All: nationalistic flamewar is not ok on HN, regardless of which country you have a problem with. Yes, there is a war going on. That makes following this rule harder, and also makes it more important.
The level to which many commenters stooped in this thread was shameful. Please review the site guidelines and stick to them if you want to keep commenting here.
I watched the video and the robot most certainly did not grab the boy's index finger.
Sequence of events
1. The robot was capturing the boy's queen with a bishop. For that, it first removed the queen from the board.
2a. The robot next moved the bishop onto the square where the queen was previously located.
2b. At the same time, the boy prematurely moved his rook to the same square, he completed the move before the bishop has been placed on the square
3. The robot completed its final downward motion to place the bishop onto the square while the boy's fingers were still on the rook, thus pinning the index finger between the bishop and the rook
The robot didn't do anything it wasn't programmed to do
Right, this is why when we have robots that operate around humans we make sure they sense behaviors like that, and that they don’t use enough force to hurt humans.
This attempt to exculpate the robot's actions (more more directly: the actions of its human programmers) is just ... bizarre. Yeah, the robot didn't specifically "grab" the boy's finger. It grabbed a piece while the boy's finger was still on it. Without having any idea what it was doing.
Same thing, in other words -- in terms of the end result. And more to the point, it was an action that a human player would most likely have bounced back from, before completing the intended motion.
The robot didn't do anything it wasn't programmed to do.
Yup, it sure didn't. And that's precisely the problem.
The robot didn't do anything. Some humans rented a machine and inexpertly operated it, no different than if I rented a back hoe and dug up a power line.
There is nothing to contest when people observe this fact.
No one is blaming the robot, but that doesn't change the fact that it's clearly not fit for purpose unlike a back hoe. A robot is expected to be smarter than a back hoe as it works autonomously, especially when it is designed to be operated near a child.
Yeah this isn't a case of rogue AI, it is a case of the stupid variety that does exactly what you tell it to, which includes crushing fingers if those happen to be in its path.
In factories humans are physically excluded from the reach of robotic arms like this. It is negligence to operate this thing where it could reach a kid.
Couldn’t they have done this with magnets and the arm mounted upside down below the table where it couldn’t eat people?
They did it like this for a lot of reasons. One is because it looks cooler to have the arm moving pieces around. “Looking cooler” has been the cause of many a lost limb and more than a few eyeballs.
There are clear perimeters set in industrial settings when robots are in operation for this precise reason.
I'm sure the devs could have used much lower force values when dealing with the prices or put logic in place where if a hand is on the board the robot disengages. Hindsight is 20/20..
Looked horrific could barely watch for a few seconds.
Not every robots has force sensors and configurable force settings. Some only has overcurrrent error reporting, or only take positional inputs.
The “correct” way to do this is to use weakened “cobot” type robots that are specifically designed to be operated around humans, add at least a laser fan-beam fence that robot is not allowed to move while any object is detected by it, and put a big red button somewhere with a guy in charge of pressing it as well.
This is appalling. There is no world in which an industrial robot like that should be operating next to a child. Their force sensors are not nearly sensitive enough to stop before causing serious injury. Going fast enough, they can absolutely kill you. This just screams negligence to me. Cannot believe they tried to blame it on the child.
There are robots, called Cobots, designed specifically for this type of environment. They are highly specialized and extremely sensitive to unpredicted forces. Even then, you'd likely have a light curtain to stop the motion when anything crossed over into the table.
This is very much a default mode for ex-USSR countries, especially russia. While russian bureocracy is extremely procedural, it has nothing to do with efficiency or safety (most of the regulations and laws in post-soviet countries are written not to increase safety or utility for population, but for controlling power and money flows and benefeting someone on the top).
Well I heard conflicting info on this one from Baltic states citizens. On one side they are clearly working much more efficiently, as long term economy shows and align more with western approach to things and values.
On the other side, every single person from there I've asked this specifically agreed their country is utterly corrupt mess, government after government, with tight coupling to big brother russia and mafia.
Its not unique to Baltics, I come from former V4 (poland, czechoslovakia, hungary) and we have some variant of that. Legacy of our fucked up russian tyrannical overlords from cold war is still running strong through very fabric of our societies (plus last 20 years of very effective FSB/GRU psy-op to sow hatred and division all around EU to weaken it, allowed by weak politicians like Merkel).
> On the other side, every single person from there I've asked this specifically agreed their country is utterly corrupt mess, government after government, with tight coupling to big brother russia and mafia.
No, not really. For example, Estonia has been very well governed, including deep digitalisation of the economy, one of the best educational systems in the world and a complete and utter dislike/hate for all things Russian.
I gather you don't know what you are talking about but painting broad strokes so wrongly over 3 States who have been peacefully revolutionised in the past 30 years is offensive.
I would defer to the background checks the U.S. military and federal government is doing in consideration of selling those Baltic states a lot of weapons. They will definitely do a better job that I ever can.
> specifically agreed country is utterly corrupt mess, government after government, with tight coupling to <bad people>.
Isn't that (citizens thinking that) the same for most countries in the world?
Like I'm pretty sure many US citizens would say the same.
Or UK citizens.
Or German citizens.
Or <insert EU member state> citizens.
Or Singapore, Australia, china, japan.
etc.
through they might mean different thing when they say "corrupted mess".
And yes, all the mentioned states are corrupt to different degrees in different way. But I think finding citizens which would describe their country as "corrupt mess" isn't a problem (except if they are afraid about repercussions).
Please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar. I know how incredibly frustrating and upsetting it is to be representing a minority point of view amid a majority who say a lot of ignorant things, as majorities everywhere do. But you still have to follow the rules, even from that position. They are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, and if you'd please review them and stick to them in the future, we'd appreciate it.
It's also very much in your interest to do so, because when you lash out, as you did here and in other places in this thread, you only reinforce the position you're arguing against and discredit the truth you're trying to represent.
One consequence of this dynamic is that the burden is much higher on the person arguing for a minority or contrarian view. You can make the point that this is not fair, and indeed the unfairness gets intensely worse, the stronger everyone's emotions are. Nonetheless, it's just the way it is. Fair or not, it's in your interest to develop the capacity to resist these temptations, and fair or not, we end up having to ban the accounts that won't—not because they're wrong, or because we disagree, but because the forum won't survive if we allow people to keep breaking these rules.
No it’s spot on. Check the response by the chess association. They blame the boy. In Russia, it’s your fault and there will be bureaucratic treacle to wade through instantly.
I’ve worked with many people from that region over the years and dated one and it’s absolutely right.
Wasn’t a bad dating experience. We’re still friends. She moved out of Russia because no one would investigate why her brother disappeared on a government job. It was her problem. It was his fault.
Maybe you should consider that when a person brings up their dating experience to support their spite towards some culture in a discussion about a child's broken finger, they actually couldn't care less about the child, eh?
There is really no other reason to bring "I dated someone Russian" into this discussion other than spite.
Not letting people (and much less children) around industrial robots is not virtue signalling, it's basic safety and common sense. Where's everyone's protective headgear anyways? What if it starts spinning around because of an error in the Gcode? This thing could kill everyone around it with one swing. Where's the emergency stop button?
Don't switch the topic. You were saying something about blaming the kid and suddenly you are discussing the safety issues.
Also, you haven't seen much chess robots, have you? "Industrial robot", my ass. Have you actually seen one? The one that "could kill everyone with one swing" is a tad different.
Yep, I've seen and programmed many industrial robots. You would be surprised how easy it can be to kill a human with a swinging robotic arm, even a small one (such as the one here). Even a relatively light hit at the back of the head can be fatal.
Um the discussion was revolving around a chess tournament organized (by admission of the moscow chess open website) part of the Russian government. As you know, Russian government right now has been agressively sending tanks into neighboring nations with the very flags of the USSR, including the hammer and sickle, while that same government goes on 45 minute tirades about restoring the glory of uniting former soviet satellites. So you know this discussion about the policies of the chess organizers, the russian government, has a lot to do with the USSR.
On a technical implementation of the robot I agree completely. On the policy level I concede I am not very familiar with policies of the USSR, but it is a policy decision of the Russian government organizer to allow the placement of the robot, a robot that many organizers would deem not safe for interaction with children. Recent policy in Russia indicates they still have a lot of legacies left from the USSR.
A robot designed to move chess pieces should never have enough power to break anything. Could be run from as little as 2 AA batteries. This is simply bad engineering.
I think that’s challenging to achieve if you also want the robot to play well under time pressure.
Even if you manage to build an actuator that can grab a piece quickly but can’t break anything, the required rapid movement of the arm still can break things.
How about a magnetic base on each piece and a table built on top of a pair of xyz movements holding two magnets. That way the brain can at any time grab its piece and make a move while nudging any obstructions out of the way temporarily. It could probably made to filp the polarity on the lower magnet causing the opponent piece to topple gently when appropriate.
Seems very human proof and also exciting to watch in action.
Neat, and very cool that they're open sourcing design and software elements. The video had me thinking that this kind of thing must have been made before. It's exactly the sort of thing they used to sell in the skymall catalog. Sure enough:
https://youtu.be/mrDy0dF8aQw
Yes, and some countries even allow car sized robots to operate next to pedestrians. That level of carelessness is something I can't understand. Almost as if they want to explicitly kill people.
I assume you are referring to driverless cars. Those aren't inherently unsafe. Neither are six axis robots. As I mentioned, cobots are well suited for this sort of situation.
Just to reiterate, I am not trying to make some any sort of statement about the country. I'm just expressing my disgust in how this specific incident was responded to and the multiple failures in oversight leading up to it. Mistakes like this happen everywhere.
The poster has not stated that robots would be inherently unsafe. (And if they were judged so, it would also be in consideration that humans also are.)
