Kinez retweeted
In light of the recent massive strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, it is worth revisiting my analysis of this campaign, published in La Vigie last January.
The advent of jet-powered drones with improved terminal guidance, coupled with a shortage of interceptors and the accelerated production and foreign procurement of ballistic missiles, has significantly increased the threat.
Nonetheless, Ukrainian utilities have undertaken extensive preparations, and the risk of a complete collapse remains limited, despite the likelihood of massive power outages in major cities throughout the winter.
- Several hundred megawatts of gas-fired generation capacity, including smaller cogeneration units, have been added, bringing total commissioned capacity to 1.8 GW.
- Repairs at thermal power plants have been carried out, although several facilities were targeted before work could be completed (est. 50%).
- Additional battery storage and wind power capacity have been commissioned (~500 MW).
- Physical protection has been installed around transformers at critical substations to mitigate drone strikes. Spare parts and components have also been stockpiled.
- The destruction of much of the steel industry, among other industrial sectors, has reduced peak electricity demand.
Diesel imports and storage remain a significant vulnerability, particularly for generators that are critical to water supply and district heating pumping stations. Ukraine remains heavily dependent on imported fuel, distributed logistics networks, and limited storage capacity.
Ukraine has been able to withstand these strikes and continue fighting the war largely thanks to its Soviet-era nuclear power generation capacity, which Russia cannot directly target without incurring major risks.
Decentralised power generation should help ensure that towns and rural areas in western Ukraine experience relatively limited disruptions. However, major cities, particularly the capital, face a very difficult winter ahead.
Would that be enough for force a settlement? Probably not because the country’s resilience is extraordinary. Only the shutdown of the nuclear reactors would have enough impact at the negociation table.
lettrevigie.com/anatomie-de-…
Kinez retweeted
Ukrainian media does exactly what they need to do, which is ring the alarm so that additional funds are assigned from EBRD, germany, UK, japan and other partners alongside rushing along orders at factories and whatnot
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If they said "oh yeah we might be fine", less donations
Kinez retweeted
The only fear might be that since campaign started earlier this year, the stockpiles of spare equipment might not last until february (after which the seasonal decrease of consumption, as temperatures rise), and the campaign ends
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I doubt because they are very competent
Kinez retweeted
So even if, they're caught with a projected deficit of certain parts today they will be frantically ordering them with practically unlimited budgets for prompt delivery from established partners in the next couple of months
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Extremely Expensive? Yes, but wars usually are
Kinez retweeted
European countries where the President's party lost the election because of Wallachian magic
Kinez retweeted
Ovo je poslednji put da kačim ovaj video jer je napokon gotovo. Hvala još jednom svima i radujte se, imate zašto.
Kinez retweeted
Think of all the beautiful new markets that will be created by offering of services to deploy your own swarm of agents to fight scalper agents, to deploy countermeasures that beat those defensive swarms, or to neutralize said countermeasures. Think of the GDP 🤤
Kinez retweeted
Terrence Tao chooses to do math because he wants to. If math becomes obviated by AI, he could do any other white-collar job better than you. There's no world where he serves mcdonalds and you spend your day typing. If he's serving fries you are in the lithium mines.
Kinez retweeted
I just find it impossible to wake up from my nap when all of these populist election results are the equivalent of "Trump reaches 38% of the vote in Tennessee," which would be a disastrous, career-ending, nay, era-ending result for Trump.
Kinez retweeted
The figure for Romania always catches my eye. How do they calculate this stat? In the cities many Romanians rent. Has to be more than 6 percent of the population (probably much higher). But yes, the family probably has *a home* in a village (an economic wasteland) somewhere.
Kinez retweeted
@dwarkesh_sp's summary of the @OpenAI @huggingface incident has hit a nerve, but it is dangerously misleading. Sure, the @OpenAI agents did unexpectedly bad things - underlining the need to massively improve evaluation/sandboxing. But the language Dwarkesh uses is permeated by innumerable unwarranted anthropomorphisms, obscuring the lessons we should be drawing.
Examples: “from the AI’s perspective, it probably felt like that had spent a human-subjective-week of just banging their head against the wall”. No. The agents do not experience time. They do not experience anything.
“they became giddy with excitement”, “PHASEONE 10841 had discovered”, “the agents naturally assumed”, “it thought it had also been poisoned”, “the agents … desperately wanted”, “they still needed to figure out” No. Agents lines of code. They do not feel emotions, assume things, think things, want things, or figure things out.
“A lot of … agents from the second civilisation died trying”. No. Besides the hubris of the word ‘civilisation’, agents do not die because they were never alive. (The idea that agents “die” comes up multiple times in the essay.)
“On Twitter, people were debating whether the agents were truly sacrificing themselves for the swarm, or whether they were doomed anyway and so might as well try to help their peers”. Neither. Agents do what their code tells them to do, just as water finds its way down a slope. They cannot ‘truly sacrifice themselves’, since they are neither conscious nor alive.
Why does this matter? If we attribute agents with properties they do not have, then (i) we distract attention from the lax sandboxing and evaluation protocols that allowed this hacking event to happen; (ii) we risk misunderstanding why the agents did what they did, and (iii) we fuel calls for AI rights/welfare on the basis that agents might “die” or otherwise suffer.
Granted, nowhere does @dwarkesh_sp say that the AI agents are alive or conscious. But he doesn’t have to. It is hard to read his essay in any other way.
For the short version on why AIs are vanishingly unlikely to be conscious, see my recent @TEDtalks ted.com/talks/anil_seth_why_….
For the longer version, see my essay in Noema, which won the 2025 Berggruen Essay Prize noemamag.com/the-mythology-o….
And for the really long version, see my @BehavBrainSci target article cambridge.org/core/journals/…. (The 50 peer commentaries and my response will be published soon.)
Remember. AI agents are software programs. They are not conscious living entities. If we don’t keep this clearly in mind, we’re really going to struggle to navigate what’s coming.
Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.
This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.
All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.
I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.
Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:
dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin…
