You are not living in Europe, right? Because while I agree that China is a problem, the USA is a much, much bigger problem for Europeans than China is right now. It's mostly the USA that wants to depict China as the main problem when in reality the USA behaves in a hugely aggressive colonial manner. Trump just makes this more obvious, but that has been the case way before Trump already.
Please speak for yourself. Not everyone in Europe thinks US is bigger problem than China. For many China is far bigger geopolitical threat since they openly support Russia in its current war.
It does actually matter that the US president is continually deriding Europe and making weird threats in English language social media where we can see it, while the Chinese leadership is politely selling us discounted cars.
(When is the first war going to be started purely downstream of social media beef? Was it arguably the Iran war?)
Well, yes, that's a huge structural problem in many American cities. When people perceive the police as more of a threat than crime, the situation deteriorates. Somehow "make the police trustworthy" isn't considered an option.
In this metaphor the police are corrupt, running a protection racket, and might get drunk and shoot you while your dealer is in the mafia. The mafia link might be a problem at some point but the person with the badge and the gun is a problem right now.
My hope as an American is that China's growing power will bring Europe and the US closer together.
It's true that MAGA craziness has pushed Europe aways from us. But, ironically, Europe increasing defense spending and standing up an independent military machine will actually make some MAGA people like Europe more.
But either way, the best thing for both the US and Europe is to figure out a way to reconcile. The alternative is a Europe-China alliance (which would be bad for Europe) or a US-China alliance (which would be horrific for Europe).
As a European that lives 200km from the Russian border it seems the USA has been supporting Russia in its current war a lot more than China.
Consider these points:
- US withdrawing it's "Intel support" just as Russia started a major offensive last year.
- US starting the war on Iran clearly to help their pal Putin on oil prices, now they try to use Ukraine as a scapegoat for "attacking Russian oil export infrastructure"
- Another "side effect" of war in Iran. No more patriots or modern weapons for any country that ordered them from the USA in recent years and was expecting deliveries just about now.
- US committing actual act of war (threatening force has been considered an act of war for centuries) against the EU by talking about invading Greenland (most certainly if Russia attacked Estonia US would try their luck with Greenland on same day, does it remind you anything from history?)
- US essentially waging an economic war on the rest of NATO.
- US companies with full support of the state trying to deny computing hardware to the rest of the world in hope they manage to monopolise compute capability using AI as cover (yes China is a real ally in this).
And much more.
Yes, the US is a much higher threat to the EU than China now.
US motives are currently inscrutable, but the US is sending military hardware to Ukraine, whereas China is sending dual-use hardware to Russia. You can see an itemised list of US contributions at the following link. It's not nothing.
Overall I agree with you, but I'd be wary of taking these numbers at face value. For instance, $20b of America's $65b aid contribution comes from a loan that's repaid by selling off sanctioned Russian assets. Many of the weapon systems sent over are decades old, but valued at the price the US paid for it in the 1980s/1990s.
Side-by-side with, for example, itemized Israeli aid, it's pretty clear which conflict the US is putting on the back-burner.
> it seems the USA has been supporting Russia in its current war a lot more than China
Don't be ridiculous. The US literally provides targeting information to Ukraine, including for long-range missile strikes deep inside Russia earlier this year.
This is incredibly inaccurate. China is why Russia is still even in the war and is still a functioning country. The EU itself supports Russia much more than the US does with its energy imports.
Some of that alleged "support" for Russia would be more accurately described as a failure to support Ukraine. But most states outside of Europe are failing to support Ukraine.
BTW, Zelenskyy supports the Iranian opposition, possibly due to the fact that the current Iranian regime is sending Shaheds to Russia. The US has attacked Shahed factories during the current Iran war.
> it seems the USA has been supporting Russia in its current war a lot more than China.
No way that's true.
China is main ally of Russia. China have a huge economic exchange with Russia, China is the sole gateway to technology for Russia, and provide a great amount of political support for Russia.
Even if we are comparing USA and EU in those aspects, EU's support of Russia is way bigger. EU spends huge amounts of money for purchasing energy resources from Russia, EU spends far less money on help against Russian invasion than US (although EU's population is larger, and that issue is way more pressing for them).
I mean look at the numbers: EU spends on confrontation with Russia less money, than they have spent on economic crisis in Greece or something. That is how they perceive this problem and how "important" it is to them.