Anyway: the difference is in explicit projectual intention. Some systems are created with a dimension (contextually, safety) as a key performance indicator, some other as just a factor to be sensibly taken into consideration. If you are drawing the project for a plane, a main thing you'll keep in mind is that it will have to stay up; if a toy, safety is required but not part of the function.
> The poster has not stated that robots would be inherently unsafe. (And if they were judged so, it would also be in consideration that humans also are.)
But he has. The statements
> This is appalling. There is no world in which an industrial robot like that should be operating next to a child.
> I assume you are referring to driverless cars. Those aren't inherently unsafe. Neither are six axis robots. As I mentioned, cobots are well suited for this sort of situation.
Together form a very easy to interpret implicit argument that "industrial robots" are "inherently unsafe" (since that was used to distinguish them from driverless cars) and that cobots are, by virtue of not being "inherently unsafe" (like "industrial robots"), well suited. Even just the choice of words for "industrial robots" lay bare a moral judgment of using them for entertainment purposes near children. Is there anything less "industrial" about the 500KW motor on a tesla?
If you want to claim that he didn't _directly_ and _explicitly_ state that argument outright, then you're right. It doesn't take a lot of reading between the lines to come to the conclusion that he considers there to be some difference.
> Anyway: the difference is in explicit projectual intention. [...]
So what's the argument here? That driverless cars were made to be safe and this chess playing robot wasn't? With how driverless cars have been pushed onto the roads with over the top promises and negligent safety features, how do you even begin to substantiate that argument?
Don't do it. You have been here for years, you should have noticed: do not read between the lines. Do not overread what other said. Do not attribute intentions. Do not paint ideas that come from you on the expression of others.
In the past very few days I had posted about the buffers of undetermined positions¹, and hours before I had a post of mine literally re-translated in ideas that certainly were only in the mind of the "translator", parallel with other interventions that surely had skipped the duly operation of understanding where possible and stopping inventing statements otherwise. It is really to be avoided.
You exercise doubt on your interpretations just like you exercise doubts on all your ideas - and more, on your habit of forming ideas.
Contextually: notice that formula, '«like that»', that the poster wrote.
> So what's the argument here
Yes, the chief point in engineering a "driverless car" is that it does not crash on things. I «substantiate that argument» - which a difference is there between KPIs and constraints - beyond the beginning because nobody told you that the engineers succeed.
I'm not trying to make an argument, I'm trying to examine the argument made by someone else.
Personally, I believe that neither driverless cars nor "industrial robots" are "inherently unsafe". In fact I think the whole notion of "inherently unsafe" is flawed. An "industrial robot" playing chess with children can be fine if it's engineered well, which this particular robot evidently wasn't. Driverless cars can be fine if they're engineered well, which I would argue has not always been the case.
I think it’s an inference from domain specific common sense in robotics.
“Inherently safe” is a technical term. It’s an ideal form that almost never materializes, so “functional safety” substitutes it and arguments are made as to what risks exists or how they should be mitigated.
“Inherently unsafe” as reverse of that means an object cannot be safe no matter what; A bomb next to a person can be an example. Had a driverless car inherently unsafe, it cannot be placed on public road.
The original argument therefor means, that it is established that cars and robots can be safe-fied with functional safety standards and measures such that only tolerable risks exist, so they cannot be inherently unsafe, so generally they can be let be on public roads or around people with conditions.
Car accidents and guns are not the same as an automatic robot. You could compare this to tesla. Users are blamed when it's the sole responsibility of user on how that thing can be used.
Well, as a company you can choose to do the right thing, or you can choose to weasel your way out of uncomfortable situations using lawyers and the fact that the law is always lagging behind technological development.
Still, the situation at hand is primarily fault of the government - which should've taken care of it at the very least 5 years ago, or sooner. It isn't a problem exclusive to Tesla, Mercedes has a very similar feature called Drive Pilot (introduced in 2013 IIRC) and except for the most recent model year a malfunction is a problem of the user just like with Teslas.
BTW this isn't even about any lawyers and EULAs, there's simply no legal way how a company like Tesla or Mercedes could take responsibility for a crash, so IMHO Tesla is at least nice enough to spell it out, unlike Mercedes.
Read through the laws about deciding blame in car crashes. There isn't a single word about transferring blame to the manufacturer, and thus it's not possible - and the law specifically says that the driver has responsibility. Nobody had to specifically weasel themselves into it, just the states kept sleeping a decade too long.
I'm not going to read through law texts, but I'm sure that there are provisions for the case where the manufacturer made a design error and is responsible for a crash.
This isn't the case though, the car works as advertised and licensed, the problem here is that the law makes the driver responsible for something they shouldn't be.
This is a common saying or trope with the number varying to a degree. The original version I know of is that in the Soviet military it was an acceptable loss to lose two people out of a hundred during a regular training operation.
Some may have put a number somewhere, but the general idea is not unique. And of course, there is that """detail""": «during a regular /training/ operation». This is the humour of Crock (Bill Rechin, Brant Parker and Don Wilder): «Losing fourteen men on patrol bothering you Poulet? You are thinking of bettering it, but we do not have twenty-eight to spare».
More to the glacial reality, it is said that the notorious dictator who made the move in '39, once presented with a report of particularly heavy losses, after a pause said "After all, this is what the young are for". Some people can have so debatable ideas.
This is a falsely attributed quote. There's zero record of Zhukov (or anyone, particularly none of the various people this quote has been attributed to) saying this. It's a lazy stereotype of the CCCP's strategy during WWII and absolutely incorrect.
> The child moved the figure, then the robot must be given time to react. But the boy was in a hurry and the robot grabbed him. We have nothing to do with the robot,” commented Moscow Chess Federation President Sergey Lazarev.
I never said anything about Russia. I am talking about the people in charge of this event specifically.
> the robot must be given time to react. But the boy was in a hurry and the robot grabbed him
A soft blame, but a blame nonetheless. It's an attempt to divert responsibility, no matter how you look at it. They were ultimately in charge of the situation, it's never a good sign when the leaders immediately try to assign blame elsewhere.
Is that not an explicit diversion of responsibility? They allowed the robot to operate at their event. I might buy a mistranslation, but seems like a stretch.
I come from 8 years of experience in industrial robotics. That the boy triggered a “bug” is irrelevant. It's a distraction. The bug isn't the issue here. This kind of robot should not have been used in the first place. That is my point.
> This kind of robot should not have been used in the first place. That is my point.
Please, open your favorite search engine, find images for "chess robot" and tell me how the whole humanity had managed to fail in designing a default chess robot.
In any case, seems like we won't be seeing any chess robots in Russia anymore, which would be stupid as hell.
The answer from the federation is unconscionable. They blamed the boy and then said they could not be held responsible. Fuck off, a kid made a reasonable kid movement. If the robot wasn't ready to be around children, it shouldn't have been deployed around children. And there should have been a big red button that immediately everything, within reach of every player.
Honestly, as someone that researches ML, this is my major concern. It isn't AGI that has the potential to kill us, it is current ML systems that can't handle OOD data and engineers put it in place because "that's the user's fault." Same reason we have Teslas crashing. AI safety might talk about AGI a lot, but their main area of research is modern systems and concerns over that.
OOD data is really hard to deal with FWIW. But personally I don't feel confident that adding more matrix multiplies won't generalize in a way such that OOD isn't of major concern.
AGI alignment is a vastly bigger problem. Of course poorly built and deployed ML systems will kill and injure people - but these are tragedies of the kind humanity can endure and overcome and has overcome. Poorly aligned AGI is nothing less than the entire species at stake.
But also far less likely to happen anytime soon. A bigger danger is when someone thinks a machine is sentient or "semi-conscious" (whatever that means) and naively uses it to do tasks it shouldn't.
I don't think you nor anyone else knows when AGI is likely to happen. I also don't think that incorrectly believing a machine is sentient when it is not is a "bigger danger."
Again, an improperly aligned AGI could kill the entire human race. I'm not sure what harm incorrectly believing a machine is sentient might do, but I don't think it would be as bad as human extinction or enslavement which are both real possibilities with AGI.
You seem to be comparing only the worst-case impact and not the probability. To see why that's fallacious, consider that an asteroid could also kill the entire human race, but nobody would agree that asteroids are more dangerous than drunk driving.
I think there's a high probability of AGI within a century. Surveys show most experts share that opinion. It's hard to know the probability that the AI will be misaligned - but currently we have no idea how to align it. It's also hard to say how likely a misaligned AI would be to cause extinction. However, we have no reason to think that either of those things are unlikely.
> I don't think you nor anyone else knows when AGI is likely to happen.
Sure. But since I am an AI research I'd imagine I'd have a good leg up on the average person. I'm at least aware of the gullibility gap. Lots of people think it is closer than it is because they see things doing tasks that only humans can do but really your pets are smarter than these machines.
I think that's a reasonable stance, but only for some values of "soon". In a hundred years, we may well have AGI. At that time, we better have developed a robust science for how to control them. This is a somewhat unrelated problem to the current problem of machine/AI safety and both require more focus than they currently get.
We use the same scheme we use to control humans. The rich own all the valuable land and all the money. Ban robots from owning land. That way people can just use their shotgunsor call the police to kill them for trespassing.
If I were an AGI robot I would be scared of getting swatted for lols.
This is a classic case of undefined behaviour or memory unsafety. Your mistakes can have an infinitely bad outcome but people blame the programmer even though there are memory safe languages. Yes they sacrifice efficiency but who the fuck wants to consider the billion potential ways of operating a robot in a physically unsafe way?
This means we are going to have the equivalent of GC in robots that interact with other humans.
To some degree, that doesn't matter. An underlying feature of a competent approach to safety in design is that the design must take maximal ownership of eliminating risk to all people in all scenarios that can be reasonably expected to result from the design.
