I'm spending fair amount of money on helping teachers and professors in Serbia who had their pay reduced to to absurdity because they are supporting their students in demands for justice in the case of Novi Sad canopy collapse[0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novi_Sad_railway_station_can...

It's relevant from an engineering perspective. They have a way to develop a new model in months now.

I've stopped using search engines actively 18 months ago. My first stop is an LLM. Once I understand what I actually need, I do a web search to go to the product/tool website. I do this not because LLMs are that good but because web search result quality went way down in the same period.

One interesting trend that I like is that I started using local LLMs way more in the last couple of months. They are good enough that I was able to cancel my personal ChatGPT subscription. Still using ChatGPT on the work machines since the company is paying it.

This happened during 15 minutes of silence for 15 persons that died in the collapse. Everyone was silent and mourning.

That's a blatant lie. We are protesting because 15 people died in Novi Sad because of corruption, 4 months ago. We want justice.

That's exactly what I'm saying. These protests aren't what the OP makes them out to be, completely orthogonal to Russia.

If there's potential military use and you don't build it, you risk your adversary doing that.

If life is only hedonism to you, then sure. It would be a waste.

"Only" is doing a lot of work there. Life is "only" hedonism for billionaires too--it's just that the things they enjoy are all about controlling other people.

On a long-enough scale, this planet will die anyways. Let's first try to expand life and unlock the secrets of the Universe, as much as possible.

At this point in time the humanity has nothing to offer to any other intelligence (if there is any) out there, nor it doesn't have a need itself to go outside of its own planet, and the big mess that it made out of it. It's akin of letting a toddler walk out of the door and roam into a busy street merely for a satisfaction of its curiousity. What is more likely to happen is that the valuable resources that we still have will be gone (it won't take long, as consumption is growing at exponential rate), without ability to recover - a one way ticket to stone age. It's nice to dream and look at the stars, but can we please sort the shit here first?

Chernozem.

Would starvation be a problem? Don't most countries have food reserves for these cases? At least enough food for one season?

We didn't have toilet paper because some people freaked out, you think there's a maintained warehouse of perishable supplies? Or just a big vault of cans somewhere?

No, nations do not have the means to feed their constituents in a nation ending disaster. It's easy to move food from Florida to California in a state sized crises, but the logistics of maintaining a just in case food supply for hundreds of millions distributed around the country? It's a safer bet to assume you'd die in the disaster than to convince people to plan for the future.

Ha ha ha ha ha where is the profit in that?

Having a supply of something that is suddenly supply constrained is pretty much a literal definition of how to make a profit. No need for a ??? step on that one. Of course you will take a storage cost loss for potentially thousands of years first.

Leftist radical.