Honestly, I had the impression that the current US regime also supports Russia in its current war. Did they not ask Ukraine to give the already occupied land and then some? As far as I remember, that was in a form almost like an ultimatum, too.
China might be a bigger threat, but I find it hard to believe that this would be the reason.
European governments still importing Russian fuel. Not that it matters much as fuel is mostly fungible, if Europe imported from elsewhere for a higher price they’d be the middle man.
> Did they not ask Ukraine to give the already occupied land and then some?
Ukraine is never going to retake the territory they've lost without European soldiers on the ground. Macron famously said that he would have to send troops to Odesa and yet 3 years later there are still no French troops in Ukraine. Meanwhile Putin has captured even more land and is now actively bombarding Kyiv.
It is painfully obvious that Europe lacks the political will to do any kind of substantial intervention. The war is at a complete standstill and it will last for another horrible decade if no concessions are made.
Not being able to take the territory, having a ceasefire over the territory, and actually conceding the territory are three different things. The world is full of unceded occupied areas. Korea. Taiwan. Northern Cyprus. Palestine. Nagorno-Karabakh. Transnistria.
Ukraine rightly has no interest in ceding land to achieve a temporary ceasefire to allow Russia to re-arm and then attack again.
Meanwhile it is also important that we don't have two nuclear armed states (France and Russsia) officially at war.
I'm not excited to have France and Russia in direct conflict, but having two nuclear states at war would not be anything new. There's been China/USSR, India/Pakistan, India/China, and if you want to consider wars that mostly exist on paper at this point, North Korea/USA.
>The war is at a complete standstill and it will last for another horrible decade if no concessions are made.
There is a slight hope that the current Russian regime will collapse before then and be replaced by one that doesn't want to continue the war. (Though, that said, it could equally well be replaced by a regime that's even more ultranationalist than the current one.)
While Europe certainly does lack the political will to make a substantial intervention, it's not just a question of political will. There is the small matter of not starting the third world war to consider.
> Did they not ask Ukraine to give the already occupied land and then some?
I mean what are the alternatives? Ask Ukraine to give the already occupied land and then some, but later, when several more millions of Ukrainian men would be grabbed by Ukrainian gestapo from the streets like rabid animals and killed?
Because with current support from the EU (that is less then EU support for Greece during economic crisis), that is the only alternative.
I live in Europe and me and most of my friends (which of course are not representative of the whole population) consider the US a larger threat than China. On the other hand the US is a pretty aggressive country that has been supporting coup-de-etats and starting wars for more than a century. The current president has an open expansionist vision that includes European territories (Greenland), has started a war that is fucking up the world economy (Iran) and could start WWII, is supporting a genocide in Gaza, has an ambivalent position about Ukraine (and all the post-soviet foreign policy of the US over two decades have probably contributed to this situation), completely disregards current most existential threat to humanity (climate change), openly supports neo-fascist groups in Europe like the AfD, Vox, etc.
Meanwhile China exports cheap stuff, is leading the world efforts developing green technologies, is leading the efforts democratizing AI technologies, and doesn't bully people around with their army.
Sure the US, with its bipartisan system, is barely more democratic than China, but should also judge countries by their actions not just their deliberation process.
If you "rationally" decide to kill me, I'd rather you had been told by "god" not to kill me, even if I don't believe in god and generally think that non-theistic morality is better and more democratic.
This is all in your head. We just expect people in Europe to begin picking up more of the tab for things like NATO, and don't want our enemies (your enemies if in western/central Europe too, BTW) to get control of future energy/minerals. You call it "aggressive colonial control", Americans call it "time for Europe to accept more financial and personal responsibility.
I'm from Europa and consider China a far bigger threat. Trump is probably going to get replaced by a Democrat in a few years. China has been ruled by dictators for decades and probably will be for decades and they are a lot more hostile to democratic nations.
For European governments that have their email and such running with Microsoft, it's quite the signal when individuals lose their email because the US doesn't like them. See international criminal court.
I think it’s fair to say the U.S. and Russia are Europe’s principal geopolitical adversaries, today, while for anyone in Asia or Oceania it’s China. (Africa and South America are being weirdly carved up—it’s not particularly clear who is trying to colonize versus trade with them.)
In the way slavery and employment are similar, sure. In practice they’re very different things, even if one—when taken to the extreme—can turn into the other.