The moment Telsa set expectations by proclaiming it as autopilot, they took the corresponding responsiblity to make sure it did not generate any scenarios which were unsafe. The moment they implemented features that allowed the attention of drivers to drift more than standard driving, they also took responsibility to make sure that the drifting attention of drivers did not place the system in an unsafe state.
This same issue applies to touch-screen interfaces in modern cars. Drivers could always stare down at their radio when there were tactile knobs and dials, but touch-screen interfaces now expect that because they've eliminated tactile feedback. Telling drivers 'just don't look down' misses the point, because it's the responisbility of the car manufacturer to not create a system where that added safety risk is not controlled appropriately.
Pretty much this. They could have called it Super Cruise Control or something and I'm pretty sure nobody would have anything to say, because it is expected that cruise control be supervised, but, I think people wouldn't be quite as willing to pay a lot of money for a feature that didn't sound so remarkable.
Self driving technology did seem to reach human parity in 5 years back in 2010s, and the growth was later revealed to be logarithmic than exponential, and Elon doubled down on a bad bet on it.
It’s not about whether they should have clarified the scope, the scope did include a completely automatic driving. It just that they failed to deliver(tbf no one truly made it).
I really don’t see how anything could matter more than “does it save lives, on balance”. If it saves thousands of lives annually, then why would we let tenuous marketing grievances forestall its deployment? How many lives should we sacrifice over branding concerns? Of course, if the technology doesn’t save lives on balance, then that’s reason enough to restrict deployment, but in any case marketing issues don’t seem like they should factor into the calculus.
It’s not the big mistake at the end that stands out to me but the sheer volume of mistakes it makes along the way. Edging forward at an intersection when there’s a red light for example.
I don’t doubt that self driving tech will improve and be a safer alternative to a human driver eventually. It doesn’t seem like we’re there yet though.
Yeah, I fully expect Autopilot to have different failure modes than human drivers, but what I’m interested in is the different fatality rates (deaths per hundred million miles, adjusted for different types of roads i.e., highway vs city streets). If Autopilot can save hundreds of lives annually to human-error mistakes like falling asleep at the wheel, etc but at the cost of one life annually due to obscure failure modes like driving toward a train, I maintain that we should not only allow Autopilot, but probably even mandate it on new vehicles. Sacrificing hundreds or thousands of lives annually because we don’t like the specific failure modes seems absurd. Of course, if it doesn’t save lives, then we should block its deployment on those grounds (but the particular kind of failure mode shouldn’t affect the calculus).
Many, if not all publicized "Autopilot suspected" Tesla crashes were later found to happen because driver accelerated too fast, forgot that break pedal exists and lost control.
That is less possible with Autopilot, as it can't go faster than 90 mph
Are there any other major examples of modern ML ethical issues besides some Tesla cars killing their drivers?
Are ML driven robots in factories killing people or
Something? Because I haven’t heard of anything else.
The only other modern AI ethics stuff I hear about is making image generators more politically correct and maybe some criminal sentencing algorithms that are being misused (which isn’t really an AI ethics problem but a judicial procedural one).
Not AI directly, but there is a talk by a coder who was asked to do triangulation targeting for mobile phones. It was an interesting problem so he went for it.
After a while he figured out that his code was used to target missiles on people using cell phones in Iraq.
> Are ML driven robots in factories killing people or Something? Because I haven’t heard of anything else.
All the videos on the YouTubes I’ve seen show industrial robots with crazy amounts of safety equipment where you can’t get close enough to it while it’s running for someone to get hurt.
I have seen people experimenting with robot arms next to their CNC machine where it could easily take off someone’s head if you piss it off but these are small shops where they expect the operator to keep on the robot’s good side, no inappropriate sexual comments and biology shaming.
I was watching one video where they had to train the arm what to do and am pretty sure they (the Silicon Valley robot arm startup) gave it AI magic sauce because even toasters have AI these days.
> I’m still waiting for those GPT-3 and deep fake horror stories we were warned about to come to reality.
I'm a bit confused. There's plenty of propaganda written by ML. Here's some deep fakes with respect to Ukraine[0][1]. Manufacturing robots kill people all the time[2][3]. They are weaponizing ML. Like specifically GPT-3? Probably not but people do use these to write tweets and short form things.
> Manufacturing robots kill people all the time[2][3].
Your techrepublic article discredits your statement:
> While any death is a tragedy, it also must be put into perspective. Humans and robots have been working together in the manufacturing industry for decades with few grievous problems. According to a 2014 New York Times report, citing OSHA, at the time robots had been responsible for 33 workplace deaths over the past 30 years. According to the National Association of Manufacturing, there are 12.3 million manufacturing workers in the US, who account for roughly 9% of the country’s workforce.
It's appalling the robot was designed to ever use that much force in the grip. Even if the chess pieces were made of lead I can't see it being needed. In general, more attention to failing safe.
But the kid is some kind of local chess champion, I can't fully fault the decision to have him play with the experimental chess robot. Is it more dangerous than a lawn mower or a blender or any other machine that 9 year olds might begin to operate?
Correct. The fact they made a robot that could crush a human hand means they paid no attention to this hazard. Competent execution of Safety in Design concepts would demand limiting the grip force to only what's necessary to reliably move the pieces, which almost certianly wouldn't break bone. If that isn't possible, then it would imply the requirement to find some other way to resolve this hazard in the heirarchy of controls.
Relying on a human is the last option, not the default, when it comes to safety. Human adaptability is not a licence to hand-wave away design responsibility. The most glaring example is Tesla, who is unforgivably guilty of this.
This is bog-standard competent engineering in almost all domains of engineering. It is the table stakes-level expectation of a reasonable approach to safety. I'd literally end up in jail if something went wrong and I had been found to not consider these factors.
Software- and computer-related domains of engineering are a conspicuous outlier when it comes to this philosophy.
You would think that much force would lead to broken actuators and chess pieces often enough during development that someone would land on the idea of setting an upper limit on all forces just to save money.
If that is the official statement of the federation, I agree it's abysmal. But i question whether Lazarev really blurted all of that in one go, or if he was asked a series of leading questions and then his answers were misleadingly pasted together to make him sound as callous as possible.
To be clear, any answer short of, "this was a failure on our part to protect the children who attended, and as the leader of the organization, responsibility falls on me. We will make this right for the family and I will tender my resignation" is not adequate.
Then you don't want a voluntary resignation, I think you want them ousted.
The kind of person to learn from their mistakes through honest self reflection (and hence would voluntarily resign) is probably the kind of person you might want to keep around, or at least not decide to make a public example of.
The kid tries to beat a piece before it was even placed and then the robot tried to place the piece on his piece while his hands were still covering it. This could have lead to a minor injury even with a human opponent. What is strange is that they insisted on using such a powerful robot arm without any compliance in the actuators.
Honestly a broken finger is pretty far down the spectrum of things to go wrong when near heavy machinary. Such a robot should have never been rolled out. The state of robotics is simply not advanced enough that I would ever trust one near me. Maybe those Boston dynamics ones. But they are on a completely different level.
That's not what they said. They said they weren't responsible for the robot, and which is true. Same as if a human player injured another player.
The robot's operator is responsible.
I disagree, if they are running the event, they are responsible for ensuring the safety of participants. You go skydiving and the chute fails in a totally predictable way, the company who takes you up shouldn't just shrug and say, "well, we aren't responsible for the chute, that was provided by another company"
>people sign a disclaimer about the risks, they can not be held responsible.
This isn’t adequate in civilized countries. You can’t run an amusement park that severs the limbs of 1% of the participants under the protection of a disclaimer.
There is a threshold where it’s acceptable though.
For example: the general rate of skiing injuries is about 1 injury per thousand skier days. Ski resorts will sell a day pass to let you experience that 0.1% injury risk as Long as you sign a disclaimer.
A ski lift that breaks legs one day per thousand would never be acceptable. Risk imposed on you by someone else or a machine operated by someone else is not at all like a risk imposed on yourself by you personally skiing with your own legs off the mountain, into an unmechanized tree.
IMO there is a huge difference between something that brings mechanical force to you (robot, ski lift) vs you bringing mechanical force onto something else (crash into rock/tree while skiing).
Ski lift fatality rate is about 1/10 of cars, with only one death per 700 million miles traveled and average of 0.34 deaths per year.
Ski lift is one of the safest modes of transports known to man. It probably saves many lives vs someone walking up the mountain. That is, unlike the chess robot it creates a comparative net decline in risk for achieving the task of climbing a mountain. A wildly overbuilt (for the task) industrial robot as designed in this configuration here creates a net increase in risk vs playing against a much weaker human hand.
Fatality rate from ski lifts may be very, very low. But number of broken limbs per user are probably relatively high compared to other modes of transportation. (Especially I think in small pull-based lifts)
Wow you are incredibly clever, would you like a cookie? The best you could do is sometime, somewhere, people get injured a ski lift. The same could be said for people walking up a mountain. AT least I provided some data, including a study that showed injuries.
Well I do have a "clue." Fatality rates for walking are imperfect but some studies have put them around ~37/billion kilometers walked [0]. For Ski lifts, it is 0.93 per billion kilometers. That's over an order magnitude worse for walking.
Now most people don't walk on mountains, so it's not a direct comparison. Walking on sidewalk is often a well paved, but with the risk of cars. Cars usually aren't on mountains, but on the other hand the conditions are oft very inclined with ice/snow, with difficult walking that can lend towards inducing casualties. My educated guess are these tradeoffs aren't enough to overcome the order of magnitude higher rate found in walking vs ski lift in our imperfect comparison across studies.
The honest answer is the word "probably" was used to denote the evidence points my mind in that direction, in a way that appears reasonable at least to me and probably many readers here. But if I want to use the bad faith accusatory tone you've presented, then I'd just say I said it to annoy persons such as yourself for my personal amusement.
