On the side of communists, of course

Compare here. Pretty straightforward reverse-engineer, looks like.

This can actually work better than car autonomy. Based on their prior record, expect something real in maybe 4 years.

Apparently the hoo haas went waste_the_motherfuckers.mp4 on the crowds after the the Abbey Gate bombing. Fitting, given the reaper drone strike in response mostly killed kids. That said, the army is finally out of there, and it's just the CIA stay-behinds the Taliban has to mop up now.

BONUS: Pentagram knew the attack would happen hours before it did and "just let it happen."

The history is correct, but the forward-going conclusion and hopefulness was not. The council gave up on white supremacy in favor of thorough corruption. While the ideology has changed, the Good Ole Boy network is still the operational principle. Houston works much the same way, right down to the history.

Was as much of a disaster as you would expect.

Attacking Daesh Khorasan, which is likely just pashtun tribes that don't play ball.

Not shocking, they know the only serious opposition to the Israelis comes from the Jewish left in America.

Interesting that they were weak enough to get clapped. What comes next will be interesting to say the least.

This is, by the way, the dirty secret of the machine learning movement: almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what humans did while following a very dumb heuristic. There's no magic here. If you use ML to teach a computer how to sort through resumes, it will recommend you interview people with male, white-sounding names, because it turns out that's what your HR department already does. If you ask it what video a person like you wants to see next, it will recommend some political propaganda crap, because 50% of the time 90% of the people do watch that next, because they can't help themselves, and that's a pretty good success rate.

Pretty much. AI is just a mirror, and the twerps just don't like what they see.

The brilliant bit here is that each of the trackers has a bit of data about you, but not all of it, because not every tracker is on every web site. But on the other hand, cross-referencing individuals between trackers is kinda hard, because none of them wants to give away their secret sauce. So each ad seller tries their best to cross-reference the data from all the tracker data they buy, but it mostly doesn't work. Let's say there are 25 trackers each tracking a million users, probably with a ton of overlap. In a sane world we'd guess that there are, at most, a few million distinct users. But in an insane world where you can't prove if there's an overlap, it could be as many as 25 million distinct users! The more tracker data your ad network buys, the more information you have! Probably! And that means better targeting! Maybe! And so you should buy ads from our network instead of the other network with less data! I guess!

None of this works. They are still trying to sell me car insurance for my subway ride.

Recommendation engines are highly context dependent. I don't read news with the idea I'm gonna buy shit. I do watch videos with the idea I may watch more.

When I heard this was also when I learned the word "satisficing," which essentially means searching through sludge not for the best option, but for a good enough option. Nowadays Netflix isn't about finding the best movie, it's about satisficing. If it has the choice between an award-winning movie that you 80% might like or 20% might hate, and a mainstream movie that's 0% special but you 99% won't hate, it will recommend the second one every time. Outliers are bad for business.

Yet again reiterating that AI can't do better than recommend what we already empirically are shown to like. It's such a mirror we don't realize it later in the same article.

Make it feel like Taylorism by having missions other than making money by doing less work or making better products

under the influence of captured parties and the military’s ubiquitous and extravagantly funded public relations apparatus, America has itself redefined the “nature of war.” Armed conflict has gone from being an occasional unpleasant political necessity to the core product line of the American corporation. Wars are what we make, and like blue jeans or Louisville Sluggers, we build them to last, with Afghanistan the prime example.

Whooooa, like I-Raq! Built Ford Tough

Taibbi rightly has a moment of forbidden noticing about the matter.

Well, that's one way to try to keep the USA "in theatre"

Flushed right down the commode. Just think how much good that could have done in the form of taxes not needing to be paid.

Thots off death watch

Just like in Iraq, US bungling continues to provide endless moral authority to fellows like Nasrallah. This will prove even more fatal to the US agenda than the (now) very real possibility of an Iran friendly nation existing between Iran and Pakistan. I don't think the USA realizes how quickly the rest of the Middle East might realize that it is the right time to kick out the Americans and their quisling regimes, much like the Afghanis did. Saudi and Israel should probably cease their warmongering activities and focus on diplomacy.

The next NATO move is likely to side with the Taliban in an attempt to make a muja menace against china (Uyghurs) and Russia (Uzbeks).

Quickly building ties with their neighbors and deflecting NATO excuses for "humanitarian intervention".

As always excellent work by Scott Horton

Twenty years. All that exists of this century. As I have written elsewhere, the war was a total failure, by any measure, perhaps the great failure of our age, the nexus of all the malignant forces precipitating American decline—End of History delusions, failed leadership, the ascendant Human Rights NGO complex, public-private self-dealing—venal, arrogant, brain-dead, sclerotic, unaccountable in every aspect. We will likely learn nothing from this catastrophe. Our leadership class will not be chastened by it. They will not reconsider their magical thinking. They will simply redirect it elsewhere. Probably at home. There is already talk of forgetting the terrorists in Afghanistan so we can fight the terrorists on our own soil.

In case there is any doubt, they are referring to you and me. They are referring to anyone who doubts their mandate to rule over us. What comes next will likely be far worse than what preceded it, if equally deranged. And though the architects of this failed war might not take any lessons from Afghanistan, we can. The Pashtun persevered because they had the will to do so. Because they had God on their side.

Hold the line. Call their bluff. They will blink first. The weaker hand always does.

Great essay by a veteran. In'shallah the fall of the capital will be the next thing the empire brings home.

Interesting implications for the SPARC reactor.