Both claims can be correct. US became Europe's adversary, quite active and pushy. We don't know yet where the end of backstabbing and shitting on us lies, we can easily have a war ie over Greenland within 2 years.
China? It wants to sell its cars here, and thats about it. Incomparable.
China isn't a big bully for European nations cause it's counterbalanced by USA, not of inherent niceness. Also in two years there will be a different president in White house, but in Beijing things aren't that fluid.
US is also nice to others only because it benefits it long term ie in building and maintaining its hegemony, fighting for petrodollars and so on. Now that it shat on those decades of hard-won fights and alignment thats irrelevant thing of the past.
Ask/look around in places that dared to stood apart or directly up to whatever US wanted, the story is everything but nice and bloodless. Ask those that fought for them, and were completely abandoned to be then murdered one by one (vietnam, afghanistan).
Rest of your post is just wishful thinking, US is in semi-lawless state now with new oligarchy ruling the country based on emotions and whims and hardly any laws, so prior experiences do not guarantee any form of future. I personally would literally, objectively, trust Xi more than trump if I had to choose (which I don't, nobody does), any day any night.
USA fluctuates expanding, and diminishing its power mainly because it's typical for electoral democracies to change its course with higher frequency.
It's friendly to Europe most of the time, and hostile at times. It's culturally closer, and functionally democratic. You quite obviously don't like the latter statement, but it is, and it is verifiable claim.
1) Can an American sue the country's gov't and win?
2) Is said gov't changeable by the way of elections?
3) How easy it is to participate in political debates for electoral outcomes?
On all 3 USA gets pretty high score. In high contrast against the backdrop of China. Like, if you prefer a world hegemon who is actively imperialist, and contra democracy, cause you're so outraged by the orange man - that's your choice, of course. But let's not pretend the choice is well-thought. Were HN a Chinese place, and you dared to criticize Chinese imperialism your account would not remain unpunished for long, for instance.
When Trump talks about doing the anti colonial thing and withdrawing troops from European soil, the response is outrage.
But I've learnt that iPhones and social media is American imperialism, but thousands of troops in dozens of military bases on European soil is not, somehow.
> thousands of troops in dozens of military bases on European soil is not, somehow
Presence of allies is not colonialism. Threat to annex Greenland is. Threat to annex Canada is. Keeping pet dictator in Venezuela and taking their oil is.
On the other hand, when Germans, France and other European soldiers came to Greenland to defend against an American threat, it was not colonialism. It was being allies.
> and withdrawing troops from European soil, the response is outrage.
The response to withdrawing troops from European soil was mockery and frustration from army that is loosing valuable bases. Either way, it is not an anti-colonial thing.
> When Trump talks about doing the anti colonial thing
Trump is modern colonialist. He is not talking about doing "the anti colonial thing" ever, instead he is bragging about making America colonial.
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Trying to frame Trump as somehow anti-colonial is really new level of post-fact dishonesty. It does not work, because his appeal is based on dominance, violence and willingness to steal.
Which way is it: Allies or a threat? How much double-think can you fit within a comment?
To me the question is crystal clear: No country should want to have foreign troops permanently stationed on their soil, no matter how good friends they are.
Not to mention, the idea that Germany, 3rd or 4th largest economy on Earth, cannot defend itself on its own and needs American troops "to defend itself" is just ridiculous.
The Americans are there as a front of US empire (IIRC Rammstein is being used for Iran war).
> Which way is it: Allies or a threat? How much double-think can you fit within a comment?
America was a trusted, respected and liked allied nation. It was not a threat. Then Trump supported by people like you turned into a threat to Canada (another former ally), Greenland, democracy and freedom. So, America is not respected or liked, except by neo-nazi it supports. There is no double think involved here.
> To me the question is crystal clear: No country should want to have foreign troops permanently stationed on their soil, no matter how good friends they are.
It is irrelevant what you think about what other countries should or should not want. The question is what is colonialism.
> Personally I think we absolutely should, I just don't think we will.
I think many millions in the EU want to. The problem is that the current EU "politicians" are just US lobbyists. You can see it when Leyen signed the
surrender treaty with her Overlord-buddy Trump. You can not fix the EU with
such lobbiysts in place - and it's not just Leyen alone. Look at Merz - the
guy basically is a tool used by US companies. He is not the brightest but
very loyal to the USA. More than to the people who voted for him (and now
curse themselves for having made such a big mistake).