You can't just 'waive' criminal responsebility - if I have a dangerous dog or industrial machinery that chops off hands, it doesn't matter what piece of paper the kid or the legal guardians sign, If I purposefully let kids play with them, I have put kdis in harms way.
In the US South there's a ton of poultry workers that have lost fingers and parts of hands to machinery. It's gotten a lot better lately, but for a long time it was a very bad problem. Since most of these workers were Black or from Latin America, there was very little was done to protect them.
You're welcome to challenge the "it's not race, it's poverty" assertion anytime you want by hopping on a flight to Shreveport, Alexandria, or Opelousas, and just walking around. In places like that, where the population is about 50% black, and 50% of the population is under the poverty line, you'll notice that nearly 100% of the non-managerial people working at fast food places are non-white.
I don't know what the appropriate coin-flipping analogy is, but it's like getting heads a lot of times.
It’s America and it’s about race because if you look like the people this country historically extracted free labor from, then you are much more likely to be treated poorly for profit. Being poor is different than being poor and black or latino in America. Our livelihoods ride on the manufactured failure of specific groups of people for political reasons. Then here you come calling it all poor people, erasing the specific struggles that enable the system. If you are going to argue on behalf of white people, which ones? What are the lineages of people who were affected most? Who cause the harm? Was redress made?
American Descendents of Slavery haven’t gotten their reparations yet, and LatAm is still an American-managed cluster fuck.
When it comes to children there is an additional level of responsebvility that cannot be 'waived' away.
For instance if children tresspass onto your land and hurt themselves, you could be held legally responsible under the doctrine of 'Attractive nuisance'
Setting responsibility on guardians for not having forseen or prevented that is a slippery slope, or at least leads to unintended consequences.
Imagine a world where guardians will never let a kid go somewhere or do something that they don’t have 100% knowledge of, or aren’t 100% sure it’s perfectly safe.
In this specific case:
- you wouldn’t expect that issue at first sight
- it looks fun enough to give it a try
- the kid disn’t die. It truely hurts and can have long lasting damages if not treated properly, but a finger broken is not the end of the world for the kid.
If this was any workplace in many countries, the robot owner would totally be culpable, even if it wasn't a child. There's a reason that people are not allowed near robots in many cases.
This is why in civilized societies the government mandates minimum safety standards so that a company is not even allowed to place such dangerous equipment around people.
You wouldn't be allowed to build a mangler anymore in a civilized society, waiver or no.
That why in civilized societies use illegal immigrants or put the factory in other countries who have less safety regulations and then import it, or have corporationsso big that they are untouchable.
I'm pretty sure there is only a tiny fraction of the population that is even willing to press the emergency stop when something bad happens. Most likely they will scream or freeze in place instead.
Although I can imagine what it sounded like at the scene though. "Ay Blin" and then people scurrying around looking for the power plug of the robot or hopelessly trying to overpower a heavily geared joint motor.
> there should be some debate about whether this is even a significant enough incident to require an apology.
The robot behaved in an unexpected way which caused injury to a child. An apology is the absolute bare minimum they could do.
As a parent, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect event organisers to have put adequate safeguards in place.
We don’t need to put kids in front of a bear to teach them about the wonders of nature. Likewise, they don’t need to be in the path of a dangerous robot to discover machines.
> As a parent, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect event organisers to have put adequate safeguards in place.
Literally everyone thinks that. Who is going to say that they expect event organisers to put inadequate safeguards in place? The issue is that things can go wrong even with adequate safeguards. Life be risky.
> We don’t need to put kids in front of a bear to teach them about the wonders of nature. Likewise, they don’t need to be in the path of a dangerous robot to discover machines.
Attempting to kill kids does seem like a bad strategy. But if you want them to learn about nature, they will actually have to go out into nature. And that'll be a lot more risky than this robot - nature is not safe either.
"Think of the children" when used as an expression refers to the situation in which children are used as an excuse to implement rules which would be otherwise unpalatable. Not every case of protecting kids is a "think of the children" situation.
Quite the contrary, I think. Society has become "soft", for lack of better words. If we had been so risk-averse centuries ago, the industrial revolution would have never happened.
That sort of argument might work well for a time when slavery was a recent memory and children frequently worked in factories instead of going to school. That doesn't mean it works equally well for the present day, or for the kind of future most of us would probably prefer.
I'm confused. You think if we don't let robots break childrens fingers because we insist on proper safety, then the industry of physical chess playing robots might never get off the ground?
We could have had a perfectly good industrial revolution with more mechanical safeguards and less child labor.
If a machine is 20x faster than human labor, and making it safe knocks off 10%, that's fine. And it'll leave you with better employees over time. It's only a problem if you're in a race to the bottom that doesn't care about worker safety.
The industrial revolution and accompanying urbanization lowered birth rates.
Technological progress is not necessarily good for the species, although it can be (c.f. the advent of new agriculture methods creating more food post WW2).
There are tons of rules around these kind of robots in regular work environments for precisely this reason.
Usually there need to be either a physical barrier like a cage or a virtual one like a laser waterfall that detects foreign objects in the robots perimeter and emergency stops it.
These rules were disregarded here.
I used to work in a company were such machines were developed and even a very experienced engineer, working on a prototype, was once hit by it (no serious injuries and safety was improved afterwards) because they can move very fast and in unexpected ways.
These days there are better solutions available (so called cobots) which are designed to be work together in very close proximity with humans whiteout physical separation. They feature very sensitive force sensors and are severely restricted in the way the are allowed to move.
So yes "think of the humans/children" does apply here. This is a solved problems and the operators decided to disregard established procedures and went instead for "flashy and cheap" (cobots are more expensive and slow as molasses)
What do you mean? There's no reasonable time where you and your opponent are touching the pieces at the same time. Nor is there a reasonable time where you reach for the same piece.
Is it normal in chess to break fingers of an opponent who breaks rules? I think not. If it was not a robot but a human being he would be considered guilty. Yeah, boy broke chess rules, and what? He probably should be punished by losing chess points or something, but not by the means of breaking fingers. But the human who broke fingers of his opponent would be disqualified from chess for a life and would face charges. It is robot, it cannot be guilty, so someone else is. Who is? His creators? Or organizers of the event? Or parents of the kid who allowed him to go to face the robot? Some adults are guilty, not the boy.
It does not excuse such a reckless use of industrial equipment around people without appropriate failsafes.
A robotic arm like this not a toy, is a deadly machine with a lot of force and a lot of mass. If you were standing next to it for some reason it could unexpectedly swing around and break your neck in an instant. Engineers should be careful to design such systems with failsafes that account for any action the operator might take.
Dude, children get antsy sometimes. They literally have different brain development than adults do. They do not have the same controls and inhibitions.
Children are literally wired for physical experimentation and echopraxia.
Kids also want to be seen as helping. If this robot put a piece down poorly, the kid might be trying to straighten up after it.
All of which are eminently reasonable for a kid who has no concept of operating around dangerous machinery.
Sure there is, like if you move a piece, hit the clock, then realise your piece wasn't quite centered on the square. Maybe not technically correct, but reasonable.
Oh, that settles it. Robot cannot do things that are outside of the rules of chess.
Kid should have known better than to open with the classic, "break my finger" opening from the regulation standard rules.
Industrial robotics are incredibly dangerous. They operate without concern for anything in their path. Robotic arms like this can be lethal, and the idea that the robot wouldn't ever do anything unusual is, quite frankly, laughable naive.
Is the robot controlled by the tablet we see at the top ?
It seems a human that is not the robot operator panicked and pressed something (on-screen emergency stop button ?). Did the robot stop because it detected an excess force/failure to reach position, and is in fact not stopped and trying to reach position (aka crushing finger till the claw reach its closed position ?).
If e-stop was pressed, what would have happened if no-one pressed the e-stop ? would the kid have been dragged across the board then released a few seconds later when the piece would have been dropped ?
How much force is there in the claw of this robot ? What happens when the e-stop is pressed, does the robot fall limp or does it hold position with power in the motor or does it hold position because it is not back-drivable ?
The robot is a standard industrial robot arm that happens to be used for chess - it it was not made to be a chess robot. This is absolutely overkill for chess even just from a cost perspective so you wouldn't build something like this if you actually were building a chess robot.
The amount of pressure this robot applies is totally adequate for its normal operating environment which is far away from humans.
There might be a way to vary the level of force applied but it may have been abstracted away (maybe you need to go one level lower to get that level of control) by a simpler API for applications where a "default" level of pressure is acceptable.
"The amount of pressure this robot applies is totally adequate for its normal operating environment which is far away from humans."
it's interesting to watch some of the Boston Robotics videos. They're mostly supposed to be entertaining, but even then, it's clear that they've thought about safety.
In one, they're dancing, but the dance area is surrounded by observation walls. In another one, a guy tests a robot's sense of balance and ability to react to unexpected events. He uses a broom stick to push the robot to try to unbalance it, and a hockey stick to knock a box away from the robot as it was about to pick it up.
In other words, you just don't go right up to the robot and do what you want, you maintain distance in case the robot does something unexpected. I presume they have some kind of kill switch, too, in case the whole experiment goes tits up.
That whole robot chess stunt seems pretty dumbass in retrospect, but instead of learning the lesson that industrial robots are potentially dangerous they go and blame the boy. So, lesson very much not learned in this instance.
I have a robot arm (Dobot MG400), it has a has a force sensitivity setting (5 levels) that stops when a collision happens. There's also an e-stop that you can hit that will stop the robot.
It’s to move pcbs for firmware uploading and testing.
I built the jig for firmware uploading and testing last year. Had to place the pcb on the jig manually and wait (~2 minutes) for the process to complete.
