Its left to be seen in the future then

If NATO and the EU left Ukraine as a non-aligned, neutral country, the Russians would have not invaded.

Too bad it isn't NATO, the EU, or Russia's decision who Ukraine is aligned to and who they favor. Get your shitty imperialism out of here. Ukraine can do what Ukraine wants to do and you just have to deal with it.

Russia screeched that an old colony would dare leave their sphere of influence and invaded. And in the process, they exposed themselves as a global laughingstock. Their military is pathetic and weak, just like their leader -- a projection of strength hiding a feeble fool.

It doesn't matter if the Russian military has even slightly improved in one aspect -- which I highly doubt -- because their ability to project military might is gone. No one will take their threats or military seriously anymore. Everyone knows they're impotent.

Oh great you fuckers are on Lemmy now too?

Could you do us a favor and at least fight against the Tankies so we don't have to deal with either of you? Or perhaps you are a Tankie, and have unironically becomes indistinguishable from far right trash.

I don't know, I think Poland is in a "I wish a bitch would" mood. They could have it handled before the rest of the world even has a chance to respond lmao

(More seriously though, yeah you're right. I'm mostly joking around)

This is exactly what's happened over the last few decades too. They take Georgia, then they wait and resupply. They take Crimea and launch a war in Eastern Ukraine, then wait and resupply. They thought they could take the entirety of Ukraine and repeat the pattern, but they've overplayed their hand.

Because Russia has been gradually conquering territory, not all at once. They create puppet states and take over land, then regroup and rebuild before attacking again. There's a clear pattern of this with Georgia, Crimea, and now the whole of Ukraine. Each time prior, the international community wagged its finger and slapped sanctions. It's generally accepted now that enough is enough, and it ends here.

It certainly doesn't help either that Russia has been funding far right parties throughout the West who try to lift sanctions against Russia.

It depends on how retaliation goes. If the side that's attacked uses conventional weaponry, we're all fine.

So basically if Russia starts using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, NATO could respond with a conventional invasion of Russia and be done before noon. There's scenarios where the rest of the world is fine if Russia uses nukes. But there's no scenario where Russia is fine if they use nukes.

The only leverage Russia has to prevent all of NATO from joining in militarily is nukes. Using a nuke removes that leverage.

Indeed! You can choose to co-op with friends, but it isn't necessary at all. It's a really nice model for RPGs.

Uncountably many

Only an idiot would decide to mindlessly trawl Reddit to train an LLM. They'll be confused when their model suddenly is confidently wrong about everything and have no clue.

It's only easier to verify a solution than come up with a solution when you can trust and understand the algorithms that are developing the solution. Simulation software for thermodynamics is magnitudes faster than hand calculations, but you know what the software is doing. The creators of the software aren't saying "we don't actually know how it works".

In the case of an LLM, I have to verify everything with no trust whatsoever. And that takes longer than just doing it myself. Especially because an LLM is writing something for me, it isn't doing complex math.

Still highlights a vulnerability doesn't it? The system is only as secure as the most vulnerable piece.

Techbros try to address global warming instead of addressing the next big scam fad (impossible)

I don't really disagree with anything you've said, it's a very valid take -- and you're spot on about underestimating Trump but overestimating Republican cohorts in polls. My only qualifier there is that we don't know if 2022 models were overtuned for only Republicans, or also Trump support.

I don't know if we can take 2016 as representative of our current dynamic. I think it's certainly more representative than 2020 however, but shifting populations and world/domestic events have had massive impacts.

In short? I don't know which outlook is more accurate. What I can reasonably assert though is that the reality will be somewhere between the less optimistic and the more optimistic outlooks. Taking these poll results at face value is probably the better strategic option anyway to create pressure to go vote and campaign.

I agree though, we shouldn't be totally dismissive of these polls. It's fine to scrutinize and question them like I've said, but it shouldn't take away from the very real possibility that these are correct. Oddities don't create impossibilities.

That's the thing, we don't know how they're correcting for it, and if it is just a fudge factor. The issue is there's more confounding factors that anyone could list which could be the culprit here.

A fudge factor is easy, but the wrong solution here. But the right solution is incredibly complex and difficult to even identify. In my field we can get away with using a timer instead of a precise calculation sometimes. That really isn't an option for polls. I don't favor the people trying to fix the models.

To be clear, polling theory is totally valid and an established science within statistics.

But the challenge is always with methodology, because you can never get a perfect simple random sample. And the methodology here certainly seems terrible.

Huh. Well I'm willing to believe that's reality then.

This is quite interesting, thanks for sharing!

My only critique is that I don't think 2020 skew is valid anymore. After Dobbs, the landscape seems to have significantly changed. 2022 was predicted to favor Republicans by a strong margin, but it ended up being a tie pretty much. And a lot of special elections have had surprising results too.

My personal opinion is that polling methodology may have overcorrected for 2020, and we're getting a picture now that's skewed right, versus left from beforehand.

It's really hard to say though. There weren't a lot of great polls to start with in 2022, and special elections don't have significant polling either. It's a weird position where the only good data set we have is from 2020, but there have been so many changes in the national environment that we have reason to doubt the skews from 2020 are still valid. But at the same time, what else do we have? Vibes and feelings and anecdotes. And the engineer in me dislikes dismissing data in favor of vibes. It's important to consider still I think, because none of this is infallible. But I honestly couldn't tell you what the "right" outlook to have is. Maybe I'm onto something, but maybe I'm just letting optimism bleed into my better judgement.

All I know is that I don't know.

I really hope so.

I dislike doubting polls, but there's just some odd stuff in here.

• 10% go for RFK Jr, and it's equal siphoning from both parties? 10%?!
• 20% more people blame Biden for Roe being overturned than Trump?
• They're TIED with Gen Z voters? TIED?!
• After the absolute thrashing that Republicans have received on abortion, only like 50% of women would break for Biden?

This is a poll of just the 5 key states, but this part of their methodology gives me significant pause as well: "To further ensure that the results reflect the entire voting population, not just those willing to take a poll, we give more weight to respondents from demographic groups underrepresented among survey respondents, like people without a college degree. "

Emphasis mine. There could be a huge skew. And these results don't make sense. The other NYT poll from several months ago was also incredibly unusual and had very weird findings -- to the point that the Guardian wrote something was very fucky with the results.

This isn't to say this can't be what's going on, but we need corroboration from other polling groups. And it isn't summer yet, which makes polls rather inaccurate too.

TLDR: Something's fucky, we need more information and to monitor this.

EDIT: I just want to use my bully pulpit here to say that my criticisms by no means disprove the poll results. There's oddities, but that doesn't make the results an impossibility. Don't only give credence to criticism of polls. If someone has reasons they believe the poll is accurate, you should give equal attention to it. At the end of the day, we don't know what the actual truth is, and we won't until the election is over. Just remember that we don't want to just win, we want to dominate. We want massive margins. And that means we need to see wins even in less than accurate polls.