> But the most stunning—and creepiest—software developed in Russia is something called FindFace. It’s an app that lets you take a picture of a stranger and then almost instantly, using a facial-recognition algorithm, find the person on a social network. If you’re hoping the software doesn’t work that well, you’ll be disappointed: When I tested the app, it found the right faces all the freaking time. Privacy is so 2015.
Still waiting for social networks to search for you on other social networks, to verify your identify.
We're sorry, this photo doesn't match your face in photos on other social media, so we can't add it to your profile.
Any idea how these applications are built and trained?
My assumptions are that the process is scraping social networks for tagged pictures; identifying and standardizing faces and then training a CNN network to identify individuals.
The trouble is wrapping my head around how to do that at the scale needed to uniquely identify 20M+ individuals. Do they train the CNNs in smaller batches and run the models in parallel? How do they normalize the results? How do the add incremental data?
They could just be using a feature space for face representations that a model is trained to generate given images, which would reduce the identification problem to a n-dimensional clustering problem.
I'm not as familiar with the models in face recognition but something analogous to word2vec may produce reasonable results.
My guess is that they use siamese cnns or autoencoders and look at the latent space. Also, just straight up training a deep neural network on 20 million classes isn't impossible. We've developed an in house technique that greatly accelerates this. Keep your eyes peeled on arxiv for a publication soon ;)
Also, the essence of it is sampling the "labels" (the people's face ID) similar to Word2Vec through similarity. When applied to people's face ID, the key phrase is "In feature space, faces of a feather flock together".
Then, use a recurrent ConvNet at the end to pump out probabilities for each class (in this case face) with a low/tractable number of parameters.
Spent a couple of hours of interesting reading. It sounds like faces cluster in high dimensional space. From the perspective of a curious spectator I would love to see a blog post or article that answered:
What would pairs of maximally distant faces look like?
What would the mediods of a large dataset that was clustered into two clusters look like? Would it be a high level feature that we'd recognize like male or female?
Would faces that were mediods of the cluster be considered more attractive?
Would it be possible to build a similar app that allowed you to identify an individual from memory? Cluster the dataset and present the user with images representative of the mediods of the clusters. Discard images from clusters that weren't selected and re-cluster. Repeat until a handful of images remain.
Could that technique work as a virtual sketch artist and identify a person's doppelganger?
The library gets the picture as input and spits out a 128-element vector. The more similar the vectors are for two pictures the more likely they are of the same person.
You don't need to train it, there is a pretrained version available.
This reminded me of a news article I read about "eigenfaces" as a facial recognition method way back; here's its corresponding Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface
Really, there would be "eigenshapes" for any arbitrary configuration of 3D space. That we can smoothly transition from one face to the next in a higher dimensional matrix is no surprise.
Not much info in the video but they did train for 6 month to get their first good results. There also seem to be neuron combinations for race and eyes...that's pretty much it.
I believe this problem is common to many types of machine learning classifiers (not even just neural nets). See the discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8721650
Many of the really good software engineers I know are Russian. As in they grew up and were educated in Russia but they all end up working for U.S. companies. Russia is missing out on a lot of talent right in their back yard. If the government was a little more forward thinking and didn't try to stifle and control things so much who knows where they would be right now.
Not just the Russian trained software engineers but a lot of children and grandchildren of the 1990s Eastern Bloc immigrants are lost to Russia. These were the families most likely to have access to computers and educational institutions no matter which country they stayed in but widespread oppression pre- and post-USSR by antisemites, thugs, corrupt bureaucrats, etc and an economic collapse robbed the country of much of the talent pool.
I'm one of those immigrant children that arrived in SF in the early 90s, now having grown up in SF and found success here, I'm actually looking at moving back to work in tech in Moscow. There is an energy there that I haven't felt anywhere else, hopefully the geopolitical situation will settle down over the next few years to make it a reality.
There are quite a few outsource shops who would benefit from having tech people with SV experience. For starters you might land a job for one of these.
I would also recommend Sankt Petersburg over Moscow, having lived in both.
There's this problem where tourists visit tourist sites or big cities in autocratic states and see everything as so orderly and relatively clean, with no homeless, not too much petty crime, little to no graffiti, etc. They see a lot of police around and think 'Hey these guys know what they're doing.' Of course, the cleanliness is a side effect of absurd fines, though not usually official, but because the police grab you and demand a bribe unless you want a higher made-up charge. The littering or jaywalking is just an excuse to shake you down. Or the fines and jailing are real and if a Westerner was on the receiving end of a week in jail or even physical punishment like caning for spitting out gum, they'd be incensed.