I’m building the robot cell this year which will do a batch of ~15 pcbs at a time.
MG400 is really affordable, Dobot also has a smaller educational/tinker version called the Magician (lots of other ones: uArm, mycobot/mypalletizer, mirobot, etc). A step above the MG400, price wise, would be an Epson Scara or a 6-dof Yaskawa MotoMini. Lots of Scara Robots in the 5-20k price range. 6-dof like UR3 or Motoman Mini are like 20-50k. Ebay has a bunch of used ones that are much cheaper too!
Most likely because they got it for cheap/free and someone had some fun programming it without ever thinking about the dangers - presumably they never actually observed just how much force this thing could produce.
As for the Chernobyl comment, if they had not dug under the elephant’s foot before it started to cut into the subsoil, that’s exactly what would have happened when it hit the water table. People risked a lot to keep that from happening.
The force required to open isn't necessarily directly related to the force being applied to the hand. The default for motors on robotic arms are braking when not being driven so the arm doesn't flop around or get back driven so the force needed to reopen them can exceed the force being applied while closing.
And probably is. Looks like an off-the-shelf industrial arm from the video.
The common recommendation around these powerful automated machines is to stay clear over the entire range of motion. These are difficult to secure even if they have force-sensing features, for the simple fact that it's incredibly difficult to foresee all possible ways you might need these sensors, and the sensing capability might be skewed toward higher forces.
As others mentioned, this arm might stop by default if bumped, but maybe during the downward motion a sudden spike in pressure is expected to be seen to complete the step. Not taking sides here, just trying to explain that the entire concept of "fail safe" is _extremely_ hard to achieve even with apparently dumb moving machinery.
A better solution if people are involved is to design a robot that can always be overpowered. But such structurally weak arm might be quite tricky to move, and probably start oscillating like jello without proper dampening and motion control. Not something I would expect to find or be able to purchase due to the lack of practical utility (besides playing chess I guess).
Exactly my impression. That damn thing had no business anywhere near a chessboard with a person who could put his hands “inside the cage.”
But this is Russia, where it’s natural to blame the kid.
In the beginning, there was man. And for a time, it was good. But humanity's so-called civil societies soon fell victim to vanity and corruption. Then man made the machine in his own likeness. Thus did man become the architect of his own demise - second renaissance
It shoudn't even be anywhere near an adult for that matter. Even a trained operator wouldn't be putting fingers where there was no safety interlock.
for example, two buttons you must keep pressed with both hands before the robot starts to move and will stop immediately once you prematurely let go of it.
When I read about this my first question was why they use industrial machine as a chess robot. I believe that the answer is “just to show off”. But IMO this makes an opposite effect.
They could use a pair of magnets attached to each chess piece and chess board. One under the board, one attached to the piece. Then move magnets under the board and voila chess pieces move automagically.
1.) What organizer/parent in their right mind thought that this was a good idea. Never place humans within the reach of industrial robots. He's lucky to have only broken a finger.
2.) Why make a robot pick up the pieces? Handling movement of chess pieces by a computer has been done safely since the early 1980's by Milton Bradley.
3.) Was the boy actually playing against a computer player? If so, why? Computers are already much better than humans and have nothing left to prove in the chess arena. If he's playing a human why is a human not moving the pieces?
> What organizer/parent in their right mind thought that this was a good idea. Never place humans within the reach of industrial robots.
Would you scold Japanese the same if they "placed human within the reach of industrial robots"? Oops, they actually did that:
> A robot arm (L), developed by Japanese auto parts maker Denso and operated by computer game software YaneuraOu, plays against professional shogi, or Japanese chess player Shinya Sato (R) in Tokyo on March 22, 2014 at the second match of the Denou-sen between computer and professional shogi players.
I think you're reading too much into this. The people who did this particular stupid thing were Russian. That isn't a claim that all Russian people are stupid. People of all nationalities do stupid things all the time.
It probably only checks the state before/after and blindly does the arm movement in between as is usual for these industrial robots, since they can do this quite percisely without active corrections.
I doubt it has any kind of hand or finger detection built in, since all you need is to figure out the board state.
I had a look several times at the video (the quality is awful) and it seems that it is going for the position of the piece of the boy. This cannot happen in chess.
So if it squeezed his finger because it expected his own piece there, then this is a serious bug in the program.
... this kind of machinery is usually used for industrial automation and should absolutely never have been employed for playing chess matches with children... completely irresponsible, wow.
It looks like the machine’s bishop was capturing the kid’s queen. Humans usually do that in one motion, bumping the bishop into the queen. Most of the machine’s moves also are one motion, but its captures take two: 1) ensure that the destination square is clear, then 2) move the attacking piece.
For all of typical games and most of this game, there’s a rhythm of alternating motions between players. After the machine’s first motion here, the kid absentmindedly continued the rhythm and made his next move, which was to capture the attacking bishop at its destination. The machine, naive to the anomaly, continued ensuring that the destination square was empty.
It's Russia we're talking about. In Russia, the default mode of answering any complaint is "it's your own fault, we're not responsible, go away". It's not only on the big political scene - it's everywhere, from a village grocery store to a national federation. If you admit any mistake and any responsibility for anything, you're an idiot and a "loch" (pronounced the same as Scottish lake, but means a person to be taken advantage of, one that is too stupid to take care of oneself and deserves to be cheated and mistreated). It's a culture-wide thing. And denying responsibility and lying is not considered really shameful in such situation - it's the expected behavior and getting away with it is a sign you are powerful and worthy of respect.
The same culture exists in Poland. Drove on a normal road and an unsecured bar of metal fell on your car from a construction site? Should have watched where you were going. The default stance is always that if something happens to you it's your own fault, should have been more careful. I'd lean towards this being a common thing either in Slavic culture or at least in ex-communist countries for some reason.
Can't confirm as a Pole. Don't want to ask you to dox yourself through an argument, but I'd like to say that it's a lot better nowadays, with the only exception being the Catholic Church's wrongdoings in the countryside.
Maybe. Literally had a situation few weeks back when a waitress brought our meal to the table, dropped it all on the floor, and her first words within 5 seconds? "your child distracted me, what have you done" - a child that was strapped in a chair and commiting the grand crime of smiling at her. She calmed down shortly after and apologized, but her first instinct was to blame anyone but herself.
Like yeah, maybe it's getting better. But I keep running into these situations where if something goes wrong, you are always at fault by default. I don't mean to say anyone else's opinion about it is not valid though.
It's funny cause I've seen similar situation with people of wildly different social status. A big lawyer asking a court clerk for files. He grabbed them like a moron, folders all slipped and fell. We all saw it coming but assumed he wouldn't be so goofy. The young lady clerk still jumped to help him gather the files. His first word: You stacked them wrong you idiot. She smiled and he got away with being an impolite moron.
Now seeing a waitress act like this to a customer is even weirder :)
On the other end you have California where people will sue the state for thousands if they trip on the sidewalk, scraping their knee a bit. I suppose the USA and ex-USSR still remain polar opposites in some respects.
While I agree that McDonalds should have been found guilty in that case(they deliberately set their machines to produce much hotter coffee than is standard anywhere) I feel like this is a case that could have been only won in the US, because only US courts give any time to stuff like this. Maybe I'm wrong, but my feeling is that a case like this would have been thrown out long before being heard in any other country - she spilled her coffee, it's clearly her fault(would have been the resoning).
Legendary in the sense that you got all the details wrong. If you're answering someone saying 'citation needed' the least you can do is look up what you want to reference first so you can actually share useful information instead of multiplying confusion. If you can't remember or don't have time to look something up, you can just not reply.
I once had a guy scold me for having an umbrella in my hand while walking on the street in front of his business (a garage, really) because his German shepherd will attack me and it will be on me.
Incidentally, his appearance was in total sync with his character. This was about a decade ago here in Bulgaria. We have plenty of troglodytes like that around here
>It's Russia we're talking about. In Russia, the default mode of answering any complaint is "it's your own fault, we're not responsible, go away".
a related joke from USSR times. A foreigner from a civilized West country walking on a Moscow street falls into an open unmarked unattended trench. When people help him get out, he is furious - "How come the trench isn't fenced with say a rope with red markers?!" and gets response "Crossing the border coming into USSR you did see the red flags at the entry point, didn't you?"
That's what some people report from diplomatic ties with Russia. They explained the same thing about shame and power. Diplomacy and talk is weak, they only react to conflict and dominance based relationships.
It seems likely that it wouldn't happen in the first place, because people would be (rightfully, in this case) afraid of liability.
If it did happen, I expect they'd either issue a long, wordy but mostly empty statement that they're looking into it, possibly with an apology not accepting blame, trying to avoid attention at all costs. Saying something means the press has something to write, so aside from maybe a first vague statement like this, they'd probably stay silent.
In a clear case like this, they'd likely be torn apart afterwards though.
It used to be like this, in the 90s and 00s. Mainly it was a result of lower class guys getting rich after the events of 1991. It’s not like this anymore, at least not that common. Stop spreading lies, please. Saying that it’s a “culture-wide” is insulting.
It's not cartoonish, it's the culture. Of course it's not homogenous - you can find a lot of people that go against the mainstream. In a hyper-macho culture you can find males who are shy and sensitive, in an introverted culture valuing privacy and closeness you can find people who are extroverted and exuberant, in a culture where accepting blame is not encouraged you can find a lot of people that will readily do that. When you describe the culture as if it were a single person, it will necessarily get a little cartoonish because we are reducing millions of people to one description. But I think this description matches the dominating culture quite well - though you of course always need to realize not everybody follows it to the same degree, and some people would eagerly defy it.
That explains a Russian traveler I met at an airport once who asked me for bus fare to some tourist destination. I declined and the bus left without him. He and his girlfriend passed me later and he said "Thanks to you we can't go to (wherever).". I couldn't really understand how someone could be that entitled, but if it's more a blame-others-by-default attitude, it makes more sense.
