news

Iran is now locked from Russia by land from Armenia

is this actually true or influential? train routes over the caucauses (which go thru NATO-aligned georgia??) don't seem the most efficient way to transit goods to Iran. there is a sea that does this better.

The Caspian sea can now house NATO assests

this has nothing to do with the corridor and in it's maximal ideal is anaemic. yeah NATO will suddenly dominate an inland sea bordered by 80% Russian allies. they can't put a boat in the caspian sea unless it is built by azerbaijan. the azeri are not going to independently start a blockade on russian shipping on the caspian. they don't want a russian division having brunch in Baku.

Hungary will probably block them entering NATO too lol. someone needs to invent a hungary spelling with ks in it so i can express how everything they do is white supremacist

the CSTO and BRI will persevere, because they were not hinged upon a tiny territorial link. Chinese shipping to Russia obviously doesn't go thru Armenia, the CSTO all have direct links to Russia not 'neutered' by Armenia.

Strictly speaking, all these things already came to pass and this merely formalizes what was already the de facto situation on the ground. IIRC, some air assets transited through Armenian airspace into Azerbaijan during the attack on Iran in June.

As for the BRI, China was already presented with the fait accompli of having the West Asian BRI route locked out when Syria fell in December. The aim had been to establish a corridor from Iran to Iraq to Syria to the Mediterranean, bypassing NATO Turkey and its karma houdini Sultan-wannabe leadership. This has been squashed and now the only option is the Azerbaijan/Turkey route; the so-called "Middle Corridor" that all the Western geopolitics commentators have been drooling over (media like Foreign Affairs, The Economist, The Diplomat, etc. all have been openly talking about this).

As already seen with Azerbaijan, Turkey gets to parasitize the BRI by co-opting the trade infrastructure China builds to extend its influence (and Turanist fantasies) towards its "Turkic brethren" across the Caspian, which it incidentally had never been able to penetrate historically even under the Ottomans, due to Tsarist Russian and British counter-influence, so this is genuinely quite the coup for Erdogan. The West gets to tag along and so the real goal here for all co-conspirators is Central Asia, which the West had been locked out of since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Having been shut out, the West and Turkey are priming to re-enter through the very road that China will be "trapped" into building for them via the "Middle Corridor."

All this had been previously irrelevant because China plainly had been more interested in rebuilding war-torn Iraq and Syria as its West Asian BRI route rather than going through a direction that Western think tanks were publicly gloating about, but now the choice has been taken out of their hands because that direction has now been intentionally set up to be the only "viable" option. Some responses I encountered back in December were to scoff at the notion that the West's (and Turkey's) flipping of "insignificant Assadist Syria" could in any way detrimentally affect the "great anti-imperialist keikaku" but I think it's becoming evident that the fall of Syria really is an immensely consequential paradigm shift in the region.

Fuck armenia

[obligatory sarah palin joke]

Putin agreed to meet in American territory? Is he stupid

Jesus Christ that is so much internal politicking bullshit. Please, just learn about democratic centralism.

When will vooters learn that voting is the least important part of democratic life?

I hate digital voting, I would always rather organise a ballot committee and count votes by hand during elections, it's especially frustraiting when voting in a meeting, we're all already here, lets just vote

As someone who's worked in technology for nearly decades, I'm always horrified by the idea of digital-only voting

Anywhere I can keep up to date on this stuff?

its so mid and the context window is shit too unless you pay $200/m. Qwen and Deepseek's () open weight models have longer context windows and is cheap.

Lmao, the free money is drying up for AI companies and they’re enshittifying hard. From the massive rate limiting on Claude’s APIs, to this - the free ride is over, and the largest capital expenditure in the history of tech is producing fuck all to show for it.

As ever, Ed Zitron has been great on this:

In the event that they are representative of the greater picture of Anthropic’s customer base, this company is wilfully burning 200% to 3000% of each Pro or Max customer that interacts with Claude Code, and in each price point’s case I have found repeated evidence that customers are allowed to burn their entire monthly payment in compute within, at best, eight days, with some cases involving customers on a $200-a-month subscription burning as much as $10,000 worth of compute.

…

I am, however, unsure what restrictions Anthropic could make that would ease the burden on its infrastructure without also hemorrhaging users. I am deadly serious when I say that almost any interaction with Claude Code loses Anthropic money, and anyone using it for even a few hours a day is guaranteed to burn through the majority of their subscription revenue in a couple of days.

This is not a sustainable business model, but also suggests that the violent and sudden changes to products like Lovable, Replit and Cursor are indicative of the real economics of these models, and the likely future form of products offered by OpenAI and Anthropic themselves — opaque rate limits, random service outages, constant demands to upgrade and unhappy customers churning every hour.

Edit: just played with it, the AGI is here folks

The ai gf/bf subs are losing their shit.