The realization that should come later is that because people in the West have basic human rights, life is messy as its harder to control a population that's guaranteed rights. But in autocratic/dictatorial states many people are beaten, jailed, or simply killed with impunity or have a mock trial for formalities. Tourists will never see any of this and their Western passport means they'll never be shaken down or beaten or harassed by the authorities. They'll get preferential treatment because its within everyone's economic and political interests to do so. They mistakenly think this is how the locals are treated as well.
Sadly, many Westerners get the 'big city' autocratic treatment and bemoan the messy chaos of their own cities, without realizing that chaos is a feature, not a bug, especially if you want your 'features' to be the rule of law, personal freedom, property rights, an independent judiciary, and human rights.
We have other sad excuses to shake you down. Petty drugs (Ganja), Copyrightviolations and beeing a Idiot (literally Privat-Man in ancient greek).
Thus far, your list of things not found in the west can bef ound in the west.
Western states certainly aren't perfect but they are far more permissive on a practical level and tend to lean towards lowered corruption and reasonable punishments outside of edge cases.
From a tourist's perspective NYC, Chicago, LA are a madhouse of crime, graffiti, etc while Pyongyang is a wonderful, clean, and relatively quiet capital. You'd think the latter would be utopia, but of course, its far from it. My point is that a tourist's experience actually has the opposite incentives as a citizen's experience. An oppressed and submissive populace is nice for tourists but not nice for locals. A boisterous, empowered, and loud populace is nice for locals but not nice for tourists.
For example, I imagine the Paris and Athens metro systems go on strike a lot more than the Moscow and Pyongyang metro systems do.
To be fair though, as a European who has lived in China and spent some time in NYC. I'm always very fearful of the police in the US. I've heard about all the horror stories and I know that as a foreigner I'm even less likely to be treated well. I'm much more scared of the US police than of the police in UK, France or Spain.
In China, I'm scared of the police too but I know that I'll get preferential treatment because I'm a foreigner so excesses are less likely.
That said, I agree with your points, especially with China becoming more and more autocratic since 2013...
Both China and Russia run this kind of anti-us proganda. Its not true, the police in the US will treat you the same way that the police in other countries such as Britain treat their citizens.
Again, I'm European. I look at police shootings statistics and see a huge difference between European countries and the US (55 shootings in the last 24 years in UK compared to 59 shootings in the first 24 days in US). It's an order of magnitude higher and the difference cannot be explained by population.
So, yes I'm much more afraid of the police in the US, they are demonstrably more violent. That doesn't mean that China and Russia are not dictatures, they are. It also doesn't mean that the police in those countries are not scary. They are scary and they are corrupted and will shake down locals (but rarely foreigners because it's too risky for them).
"police grab you and demand a bribe unless you want a higher made-up charge. The littering or jaywalking is just an excuse to shake you down. Or the fines and jailing are real and if a Westerner was on the receiving end of a week in jail or even physical punishment like caning for spitting out gum, they'd be incensed." - I'm wondering when and where did you find that in Russia? Been caught few times by police for doing bad things on streets (and had many friends in "obschaga" with similar experience), I can't confirm this was true even in early 00s.
i always had your experience (not being harassed) at another not-first-world country. and was always hearing comments like the above yours and distrusting them.
until my significant other got shaken down by the police there three times in the last three times we were there. so now i realized my first experience was skewed because I'm not the demographic that is the target of all that.
now i know better: your isolated anecdotal experience should never be the only argument for a political discussion.
Our government has no incentive to retain them. Their main source of money is not small / medium / innovative business taxation - it's oil and other natural resources. And you don't need higher education and talent to extract oil. Actually, you don't need any population at all.
As I see it, their real incentive would be to shut down the higher education system, because it a) costs money, b) sends a good part of produced talent to other countries, and c) produces educated citizens which are harder to manipulate.
Sadly, I hear quite a few confirmations of this from friends who work in education.
BTW, here's a great video, Rules for Rulers, which is basically a video TL;DR of "The Dictator's Handbook" that explains incentives of democratic and autocratic rulers:
What? The German war machine was extremely efficient compared to its counterparts, especially if you compare the asymmetric casual count. Many technologies such as radar or jet aircraft were first used by the Germans. I'm pretty sure Germany lost because several countries united, and took heavy casualities fighting rather than a failure of the education aystem.