You could have used “cowboy culture” instead of “macho culture”, that way at least your over-the-top generalization would have been free of cultural appropriation.
I think this comment already has at least a half of the culture war bingo. If you add a couple of -isms and maybe a -phobia or two, you will have a definite winner.
Dude, you are just projecting your spite. This would be laughable if I didn't know you were serious.
So it's actually just scary how how you make things up.
>Dude, you are just projecting your spite. This would be laughable if I didn't know you were serious. So it's actually just scary how how you make things up.
I lived in Russia for the first 27 years of my life (but I've been out for 11 years). The claimed phenomena definitely existed and was widespread back then. I was an odd duck by being ready to openly accept my mistakes / misdoings, and I was not alone, but that was not common.
I'm sorry to scare you, please drink a cup of warm tea and listen to some good music, it will relax you. I haven't made up a thing though, I've observed this culture personally for decades. I grew up in it. Not sure what you mean by "spite" - nor do I care that much - and of course, I could be mistaken, but these were my observations and my conclusions, nothing is made up.
As in illustration, I'll relay you an actual story that I read from one Russian blogger (who witnessed it himself and I trust him that he did):
The scene is a couchette car in an overnight train between two Russian cities (a very popular mode of transport in Russia). It's late at night, so most people are preparing to sleep or sleeping already, so it is pretty quiet. Except for the two slightly drunk guys in one end of the train, who are engaged in a lively conversation. After a while one woman next to them loses her patience and shouts "you two over there, would you shut up finally? People are trying to sleep here!". To which one of the guys answers, not missing a beat, with innocent indignation in his voice: "And why did you think it's us?!"
That's nothing. I once read an actual story on a US aggregator site.
The scene is a guy whose knowledge of anything outside his country is lacking. A relatively common occurrence around where he's from.
After being bombarded with all kinds of propaganda for decades he'd easily believe almost anything on the topic. Especially after several months of extreme 24/7 antagonism due to a horrible war.
I assume you mean me. But which country do you mean? I lived in several. I grew up in a culture I am describing. I still maintain contact with many people living there. I base my conclusions on my experiences and data I gathered for decades. You base your conclusions on ignorance and stereotypes - you have no other choice since you don't know me. But you try to mock me - unsuccessfully, of course, because you don't know anything - maybe you should spend a bit of time on gathering your own information instead.
Point contextually not clear. "Be careful of sources?" That would be as generic as Cato's "Oh, and should I remind you that we should destroy Carthage".
Your assumption what this behaviour is exclusive for Russians is naive at best, but your relying on the anecdote (of a person you never ever met!) is borderline stupid.
Also take a dive into Reddit most popular subreddits[0] - you will find such behaviour en masse and I will wait here for your explanation how Soviets could instill this culture into Americans.
This videogame review from a YouTube channel called Warlockracy is actually also a really interesting perspective on at least some aspects of Russian subcultures and their prominence, I found it a surprisingly insightful social commentary wrapped up in an entertaining vid.
The second video is more serious but also rather interesting (clips from it became very popular at the beginning of the Russian invasion into Ukraine). It is a lecture from a Finnish University Professor whom spent most of his career in Intelligence specializing in Russian relations and now teaches intelligence and security. He talks extensively about the corruption hierarchies in Russia as well as Putin and Propaganda, well worth a watch (and more recent videos have been released since found on the same channel).
Operating under the assumption that the video isn't misrepresenting the cultural aspects of Russia I think we would both be surprised at how "cartoonish" things can be.
Video #2 should be required watching for anyone joining the conversation about the Russia - Ukraine war. Martti J. Kari (the lecturer) spent his whole career in the Finnish military studying Russia.
The Russian mentality is _really_ hard to understand for a generic westerner. Russia has been lead by a conservative leader for 200-300 years. Lead by an autocratic leader (Tsar) for a good thousand years. The next Tsar will always be from the "Princes" - never a complete outsider.
Trying to change that mindset is as impossible as it would be for the USA to not have a two-party system. Their whole culture and bureaucracy is based on the fact that there is an "us" and a "them". Three or four parties will never happen in the USA.
Three or four parties could easily happen in the USA of they'd change their electoral system. FPTP system and lack of culturally divergent regions (like Scotland in the UK) is the reason there are no third / fourth powers. If, say, half of Congress were elected by party lists, there'd be a lot of political diversity fast.
France had been ruled by kings, and before that, the Roman Empire for thousands of years, and then one day we had a revolution and became freedom-loving leftists. Same can happen in Russia -indeed, same DID happen in Russia, until the USSR turned into a totalitarian state under Stalin.
Also, the US can totally have a multi-party system if they reform their electoral system. [0]
There was almost nothing “conservative” about Leninism. The same goes for Stalinism. Your comment actually just made me want to but “The Atheist Manual” (or something similar, can’t remember the exact title) that was published in 1950s USSR and which I found in a Romanian translation in an antique bookshop that I usually frequent.
One has to distinguish between early revolutionaries - who had many weird ideas to overhaul everything, from the calendar to the family structure to the language to the alphabet to how the art is done (in that latter they actually produced some interesting results that didn't end up in blood, tears and mass murder, too bad it happened in many other areas). They definitely weren't conservative by any measure. But, once Bolsheviks took power and consolidated, their regime was as conservative as the Tsar's - including promoting the same conservative values the early revolutionaries raged against. People in power have much different interests than people trying to overthrow the power, you know - even if those happen to be the same people at different times. The time it happened has been somewhere contemporaneous with the power transition from Lenin (largely disabled and unable to control anything for the last year of his life, but being severely ill even before) to Stalin.
As I said, the Church had a very, very rough time throughout the existence of the USSR. There was a slight reprieve going into WW2 and during the war because Stalin wanted the most out of the USSR citizens, but otherwise religion, the conservative thing by definition, was a non-entity.
Also, women participating in the labor-force was encouraged throughout the regime’s existence, until the very end, there was no “Stepford Wives”-like tale East of the Wall. One of my aunts was an industrial crane operator in the ‘80s, I, as a kid, was finding that perfectly normal (I also grew up East of the Wall). Stay-at-home mothers, another traditional thing by definition, was seen as retrograde, “you had to have a job, hence a salary”, everything else was seen as laziness.
And I could continue with countless other examples similar to these.
>I found it a surprisingly insightful social commentary
And how did you determine that it is insightful?
The video starts with the guy confidently saying that Alcatraz is a nickname of a Moscow prison (!!!), apparently having no clue that the Russian name of the game doesn't have anything to do with prisons and the name 'Planet Alcatraz' is given to the English edition of the game. If you have no idea what you talking about -- just make things up, right?
Should I find Manhunt or Postal to be a mirror of American culture? "Interesting perspective", "insightful social commentary"?
And you are aware that he's playing the russian version of the game, right? Translating some bits for the english audience. I'm sure he's perfectly aware what the name of the game is in russian (it's literally in the first shot of the video).
Seems like you watched 5min to just quickly find something to discredit and immediately dismiss it.
> Should I find Manhunt or Postal to be a mirror of American culture? "Interesting perspective", "insightful social commentary"?
Not a "mirror" of a culture, but if you were not already versed in American culture and watched an insightful review of those games pulling on various culture trends which make up those games, I see no reason why it couldn't be an "Interesting perspective" or "insightful social commentary".
You are right about the prison, I guess I missed both the word 'planet' and the prison name and filled in the blank, and made an unjust judgement of the author of the video.
'Seems like you watched 5min to just quickly find something to discredit and immediately dismiss it'
That's quite an uncharitable interpretation. You are right about one thing though -- I gave up quite early.
"I see no reason why it couldn't be an "Interesting perspective" or "insightful social commentary""
In the context of judging the American nation as a whole -- of course not.
Agree, that was an uncharitable offhand sentence. I think it was prompted by your uncharitable criticism of the video -- immediately concluding that he's making shit up (rather that thinking it was a mistake or something else)
>In the context of judging the American nation as a whole -- of course not.
I don't think video is there judge Russian culture as a whole -- and I don't think that's ever useful. It's there to entertain and present (and judge) various cultural _strands_ of it, which someone outside of Russia/Ex-soviet states may not be aware of.
In the context of this thread, grandparent (smsm42) does seem intent to reduce this particular cultural stand to being _the_ Russian culture and all dominating. I disagree with that, but neither this video nor context of the palmetieri2000 post (he wanted to illustrate that it _can_ be that comical) was about that.
'I think it was prompted by your uncharitable criticism'
Yep, it's only fair.
'nor context of the palmetieri2000 post (he wanted to illustrate that it _can_ be that comical) was about that'
What is 'it' in 'it _can_ be that comical'?
Here I disagree with you -- I interpret 'it can't be that cartoonish' as a reply to 'culture-wide thing' statement. A subculture can be arbitrarily weird, but when a sweeping statement is made about the whole nation it becomes cartoonish.
In this context bringing up a game review is as a valid point as bringing up Manhunt or Postal in a thread about American-wide culture.
Considering your lack of charitability you had for my initial comment why would the person you are replying to interpret you as anything other than nitpicky and asinine?
You have added nothing to the conversation.
Also in what way would this ever be at all related to the context of judging the American nation as anything? The article is about a robot is Moscow and the comment I replied to is discussing if Russian subcultures or culture can seem Cartoonish.
"the comment I replied to is discussing if Russian subcultures or culture can seem Cartoonish."
Why did you inserted 'subcultures' here?
The smsm42 subverted the discussion of the robot fuckup with a russophobic comment specifically saying 'It's a culture-wide thing' and you were replying to the comment saying 'there is no way they are that cartoonish'.
