Tech companies should be opposing Trump's policy and, instead, beg the Trump administration to grant meaningful concessions to countries that have rightfully lost trust in American companies. Bullying tactics will only intensify the loss of trust and fuel the push to adopt alternatives.
The more completely fissile material is used up, the higher the explosive yield, so it seems intuitive that fission and fusion bombs should have become cleaner as technology progressed. However, in many cases, even the U.S. has had to play catch-up just to reproduce what they did half a century ago. e.g. Fogbank[1] Delivery vehicles have advanced quite a bit, but the payloads themselves, perhaps not so much.
Even if we assume fission and fusion bombs have become completely efficient in using up their fissile materials, there's still the threat of nuclear winter. Nuclear winter has nothing to do with residual radioactivity. Powerful explosions loft fine particulate matter so high into the atmosphere that it takes years or decades to settle. While it's up there, it blocks sunlight and it spreads around the world. If enough bombs explode and enough sunlight is blocked, agriculture fails and the environment collapses globally. Even a completely unopposed unilateral strike, were it large enough, could doom the aggressor to starvation, social breakdown, and civilization collapse. An exchange on the other side of the planet (e.g. between China and India) poses a direct threat to the U.S., the same as every other nation.
There are people who will be happy to throw shade on the research on nuclear winter, and AI are no doubt lending them equal weight. However, even if they were just as likely to be right as the research that has highlighted these risks, is the risk worth taking? Are you willing to make that bet? An AI that doesn't reason as humans do and can't do basic math without making mistakes might say, "yes".
The new (to me, at least) idea here is that the different regions of Scandinavia didn't mix as much, "on the job" or genetically, as I thought they would have. They each carved out their own territories and mixed with the local population, but not with each other to a significant degree. It's surprising to find that more genetic material was making it's way back to parts of Scandinavia from those far-flung regions than from neighbouring Scandinavian countries.
A historian I respect - don't want to name him in case I accidentally misrepresent his ideas - has speculated that the Norse didn't mix with the Sami because having a separate tribe of hunters (no major reindeer farming back then) was useful to them. Almost like a caste. If people live side by side for 1000s of years, I think that's fair to speculate - there has to be a reason they didn't just assimilate into each other.
After the Danes returned to Greeland and first met the Inuit, the priests pushed for religious and cultural assimilation. Not strictly speaking linguistic assimilation, since they were good protestants who believed everyone had a right to hear the gospel in their own language, but it seems likely the language would have disappeared eventually if they got their way.
But the mercantile class in Denmark resisted development efforts, because if the Greenlanders became just another European people under the Danish crown, exploiting trade with them might become less profitable. People who were willing to live without European material comforts, such as they were, yet would sell you highly lucrative trade goods in return for comparatively little. The policy may have saved their language and culture, but at the cost of crippling economic development for a long time.
Maybe it was like that with the frontier/foraging Sami in the past, too. Kept apart in order to be easier to exploit economically. Though already in Harald Fairhair's day, it seems there were also Sami living among the Norse as boatwrights and smiths and maybe also as wandering professional hunters, hunting livestock predators for bounties - we know that kept going for a long time.
Another historian, which I will name - Johan Borgos - has written that the Lofoten islands were roughly 1 / 5 Sami, and that it was priests, the social elite, who first broke the taboo on marrying across the language barrier. Once they had done it, common people started doing it too, and so the language died out in that place. Not really from deliberate suppression effort (that came much later), but simply from "well, our parents speak different languages but most of the people we interact with speak Norwegian, so..."
Segregation can "work wonders" for preserving language and culture, but it's obviously often not a good thing. And to some degree, I think we have to respect our ancestors choices that they wanted bakeries, horn orchestras, cinemas, photography studios, tuberculosis sanatoriums, teetotaller lodges, baptists and salvationists, steam ships, traveling circuses, gymnastic competitions, revue theater etc. etc. in short everything modern, coded as "Norwegian" to them - rather than joik and reindeer and the few exotic things coded as Sami.
I don't give much credence to the theory though, having grown up in a part of Sweden where every village have their own "language"(we call them mål, which is like halfway between dialect and language, they're not officially recognised as minority languages, but they're more than just dialects: villages as little as 30km apart can't understand eachother at all, and one of them, Älvdalsmål, is notoriously more similar to Icelandic than it is too Swedish)
These are Swedish communities, as opposed to Sami ones, they've been integrated into the wider Swedish society since their founding, yet these languages are still alive today(though some are critically endangered)
There are degrees of integration. People from Älvdalen, should they choose to, could move to Stockholm and change their dialect (one of the ways you know it's a dialect, is that they understand you much better than you understand them). It's been that way for a long time.