The 'lack of brains' argument holds if you're looking at the Third Reich leadership rather than Germany as a nation. Aside from the poor choice of trying to take on both the USSR and the USA, near the end of the war, the Third Reich made a number of awful military tactics and logistics decisions that accelerated their loss.
What? Albert Speer pulled off a "armaments miracle" where production increased despite allied bombings. [1]
Hitler got extremely far in the war against the USSR, and probably lost (in his words [2]) because the USSR rapidly moved production beyond Nazi reach. Also the USSR had a resolve to send millions of people in near suicide waves, something the French refused. Also the unwillingness of the Japanese to attack the USSR [3].
This is necessarily true because the Nazi's were in power for less than 15 years. Nevertheless, many scientists, specifically those whose work was directly applicable to war effort received significant support. For example, Wernher von Braun, a large part of those thesis was classified.
Who says the government is missing out? Russian economy as a whole might be missing out, because qualified labor is leaving, but the state probably gets their pick of top graduates. Who do you think runs Kremlin's hacking, spying, and bot programmes? I imagine it's not the straight C students. Same goes for critical industries like defense and o&g.
>Same goes for critical industries like defense and o&g.
not much. In O&G all the complicated drilling is done by foreign companies who have the tech (while, yes, accounting IT in Russian O&G can employ the top grads :). In defense it is even worse - Russia still can't build a stealth plane, i.e. they were able to produce a body, the easiest part, can be calculated on computers with basic scientific knowledge, while the radar and engine require a well developed technological base and thus still not reachable for Russia.
There seems to be so much vaporware around AI currently. It seems like theres a fair bit of it in this episode. Apart from that I thought it was a great doc.
Can we have the original article titles (or non-click-bait derivatives) for HN. This one is not entirely disconnected.But just for Informational sanity.
Does anyone know the name of the Russian choir song at minute 16 of the documentary? I want to use it for the background song when individual factions reach the Factory in Scythe (parallel universe board game).
https://youtu.be/tICL-lwI7KM?t=930
One piece of software I am very impressed by is Dmitry Shkarin's Durilca, a very fast and efficient file compressor, topping the benchmark charts. I wonder what he's doing now.
And if I'm not mistaken Eltech's Exagear (close to native i386 binary emulation on Arm) was made by Russian programmers too.
It seems like Russia's tech is having innovation spikes here and there, but it just seems so. I haven't seen any original ideas in that documentary. Everything is a copycat of some idea someone else had in Europe or in the Americas. They took it and made it far better, but for a very limited market. They exercise the same principles Steven Jobs had used for his designs: find cheap shit (or get paid by the gov), make it golden, sell it. That's also why the Russian nuclear institute looked like a trash dump in the video. You can't sell nuclear science to people. Not with a logo on it, you can't. But, who knows. Never underestimate the idle mind of a Russian. It's dangerous.
I felt the same: lots of very good engineering but not a lot of open, competitive, creative and free capitalism. Even China does a lot better than just copycat.
However, it seems that most people reading this thread are from the Родина (rodina: motherland) and get offended by objective criticism about Russia.
Disclaimer: didn't watch the video, read the text.
At least in the text the author seemingly misses an important theme: there is a rising gloom in the Russian techscene lately. Talented programmers are mostly open-minded and keen to the western perspective, so the recent (~2012) turn in Russian politics was (and is) morally hard for a lot of them. All hopes for modernization, "westernization", and brighter future in the next decade were shattered, most startups now look for either government or government-associated funding. Like, the only way the founders of that creepy FindFace startup were going to monetize is to sell it to siloviks. The economic downturn also plays its role.
Talented programmers are surely open-minded, but not necessarily pro-western, moving away from millennial bubbles in central parts of megapolises (even the bubbles imagine their pro-Western vector in a very unclear form, which is pretty understandable considering Western discourse is not monotonic at all, so its hard to follow it without a clear definition social media youth lacks generally). About funding, I'm not sure at all, probably it's not much different from 2011, are any links behind the claims?
To be honest I don't see how this claim can be compatible with your disagreement on funding. Startups are either SV-style (free market above everything, private VCs, fierce competition) or China-style (heavy government involvement at all stages, from funding to market regulations). So you are either "pro-western" or pro-govt-funded "VC". It is true that there are people with paternalistic view of the government, and all the talk about "import substitution" favors them, but that's exactly the point I was making: the future is gloom here for people with a classic startup culture.