Nowhere subcultures are mentioned except in your comment where you offered a game review as a source of information about Russian culture ('a really interesting perspective on *at least* some aspects of Russian subcultures and their prominence') and partial confirmation of the 'culture-wide thing' comment.
My point is that you brought a cherry-picked subculture to the discussion of the 'culture-wide thing' and after that lied that the conversation was about 'Russian subcultures or culture'.
I don't think you can 'address' it in any way except for not doing such things in the future.
The stereotype in question is 'denying responsibility and lying is culture-wide thing' and nowhere in my comments I denied responsibility or lied (unlike you).
Edit in reply to your edit: it shouldn't be hard for you to point to a lie, please do it.
"Operating under the assumption that the video isn't misrepresenting the cultural aspects of Russia"
And why do you operate under this assumption?
The guy keeps saying '[In Russia] conservatives have always had power.' Was Lenin a conservative? Very few countries undergone such radical changes as Russia.
The one thing he repeats even more is 'infallible Tsar'. Let me tell you a secret -- Putin have ruled for so long because life for ordinary Russians was getting better despite all his fuckups. Now this have changed and we have entered very 'interesting' times.
Lenin ruled for barely 4 years. Since November 1917 till late 1921, when he already had been gravely ill and was largely removed from all power and left as a figurehead. In 1923, he had his third stroke, and his days were numbered. So, compared to overall Russia's history, Lenin's four years have been but a brief episode. Stalin, who replaced him, was a conservative ruler (though of course not the kind of "conservative" that we have now in America, obviously), so were all up to maybe Gorbachev - who ruled for about 6 years overall. As you can see, not being a conservative leader in Russia means a rather short tenure, somehow.
> Now this have changed and we have entered very 'interesting' times.
If you think people in Russia will raise up and overthrow Putin because of the suffering he has inflicted on them due to his insane lust for conquest - don't hold you breath for it. He has much better chance do die as a Tsar (which is what most Russian Tsars did) than to be deposed. Russian people, as a mass, have absolutely zero inclination to overthrow Putin's regime.
Try and think of the many ways in which the USSR was different from the Russian empire and you will understand the scale of Lenin's and Stalin's radical changes.
All governments do it to a certain degree. But usually when American government gets caught on it, it is considered an embarrassment, and people involved may have to apologize or, in very rare cases, even suffer some consequences. In Russia, it's how it is expected to work and there's no shame in it. It is very sad to observe that American government (and American politicians, and American press, and many other institutions) are sliding to that direction lately. Not there yet, but the vector definitely points to that direction.
There isn't. Either they didn't read the linked article, or they are projecting their own spite - I have no other explanation of how one could interpret really like that.
Well of course Chechen culture or Buryat culture or Tatar culture or Chukcha culture will be very different. But this is not the culture that dominates functionaries of federations in Moscow. "Imperial" Russian culture is. That's the one I am talking about. Of course on Russian territory there are many other cultures, but these are not ones I considered.
Is it? Is the culture of Paris fairly homogenous? New York? London? Berlin?
I would imagine the place has some shared cultural understandings, generally, but that a big city is going to be much more heterogenous. But maybe I'm thinking too micro scale.
There's definitely something different in Berlin vs New York culture, and me, a person that sees commonalities everywhere, i.e. a lumper, definitely sees a common/dominant culture in each of these places.
On the other side you have splitters that always find a reason to differentiate more.
There's no right and wrong on this discussion, it's subjective in essence, you can always lump or split by your own rules. That is a classification problem.
Darwin talked about it at length, because he was annoyed by splitters denying any kind of classification, making it really hard to make a taxonomy.
If you split too much, every human is an individual, you can't say anything about anything anymore.
If you lump too much, all humans are the same, you can't say anything about anything either.
The sweet spot is somewhere in between, where you can speak about Moscow, vs Berlin, vs New York culture. Because there's definitely something different about these places. And neither say they're all the same, or that you have to look at each individual before making a judgment.
But most people can't agree where exactly this sweet spot is.
You need to realize though the West has embraced multiculturalism, largely. Russia has not. It does not mean there are no diverse cultures in Russia - or even Moscow, but it does mean there is one dominant culture, and closer you get to the places where power is accessible, the more dominant and more exclusive it becomes. There are various cultures found in Moscow (and any big city in Russia), but there is also the Culture. In the West, a lot of effort is taken for the old Western culture not to be the culture of Paris, New York, London, Berlin, etc. Some endorse these efforts, some decry them, but it is obvious they happen. In Russia, nothing of the sort happens, on the contrary, if you want to be in power, you will abandon whatever culture you came from and embrace the culture of power. If you do not, you'll never get to wield any power.
> What is the "culture of power", can you give some examples?
I thought I did, in my comments uptopic. If you expect me to write a doctoral thesis on modern Russian culture, sorry, I am neither qualified nor it is the right place. While I have plenties of anecdotal data, and would be glad to share my experience to the extent I can, systematic treatment of a culture is not something one could do in a random comment on HN. I can name it, at best - Russian Imperial culture, and describe some of its qualities, but anything beyond that will have to wait for somebody who either has a PhD or wants to get one researching Russian culture.
If you're talking about your first comment in this chain(about people refusing to take responsibility), I don't see how that's related to multiculturalism. I've never been to Russia, and I don't even watch Russian media often, but from what I can see, they're trying to promote multiculturalism a lot.
It's not that I don't believe that Russia has a "culture of power" and that people at the top all share the same ideology, but this is happening everywhere.
The culture comment was an answer to the critique that you can not talk about culture in Russia because there are many cultures. There are, but one of them is dominant. They do not promote multiculturalism, at least not what is meant by that in the West. On the contrary, the staple of their official ideology is preserving Russia's uniqueness at all costs - even at the cost of rejecting humanist values that are considered "Western". Other cultures are allowed if they are subservient to the imperial culture - same story in every empire, really, take a book about any imperial culture, Russia's one would have similar traits, it's not unique in that regard. The main source of conflict now is that imperial culture needs much more of an empire than Russia currently is, thus obsession with territorial conquest, despite already having huge undeveloped and neglected territories.
In fact, it's the same country and the same establishment. While Chernobyl is currently, as everybody knows, Ukrainian territory - at the time it was the territory of the USSR, and the dominating culture was Soviet - which despite being theoretically "internationalist" actually meant "Russian Imperial". People who made decisions there may have been born anywhere, but they all spoke Russian, and they all looked to Moscow for authority. And the establishment largely did not change in Russia since then - while some people went away, naturally or forcefully, and some new people came in, the new people now in Russia were largely parts of the same establishment as in the USSR - they just went up a number of rungs on the ladder when the top elites had to retire. The classic case is Putin - who is ex-KGB - but if you look at his team, you'll see most of them have roots in the old establishment or have been brought in by the people from the old establishment. In contrast to Ukraine, where old elites largely lost power (new ones are far from perfect either, but that's a topic for another day) and have been replaced, in Russia this replacement never really happened - and that may be a good key to why what is happening now is happening.
Well you're right, Russia (especially under Putin) has spent a long time presenting itself as the bogeyman of Europe with rampant international threats and assassinations, and now you're surprised people are afraid? That was the whole intention and well congrats, it worked. You don't get to have it both ways so kindly piss off.
It seems you are saying 'it's your own fault, we're not responsible, go away' to me.
I kindly remind you that the comment I was replied to is saying:
'In Russia, the default mode of answering any complaint is "it's your own fault, we're not responsible, go away"'.
The irony is that by not being able to take the exact same thing you're dishing out and defending, you're confirming the exact same stereotypes you doth protest too much about, methinks.
Are you as hateful and violent against gays as your government is?
Misrepresenting - sure. Accurately representing - well, I guess it still can be propaganda, but propagating the truth bears no shame.
It is interesting though how the defender of Russian culture chooses to wield a Western weapon of "hate speech" accusation. In Russia, "hate speech" would be something that the government does not approve of. Including telling the literal truth - such as calling the war the war - or even saying that patriotism is not kissing the ass of the President (a person got arrested for that, though I don't think they decided to prosecute - that'd be interesting to see them attempt to prove that patriotism actually is just that!)
What exactly is interesting? Hate speech is bad, unless it is directed at Russians and then it is not hate speech but 'accurate representation'?
'In Russia, "hate speech" would be something that the government does not approve of'
Not really. 'The motive of political hatred' can be added to the case as an aggravating circumstance, but the charge itself is 'discreditation of Russian army' or 'spreading misinformation'. Not that it makes much difference, since the war began life's got scary in Russia in this respect.
'even saying that patriotism is not kissing the ass of the President'
'a person got arrested for that'
Is this what you call 'propagating the truth'?
Yuriy Shevchuk said a lot of things during his concert but he was never arrested and the court dismissed charges of administrative misconduct for the lack of substance. The prosecutor is going to try again though, but I hope for a good ending -- Shevchuk has a lot of respect in Russian society.
The interesting part is a cynical attempt to use a Western culture war weapon in order to promote Russia, which rejects Western values and hates and wants to destroy both sides.
You are quite mistaken. The notion of hate speech is not unique for Western culture.
Article 282 in Russian Criminal Codex exists since Eltsin time (1996) and addresses incitement of hatred on racial, religious and ethnic grounds. It itself is based on similar article from Soviet times (1960).
In 2003 it was extended by Putin in include hate speech based on gender, language, origin and social stratum.
> The notion of hate speech is not unique for Western culture.
Of course not. But you are using it as a weapon agains Western culture, trying to trigger it into self-harm. Not because you care about Western values and not promoting hate, but because you see a vulnerability that you could exploit - tell somebody "it's hate speech" and they'd run in panic. Except the trick is now obvious, so it won't work.