And from what I understand Älvdalsmål is, like all dialects, getting rounded at the corners and getting more understandable to other Swedes.
Even dialects that sound incomprehensible at first, if you're a native speaker you'll get used to it quickly. The difficulty of Älvdalska is superficial, it's actually very close to what you're used to, so you'll learn to understand them and they already know how to understand you.
Sami is completely different. It takes a long time to learn. Go back 150 years, and very few Sami would be able to move to the capital and pass as Norwegian or Swedish, their accent would give them away even if they did know the majority language. Go back another 50 years, and they may simply not have been allowed to even try to pass in many places (as I recall, the first Sami priest in Norway, Anders Porsanger, was rejected by his Trondheim congregation. He was simply too weird for them, even though he was highly educated and of course spoke excellent Norwegian).
Älvdalsmål is critically endangered. You have the parallel existing älvdals dialect, which most people living in Älvdalen speak. Last I checked there was something like 5 living people who can speak älvdalsmål.
I'd argue that the reason locals understand you more than you understand them is, in these cases, that they're effectively bilingual. If they want you to understand then they'll switch to Swedish and you'll understand just fine.
There hasn't been anyone speaking only Mål in a few generations, in my estimate. You either speak both mål and Swedish, or only Swedish.
And no, you don't pick these up easily. I grew up in Rättvik. My grandmother used to speak rättviksmål on occasion (she was bilingual with Swedish) I can understand rättviksmål somewhat. I used to date a girl from Malung, who spoke Swedish usually, but exclusively Malungsmål with her mom. 3 years together and I still couldn't understand a single word she said to her mother. Mål is often conflated with the dialects of the same area, but they are 2 distinct things. Skånska is a dialect,I can understand it fine, even I have to focus a bit more than usual. Dalarna has a dialect too, the one Gunde Svan speaks on TV, it's easy to understand. Mål is separate, and much, much harder.
You're right that Sami is harder though. It does not share a common root with Swedish, so there are basically no similarities. Even German would be easier for Swedes as they're both Germanic languages, but they've diverged long enough ago that similarities are sparse these days.
“Mål” literally just means language, there’s nothing special or particular to Swedish regional dialects about it. You have the word “språk” from German “Sprach”, likely via Low German.
The term “dialect” is very fluid, and intelligibility is not a requirement. It is often a negotiated term that has more to do with culture or politics.
In China, they even call Cantonese and Hakka “dialects”, which is linguistically absurd, but serves a political purpose.
Saami were sparsely populating large areas - so they did not exactly live side by side with other people. And the more people came to live where Saami were herding their reindeers, the less space they had left to herd them. Throw in to that climate change into that as well. But to the contrary to what you are claiming here, Saami did assimilate into Norwegians and Norwegians also put a lot of effort in assimilation of Saami - mainly during the times, when religion was dominant form of identity, so it was done with good intentions - like all the major crimes against humanity.
Vikings were a product of mixing people of different origins. And that is a consistent result across whole Europe. The same thing applies in Western Europe, just as in Eastern Europe. And that applies to Norwegian vikings, even if they had a chance to colonize some empty lands - they still also took wives from other places than just Norway.
They were not that much more sparse than their neighbors. They typically moved with the seasons, so maybe they needed a little more space (a summer place and a winter place at the very least), but not radically more so. After all, the Norse had summer pastures in the mountains too.
Reindeer herding is younger than people think, as I said. Until the major predators were exterminated, it wouldn't have been possible to have herds of the sizes we're used to. Land wasn't the limiting factor for herd size. Until eastern Norwegian immigrants came in the 1750s on, and settled inland - a crazy thing to do according to locals since of course you wanted to live by the sea where the fish, the money were, and it was cold inland - there wasn't much land use conflict.
There were no centrally organized assimilation efforts until von Westen at the earliest. And while he was zealous about rooting out superstition and customs which he saw as pagan, he was also protecting the language, teaching people in their own language (for a generation after Westen, Sami were said to be more educated than other northerners, and you see it in the censuses!) and certainly wasn't putting people into encomiendas or otherwise forcing them to change their material way of life.
> If people live side by side for 1000s of years, I think that's fair to speculate - there has to be a reason they didn't just assimilate into each other.
