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TheChurn

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TheChurn ,

American hegemony was a conscious American policy choice. We didn't want the Euros having an independent foreign policy, we wanted them reliant on American military protection. This was how the US kept those bits of its empire in line.

Notice how the only Western European country that even pays lip service to independent action is France, the one Western European country with a military capable of independent operation. And then we get "Freedom Fries" and all that shit whenever they don't do whatever the current US admin wants.

The single biggest thing Trump fucked up for the US was pushing NATO countries to spend more on defence. This will drastically reduce US influence over the continent in the coming decades, speeding up America's worsening diplomatic isolation.

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)

You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...

TheChurn ,

There are really only 3 search providers, Google, Bing, and Yandex.

All others will pay one of these three to use their indexes, since creating and maintaining that index is incredibly expensive.

Greater Idaho movement: 13 counties in eastern Oregon have voted to secede and join Idaho (ktvz.com)

On Tuesday, voters in Crook County passed measure 7-86, which asked voters if they support negotiations to move the Oregon/Idaho border to include Crook County in Idaho. The measure is passing with 53% of the vote, and makes Crook County the 13th county in eastern Oregon to pass a Greater Idaho measure.

TheChurn ,

Electoral college. Idaho always goes red, Oregon always go blue. Moving population from Oregon to Idaho transfers electoral votes from a blue state to a red state.

Whether it matters or not depends on whether it changes the tipping point state in any given election, which is hard to know in advance, but for the red team it is at worst identical to the current setup and at best a small boost to their chances in a presidential election. Conversely for the blue team it can either be meaningless or a slight negative.

TheChurn ,

if it didn't have parents it isn't food either

What does this mean?

TheChurn ,

That would give politicians another reason to raise the retirement age, in order to stay in power.

TheChurn ,

I'm not sure I'd trust modern CA to do Med3 justice. The new style of Total War is just a different beast from the sublime RTW/Med2 era.

Lots of little things changed, and it just 'hits different'. Probably the biggest difference is just that every single fight after the first 20 turns will be a 20 stack vs a 20 stack, and every single battle is life or death for that army. It makes the campaign much faster paced - declare war, wipe stack, capture cities for 3 turns until the AI magics up another 20 stack.

In the original Med2, since there wasn't automatic replenishment, there were often battles between smaller stacks, even in late game, as they were sent from the backline to reinforce the large armies on the front. Led to some of my greatest memories trying to keep some random crossbowmen and cavalry alive against some ambushing enemy infantry they wandered into. The need for manual reinforcement led to natural pauses in wars and gave the losing side a chance to regroup without relying on the insane AI bonuses of the modern TW games - and I do mean insane; they'll have multiple full stacks supplied from a single settlement.

TheChurn ,

Early heat seekers wouldn't reliably lock an aircraft from the front, since the heat signature is really only visible from the rear.

Something like this would almost certainly need to be actively guided, but then the RWR needs to be more expensive and that cuts into yacht money for the Lockheed execs.

TheChurn ,

Most OLEDs today ship with logo detection and will dampen the brightness on static elements automatically.

While it isn't a silver bullet, it does help reduce burn in since it is strongly linked to heat, and therefore to the pixel brightness. New blue PHOLEDs are expected to also cut burn in risk. Remember that LCDs also used to have burn in issues, as did CRTs.

TheChurn ,

I mostly just pay for it because I've used it for ages and definitely get more value out of it than the subscription cost. I don't think I use a single nitro feature.

TheChurn ,

They send random gifts some times, usually a code to redeem something in a game I don't play.

Some super reacts - animated emojis basically.

Other than that I really couldn't tell you. I don't think the subscription is worth what the subscription gives, but the alternative is the free product gets worse faster, and that would disrupt a lot of communities that I enjoy interacting with.

Thinking of Discord as a whole, I think it is worth the nitro price. Not in love with the trajectory though.

