still claim it. Do some sampling tests, culling etc and call the product "virus free". But calling modified pigs not modified is tougher, I think.
At least with the Venus probes they were only publicly announced when they were well on their way to Venus with failures either not getting published or getting assigned alibi mission goals (e.g. if they failed to leave earth's orbit) so failure modes were limited to the destination.
This is a question I've tried to answer to myself, and I think it's actually pretty hard to tell, if all your sources are Western media. I'll give you my impressions but I'm by no means an expert.
I tend to reject any narrative about the Soviets which makes them not sound like humans. They weren't all idiots or sociopaths: they understood, just like we do, that people make mistakes and that if you punish mistakes too harshly, people won't want to risk working with you. The Soviet government punished dissent harshly--but if you were working with them they weren't typically so foolish as to punish honest mistakes with a stay in the gulags. In fact, technical fields like their space program (and, for example, infrastructure programs) were safe havens for intelligentsia, where some criticism of government was tolerated because it was understood that criticism from people with technical knowhow was necessary to progress Soviet goals.
There are exceptions I've found, but I tend to think those are the result of a few people with too much power making bad decisions, rather than a pervasive cultural norm.
None of this should be perceived as a defense of Soviet totalitarianism. Stalin has the highest body count of any dictator by a wide margin, and that's totally reprehensible. All I'm saying is I think he killed political dissenters, mostly, not allies who made mistakes.
As a Russian I will explain my vision: one of the oldest Western traditions is to demonize Russia and Russian people. You can find plenty of examples in the Western literature from 100 years ago, from 400 years ago, and right now on CNN or Bloomberg or in any Hollywood movie.
E.g. movie Tenet starts from depicting a scene from "Russian life": under a low sun, in freezing cold, dirty hungry Russians are crawling in the dirt gathering "pieces of Uranium" with their bare hands.
Or you can open just about any publication/movie about Russia/Soviet Union from just about any period of time: there would be not a single good word. Western Media almost never publishes something like: "There's a new school/hospital/stadium/factory opened in Russia". Instead all you can see is "Russian corrupt government officials set a record of eating 100500 babies alive today.", "Weak Russian economy means that Russians will survive on a diet of two rotten potatoes a day in 2026", etc. etc.
It's just that Soviet period is demonized the most.
I spent three years on Africa, and it’s the same story there. Literally everyday millions of africans laugh and sing and cry with joy at weddings, parties, birth of children. New hospitals get built, life is rapidly improving.
Basically nobody in the west has any idea, and people always assume I was in a hell hole the entire time. It’s wild what propaganda will do for knowledge of a place.
So basically you are fine living in a imperialist, totalitarian dictatorship, where the slightest descent is punished by years in prison, because the boot on your neck is Russian made?
The rest of the world having to clean up the mess left by the Soviet Union (paying for the cleanup and decommissioning of nuclear submarines, Chernobyl, rebuilding eastern Europe) may have a lot to do with the anti-Soviet attitude.
Have you ever wondered if maybe that (and by extension your attitude to it) is part of the problem?
> E.g. movie Tenet starts from depicting a scene from "Russian life": under a low sun, in freezing cold, dirty hungry Russians are crawling in the dirt gathering "pieces of Uranium" with their bare hands.
Your very own directors depict it this way, mainly Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev or Stalker.
Russian soldiers stole radioactive materials with their bare hands in Chernobyl some years ago. When you steal thousands of children, keep invading neighbors, assassinate people all over europe, its not that weird that you don't have the best PR. The western world tried to get you to join the free world for almost 30 years, so this is all on yourself.
Honest question here. What is the Russian opinion about the quality of life in Russia, in Soviet times and post collapse? It seems to me as an observer from North America that the Russian people have had to ensure a lot of violence from their rulers for a long time.
Maybe if not for the majority of Russians actually supporting the brutal dictator ordering ongoing war crimes in Ukraine you could ask for some sympathy.
This isn't just oppressed society afraid to act. This is actual support for the actual killer of the babies. Despicable.
Some of it is also caused by the pervasive hostility to the values important to most humans, pervasive disinformation efforts, and aim to destroy the peace and integrity of the countries it perceives as a competition.