The EU needs to stop giving money to the USA in general. They contribute to their own demise by doing so. Canadians understand this so much better than the EU, so the only logical conclusion to be made is that the EU is currently controlled by US lobbyists. This would explain about 80% of the issues; the remaining issues are inertia within the EU, but it also isn't made any easier when the US government constantly favours US mega-corporations ruthlessly infiltrating and abusing other markets.
I fail to see how this is relevant with regards to areas.
Whether AI is hosted by the USA, Europe or China - they all are awful and eliminating real jobs while also driving up RAM prices etc... Why should I want to support any of these?
Because it's increasingly obvious that this is the next step in our capabilities as humans competing with that of the discovery of bacteria and transistors.
Because humanity stalled out- and coasted for the last 50 years and it shows. And now it must compete and git good or git gone. No more fat ponies paraded as race-horses.
The last 50 years is a wild take considering thats the time in with the computers became a bigger thing, mobile phones, smart phones. CRISPR, mRNA Vaccincs, HIV Antivirals, HPV Vaccines, We friggin confirmed the Higgs Boson and Gravity Waves. Found thousands of other worlds outside the solar system. Lithium Ion Batteries, the modern solar panel making solar power the cheapest energy source in most of the world. Blue LEDs making RGB LEDs a thing. Reusable Orbital Rockets.
The article says that this proves that Einstein's equivalence principle (resulting in relativity) holds in this test of a falling quantum particle (where gravity results in a phase shift in the quantum state).
It doesn't show/prove how general relativity and quantum mechanics interact.
NOTE: The Dirac equation and Quantum Electro Dynamics (QED) unify quantum mechanics and special relativity (non-accelerating frames of reference).
So the remaining piece is either to extend QED/QCD to accelerating frames of reference or to quantize general relativity. That would likely predict the phase shift observed in this experiment.
> The Dirac equation and Quantum Electro Dynamics (QED) unify quantum mechanics and special relativity
And more generally the Standard Model, which includes the weak and strong interactions. The SM is a quantum field theory, which, as you say, unifies QM and SR.
> (non-accelerating frames of reference).
No, SR and QFT are not limited to non-accelerating frames. They are limited to small enough regions of spacetime that spacetime curvature is negligible. This experiment is an illustration of that: it compares an accelerated atom with a free-falling atom to show the phase shift between them, and the lab frame in which it is done is accelerated--but the SM and SR work just fine. But the experiment does not show any effects of spacetime curvature.
> the remaining piece is either to extend QED/QCD to accelerating frames of reference
No, that's already done. See above.
> or to quantize general relativity.
That's the big missing piece, yes. We know how to write the QFT of a massless spin-2 field (which is our naive expectation of what a QFT for gravity would look like), and we know that the classical limit of that QFT is the classical GR we have now. But we know that QFT has to be just an effective theory, just like the Standard Model; it can't be the final answer.
> That would likely predict the phase shift observed in this experiment.
The theories we already have (Standard Model + the equivalence principle are all we actually need) are sufficient to predict that. Of course any more comprehensive theory will have to reproduce that prediction, yes.
All of it. The theoretical work that showed this was done in the 1960s and early 1970s by Feynman, Deser, and others. One of the key insights was figuring out how to reformulate the theory so that it did not require an infinite series of terms, whose sum nobody knew how to calculate, in order to derive the exact field equation correct to all orders. IIRC Deser was the one who figured that out, and he published a paper in the early 1970s that summarized the research.
My understanding is that 1) SR doesn't consider acceleration (it's an extension of Galilean/uniform motion), and that 2) when Einstein considered acceleration as well as gravity via the equivalence principle which lead to GR [1]. The key insight of the equivalence principle was that the force from gravity (e.g. standing on the Earth) is no different to the observer in their frame of reference to them being in a room in a rocket accelerating at the same rate as gravity [1], [2].
Thus, if you extend QED/QCD/SM in a similar way (thinking of QED/QCD/SM extensions in terms of acceleration and curved space with the equivalence principle in mind) that may lead to a quantized theory of gravity. -- Sir Roger Penrose has a similar idea/thinking [3].
