You get to vote for one of ~5 alternatives every 4 years. This then propagates to hundreds of decisions in a way that dilutes your influence to practically nothing.
This is commonly known as "LLM-as-a-judge" and anecdotally multiple people I know who write code using OpenRouter or using multiple models say it's surprisingly effective. It's strange that there don't appear to be any major papers on it since ~early 2025, which at this point is basically ancient history.
Here is a piece of history trivia. Not trying to have an argument.
> they wanted to bypass what they considered "trading bottleneck" created by Ottoman
The Ottomans didn't exactly close the Silk Road, but they made it harder and more expensive to use it.
But the major reason for the maritime routes taking over the cargo traffic was that it's much more efficient to sail to Asia with your cargo than to walk it on camels.
So when the Portugese found the way around Africa and landed in Calcutta on May 20 1498, the trade patterns changed forever.
>So when the Portugese found the way around Africa and landed in Calcutta on May 20 1498, the trade patterns changed forever.
This new route discovery actually significantly increased the importance of Strait of Malacca and Singapore, not decreasing it.
Actually even before that important turning point event, the European already knew about about the importance of Strait of Malacca including both the metropolis Malacca and Singapore/Temasek. The is one famous quote by a 16th CE Portuguese explorer Tomé Pires, who declared: "Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice".
To say that Singapore was an obscure fishing village is disengenious by the colonial powers and those believing this wicked narrative are in denial.
My once top comment about this "elephant in the room" has been downvoted to oblivion, but hey c'est la vie. There's a very popular saying, "you can fool some people all of the time, and all people some of the time, but you simply cannot fool all of the people all of the time".
There's also a narrative that if the tea via land it's called chai and if if the via sea it's called tea [1].
The Ottoman controlled both the land and sea route to Europe creating the trading bottleneck from the European perspective for many centuries to the far East, they never close it. Thats's why both Dutch and British created their very own East India Companies about the same time around 1600 CE as the vehicles to trade in Asia once they found the new trading route around Africa to Asia. Due to their highly profitable business endeavour, their governments willingly become the side-kick colonizers for their new companies and becoming complicit to wrestle and overcome any countries that refused to their own unfair business arrangements, terms and conditions including trading monopolies.
[1] Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea (317 comments):
With AIs as teachers, I disagree. But with AIs assisting routine grading, filling in the university's assessment_framework_draft_v3_final_FINAL.docx, and otherwise freeing up time to actually focus on students - maybe? Although I fear that any productivity gains will be swallowed up by further reductions in lecturer headcount...
AI lacks both the reasoning and insight needed to teach anybody that isn't already immensely interested in the topic, and even then might leave large knowledge gaps, not to mention how often it hallucinates wrong knowledge. Especially with topics that already have a lot of bad information floating around.
Perhaps. For now, one of my one-on-one tutoring sessions (in real analysis) this semester consisted mostly on un-teaching a student a bunch of wrong crap they "learned" from ChatGPT.
I'm thinking of custom built Teacher AIs, trained in how to teach different kinds of students, and with well defined curriculums.
Even if they're not better than the best human teachers, I think being able to "personally" interact with each student 24/7 will be a huge improvement.
It was a coalition of monarchies, so terrified of the prospect of even a single popular republic rejecting the divine right to rule, that began the bloodshed and invaded France.
Blaming the Revolution for the Coalition wars is just bad history.
In case you didn't notice, the Revolution won. All contemporary republics fundamentally inherit from the French Revolution - you're surprised that the systems of govt honour and romanticize it's progenitors?
Aside, if bloodshed prevention is your only barometer for history, supporting the Coalition view of events is even sillier, because the Bourbon Restoration directly led to the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, which was yet more bloodshed. Almost as if unjust systems are fundamentally untenable...
> In case you didn't notice, the Revolution won. All contemporary republics fundamentally inherit from the French Revolution
“Fundamentally inherent from”
is such a broad statement that it’s difficult to argue with, but the US constitution predates the French Revolution.
> so terrified of the prospect of even a single popular republic rejecting the divine right to rule
If the monarchies of Europe were so terrified of a single country rejecting the divine right to rule, why did many of them assist the United States, hinder Britain, or remain neutral in the revolutionary war?
That is a bit of revisionist history: conspiracy theories gripped the revolution, and a lot of them thought Marie-Antoinette was already organising an Austrian invasion of France (since she is Austrian), so rather than wait for the supposed inevitable to happen, France attacked first. And that's what made the coalitions form. Not that they liked the idea of a Republican France, but before France attacked, they were unlikely to do anything about it.
Exactly right, there's even ones so conservative they market themselves as cash equivalent. Basically zero gain/loss in those funds. If you're so worried then go login to your 401k and change it.
“belong” is a flexible word. You’re right in theory but depending on the situation money in your bank account is worth more to you than an equivalent amount of money in a company’s bank account (of which you are a shareholder).
A sufficiently advanced technological field is one where any expert would start laughing at you for suggesting "hardening" against bullets. The denominator for rockets is always mass. Most of the difficulty is derived from not just doing a thing, but doing it in as lightweight a way possible. There are rocket stages that won't even stand up under their own weight, we have to inflate them like balloons just to move them.
There are rarely mentioned cases where you do actually want to be able to pierce a rocket with a bullet. Mostly related to recovery (or not...) post-flight.
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