Yeah, they had completely different lifestyles that were reliant on completely different biomes. The Norse were farmers, they needed farmland and a little bit of forest for wood and hunting. The Sami were reindeer herders, they needed tundra. Neither could live where the other lived, they spoke languages from completely different families, they had completely different cultural traditions. Neither side had much that the other side wanted. Of course they didn't assimilate, how could they?
But when the industrial revolution came and iron ore was discovered up north, suddenly the desire to assimilate them (or genocide them...) appeared, because now they had something that the people in the south wanted very, very much.
> Though already in Harald Fairhair's day, it seems there were also Sami living among the Norse as boatwrights and smiths and maybe also as wandering professional hunters, hunting livestock predators for bounties - we know that kept going for a long time.
My understanding is that the Norse respected the Sami as a people different from them, and were a little bit afraid of their "magic", because they didn't understand it. They were perfectly happy to live apart, and do a little bit of trade in goods and services. Why go north to raid the Sami, when you could sail south and raid the fat and rich English or the French instead?
> The Norse were farmers, they needed farmland and a little bit of forest for wood and hunting. The Sami were reindeer herders, they needed tundra.
This is a common stereotype, but it's simply not accurate. Intensive reindeer herding didn't become a thing until the major predators and the wild reindeer were wiped out. Sami lived very similarly to the Norse - a bit more semi-nomadic, and a bit more adapted to use marginal land maybe, but they held sheep, fished and farmed just like their neighbors. And once intensive reindeer herding took off in the 17th-18th century, still it was a minority who lived from that.
There were raids done against Saami as well, though it is right - more profitable raids were better down south. In much later times there were also slavery raids done that included Saami people, though this cross over into times that were past viking Age as well by cultures that evolved from vikings, where there are different opinions what can be defined as vikings.
maybe you hate your neighbors more than you hate the exotic foreign visitor?
hmm, of course current news would rather undermine that theory, but maybe today's exotic foreign countries are about as close as neighboring countries were back in Viking times.
It's a distasteful, but relevant, aspect of vikings that they were slavers as well as raiders. If you went viking, a large part of the booty you brought back walked on two legs and had genes to pass on. Perhaps the Norse liked their neighbours just enough not to make many of them "visitors".
I think the explanation is much simpler, we know the Norse were a bit afraid of the Sami. They viewed them as a weird non-threatening neighbour people who had a weird language and weird magic. So you traded with them, you respected them, you said please and thank you, and then you were happy to see them gone because you didn't want them to curse you. (And I would assume the Sami were very happy to foster this belief since they were much weaker militarily)
Unlike the fat and rich continental Europeans that the Norse viewed as ripe for plunder, they did not fear them at all.
The Norse had a big fear of curses, the evil eye, the "strength in weakness". I think there's a wide theme in Norse legends, which is about spite and betrayal, but it doesn't work quite like we're used to. In Rigsthula, the social origin myth of the Norse, the first king is suggested to have taken the inheritance of his wealthier brothers by force - possibly by murdering them. And in the Norse creation myth, the gods also arguably seize the world from its original owner (and creates the world as we know it from his corpse).
So the theme is that all power is illegitimate, or at the very least seized/stolen, and the robbed want it back - and they will get it back eventually. All hubris will fall, not just for the individual non-god as in Greek mythology, but for the whole world and the gods themselves. The world three has tree roots, one to the well of the norns (fates), one to the poisonous worm Nidhogg who gnaws on the root and will eventually kill it, and one to Mimir's well, the well of wisdom, where you can maybe learn secret tricks of gods and rulers to postpone the inevitable.
So spite, or nid, dark power to break rather than to rule, is the ultimate danger to kings and rulers. To invite it by acts of cruelty, especially against the weak, is to bring ill luck upon yourself. Your followers, too, believe deeply in this, so they may abandon you if you seem to "draw in bad karma".
But those who are weak, and have nothing to lose, can dip into the power of spite and hate, and do things which would be unwise for a ruler to do, such as poisonings, betrayals, or vicious cruelty. They aren't evil for doing so, it's just the way the world works - if you run afoul of this, it was your own fault for inviting their hate.
Even demand for safety can be scornful, and "nid". Kings are supposed to trust in their own strength, and to some degree accept living with threats hanging over their heads. King Nidhad, in the story of Volund, listens to his wife's advice and hamstrings Volund. It's arguably self-defense since Volund certainly hates them, but it's still a scornful, cowardly act - which Nidhad and his family end up paying dearly for.
So yes, with respect to the Finnish and Sami neighbors, they would have feared them because of potential curses, but it wasn't because they were a magical people as such, it was simply were weak.