For now I'll just agree this is largely deserved, and I'll play the sad tune on the tiny violin.
The USA is the #1 supporter of baby killing in the world right now, by a huge margin. Everyone outside the USA’s imperial propaganda bubble can see it - Americans cannot.
Are all Americans bad guys because of what they are allowing to happen with their countries resources?
Rusofobia started in middle ages, long before Putin was born. And it never ended.
> Some of it is also caused by the pervasive hostility to the values important to most humans,
USA started with a genocide of a whole continent. Started more wars than any other nation/state in the human history. Probably killed more civilians than any other nation in history (Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, just to name a few countries with huge losses among civilians, not even counting those who died from hunger or illnesses caused by US wars and deliberate destruction of agriculture and infrastructure).
So what? Do you read every day that it is the most belligerent and aggressive state on Earth, although it really is?
> pervasive disinformation efforts
I've already wrote in the original message, how Russia is portrayed by the media and Hollywoold. Is it a really true information? Not propaganda and disinformation?
Since you brought him up: Stalin was also motivated by a truckload of paranoia, though, right? Hard to make rational decisions about who is dissenting if you think they’re all out to get you. The flimsiest accusations related by the least reliable people could be enough.
A classic feature of authoritarian governments: when their dumb plans fail, it's because of enemies of the state. Bonus points when the enemies of the state are the ones that warned of the negative effects that would happen (obviously they must have been saboteurs)
In general I think the issue is a lot of people equate Stalin with USSR. Things were substantially different both before and after him. And his reign was also from the 20s to the 50s in which there was the context of, amongst other major issues, WW2 where the Soviets lost tens of millions of people. As one can see in certain ongoing wars, exceptional loss of life seems to gradually push leaders towards having zero concern for life at all - let alone the liberties and values we hold to be desirable, even in authoritarian systems. When the "hard" decisions become quite easy, you're well on your way to dystopia.
The mass purges were deliberate, while the famine (polemically called the "Holodomor") was not. The famine was caused by Stalin's disastrous agricultural policy, but it wasn't a deliberate attempt to kill people.
>Broadly speaking, Russian historians are generally of the opinion that the Holodomor did not constitute a genocide. Among Ukrainian historians the general opinion is that it did constitute a genocide.
While I agree that one primary motive was to get more food, Communist atrocities generally start out with noble ideals, at least on paper. Pol Pot also intended to create an ideal society[1], at whatever cost.
Pol Pot actually intended to kill huge numbers of people and wipe out the cities. He had his own crazy philosophy about a peasant Utopia that had nothing to do with Marxism at all.
The Soviets wanted to increase agricultural yield, but the policies Stalin implemented caused the harvest in 1932 to fall by about 20%. In a country already just barely able to feed itself, that led to famine, not just in Ukraine but across the USSR.
> Neo-Nazis argue the same about the Holocaust, namely, that there is not a single piece of evidence showing that the highest level of the German government, in Hitler's person, ever ordered the extermination of Jews
We literally have the minutes of the Wannsee conference, in which the Nazis decided to kill all Jews.
The German state carried out a massive logistical operation of moving millions of people to specially built camps and gassing them to death. Comparing that to a famine is insane.
You're drawing an equivalence between patently absurd, factually false denialism about the Holocaust on the one hand, and the dominant scholarly view that the Soviet famine of the early 1930s was not a deliberate attempt to kill Ukrainians on the other hand.
Some of them do, but the difference is that their claim is complete and utter hogwash.
On the other side, pretty much everyone accepts that there was a major famine in the USSR in the early 1930s, mostly caused by Stalin's collectivization policy. That's just a fact.
The peak of Stalin's repression is somewhere in 1937-1939 - right before WW2, so you can't write it off to losses in the war. The reason is probably Stalin's paranoia and him seeing traitors everywhere, including his former comrades.
"I tend to reject any narrative about the Soviets which makes them not sound like humans."
