The Someday Papers (Apr. 26, 2022)

The Quarterly Review? The Whenever-I-Get-A-Minute Times?

Russia/Ukraine

Other Defense

Big Tech

  • Reddit is the most popular search engine; or, Google search is dying – Why? Because Google results are uniformly trash, unless you’re looking for something technical, in which case they’re only mostly trash. “[search term] reddit” is taking over as the way to find out what real people think.
  • I recently came across a top-[things]-guide article about the PC game Warframe that had clearly been written by an AI, with zero retouching. It fused some lingo specific to the game with a bunch of nonsense that appears in the genre of ‘articles about game mechanics’. That’s the downside to large language models: the more niche your interest, the more likely it is you’ll get pablum out of an LLM.
  • Cloudflare stays in business in Russia, with safeguards – Its Russian datacenters have a sort of dead man’s switch, if I’m reading this right, and they’ve also taken measures to protect their clients’ SSL keys.
  • Russia is running out of cloud storage space – Or they were, as of March 15. I haven’t heard an update since.

Guns

Science and Technology

The Economy

Grab Bag


  1. I will continue to spell it this way, because ‘Kyiv’ makes stupid Westerners say ‘Keev’, and that just won’t do. 

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