But Christianity complicated things. Odin, like the other pagan gods, is himself subject to the laws of fate and must be wise for his own sake, but the Christian God is almighty. You do not have to fear dark curses if He is with you. As a practical matter, they were a lot more willing to build walls and engage in other "cowardly" acts of self defense, and they could get away with it because their Christian followers didn't worry (much) that this would invite fate backlash. They were also a lot less afraid of things like public executions. It made possible much higher concentration of political power.
And no, the Norse didn't view that as simply fat idiots ripe for plunder. They admired all the great walls and splendor which concentrated political power had managed to build in Europe - things they had very little of at home. They did plunder, yes, but that was like a fox eating hens in a henhouse - he's still worried about the farmer.
Cloudflare has become so ubiquitous that they've become a major vulnerability for non-U.S. governments. The recent outages offered a small taste of what might happen if the U.S. government, on one of their random whims, ordered Cloudflare to block everyone and every site within a target country.
This in no way excuses what Spain is doing, but its important to recognize that the internet is becoming more of a battlefield every day.
Spanish citizens have control over eh Spanish government. If this is a concern they can of course change the law. Yes democracy is hard, you have to convince the country it’s important.
European citizens have less control if they aren’t Spanish citizens as they can only talk to their local and European representivies and not the national ones. But they can still raise the cause, and there nothing politicians like more than a popular cause which wins them votes. Enough people say they won’t vote for party X as they back the blocking and that becomes a policy at whatever party conferences Spain has
People in Spain and Europe have no control over America though. If the American governments blocks a site they have to comply with no representation.
Freedom is impotent, but it doesn’t mean what Americans think.
> Spanish citizens have control over eh Spanish government.
The fact is LaLiga has more.. It's been that way for years. There was a case where they would (may still do) use the microphone on your phone via the laLiga app to hear if you were watching a match and correlate that with licensed venues.
They're the most aggressive I've ever seen, and their influence in the government is unmatched.
> European citizens have less control if they aren’t Spanish citizens as they can only talk to their local and European representivies and not the national ones.
Citizens of other countries have less influence on the Spanish government than Spanish citizens? Not surprising.
One thing that's awesome about this and is 100% better than TikTok:
No burned-in branding. No trailing brand screen. No trademark brand noises.
----
Tiktok videos have omnipresent logos burned-in and a full-screen trailer with an annoying Tiktok brand sound. The few random loops that I looked at had none of these. I hope this doesn't change and, if it doesn't change, I hope loops displaces TikTok. I despise being constantly bombarded with branding.
Bombarding with branding is how TikTok got people on, and I don’t think it’s a bad strategy per se. In fact, I can’t think of any other way to overcome network effects with a product like this (word of mouth would be the best, but you’ll need a ton of creators first).
Vandalizing every video posted on their service may have helped TikTok spread brand recognition. One can only hope that a service that doesn't vandalize the content they deliver will find a way to pull ahead.
There’s a middle ground solution here. TikTok does (naturally) have a version of each video without watermarks which they show in-app. They don’t let you download it, but external tools can generally help with that. What Loops could do is default to a watermarked version, but allow downloading original as well. This way, person sharing the video can decide whether they want to help promote Loops or not.
¹ – as a humanity; I’m not affiliated with Loops in any way
2) More verbose, harder to read, and less well organized than Wikipedia.
Pick a non-political topic and compare the Wikipedia page to the Grokipedia page. It's not even close.
If Grokipedia ever closes the #2 gap, then we might start to see a non-negligible number of users ignoring #1. At present, only the most easily offended political snowflakes would willingly inflict Grokipedia on themselves.
It doesn't matter whether people decide to use it, existing AI tools already do. I've seen Grokipedia listed as a source in ChatGPT responses. Potentially any AI query can now be poisoned by Musks Mecha-Hitler.
Sure, they could. But will they, especially if Musk uses leverage to prevent them from filtering them out?
Unless all big AI providers do this, the people around us will start to get poisoned by Musks thoughts. They haven't done it so far, so I don't see a reason for them to do it in the future.
I personally wouldn't want police to have access to Flock's data unless they have a warrant to follow the movements of a specific individual. If private organizations and citizens had at-will access to this kind of data it would be worse than a panopticon. It'd be a prison where every inmate is under constant surveillance, not just by guards, but by other inmates. There would be criminals using this data to track down and harass judges. Burglers using it to find empty homes. Rapists using it to track down victims. You name it.