One of the key challenges with quantizing gravity is in how the terms in the expressions resulting from analyzing the Feynman diagram interactions behave [4] which prevent them being renormalized. For electromagnetism you can formulate the terms using the fine structure constant (via the coulomb potential, ħ, and c) which results in successive terms decreasing in value and thus stabilizing to a single value.
For gravity using Newton's relationship between two masses in a similar way to deriving the fine structure constant you get Gm^2/ħc. Applying E=mc^2 gives GE^2/ħc^5. Using the Planck energy constant gives (E/E_p)^2 for the energy coupling strength. This means that unlike electromagnetism, the successive terms in the Feynman diagram analysis grows exponentially instead of decreasing to 0. Thus, this approach to quantization doesn't work for gravity.
Note: you can still use this to analyze quantum gravitational effects at small energies by evaluating to a given number of terms.
> One of the key challenges with quantizing gravity is in how the terms in the expressions resulting from analyzing the Feynman diagram interactions behave [4] which prevent them being renormalized.
Not being renormalizable actually isn't a problem in itself if you view the theory as an effective theory, valid only up to some energy scale, not beyond that. You can still use the theory to make some predictions, as long as you're careful. But that does mean that the QFT of a massless spin-2 field can't be a fundamental theory of gravity; it can only be an effective theory, that approximates something deeper.
As I said, this is not correct. Early on, in the first years after Einstein published his papers, there were physicists who believed this (and IIRC Einstein was initially one of them), but that was well over a century ago. We've made a lot of progress since then, and part of that progress is understanding that SR can handle acceleration just fine, as long as spacetime is flat.
> when Einstein considered acceleration as well as gravity via the equivalence principle which lead to GR
The equivalence principle as Einstein first came up with it was actually about free fall. What he called "the happiest thought of my life" was "if a person falls freely, they will not feel their own weight". In modern terminology, we would say that, if you are dealing with a small enough piece of spacetime, you can treat it as flat, even if the spacetime globally is curved. And that means you can use all of the physics of SR in that small piece of spacetime. And that turns out to be a key piece of getting to GR, how to handle spacetimes that are globally curved.
> The key insight of the equivalence principle was that the force from gravity (e.g. standing on the Earth) is no different to the observer in their frame of reference to them being in a room in a rocket accelerating at the same rate as gravity
This was a further development of the equivalence principle from the free-fall version I described above. But note what it implies: it implies that, in modern terminology, treating a small enough piece of spacetime as flat works even if we adopt an accelerating reference frame in that small piece. Physics ultimately looks the same whether we adopt the frame of the object freely falling in the elevator/towards the Earth's surface, or the accelerated frame of the elevator/observer standing on the surface of the Earth. SR handles both just fine.
Where SR breaks down is when we need to extend our analysis beyond a small piece of spacetime--when the effects of spacetime curvature start to show up. That's when we need GR.
Again, all these implications were not necessarily clear to physicists a century ago. But they are now, and have been for decades.
> the remaining piece is either to extend QED/QCD to accelerating frames of reference or to quantize general relativity
Quantum field theory in accelerating frames of reference is old hat; poster children like the Unruh effect [1] and Hawking radiation [2] are from the 1970s.
From the article: "The result does not unite quantum mechanics and gravity, nor does it show that gravity itself is quantum".
I must say, it's actually quite refreshing to read an article about a science topic that conveys the caveats and limitations of the study. Far too many of these studies get filtered through the news outlet hype-machine
I'm way in over my depth here, but does this maybe that the unification of gravity and quantum physics is further out of reach than we might have hoped? Because it would be easier if gravity disappeared at quantum scales - then it could be understood as an emergent property that emerges out of quantum when you move to bigger scales. But now we have to find something that underlies both.
Is it a stretch to imagine a compromised LLM writing compromising code? I've been operating under the assumption that LLM code might be bad and not working, but I hadn't thought about it compromising a system.
Yes and no. We used to have rampant script kiddies back in the '90s and early 2000s. After 2005-ish, well maybe 2010, most systems became adequate enough to not trust users' input, bug bounties, security as a separate role, etc, etc.
It would take at least some knowledge to hack, not just a random script from a forum.
Whilst true, security will improve rapidly again. Potentially via AI, potentially via other technologies.
If its easy enough to find exploits, its likely similarly easy to scan code for exploits, or use AI-based anti-virus technologies. The only thing holding us back is the cost of compute. We can't all run the latest models against everything.
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