> Article 282 in Russian Criminal Codex
Oh the lovely 282, how we all adore it. Of course totalitarian dictatorship that rules Russia now will suppress speech, and 282 is where it started (now there are more, of course, it never stops). Only then it was "extremist" speech. I don't need to read TASS (blergh! these guys actually kept SS in their name - all you need to know about them, really) to know about 282, thank you very much. But nobody here cares about 282. You can not deploy 282 here to suppress speech you don't like. So you call it "hate speech" instead, hoping to solicit culture war reaction that you know exists in the West and thus avoid discussing the real issues.
>But you are using it as a weapon agains Western culture, trying to trigger it into self-harm.
That's funny, so now calling out double standards is 'trying to trigger Western culture into self-harm'. Because noticing your own hypocrisy hurts so much, poor you.
Nobody should be violently persecuted unless they have violently hurt other people first and our government quite often disregards human rights.
As for gays, our government haven't intervened (at least publicly) when gays reportedly got violently persecuted in Chechnya. Also our government often doesn't notice hate speech towards gays (hello, Milonov) or punishes rather mildly when it does notice.
Still, I don't think our government thinks that gays should be violently persecuted, it currently only opposes people going to children and saying that homosexuality is normal.
There is a couple of draft laws basically striking out 'children' in the previous sentence, we shall see how things will develop.
Do I? Please quote the wikipedia article you linked to.
"You also dodged all the other questions about what YOU believe, again. Why are you so coy and shy about that? Do you have something to hide?"
I don't feel like answering them.
"Do you prefer that gay Russian children commit suicide"
Quoting from your own link: "Because reliable data does not exist, we do not know whether LGBT youth die by suicide more frequently than their straight peers".
I don't want any "children commit suicide and be beaten and murdered". Or adults.
You see the root of the problem in homosexuality not considered normal, I see the root of the problem in shitty people who bully and attack ones who are not considered normal. Gay, fat, short, disabled, ugly, weak, stupid, weird, nerdy, anything else -- none of them deserve to be harassed.
I’m curious: You don’t think that being continuously exposed to government propaganda and threatened with jail/fines for dissenting opinions will increase the frequency of “shitty people”?
I don't see how the number of people 'denying responsibility and lying' depends on the exposure to government propaganda saying that Russia is doing good and justified thing right now.
If you believe you are right and what is contrary to this belief is only a fake, you don't need to lie and there is no responsibility for something you didn't do.
Then we fundamentally disagree in how human psychology works: I believe that if authorities (be they government officials, parents or others) habitually lie and cheat, then that behavior becomes socially sanctioned as a way to get ahead. Thus you end up with more “shitty people” (and a worse society)
And by the way, when you hear Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen say 'The United States will impose harsh consequences on countries that break the international economic order' and then ironically blaming Russia instead of her own country [0], do you feel how society becomes a little bit worse?
Hmm, I fail to see how this is even remotely comparable to Russian propaganda/related to the topic at hand, but I’ll give you that the “West” has also behaved atrociously in the past. Though please be aware, that arguments like the one you are trying to make, has a distinct feeling of whataboutism.
"I fail to see how this is even remotely comparable to Russian propaganda/related to the topic at hand"
Ehh, perfectly/directly?
I gave you a fine example of "denying responsibility and lying" which should have corrupting influence on the recipients. I wonder if you notice this influence.
"whataboutism"
Any mention of this word has a distinct feeling of double standards.
Again, I don’t think we are going to end up agreeing as I believe that a significant portion of the Russian people are aware, that they are being lied to, but are to scared to do anything about this.
Please also note, that I don’t believe this applied to all Russians. The few I’ve interacted with more closely have been nice (the opposite of “shitty”)
"a significant portion of the Russian people are aware, that they are being lied to, but are to scared to do anything about this"
Well, some of them must be trying to rationalize and normalize what's happening to reduce psychological suffering, but calling them bad on these grounds has a distinct feeling of blaming the victim.
From the looks of it, that's an industrial robot arm which was designed to operate no where near humans. The move paths were hard programed and has no obstacle avoidance procedure nor sensors. The robot arm had quite a strong pressure as the the victim were unable to free his/her finger.
Yea it is a very poorly designed chess robot but if they were going to use it in a competition like this, they should have at least briefed the users appropriately.
Or maybe they did brief them appropriately but the child make a mistake. There isn't enough context in the video or article.
But what's beyond stupid is claiming that a "chess robot broke the finger" of a kid as though it went rogue or operated beyond its domain.
> But what's beyond stupid is claiming that a "chess robot broke the finger" of a kid as though it went rogue or operated beyond its domain.
No, I'm comfortable arguing that being able to exert enough force to break human bones is outside the scope of what a chess playing robot should be able to do. Or is "beyond its domain" as you say.
That's not how health and safety works, you can't just leave children near lethal machinery like chainsaws and molten metal spewing form an arc furnace after 'briefing' them.
Yes, I'm not sure of the year we got it, but it was definitely when I was between 7 and 17.
It was a 2-stroke Stihl, probably the smallest they made, with an automatic brake in case of kickback. And a manual explaining how to avoid it - I never had any issue because I followed the directions. Including goggles and over the ear hearing protection.
I'm unsure which angle you're coming from with your comment, and I don't mean to assume, but I wouldn't blame the parents. And certainly, I don't think it is reasonable to expect a seven-year-old to understand the risks well.
Many people have gotten used to these things having pretty high safety standards. I feel like you can't fault them for not knowing the intricacies of how the designers programmed the robot to handle movement and collisions; it's just not something everyday people will have in mind. And as a parent, you'd assume that the chess tournament wouldn't be putting a machine in the room and allowing children to play if they knew it was dangerous.
I wouldn't be fuming with the chess federation either for not necessarily knowing and thinking about it, but I think their response is a bad look; it came off cold to me and like they were looking out for themselves. At the end of the day, they put it there, allowed the visitors to play against it, and something went wrong. Apologize, look into it, fix the problem, and let insurance pay for the accident. Take care of the person who got hurt in your tournament.
Briefing won't keep people safe. What if the kid did everything right and there was a bug? Robots like this should not be within reach of people when powered.
A killswitch wouldn't help here, the kid's finger was probably broken before he even felt the pain. Given the bot's behavior, it looks like it's programmed to move its arm down until it touches the table. It didn't notice that it encountered resistance, and kept pushing down. That's incredibly unsafe, and easy to fix: track actual vs expected position, and give up if any surprises are encountered.
Yes, it is very easy to fix: remove the inefficient and entirely unnecessary robot arm and replace with sensors and electromagnets built into the chessboard so the chess engine can detect location of and move (magnetic) pieces electromagnetically.
You can always design something to be better but part of interacting with a machine is not assuming that it will do the safe thing 100% of the time and acting appropriately.
If you're driving a car and it hydroplanes, is it the car's fault for losing traction? No, you should have been aware that it was a risk you were exposed to the moment you stepped into the car.
Can you design a car that is less likely to hydroplane? Sure, but there's always going to be an edge case it can't handle perfectly.
Ironically, if this industrial robot were used in actual industry, it would have barriers in place to keep people out of this dangerous zone. Even there were adults are trained to work with it, we require safety rather and don’t blame the victim.
Varies by country. In Uk we convicted a cyclist for ‘wanton and furious driving' when he hit some old lady crossing the road, fatally. I am reasonably certain that if your car flew into the sidewalk and killed pedestrains, you would be in serious trouble.
Highlighting the context of the content (which the article carefully omitted) is what HN is all about.
Russian tech is used to murder people in my country. It's hypocritical to be discussing Russian tech while trying to censor the mentions of its applications.
and more or less a direct offshoot of the major nuclear powers (USA and Russia) jockeying for control via proxies of the regions with the largest purest resources to feed into the Cold War nuclear demand.
A great deal of off the book destabilisation took place throughout central Africa to suppress strong independant government and knock down successive puppet governments.
Russian Chess has, and always has been, a tool in their international politics. As is any sport on a national level.
The war has affected Russia's ability to participate in sports on the international level. The war has relevance to the discussion of sports, including chess, absolutely everywhere - except HackerNews, it seems.
>Also Russia has plenty of legitimacy, both before and after the Ukraine invasion
No pain in admitting it. It still has legitimacy (as did Nazi Germany up until it lost the war).
No, you can spin politics on top of sport, but sport is sport. It's been an excuse for a long time for the West to discriminate Russian athletes for no other reason than them being born in Russia - in a more civilised place this would be seen nothing other than bigotry.
First they used doping as an excuse, with the West of course turning a blind eye on their own athletes' rampant use of PEDs and now they use the war with which the Russian athletes have nothing to do with. I'm sure Putin is shaking this whole time and is just about to tap out out of the war because a young athlete who has dedicated their whole life to excel at a sport and their potential having a VERY limited shelf life can no longer participate.
Since we're on that note, Russia is openly oppressive to queer people. It's illegal to say anything in public that suggests it's acceptable to be gay after a recent change in "gay propaganda" laws.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the de-facto tsar of the subdued republic of Ichkeria (aka Chechnya as a part of Russian Federation) has openly ran an extermination campaign against gay people.
So "they/them" worldwide do have a reason to support Ukraine in this war, besides basic human decency (in which your comment is, sadly, lacking).
Your complaint about this thread making heated overgeneralizations is valid. It's not fair to generalize a single incident as being representative of an entire culture.
Which is ironic, because you then go on to make a similar mistake with inflammatory statements like this:
> I know where that way of reasoning had led you and what you did towards Jews, Romani, Black people, Latinos and Arabs. You sick duplicitous facists.
I know it is frustrating. But let's try to keep this a civil discussion.
> One even considers that one day they might be forced to switch from civilian engineering towards the military one, since these behavior patterns all all too familiar.
The level to which many commenters stooped in this thread was shameful. Please review the site guidelines and stick to them if you want to keep commenting here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Note this one in particular: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."