Right, it's time we stopped this stereotyping and looked at this objectively. The Russian Empire and later the USSR has had many, many truly brilliant people over recent centuries. The list of names seems endless, here are few immediately to mind: Chebyshev, Cantor, Markov, Borodin, Köppen, Landau, Cherenkov, Mendeleyev, Tolstoy, Shostakovich, Gagarin, Prokudin-Gorsky, Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky. And here's just the Wiki list of Russian scientists:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_scientists. Now, there's much more, do the same again for physicists, mathematicians, chemists, composers, writers, novelist and so on. When one looks at the sheer numbers of people it's hard to believe that they all come from Russia.
Morever, it's hard to imagine where the world would be today without these brilliant people. It's almost inconceivable the world would be anywhere near the same without them.
I'd like to think most of us are smart enough to separate the majority of Russians from the small minority of ratbags, sociopaths and psychopathic, paranoid, sadistic monsters such as Stalin, Putin and Ivan the Terrible. There is no doubt that Russia has had a long and terrible history of tyrant rulers whose reign of tyranny has caused great harm to the Russian people. If anything we ought to feel some sympathy and compassion for the Russian population as a whole given the centuries-long turmoil Russia has endured.
Nevertheless, in spite of its long history of adversity Russia has still been able to produce this brilliant body of people and it's done so essentially consistently over recent centuries.
Stalin died in 1953, and these probes were launched much later, so there were no chance to get into a Gulag. However for people who worked earlier the possibility to get there was always nearby.
Sergei Korolev, a famous Russian rocket designer (who was later responsible for launching a first satellite and first human space flight), had to go through the prison and labour camp. In 1938 he was head of a laboratory for jet propulsion (mainly for development of weapon), and as jet engines were not well studied, experimental models often failed with explosions. After another failed test, several laboratory employees were arrested, and after they testified, Korolev. They were charged with sabotage - creating a secret anti-Soviet organization with the purpose of weakening Soviet defence. After series of interrogations, during which he had his jaw broken, he admitted the guilt and soon was sentenced to 10 years of work in labour camps [1]. The sentence was later reviewed and he was transferred to a prison where he was allowed to continue working on jet propulsion.
Another example is Andrey Tupolev - Soviet aircraft designer ("Tu" series of planes is named after him). He was also charged with sabotage (conspiracy to slow down aircraft development in USSR) and espionage during Stalin times and had to design his planes in a prison [2].
After Stalin death, both Korolev and Tupolev cases were reviewed and they were admitted not guilty.
After series of interrogations, during which he had his jaw broken
It was worse than that. He was beaten with rubber hose and wire harnesses, had needles pressed in the body, was urinated on. He then was sent to a gulag where he was left dying from hunger and scurvy. He was saved by a fellow imprisoned engineer who was fortunate to fight his way up though the inmate hierarchy.
The broken jaw, out of the many broken bones in his body is mostly mentioned because it was ultimately the cause of his death in 1960s.
If he's acting under NK command, this wouldn't be insulting, it's just doing a hacker's work.
Besides, you cannot have it both ways: either North Korean hackers are a "50ct army" or they are a credible threat. Most seem to be arguing they are a credible threat.
Also, he can always take the second option: "why are you asking about this in a job interview?", something many legitimate Korean candidates could ask.
> If he's acting under NK command, this wouldn't be insulting, it's just doing a hacker's work.
I understand where you are coming from, I wanted to express my idea that their person cult shaped culture might be so alien to us, that what seems obvious to us, might be a non-option to them. At least at the level where I imagine such operators.
> you cannot have it both ways: either North Korean hackers are a "50ct army" or they are a credible threat
I assume the people performing the en-masse long term infiltration are not the same with technical skills who the execute technical attacks.
That's astonishing. And Amazon's stuff generally is often shitty and counterfeit, amazing to see it so popular. That doesn't bode well for local business. No wonder there is such wealth inequality in the country when one company is supplying everyone with stuff.
> Global connectedness is holding steady at a record high level based on the latest data available in early 2025, highlighting the resilience of international flows in the face of geopolitical tensions and uncertainty.
Good question — it's pretty straightforward right now:
I pass the collected content chunks (with their original URLs attached) into Gemini 2.5 Pro, asking it to synthesize a balanced report and to inline citations throughout.
So it's not doing anything fancy like dynamic retrieval or classic RAG architecture.
Basically:
- The agent gathers sources (webpages, PDFs, Reddit, etc.)