You're mixing a lot of things altogether for unclear purpose. Russian internet was/is awesome about building profitable businesses without VC funding (at early stages of a company life at least). Also, there are many funding models alternative to VCs in 2016. Not to say VCs are different around the globe about their principles(e.g. in Finland most of funding linked with the government but I never heard that Finnish people are not pro-Western), this is not a binary choice. Also, many people in the West do not satisfied with VC model of funding (and that doesn't mean they anti-Western, in some sense many of them are more pro-Western than "startup" people in general), see e.g. "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus" by D. Rushkoff. Sorry for the chaotic reply, but you're raising a lot of concerns at once.
It's funny when Western social media synonymizes "modernization", "westernization" and "brighter future".
Especially since it was very recently that huge structural transformations in Russia (Gorby's shock therapy) brought "westernization", "modernization" and a "brighter future" to Russia - in at least all of the US reporting. The shock therapy brought democracy (yes Russians vote) and economic liberalization (yes Russia is Capitalist society). It also broke what had been of an existing soviet union (another thing for the US to cheer about).
This constantly unobtainable quality that the US really would like Russia to achieve is submission to decision making for the world centered in Washington, and until that is achieved according to "western" (sic) reports, Russia will not have modernized, and will not have a brighter future. This kind of exceptionlist rhetoric holds ubiquity over much conversation in the American bubble, but it's pretty embarrassing when you see that it has no clothes.
Russia sees itself as uniquely important to world leadership. So does the United States. Neither is about ready to submit to the other's leadership in world affairs. Prospects for both Americans and Russians in the future are down, and citizens in both countries are being motivated against one another in jingoistic fashion to promote a national sense of unity and legitimacy.
The Chinese, meanwhile, are doing quite well. If they can hurdle some (admittedly big) challenges, they will challenge both Russian and US leadership in the world in a very serious way.
This is a unique and important time in history, in which the three major centers of world power may readjust in their orientation toward one another, and the balance of power may shift in ways hopefully not so techtonic there is another war between major powers (as it would be truly horrific).
>The Chinese, meanwhile, are doing quite well. If they can hurdle some (admittedly big) challenges, they will challenge both Russian and US leadership in the world in a very serious way.
On the other hand, our incoming wildcard of a president seems to be ready to tilt away from China and towards Russia, though what really happens will be impossible to predict. I'm wondering if this rapprochement may come down to both nations' concerns about China.
Watching the US/Russia/China dance over the years has made me think that Orwell was eerily prophetic, even if he didn't get the year right. "But we've always been at war with Eastasia!"
So what you are saying is it is good Russia is corrupt, dysfunctional and authoritarian because it helps Putin in his drive to gain superpower status for his country.
No you completely missed the point, which is that the US has and does overthrow democracies for National Security and global power ambitions. Authoritarianism is an excuse for US activity and reforms in Russia that would make it more efficient but as strong willed and committed to global leadership would pose a greater - not lesser - challenge to American interests. The same analysis, of course, applies in the other direction.
Repeating propaganda about some eccentricities in the style of governance or opinions about fairness/happiness, be it old Cold War rhetoric or new 21st Century Great Game rhetoric, misses the crucial axis on which state competition functions and inevitably renders resulting commentary/analysis petty and wanting.
There's plenty to read in America about the creepy and corrupt Russians and plenty to read in Russia about the creepy and corrupt Americans.
But if you're wanting to follow the present like someone in the future is going to read a history book, the fairy tail elements, "good and evil", finger and blame pointing, and apologism have to go in favor of a sober realpolitik.
There's an obvious difference between law enforcement having these powers (and we can assume Russian law enforcement does too) and Joe Schmoe having these powers. As Russians have already said in this thread, the main use of this is blackmail and cyberbullying. It certainly is an abused feature. I think the typical "whataboutism" here is distracting from the main issue.
I did see some very solid engineering there. But I didn't see any meaningful product or business model innovation. As the documentary shows, most companies there are either replicating western business models, or doing what the government orders or allows them to do. Russian engineers are phenomenal but their entrepreneurs don't see either creative of free to create.
Compare them to Chinese entrepreneurs. In China they don't restrict themselves to copy western businesses. They adapt to very Chinese cultural habits like having chat engines on online shopping such that you can interact with sellers or even haggle and bargain when shopping. It's what Jack Ma called being "the crocodile in the Yang-Tse": being specific to a culture, understand your customers instead of standardizing them.
Do Russians do the same? The video didn't show that. What it showed is how much Russian capitalism is a pet of the Kremlin.
78 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadStill waiting for social networks to search for you on other social networks, to verify your identify.
