Putin cant visit most countries anymore. Netanyahu neither. Exceptions are the US who want to destroy the ICC anyways and recently Hungary who now want to leave the ICC to suck up to Netanyahu.

As an internationally active company there is many jurisdictions, where Microsoft can be held accountable.

Helping a genocide is very much illegal. If you sell precursor chemicals for poison gas to a death camp operator, you are also complicit.

After Oct. 7 the usage by the IDF exploded. In early 2024 reports about the AI tools used to justify slaughtering Civilians en masse came out, employees have been raising alarms through the “proper” channels and then went to public protest as Microsoft ignored them and cracked down on any mention of it in Forums, Town Halls and the like.

They absolutely know that they are complicit and would rot in prison the rest of their lifes if this goes to court properly.

As fiber is rolled out more, i see less and less why it would be cost prohibitive?

All you need to do to connect a remote place is lay a cable. More expensive if you need dig a trench and put the cable in there. But if it can be done for electricity it can be done for fiber.

Which are based on LLMs or other neural network models. It is kind of the thing that language models are actually good at.

See DeepL for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepL_Translator

The service uses a proprietary algorithm with convolutional neural networks (CNNs)[3] that have been trained with the Linguee database.[4][5]
According to the developers, the service uses a newer improved architecture of neural networks, which results in a more natural sound of translations than by competing services.
The translation is said to be generated using a supercomputer that reaches 5.1 petaflops and is operated in Iceland with hydropower.[6][7]
In general, CNNs are slightly more suitable for long coherent word sequences, but they have so far not been used by the competition because of their weaknesses compared to recurrent neural networks.
The weaknesses of DeepL are compensated for by supplemental techniques, some of which are publicly known.

Quality over quantity.

Great places to socialize are sports-clubs, social-clubs, volunteering, activism, religious communities…

I’d much rather spend five hours a week distributed over two or three occasions with people i share interests with, than with people i share work with. Meanwhile at work i am mostly engaged in small talk, that is quite repetitive as i see the people every day and i have to guard what i can say and what i cannot say more than in other circles.