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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It looks much better than elden ring in that all the models are much higher quality. Elden Ring was designed around relatively modest assets, and does wonders with what it has, but there is no comparison, DD2 wins hands-down.

As for art direction, that is subjective. Plenty of reasons to prefer looking at ER.

The Witcher 3 is almost a decade old at this point

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.