We're sorry, this photo doesn't match your face in photos on other social media, so we can't add it to your profile.
My assumptions are that the process is scraping social networks for tagged pictures; identifying and standardizing faces and then training a CNN network to identify individuals.
The trouble is wrapping my head around how to do that at the scale needed to uniquely identify 20M+ individuals. Do they train the CNNs in smaller batches and run the models in parallel? How do they normalize the results? How do the add incremental data?
I'm not as familiar with the models in face recognition but something analogous to word2vec may produce reasonable results.
Then, use a recurrent ConvNet at the end to pump out probabilities for each class (in this case face) with a low/tractable number of parameters.
What would pairs of maximally distant faces look like?
What would the mediods of a large dataset that was clustered into two clusters look like? Would it be a high level feature that we'd recognize like male or female?
Would faces that were mediods of the cluster be considered more attractive?
Would it be possible to build a similar app that allowed you to identify an individual from memory? Cluster the dataset and present the user with images representative of the mediods of the clusters. Discard images from clusters that weren't selected and re-cluster. Repeat until a handful of images remain.
Could that technique work as a virtual sketch artist and identify a person's doppelganger?
The library gets the picture as input and spits out a 128-element vector. The more similar the vectors are for two pictures the more likely they are of the same person.
You don't need to train it, there is a pretrained version available.
http://www.evolvingai.org/fooling
for recognizing ImageNet images.
Do you know if Skolkovo is still a thing there?
I would also recommend Sankt Petersburg over Moscow, having lived in both.
Though if you go as an American, you will be in a nicely padded expat bubble and the life can be quite comfortable. Just like in any other country.
The realization that should come later is that because people in the West have basic human rights, life is messy as its harder to control a population that's guaranteed rights. But in autocratic/dictatorial states many people are beaten, jailed, or simply killed with impunity or have a mock trial for formalities. Tourists will never see any of this and their Western passport means they'll never be shaken down or beaten or harassed by the authorities. They'll get preferential treatment because its within everyone's economic and political interests to do so. They mistakenly think this is how the locals are treated as well.
Sadly, many Westerners get the 'big city' autocratic treatment and bemoan the messy chaos of their own cities, without realizing that chaos is a feature, not a bug, especially if you want your 'features' to be the rule of law, personal freedom, property rights, an independent judiciary, and human rights.
From a tourist's perspective NYC, Chicago, LA are a madhouse of crime, graffiti, etc while Pyongyang is a wonderful, clean, and relatively quiet capital. You'd think the latter would be utopia, but of course, its far from it. My point is that a tourist's experience actually has the opposite incentives as a citizen's experience. An oppressed and submissive populace is nice for tourists but not nice for locals. A boisterous, empowered, and loud populace is nice for locals but not nice for tourists.
For example, I imagine the Paris and Athens metro systems go on strike a lot more than the Moscow and Pyongyang metro systems do.
In China, I'm scared of the police too but I know that I'll get preferential treatment because I'm a foreigner so excesses are less likely.
That said, I agree with your points, especially with China becoming more and more autocratic since 2013...
So, yes I'm much more afraid of the police in the US, they are demonstrably more violent. That doesn't mean that China and Russia are not dictatures, they are. It also doesn't mean that the police in those countries are not scary. They are scary and they are corrupted and will shake down locals (but rarely foreigners because it's too risky for them).
until my significant other got shaken down by the police there three times in the last three times we were there. so now i realized my first experience was skewed because I'm not the demographic that is the target of all that.
now i know better: your isolated anecdotal experience should never be the only argument for a political discussion.
As I see it, their real incentive would be to shut down the higher education system, because it a) costs money, b) sends a good part of produced talent to other countries, and c) produces educated citizens which are harder to manipulate.
Sadly, I hear quite a few confirmations of this from friends who work in education.
BTW, here's a great video, Rules for Rulers, which is basically a video TL;DR of "The Dictator's Handbook" that explains incentives of democratic and autocratic rulers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
Hitler got extremely far in the war against the USSR, and probably lost (in his words [2]) because the USSR rapidly moved production beyond Nazi reach. Also the USSR had a resolve to send millions of people in near suicide waves, something the French refused. Also the unwillingness of the Japanese to attack the USSR [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Speer
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClR9tcpKZec
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Sorge
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
not much. In O&G all the complicated drilling is done by foreign companies who have the tech (while, yes, accounting IT in Russian O&G can employ the top grads :). In defense it is even worse - Russia still can't build a stealth plane, i.e. they were able to produce a body, the easiest part, can be calculated on computers with basic scientific knowledge, while the radar and engine require a well developed technological base and thus still not reachable for Russia.
