Russia is trying to follow China's example to shed dependence on West controlled services and grow domestic alternatives. Which is long overdue since they don't have equitable access to these services.

> I scrape even app and websites data

And then try to sell it back to businesses, even suggesting they use the data to train AI. You also make it sound like there’s a team manually doing all the work.

https://www.economizafloripa.com.br/?q=parceria-comercial

That whole page makes my view of the project go from “helpful tool for the people, to wrestle back control from corporations selling basic necessities” to “just another attempt to make money”. Which is your prerogative, I was just expecting something different and more ethically driven when I read the homepage.

How long until OpenAI's ChatGPT is astroturfing all debates on social media? Many in a year or two most posts to reddit will just be ChatGPT talking to itself on hot button issues (Israel-Palestine, Republican-Democrat, etc.). Basically stuff like this but on steroids, because ChatGPT makes it way cheaper to automate thousands of accounts:

* https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/06/tech/facebook-groups-russia-f...

* https://www.voaafrica.com/a/israeli-firm-meddled-in-african-...

I sort of suspect AI-driven accounts are already present on social media, but I don't have proof.

the intent of the project is the conversion of a saline lake to freshwater, not the creation of a saline lake.

> a Chinese or Russian lab claiming something and posting to twitter has very little value

Why the national specificity here ?

>> I don't feel lucky, I feel frustrated. I get 3 reviewers and 3 completely different reasons to reject, often nonsensical (not joking, recently was rejected because a broken reference link to the appendix).

The people who review your papers in conferences and ask you why you didn't cite future arxiv papers are the same people who put their work on arxiv and cite each other's preprints. You can't rely on the process of "peer-review" on arxiv any more than you can rely on the conference peer-reviews because they're performed by the same people, and they're people who don't know what they're doing.

The sad truth is that the vast majority of the researchers in the machine learning community haven't got a clue what the hell they're doing, nor do they understand what anyone else is doing. The typical machine learning paper is poorly motivated, vaguely written, and makes no claims, nor presents any results, other than "our system beats some other systems". As to reproducibility, hell if we know whether any of that work is really reproducible. Everybody who references it ends up doing something completely different anyway and they just cite prior work as an excuse to avoid doing their job and properly motivating their work. The people who write those papers eventually get to be reviewers (by sheer luck), or sub-reviewers. They have no idea how to write a good paper, so they have no idea how to write a good review, either. And they couldn't recognise a good paper if it jumped up and bit them in the cojones.

I love to cite Geoff Hinton on this one:

  GH: One big challenge the community faces is that if you want to get a paper
  published in machine learning now it's got to have a table in it, with all
  these different data sets across the top, and all these different methods
  along the side, and your method has to look like the best one. If it doesn’t
  look like that, it’s hard to get published. I don't think that's encouraging
  people to think about radically new ideas.
  
  Now if you send in a paper that has a radically new idea, there's no chance
  in hell it will get accepted, because it's going to get some junior reviewer
  who doesn't understand it. Or it’s going to get a senior reviewer who's
  trying to review too many papers and doesn't understand it first time round
  and assumes it must be nonsense. Anything that makes the brain hurt is not
  going to get accepted. And I think that's really bad.

https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-...

So the problem is not arxiv or not arxiv, the problem is that peers in peer review lack expertise and knowledge and they can't do their job well.

> base model iPhone is only in the $600 range

Only? That's an inordinate amount of money for what's just a phone.

Before that happens, I would expect some pushback against religions brainwashing/indoctrinating children into believing fairytale characters and scenarios are actually true and actively present in the world.

Some religions take 10% of your adult income. Buying a Zelda game or Marvel movie ticket is peanuts in comparison.