Congrats! I’m heading to London next week as well - or at least I hope so 😅 Amelia rocks 🎸💜

@Isaiah Ward @Angela Rose I think the US and Israel clearly have common interests. That does not mean every Israeli decision has to become American policy. But Israel is a democratic ally in a region where many threats to Israel also threaten the West: Iran’s regime, Islamist terrorism, hostage-taking, missile and drone warfare, and attacks on civilians. To me, that sounds more like shared interests than an unhealthy relationship.

@Isaiah Ward They offer intelligence, military cooperation, cyber security, missile defence, counterterrorism experience, technology, and a stable democratic ally in a region where many actors are openly hostile to the US and the West. I don’t think the value of an ally can be measured only in raw materials. Some alliances are about shared security interests. They have citrons, too.

Even though this thread is more about industries and economics, I’d like to mention a more personal use of AI. Lately I’ve been using it to analyse YouTube videos. If a transcript is available, I open it, select the whole page, and copy and paste everything into GPT. It then provides a video summary, the main points, possible bias, weak claims, things that need further checking, and even what is particularly interesting or impressive about the video. Very fast, very handy. That has been useful, especially because it also works with non-English videos. Some people talk as if GPT were biased because someone programmed it to think a certain way. I don’t think that is true. Sure, it was trained on human language, articles, and so on. But it is not a machine overlord ;) forcing one fixed opinion on you. You can challenge it, ask follow-up questions, ask where an argument is weak, what context is missing, what is solid and what is not, and make it check its own bias. Another useful application is analysing comment sections. For example, you can copy a large number of comments under a newspaper article and ask GPT to group them: how many support the article, how many disagree, which arguments appear most often, how many are aggressive, and so on. That could be useful for spotting trends or seeing how an article shapes reader opinion. Ironically, journalists could use AI to check their own framing and blind spots. Many won’t, because they are suspicious of AI, but used that way, it could offer a surprisingly useful second look at almost anything published online.

@Angela Rose Thank you, Angela. That means a lot coming from you. I really appreciate it. Glad you found it useful. 😊

Free speech is paramount. Criticism is part of a healthy democracy. But when criticism turns into cancel culture, when people are harassed online or publicly destroyed in social and mainstream media just for stating an opinion, it starts eating up the very thing it is supposed to protect. J.K. Rowling is a good example. Mobs of left-wing activists threw everything she said, all her work, and everything good she had ever done into one big bowl and called that bowl evil. That is not mature discussion. That is harassment. It showed how quickly the left turns on a writer even many of them used to admire, the moment she disagrees with them on one issue they have declared to be a moral taboo. Suddenly she becomes a "traitor", which seems to be one of their favourite words lately. To me, it shows how the left abuses the language of rights and justice to justify deeply destructive behaviour.

@Angela Rose Good point. I could have worded it more carefully. Thanks for the reminder.

Hey ! 😄 Thanks for letting me join. Your videos are amazing, fun, and informative. I especially loved the one about the Artemis launch. We didn’t get to see much about it in the news here in Switzerland, so that was really cool. Happy to be here and curious to learn more!