One piece of software I am very impressed by is Dmitry Shkarin's Durilca, a very fast and efficient file compressor, topping the benchmark charts. I wonder what he's doing now. And if I'm not mistaken Eltech's Exagear (close to native i386 binary emulation on Arm) was made by Russian programmers too.
I'm sure you'll find something here: http://sovmusic.ru
[p.s. english: http://www.sovmusic.ru/english/index.php]
However, it seems that most people reading this thread are from the Родина (rodina: motherland) and get offended by objective criticism about Russia.
At least in the text the author seemingly misses an important theme: there is a rising gloom in the Russian techscene lately. Talented programmers are mostly open-minded and keen to the western perspective, so the recent (~2012) turn in Russian politics was (and is) morally hard for a lot of them. All hopes for modernization, "westernization", and brighter future in the next decade were shattered, most startups now look for either government or government-associated funding. Like, the only way the founders of that creepy FindFace startup were going to monetize is to sell it to siloviks. The economic downturn also plays its role.
The future isn't bright around here.
Edit: seems someone thought it was sarcastic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (it wasn't)
To be honest I don't see how this claim can be compatible with your disagreement on funding. Startups are either SV-style (free market above everything, private VCs, fierce competition) or China-style (heavy government involvement at all stages, from funding to market regulations). So you are either "pro-western" or pro-govt-funded "VC". It is true that there are people with paternalistic view of the government, and all the talk about "import substitution" favors them, but that's exactly the point I was making: the future is gloom here for people with a classic startup culture.
Especially since it was very recently that huge structural transformations in Russia (Gorby's shock therapy) brought "westernization", "modernization" and a "brighter future" to Russia - in at least all of the US reporting. The shock therapy brought democracy (yes Russians vote) and economic liberalization (yes Russia is Capitalist society). It also broke what had been of an existing soviet union (another thing for the US to cheer about).
This constantly unobtainable quality that the US really would like Russia to achieve is submission to decision making for the world centered in Washington, and until that is achieved according to "western" (sic) reports, Russia will not have modernized, and will not have a brighter future. This kind of exceptionlist rhetoric holds ubiquity over much conversation in the American bubble, but it's pretty embarrassing when you see that it has no clothes.
Russia sees itself as uniquely important to world leadership. So does the United States. Neither is about ready to submit to the other's leadership in world affairs. Prospects for both Americans and Russians in the future are down, and citizens in both countries are being motivated against one another in jingoistic fashion to promote a national sense of unity and legitimacy.
The Chinese, meanwhile, are doing quite well. If they can hurdle some (admittedly big) challenges, they will challenge both Russian and US leadership in the world in a very serious way.
This is a unique and important time in history, in which the three major centers of world power may readjust in their orientation toward one another, and the balance of power may shift in ways hopefully not so techtonic there is another war between major powers (as it would be truly horrific).
On the other hand, our incoming wildcard of a president seems to be ready to tilt away from China and towards Russia, though what really happens will be impossible to predict. I'm wondering if this rapprochement may come down to both nations' concerns about China.
Watching the US/Russia/China dance over the years has made me think that Orwell was eerily prophetic, even if he didn't get the year right. "But we've always been at war with Eastasia!"
But yeah given Orwell was English, they've been at war there for hundreds of years.
Repeating propaganda about some eccentricities in the style of governance or opinions about fairness/happiness, be it old Cold War rhetoric or new 21st Century Great Game rhetoric, misses the crucial axis on which state competition functions and inevitably renders resulting commentary/analysis petty and wanting.
There's plenty to read in America about the creepy and corrupt Russians and plenty to read in Russia about the creepy and corrupt Americans.
But if you're wanting to follow the present like someone in the future is going to read a history book, the fairy tail elements, "good and evil", finger and blame pointing, and apologism have to go in favor of a sober realpolitik.
Meanwhile it's not creepy at all that "Half of American Adults Are in Police Facial-Recognition Databases":
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/half-o...
Compare them to Chinese entrepreneurs. In China they don't restrict themselves to copy western businesses. They adapt to very Chinese cultural habits like having chat engines on online shopping such that you can interact with sellers or even haggle and bargain when shopping. It's what Jack Ma called being "the crocodile in the Yang-Tse": being specific to a culture, understand your customers instead of standardizing them.
Do Russians do the same? The video didn't show that. What it showed is how much Russian capitalism is a pet of the Kremlin.