Surveillance systems are, normally, a trade-off between privacy and safety. You lose one but gain the other. The reason Flock cameras are being torn down now is because they take away privacy while simultaneously reducing safety.
This will be so in some cases, but there are extra steps in others.
e.g. In a different path, 1 and 2 are the same, but things then diverge.
3) To recoup some of those tariff costs, the company sells the rights to any potential future tariff refunds. They recoup a portion of what they paid immediately but hand away the right to a full refund to another party, such as Cantor Fitzgerald. The seller might use this to reduce prices for their customers, but probably won't. They'll set prices according to what the market will support.
4) US government will refund all/most of that tax back to companies, like Cantor Fitzgerald, that bought the rights to tariff refunds.
5) Seller doesn't get any extra money back, so there's no money to refund to consumers.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Cantor Fitzgerald, while just one of the companies doing this, was formerly headed by Howard Lutnick and is currently owned and operated by his sons.
Sure. My point is strictly say what you want to mean.
If you believe this is bad for society then say "I can't see how allowing others to profit from your tax refund is good" and not "How is this not reverse Byzantine tax farming?".
You're right, I'm wrong, sorry, I was checking my memory on Wikipedia [1] which opens the section of his bio "Secretary of Commerce" with the line "Following the 2024 presidential election, Lutnick was being considered as secretary of the treasury." and I swapped the two roles.
While a smaller role, this is a worse conflict of interest as the secretary of commerce is directly responsible for recommending tarriff actions to the President.
To the extent this is true, the entire thing could literally be a grift (I'm not saying Trump is smart enough to come up with this, just that people around him are, and he's grifty enough to go along with it):
1. Trump enacts the tariff, despite knowing it will be struck down.
2. The tariff extracts hundreds of billions from the economy.
3. Finance firms buy the potential refund for pennies on the dollar, knowing that Trump has no plan to defend the tariff.
4. The Supreme Court strikes down the tariff, as planned.
5. The finance firms profit on the refunds.
6. We are all poorer, Trump's cronies are richer.
Trump has been obsessed with tariffs for decades. I fully believe he thought this was a great idea. Lutnick, on the other hand, quite obviously forsaw this eventuality (as did anyone who understands how power actually flows in the United States) and encouraged it while preparing to profit massively himself. It's an obvious play, good on him for getting away with it. It's clear at this point that this administration has utterly collapsed the idea of the rule of law, though. 15 years ago this would have been a scandal that would have led to firings and possibly impeachment
The AI industry is completely unlike an arcade in that arcade machines weren't run at a loss while trying to lock-in users and drive all the other machines out of business. Arcade owners expected the machines they bought to start paying for themselves from the get-go.
P.S. This article felt like it was written by an AI, or just really needs to be edited for redundancy.
Thanks for reading it. The arcade metaphor is not about business models but about the pattern of optimizing for spectacle over durability. The point is that many AI products behave like arcade machines in the sense that they are impressive in isolation but collapse when they have to deal with state, dependencies, or long running tasks.
On the redundancy point, I appreciate the feedback. The piece is part of a larger series where I intentionally revisit the same idea from different angles to make the underlying pattern clear.
There's some debate over the type of elephant Hannibal's forces used. They were likely not the African elephants we know today, but North African elephants[1]. This was a physically smaller subspecies that was later extirpated by the Romans. Perhaps analysis of the bone in this story will help settle the debate.
It's also worth noting that, despite the insane effort it must have taken to get elephants over the alps, all but one of Hannibal's elephants died during the first winter in Italy. They made for a great story and were a propaganda coup for the Carthaginians, but didn't wind up making much of a military impact. They were only present for the first couple of battles Hannibal fought.
Hannibal knew the elephants would have minimal impact by themselves, they were mainly an instrument of shock and awe and served their purpose well.
For centuries, Romans had grabbed land and defeated enemies mostly by projecting immense power and using shock and awe tactics. Hannibal of course learnt a lot about Roman tactics from his father, Hamilcar, and the “treachery” with which Rome had taken Sicily off Carthaginians. But he also grew up in Spain, in close proximity to Romans, and studied them and their methods for years.
He knew he needed to have an instrument of shock and awe himself, something the Romans had never seen before, and elephants were perfect for that.
For those interested, the Rest is History podcast did a 4 series on Hannibal last year which is highly engaging and informative
Tech companies should be opposing Trump's policy and, instead, beg the Trump administration to grant meaningful concessions to countries that have rightfully lost trust in American companies. Bullying tactics will only intensify the loss of trust and fuel the push to adopt alternatives.
reply