- Summarises each as it goes (using a cheaper model)
- Then hands a bundle of summarised + raw content to Gemini 2.5 Pro
- Gemini 2.5 Pro writes the final report, embedding links directly as citations with [1], [2], etc style citations throughout.
Reverse-RAG is something I for sure want to implement. Once I can afford a better computer to run this with at scale. Even an 8B model will take overnight to summarize an average piece of content for me right now! But I'm also keeping an eye on the pace of which AI moves in the larger LLM space. The size and abilities of likes of Gemini 2.5 Pro context windows are pretty crazy these days!
- Full content analysis by Primary LLM (Default is Gemini 2.5 Pro) with link hard-coded alongside each piece of content with structured output for better parsing.
- Temperature right down (0.2), strict instructions to synthesize, precise prompts to attribute links exactly and without modification.
What I hope to introduce:
- Hard-coded parsing of links mentioned in final report to verify with the link map created throughout the research journey
- Optional, "double-checking" LLM review of synthesized content to ensure no drift.
- RAG enhancements for token-efficient verification and subsequent user questions (post-research)
Do you have any further suggestions?
Right now I hope to strike the delicate balance between token efficiency, with enhanced grounding as optional settings in the future. I have a big task list of things, and this is one of them. I will ensure to re-prioritize alongside user requests for the different features.
Of course, being open source, contributions are highly welcome. I would love to see large community involvement. Collaboration benefits everyone.
P.s. I have spent hundreds of dollars in tests. I'd say for every 1 hour of building, about 3 hours of testing have gone into this, debugging, optimizing quality, ensuring guard-rails are in place.
If you go to the repo, also check out the config/prompts.py file - it will give you a little more insight into what is going on (there are code checks as well, but generally it gives you an idea).
Universal healthcare and having everyones medial chart stored centrally can be related, but must not be. There are many countries with some form of universal healthcare and no centralized records.
> There are many countries with some form of universal healthcare and no centralized records.
I believe you, but I'm curious how that works. When you go to a random doctor, do they have to request your records from all your other doctors? Similar to here in the USA when you have a PPO?
One, in some of the countries I know (with universal healthcare and no centralised records) you don't go to a random doctor. You have a declared family doctor and you have to go to them unless they are unavailable, in which case the other doctor you go to has to declare that you couldn't go to your doctor. It's a small hurdle to prevent doctor shopping, but it means people are more likely to always see the same doctor. Specialists are given the relevant information by the family doctor when referring a patient to a specialist, and in most other cases records are not really needed, or the ER will contact whoever to get the information they think they need. It might sound hazardous but in practice it works fine.
Second, some places have centrally-stored records but the access is controlled by the patient. Every access to the record is disclosed to the patient and he has the possibility to revoke access to anyone at any time. That generally goes together with laws that fundamentally oppose any automated access or sharing of these records to third parties.
And third, I don't understand what any of this has to do with who whether healthcare access is universal or not? Universal healthcare without centralised records exists (in France, unless it has changed in recent years, but it at least existed for 60 years or so) and centralised records without universal healthcare could exist (maybe privately managed by insurance companies, since the absence of universal healthcare would indicate a pretty disengaged state).
Until very recently this was the case in Australia. If you started going to a different doctor you had to sign a form authorising record transfer.
This was somewhat annoying since unlike the UK system, the Australian system is essentially private GPs getting paid for your individual appointments by the government (so called bulk billing), so there's no guarantee that you can go to the same doctor every time.
In the UK you have to choose a GP clinic, which you're stuck with until you get a transfer. This isn't the case in Australia, which is the difference I was trying to highlight.
In the Canadian system doctors are still on the whole private practices. They just bill the government (the "single payer") instead of an insurance company. And they bill based on standardized payment formula decided by the government.
Basically, government funded and regulated doesn't mean government run.
There is no standardized EHR system here, despite provincial governments (which are who runs the systems) wasting millions over the last two decades trying to make that happen.
This was the last decades way of doing things. The current decade is to stay within the desired charting system. That way you can one-click share data between doctors. Typically you would search for doctors that utilize the same charting platform. EPIC is probably the largest one in US today
Of course just my interpretation.
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