Reflections on Xenoblade Chronicles

Xenoblade Chronicles has been one of the broadly popular JRPG series as of late, particularly within my own social circles. I have heard mostly good things about the games, and some vocal criticisms about the second game in particular. After finally picking up a Switch last year, I have now made my way through most of the...

TheChurn ,

Got the second years ago when it launched because I was looking for a new rpg to play. Bounced off it immediately because the gameplay was far too passive -- I didn't feel like I was doing anything -- and the fucking quote spam POPPY WILL PROTECT MASTERPON is branded on my soul.

TheChurn ,

This would've been more believable if they left off the wheat. Oil I can imagine, but no fucking way are US troops stealing wheat of all things.

Do they think there is a mill at their base? What the fuck would they use it for? It has negative value.

TheChurn ,

Not in the middle of a fucking desert, on a military base, far away from any potential market.

Unless you are going to claim that the soldiers stole wheat to sell to locals, for local currency, that they can then use to.... do what exactly?

TheChurn , (edited )

Linux and Nvidia really need to sort out their shit so I can fully dump windows.

Luckily the AI hype is good for something in this regard, since running gpus on Linux servers is suddenly much more important.

TheChurn ,

I've been using Nvidia under Linux for the last 3 years and it has been massive pita.

Getting CUDA to work consistently is a feat, and one that must be repeated for most driver updates.

Wayland support is still shoddy.

Hardware acceleration on the web (at least with Firefox) is very inconsistent.

It is very much a second-class experience compared to Windows, and it shouldn't be.

TheChurn ,

One nitpick, Jesus was almost certainly a real figure. There are many records indicating someone with that name was in the area at the time, and that they were executed by crucifixion.

The religious stuff, obviously no way to prove. But as a person, the historical consensus is they existed.

TheChurn ,

As someone who spent years as a 'big company engineer', the reason I don't write code until the bosses have clear requirements is because I don't want to do it twice.

That and it isn't just me, there's 5 other teams who have to coordinate and they have other things on their roadmap that are more important than a project without a spec.

TheChurn ,

I think this is from Berserk, but it's been years and I can't quite tell.

TheChurn ,

While Finland lost, the difficulty the Soviets encountered during their offensive was noted by the powers at the time. It was another factor convincing the Nazis that invading the Soviet Union wasn't as terrible and idea as the balance of resources and forces would suggest.

Historians still debate whether the Soviets intended to conquer all of Finland at the onset of the war. While the eventual peace treaty left Finland ceding more territory than the initial Soviet ultimatum demanded, Finland retained its sovereignty, which was incredible given the disparity in military power and the existence of a puppet Finnish communist government.

TheChurn ,

"AI" isn't needed to solve optimization problems, that's what we have optimization algorithms for.

Define an objective and parameters and give the problem to any one of the dozens of general solvers and you'll get approximate answers. Large cities already use models like these for traffic flow, there's a whole field of literature on it.

The one closest to what you mentioned is a genetic algorithm, again a decades-old technique that has very little in common with Generative "AI"

TheChurn ,

No, that's not a real problem either. Model search techniques are very mature, the first automated tools for this were released in the 90s, they've only gotten better.

AI can't 'train itself', there is no training required for an optimization problem. A system that queries the value of the objective function - "how good is this solution" - then tweaks parameters according to the optimization algorithm - traffic light timings - and queries the objective function again isn't training itself, it isn't learning, it is centuries-old mathematics.

There's a lot of intentional and unintentional misinformation around what "AI" is, what it can do, and what it can do that is actually novel. Beyond Generative AI - the new craze - most of what is packaged as AI are mature algorithms applied to an old problem in a stagnant field and then repackaged as a corporate press release.

Take drug discovery. No "AI" didn't just make 50 new antibiotics, they just hired a chemist who graduated in the last decade who understands commercial retrosynthetic search tools and who asked the biopharma guy what functional groups they think would work.

