Unsurprisingly, defenders of dictatorships always have to resort to whataboutism to defend the indefensible.

As per usual, this whataboutism is lazy and inaccurate as well.

The military industrial complex is currently also doing what it's supposed to be doing by helping defend Ukraine and thereby Europe. There are two sides to this coin. One could also argue that it makes a lot of sense for the United States to help defend the only democracy in the Middle East, not just for strategic reasons.

Russia is also supporting Hamas. Both wars are part of a global conflict already.

My rule would be simple: The only ships allowed to land are those crewed by a captain who can pronounce this accent-free. Every one else gets acquainted with the business end of the Planetenverteidigungskanone.

Even first gen ones from 2015 are still being used. I don't think these die all that often. They will be obsolete at some point, but even this takes far longer than with other tech. As long as you make sure it doesn't overheat, it should last for a while longer.

Yup, they are one of the most inhuman regimes on the planet, right up there with the likes of China and North Korea: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/08/21/they-fired-us-rain/saudi-arabian-mass-killings-ethiopian-migrants-yemen-saudi

Nope, these mass death events are a regular occurrence due to the Saudi government's incompetence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_during_the_Hajj

You can not be serious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_during_the_Hajj

To illustrate your point, my old GPU, a GTX 1080 from 2016 (basically ancient history - Obama was still president back then) remains a very useful for ML-applications today - and this isn't even their oldest card that is still relevant for AI. This card was never meant for this, but thanks to Nvidia investing into CUDA and CUDA being useful for all sorts of non-gaming applications, the API became a natural first choice when ML tools that run on consumer hardware started to get developed.

My current GPU, an RTX 2080, is just two years younger and yet it's so powerful (for everything I throw at it, including ML) that I won't have to upgrade it for years to come.

I mean, one of the core ideas behind these things is that these are highly capable devices that are receiving updates for several times as long as normal tech, so you can just keep using them for ages.

Apart from the very latest codecs, what else should they do that they aren't already doing?

Because that's where the audience is. Peertube is deader than the lemmyverse. You are essentially making the silly "but yet you choose to live in society" argument.

It could be regulated into oblivion, to the point that any commercial use of it (and even non-commercial publication of AI generated material) becomes a massive legal liability, despite the fact that AI tools like Stable Diffusion can not be taken away. It's not entirely unlikely that some countries will try to do this in the future, especially places with strong privacy and IP laws as well as equally strong laws protecting workers. Germany and France come to mind, which together could push the EU to come down hard on large AI services in particular. This could make the recently adopted EU AI Act look harmless by comparison.

If you're trying to use whataboutism in order to defend a dictatorship, at least put some semblance of effort into it.

And yes, even under Trump, the US did much, much better. It's not even a competition, unless you're believing in official Chinese numbers.

I'm sorry, but have you been living under a rock in recent years? Have you totally missed the ramp up in belligerent Chinese propaganda and their military buildup?

So many of these autocratic hellholes are using the same methods at a national and international scale as domestic abusers.

China is a regional power with nuclear capabilites, not a superpower. They lack both the conventional force projection and soft power capabilities of an actual superpower - and what little soft power China has ever had (which has always been less than that of several individual European nations on their own) has been decimated by Xi's highly destructive "wolf warrior diplomacy".

I also disagree with the claim that any war with China would immediately spark WW3. Neither Beijing nor Washington have an interest in this and for as irrational and delusional as Xi is, he's not stupid enough to strike US mainland; if he ever made that suggestion, I'm sure that an army of far more intelligent advisors immediately tried to dissuade him from that using gentle enough language in order to not upset the emperor. You don't need to be a genius to figure out that a second Pearl Harbor would, even in this day and age, unite Democrats and Republicans against China. No amount of buying senators and riling up young voters through TikTok could counteract this.

I'm pretty certain - based on how similar China's buildup and propaganda is to what Russia did in the years before invading Ukraine - that the Asian dictatorship is going to start a war over Taiwan in the coming years, but they would struggle enough with combating Taiwan alone, conducting the most challenging naval landing using armed forces that haven't fought in any serious war (apart from a small regional conflict with Vietnam) since the early 1950s. They could have the most advanced weaponry in the world (which they clearly don't) and the lack of institutional experience would still put them at a massive disadvantage against the sole superpower on the planet. For as many issues as the US has a country and as a society, they are currently defeating what was once believed to be the "second army in the world" using Ukrainian soldiers and largely obsolete and/or expired 1970s to 1990s weaponry using no more than 5% of their military expenditure (and even that figure is misleading, since most weapons sent over were already considered worthless to them). China, which has been commonly ranked below Russia in terms of capabilities (remember Russian units struggling with poor quality Chinese tires in Ukraine or are currently embarrassing themselves with running head-first into Ukrainian positions on Chinese golf carts?) would face current American equipment and (sorry Ukrainians) far better trained American soldiers, far more competent American command in a far more challenging environment against a nation that built up a military strong enough to fight and win several wars at the scale of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan at the same time - that's what all those expensive carrier groups are for.

This would be a ridiculously uneven fight.

They might be able to score some cheap hits in the initial chaos (which would only rile up the American voting public as a few of their boys come home in coffins), but have no chance of maintaining that momentum. My guess is that a war against China would result in more American casualties than the war against Iraq, but far less than Vietnam. Chinese and Taiwanese casualties (especially civilian ones in case of the latter) would be horrific though, with potentially destabilizing effects for mainland China as the number of bodies become impossible to hide.

In previous discussions of this topic, there's always someone who dropped the impressive tonnage of the Communist Party's navy, which ignores that most are "coast guard" (i.e. vessels built for range, solely for the purpose of harassing fishing boats thousands of kilometers away, which lack weaponry and systems that would allow them to do anything more than look scary) would be near useless in an actual shooting war against a non-third-world military. That's on top of countless issues inherent to the Chinese system, like enormous corruption (remember when it came out that fuel for ICBMs had been sold and swapped out for water?) and party-led governance that is entirely based on obedience and loyalty instead of competency, even more so than before since Xi took power. Nearly all issues that Russia is still experiencing in Ukraine would also hamper China against Taiwan, except that they would have to cross a giant moat instead of just rolling over the border. No amount of manufacturing capabilities (which would at least partially collapse without foreign help in case of a war) can help them with this.

There would be a massive global recession, you're right on that (it would hit China the hardest right after Taiwan though, especially in the long run), and the danger of this war escalating into a nuclear one still exists, but based on everything I've read on this topic, it's far from certain this would "immediately spark" a nuclear Holocaust. I'm just some random guy on the Internet though, so it's your choice whether you take my word on it or not. I hope I've made my point clear.

Got any more baseless conspiracy theories for us? The only party in this conflict that wants another war is China.

China isn't ready for any random event that might happen today, like for example another epidemic, given the baffling show of incompetence that was Xi's and his government's reaction to COVID-19.

Given how they are also messing up the relatively new three-child policy and the economic challenges the country is currently experiencing, one does not have to worry about any baby boom any time soon.

Funny you mention that. Israeli brain surgeons saved Yahya Sinwar's life by removing a tumor when he was imprisoned in Israel for torture and murder of several Palestinians and Israelis. He "thanked" the lead surgeon by having his grandson abducted on October 7.

What's far more disgusting is stalking me after I called you out.