The US military is quite weak compared to other developed nations. They don't have a large infantry, most of their modern warfighting vehicles are fragile and ridiculously expensive, the manufacturing base is tiny. They have a history of losing conflicts. The military is also corrupt, which leads to loss of morale and subversion. Since they're lead by politicians, they don't have the will to complete conflicts in an efficient way.
They're set up to fight brief invasions of weak countries, or thermonuclear war with other nuclear powers. They can't fight any other kind of war; guerrilla war, naval war, ground war. Their intelligence apparatus is weak too, as is their cyber capabilities. As a contrast, Israel, a tiny nation, is far more effective at intelligence and warfare on multiple fronts. They also have a stronger will and purpose, and have the support of their nation to commit war crimes and genocide.
The American military is the richest military in the world, but not remotely the strongest. They need more manufacturing, stronger and cheaper weapons/vehicles, a larger infantry, and better intelligence/counterintelligence/cyber. They can't do that with the current military industrial complex.
This comment must be a joke. It is not even remotely debatable that the US has the strongest military in the world.
Outside of nuclear MAD, if the US were in a total war scenario against any other country in the world, the US would win every time with the sole exception on maybe China.
I used to be vehemently opposed to shorts, but with recommendations disabled it is tolerable, because only shorts from people I subscribe to are in there.
The only reason I really watch shorts is because Vsauce started using them a lot, and his content is definitely worth a watch every time in any format.
Disabled recommendations. Disabled comments (firefox plugin). Use subscriptions page as the homepage (firefox plugin). Only subscribe to channels that interest me (and aren't annoying like that).
In all my years of writing tools for other devs, dog fooding is the really the best way to develop IMO. The annoying bugs get squashed out because I get frustrated with it in my flow.
Iterating on a MCP tool while having Claude try to use it has been a really great way of getting it to work how others are going to use it coming in blind.
Yes it's buggy as hell, but as someone echoed earlier if the tool works most of the time, a lot of people don't care. Moving fast and breaking things is the way in an arms race.
Not just tools for devs, this is true in a lot of cases.
I used to work at Fortinet and every now and then we'd get an e-mail from information services letting us know that they would be installing a dev build of FortiOS on our internal (production) corporate network.
In cases where we needed more debug logging from a feature or where we had a fix we had to test on a live network, and if we didn't want to ship a test firmware to some huge client and say 'here, see if this bricks your network or not', they would hand it off to our IT team and we'd install it on our own network to run. After all, if you're not confident enough to run it how can you be confident enough to ask your customers to run it?
Now if they could just get the hang of not hard-coding admin credentials into the software they'd have a lot to brag about!
> Personally, I've stopped subscribing to Spotify, YT music, etc because the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream music or whatever lofi playlist.
I occasionally use Suno to re-imagine songs in different keys, tempos, and genres, and sample them. Most of the output from Suno is slop, but occasionally has a few good bits you can sample, chop up, re-pitch, and create something totally new from, which also has the added benefit of being unrecognizable to rights algorithms and lawyers from major labels.
It's a neat tool for genuine creators, and a crutch for people interested in slop.
Modern music has done this to itself. When the human product is already pure corporate slop, it's not hard for AI to compete.
Hopefully AI outcompeting humans at slop sparks a renaissance of humans creating truly beautiful human artwork. And if it doesn't, then was anything of value truly lost?
How much of your super-awesome bandcamp music is topping charts, selling millions, packing mega stadiums, and is penetrating the zeitgeist so deeply that people around the world are addicted to it?
Maybe, just maybe, I'm not talking about "my" music tastes, but offering commentary on the state of music at a global scale. Weird that this point was so hard to follow!
So true. AI music gens like Suno can't do Paul Shapera works even remotely, but can recreate a lot of pop or EDM music very faithfully. There's just no distance to close, it's already mainstreamly bad.
> Modern music has done this to itself. When the human product is already pure corporate slop, it's not hard for AI to compete.
What are you talking about? There’s lots of modern music that’s not corporate slop and that’s absolutely great. Never in history was access to great music as easy as it is now.
I'm talking about modern music. Just because a couple of dweebs on hackernews have "totally amazing underground music" doesn't mean the overall zeitgeist agrees. Regardless of your esoteric music tastes, music by sales and music by charting tells a very different story. And that story is one of replaceable slop.
So find music you like that isn't modern corporate slop. My music right now consists mainly of indie stuff I've found on youtube and daft punk. No plagiarism machine needed, just human-made music
"No plagiarism machine needed, just human-made music"
From wikipedia: Many Daft Punk songs feature vocals processed with effects and vocoders including Auto-Tune, a Roland SVC-350 and the Digitech Vocalist. Bangalter said: "A lot of people complain about musicians using Auto-Tune. It reminds me of the late '70s when musicians in France tried to ban the synthesiser. They said it was taking jobs away from musicians. What they didn't see was that you could use those tools in a new way instead of just for replacing the instruments that came before. People are often afraid of things that sound new."
Did Daft Punk put in a lot of effort to remix existing sounds to make their own music? Yes. Did they type "pls make french house electronic music number 1 chart" into a text box? No. Did they also credit original authors? Yes. I've not gone through their whole library, but for example, Edwin Birdsong has songwriting credit for harder, better, faster, stronger
There's this fallacy with AI generation that people think that all you have to do is type "i lik musik pls remake favrite song but better" and you get amazing results.
This is patently untrue.
It's like how if a junior engineer and a principal engineer use claude opus 4.6 they get radically different results. The junior doesn't have the taste or knowledge to know good from bad so the AI oversteers and slop is made. The principal has finely tuned sense of taste and deep knowledge, so they aggressively steer the AI at every step. This is also true in other AI domains.
To be absolutely clear: you can't make good AI music. Try all you want. Try the prompt you just wrote. Show and tell. It's not something you're going to be able to do.
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