TheChurn ,

Yeah, because modern skeletons have the marks of heavy manual labour on them…

Bro have you ever talked to anyone in the trades? They are all limping by 35.

Not everyone gets a do-nothing laptop job.

Admit it: ‘Artificial general intelligence’ may already be obsolete, Expecting OpenAI’s GPT and other large language models to beat humans at thinking like a human might be missing the point. (www.fastcompany.com)

Elon Musk filed a lawsuit in San Francisco’s Superior Court accusing OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, of betraying the startup’s initial commitment to openness, the betterment of society, and lack of profit as a motive. Among other things, Musk’s 35-page complaint argues that OpenAI has violated its original deal to share...

TheChurn ,

But the most current information does not mean it is the most correct information.

I could publish 100 papers on Arxiv claiming the Earth is, in fact, a cube - but that doesn't make it true even though it is more recent than the sphere claims.

Some mechanism must decide what is true and send that information to train the model - that act of deciding is where the actual intelligence in this process lives. Today that decision is made by humans, they curate the datasets used to train the model.

There's no intelligence in these current models.

TheChurn ,

Humans are intelligent animals, but humans are not only intelligent animals. We do not make decisions and choose which beliefs to hold based solely on sober analysis of facts.

That doesn't change the general point that a model given the vast corpus of human knowledge will prefer the most oft-repeated bits to the true bits, whereas we humans have muddled our way through to some modicum of understanding of the world around us by not doing that.

TheChurn ,

Victoria 3 was just boring - I say this as a huge fan of Victoria 2.

I played a few weeks after launch, and - for every one of the 4 countries I tried (Russia, Japan, Denmark, Spain), simply building all the things everywhere and ignoring money made everything trivial.

The economic simulation was super barebones, the entire thing could be bootstrapped just by building. An entire population of illiterate farmers would become master architects overnight and send GDP to the double digit billions in a few decades.

TheChurn ,

The raw spending figure isn't what is important, but the PPP figure. Russia's economy is about 1/5th the size of the EU's in PPP, and its defense sector is vastly more efficient on a monetary basis than the west - The US alone has given Ukraine close to $60 billion and it is a fraction of the hardware that Russia has produced with fewer dollars.

This isn't a 'Russia stronk, Europe bad' post, it just bears emphasizing that Russia has a large industrial base and has brought much of it into arms production over the past two years. The West hasn't, and defense procurement remains an almost artisanal process where high tech goods are bought - in low volumes - at inflated prices.

TheChurn ,

Yes, you can make the argument that a hyper-modern vehicle is a vastly more effective weapons system, so the disparity in cost is justified.

That isn't what we are seeing in Ukraine - relatively modern NATO-standard tanks are being knocked out by old artillery, immobilized by old mines, and killed by cheap drones. Industrial warfare in the vein of WWI and WWII is clearly not dead yet.

This isn't to say Russia would win a direct conventional war against the west, but we also can't sit here smugly and claim it would be a steamroll like Gulf Storm given the observations from Ukraine.

TheChurn ,

A virus doesn't care if the host lives or dies. Just like evolution doesn't care if YOU live or die, so long as it happens after you have kids.

A virus only has to have a living host long enough to spread to others, and the long asymptomatic infectious period observed with this coronavirus already fits that bill.

Think of Rabies, nearly 100% fatal, still incredibly widespread and infectious.

TheChurn ,

SS and Medicare are largely funded by dedicated taxes (the payroll tax), and the spending is mandatory - it is spelled out in the laws that created these programs.

The discretionary part of the budget is where general taxes on income, inheritance, etc. go, and where everything else the government does is financed. Foreign aid, infrastructure investment, grants, disaster relief.. everything besides SS Medicare/Medicaid.

US Military spending is more than half of discretionary spending.

I'm household terms (which is a bad analogy) after paying the mortgage and utility bills, we spend more than half of what is left of the paycheck on guns and ammo.

TheChurn , (edited )

The terms seem agreeable?

