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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

it’s not spontaneous

Spontaneity in thermodynamics refers to a process which occurs without external application of energy. In your description, a pile of ash becoming an apple is spontaneous.

So in a contained universe, it doesn’t matter if it’s an apple releasing energy and becoming a pile of ash, or a pile of ash absorbing energy and becoming a perfectly normal apple.

The net energy is still conserved. Just going from energy to mass unlike mass to energy.

There is no mass-energy conversion in an apple burning to become ash, just the release of chemical energy from newly-formed bonds.

Regardless, conservation of energy is only one part of how the universe operates. The second operating principle is (or at least from hundreds of years of scientific inquiry appears to be) the maximization of entropy. That is the ‘spreading out’ of available energy. This is the reason iron rusts, rather than remaining oxygen and iron - conservation of energy alone cannot explain natural phenomena.

Spontaneous reconstruction of an ashed apple violates the second law of thermodynamics, and the Second law is no less valid than the First.

Lastly, I was not writing specifically about Penrose’s views on consciousness. His entire theory that gravity is driving the collapse of a wave function, and that said collapse occurs retroactively, is untested and based on an appeal to elegance. This does not make it wrong, but it most certainly should not be taken as true.

Beyond consciousness, the second law of thermodynamics also implies the presence and direction of time. In fact, it is sometimes called the Arrow of Time as it appears to direct physical processes to happen preferentially in the direction that increases entropy.

A self contained universe with fixed energy and infite time will eventually see a pile of ash turned into an apple. And it wouldn’t violate a damn thing with our system of physics.

This occuring spontaneously would indeed violate the 2nd law. This is a core disagreement between classical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, which seems to re-derive classical thermo from probabilistic arguments over system states.

I feel it also warrants stating that Penrose’s theory is not widely accepted, has yet to be tested, and is based mostly on an argument to elegance - it “seems weird” for their to be uncountably infinite parallel timelines spawning at every instant. It is far too soon for it to be taken as fact.

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.

There are plenty of things that can cause fires that are not oxygen, and don’t contain oxygen.

The halogens, Fluorine and Chlorine in particular, are powerful oxidizing agents on their own and can produce flames in the same manner as common flames.

Here’s a report on the spectra of flames produced by combustion in a Fluorine atmosphere (PDF warning).

AND you’re assuming youtube wants to continue the already unsustainable ad-based model at all

No, I was explaining how people who do not watch ads are still valuable to YouTube today. It doesn’t matter if they want to move away from serving ads in the future or not, the points above are still valid.

Netflix is actually a great parallel. They need people to watch the shows and buzz about them to draw in more subscribers. YouTube is the same way, they need people sharing videos and funny comments to scrape attention away from other bits of entertainment.

Further, this isn’t a binary outcome. Each time YouTube makes it a little harder to block ads, a slice of people who don’t want to put in the effort will start watching them. It is trivial, on the software side, to fully block a video from playing if the ad is not served. To date, they have not done that, and I sincerely doubt they ever will - because ad-free viewers are still valuable.

Yes, they would prefer if everyone watched ads. But they would still prefer ad-free viewers to watch YouTube and add to the network effect than to spend their time elsewhere.

‘Those people’ are still incredibly valuable for YouTube.

They watch content, and interact with creators which increases the health of the community and draws in more viewers - some of whom will watch ads.

They choose to spend their time on YouTube, increasing the chances they share videos, talk about videos, and otherwise increase the cultural mindshare of the platform.

Lastly, by removing themselves from the advertising pool, they boost the engagement rates on the ads themselves. This allows YouTube to charge more to serve ads.

Forcing everyone who currently uses an adblocker to watch ads wouldn’t actually help YouTube make more money, it would just piss off advertisers as they would be paying to showore ads to an unengaged audience that wouldn’t interact with those ads.

They aren’t the good guys. A lot (too much if you ask the community) of the fiction is told from the perspective of the imperium/space Marines, but that doesn’t make them the good guys.

They go around saying things like “The rewards of tolerance are treachery and betrayal.” They clearly are not meant to be the good guys, even in their own stories.

The problem is media literacy is so poor that far too many people look at quotes like that and think “that’s a good point”. Even the creators have put out press releases about how all the fascists are missing the point.

how much VRAM you need to run this model

It will depend on the representation of the parameters. Most models support bfloat16, where each parameters is 16-bits (2 Bytes). For these models, every Billion parameters needs roughly 2 GB of VRAM.

It is possible to reduce the memory footprint by using 8 bits for each param, and some models support this, but they start to get very stupid.

1. Hans has admitted to cheating in the past
2. Hans played a near-perfect game as black against the best player in the world who hadn’t lost as white in years
3. Hans made some suspiciously good moves quickly, without much time passing
4. Magnus played a very rare opening that Hans was somehow able to perfectly respond to without skipping a beat

From these, many people think he cheated. The vibrating butt plug is unlikely, but what is more likely is that Magnus’ prep got leaked and Hans was able to hyper-prepare for a specific line of play.

You can fly in space towards the planets you can see. When you get there, you won’t be able to land and will be able to fly straight through the planet itself.

Planets outside of the fast travel menu aren’t really planets

Context does not matter is exactly what you’re saying

No, what I am saying is you can’t blame every bad thing about the Korean peninsula on the US. Did the US recognize the PRK? Nope, they suppressed it. Should they have recognized it? Probably.

Did the Soviets recognize the PRK? Nope, they usurped it. Should they have recognized it? Probably.

Did the existence of the PRK change the trajectory of the peninsula towards separation and civil war? No, it was hardly a speed bump to the imperial power of the USSR and US.

The PRK is an interesting historical anecdote, but it is irrelevant when discussing the Korean War.

Interesting how you ignore how the US did not recognize the goverment installed by the people of korea (PRK)

The brief existence of the PRK has essentially no bearing on the civil war. It existed less than a year, and was dismantled in both the South and the North by the actions of the US and Soviet Union.

Neither power cared to entertain what the people of Korea wanted in the Post-War period.

I wonder what half-truth or outright lie y’all will respond with next to paint the US and SK as Satan next to the Angelic Soviet Union and DPRK.

No power were the ‘good guys’. None had the moral high ground. All deserve blame for what happened. The history of the period is one of tragedy and ambition.

None of that changes the fact that North Korea, backed by the Soviets and later China, started the shooting war by invading the South.

The comment I replied to said this:

This was the instigating event behind the civil war.

Dictionary.com says this for the word “instigating”

Causing, initiating, responsible for

Please explain how an event that occured after the invasion was the cause or initiator of the war.

If you cannot, then admit you didn’t read the thread and just came in here to muddy the waters.

If you are too proud to admit that, just ghost.

Japanese occupation –> Separate US and Soviet Occupation Zones –> Two different governments of ‘Korea’.

Not all that complicated.

Well, that’s a refreshing take to see. But that doesn’t make the event mentioned here not problematic or not a further motivator of the war

Did you miss the part where the first such event didn’t take place until after the invasion by the North?