The terms that restrict the size of the Ukrainian military, bar Ukraine from receiving foreign assistance to rebuild its military, forbid it from seeking security guarantees from any country or bloc, ... The terms that would have made it trivial for Russia to further invade at any point in the future?

Those terms seem agreeable?

TheChurn ,

A token is not a concept. A token is a word or word fragment that occured often in free text and was assigned a number. Common words, prefixes, and suffixes are the vast majority of tokens, and the rest are uncommon pairs of letters.

The algorithm to generate tokens is essentially compression, there is no semantic meaning embedded in them.

Western troops on the ground in Ukraine is not 'ruled out' in the future, French leader says (apnews.com)

French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that sending Western troops on the ground in Ukraine is not “ruled out” in the future after the issue was debated at a gathering if European leaders, as Russia’s full-scale invasion grinds into a third year....

TheChurn ,

The short answer is it depends.

The long answer is that treaties and international law are pretty window dressing around the utterly anarchic reality of geopolitics. If states saw it as in their best interest to allow Poland to fall to Russia, they would allow it regardless of whatever treaties they previously signed.

Article 5 provides that the alliance must support a member after an armed attack against them on their territory in Europe or North America. In plain reading, this would apply should Russia attack Polish soil regardless of who started the war. In reality, it really depends.

No one (in the west) wants a 'real' war. War is a distraction from making money. If Poland expanded the war by joining in, I doubt they would receive the full support of the alliance.

TheChurn ,

Lina Khan has been extraordinarily ineffective at the head of the FTC.

While the agency has made a lot of noise about holding big tech accountable, all they've managed to accomplish is losing court cases and setting even more precedent against the government's ability to enforce anti-monopoly legislation against these companies.

Her heart seems to be in the right place, but results matter as well.

House China committee demands Elon Musk open SpaceX Starshield internet to U.S. troops in Taiwan (www.cnbc.com)

The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party sent a letter on Saturday to SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk demanding that U.S. troops stationed in Taiwan get access to SpaceX's Starshield, a satellite communication network designed specifically for the military....

TheChurn ,

The government already has the power to do that.

If shit ever hit the fan, they could just invoke the DPA and force starlink to do exactly what they say.

TheChurn ,

Copilot is GPT under the hood, it just starts with a search step that finds (hopefully) relevant content and then passes that to GPT for summarization.

TheChurn ,

The Dark Souls 2 DLCs are some of the best content in all of Souls. While the original game has some level design issues, the DLCs are sublime.

TheChurn ,

Loved the first one for fucking around with friends. I'll maybe pick it up after they add vehicles and we see a bit more of their long-term monetization strategy.

TheChurn ,

With refresh rates like that, you must be talking about LED billboards.

These are different from consumer monitors, which mostly use constant LED backlights and a liquid crystal layer to determine color.

An LED bilboard is going to have a fuckton of singular LEDs - each of which can emit exactly one color - arranged in groups to form full pixels capable of displaying many colors. There is no extra LCD layer between your eyes and the billboard LEDs.

The reason for the high refresh rates is because each led must be extinguished and and relit to redraw the image, and the eye is very good at picking up this strobe effect.

The difference vs. a consumer display is that the backlight in a typical monitor is constant. Refreshes the screen involves sending updated instructions to the LCD layer, twisting the crystals and possibly changing the color they allow through.

To make a crude concrete example:

Imagine I am shining a white flashlight in your face. In front of the flashlight I put a colored piece of plastic so the light hitting you is colored. Then I change the plastic to one with a (slightly) different color. I do this 120 times per second. That is a typical consumer display.

Now imagine I am shining a colored flashlight directly in your face. Then I turn it off and grab a flashlight of a different color and shine it in your face. Imagine I do that 120 times per second. That is an LED billboard.

Which do you think is more likely to give you a headache?

One final complication - the brightness of the LEDs is variable over time, they received a modulated signal rather than a steady voltage, so at lower refresh rates there will be a noticeable ripple across the image, similar to how early CRT screens could look.

Increasing the refresh rate hides a lot of these problems.

TheChurn ,

Every billion parameters needs about 2 GB of VRAM - if using bfloat16 representation. 16 bits per parameter, 8 bits per byte -> 2 bytes per parameter.

1 billion parameters ~ 2 Billion bytes ~ 2 GB.

From the name, this model has 72 Billion parameters, so ~144 GB of VRAM

TheChurn ,

You do not get 'nitrogen' at the dentist's office.

You are given a solution of normal air with a small amount of nitrous oxide (N2O) to relax you. You are never deprived of oxygen, since the dentist isn't trying to asphyxiate you.

TheChurn ,

Gold is rare, compared to just about every other element, in accessible areas of earth. All the gold ever discovered on Earth would fit inside a 23 meter (75 foot) cube. This is about 244 thousand tons, in all of human history.

Compare this to iron, where just the United States produces 46 Million tons in 2022 alone.

There is plenty of gold deep within the Earth - it is very dense, so it sank towards the core when Earth was recently formed - but on the surface and the proximal crust, it is not found in abundance.

TheChurn ,

Check it out to throw in the trash. Jared Diamond's book is thoroughly condemned in anthropological and archaeological circles.

TheChurn ,

Immigration is a football wedge issue that cannot and will not be addressed.

The solution is already known, stricter enforcement of penalties for employers of undocumented workers. But that would actually fuck a sizable portion of the economy, as these workers are vital to a lot of low-wage labor (harvesting and food processing in particular).

Instead the plants and the feds play a game where the authorities give advance notice of ICE raids, and take a couple people and the employers face insignificant penalties.

As with any other mass behavior, adjusting it requires altering the economic incentives. People come here for higher wages, they come here illegally because the legal method is expensive, arbitrary, and time-consuming, and the opportunities open to illegal migrants are still enticing enough. Stopping illegal migrants requires removing those opportunities.

That might make some shareholders a penny less wealthy though, so we can't have it. We'll just keep arguing about this for the next 500 years and accomplish nothing, just be sure to vote for US because the other side wants to do the BAD THING on immigration.

TheChurn ,

The problem with the principal refusing to escort the officer is then they are obstructing a police investigation, and that is a crime. It isn't fair to put this burden on them, the blame lies squarely with the police chain of command.

In fact the root problem of all things police is that once police decide to do something, even if that thing is illegal, interfering is a crime.

This is how we end up with people being charged with resisting arrest, and no other crimes that would warrant an arrest. This is also how we end up with a bunch of people live streaming George Floyd's execution, because stopping a cop from killing someone is a crime.

TheChurn ,

With a complaint and a full description of the offense, the officer had cause to force entry.

Same as if someone called in a suspicious package, they wouldn't need a warrant to gain entry.

Society gives police an incredible amount of leeway.

TheChurn ,

I agree with you, but it doesn't change the implications of a police officer having a complaint and a sufficient description to follow up on it without a warrant.

It is at their discretion, same as if you called in that your grandma didn't answer the phone, they could ignore it or bust down the door. Both would be fully legal.

Court is a different matter. A judge could say there wasn't cause to search after the fact, but that won't change what the police do in the moment.

TheChurn ,

Role of thumb is an employee costs roughly twice their base salary, as the employee still needs to cover insurance, taxes, sick time, and other benefits.

That leaves an average salary of 190K for the 50 employees. That isn't much for tech.

TheChurn ,

paying a peasant to work

Peasants (serfs) were not paid. They were bound to the land they worked, and were given a fraction of the harvest they produced. The rest was property of the Lord who's title controlled the land.

There was a (very small) artisan class where the concept of payment existed, though often it was payment-in-kind - smith the plow for my oxen and I'll give you some food after the harvest. Money was rarely encountered for the vast majority of people.

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