Would be interesting indeed to hear what the implications of what you bring up are. Anyone knowing enough to speculate?

The infohash is: 41f99118ec828f6de3d1536515fe01499ac62711

1,000 metric tons do not fit in a airplane…

1,000 metric tons of hot air is a lot of volume.

Just purely as a hypothetical thought exercise I wonder how infiltrated the US gov is by cartels.

Probably none.

I grew up in Mexico--spending a few years in or near Puerto Vallarta, specifically, funnily enough--and the M.O. of the cartel is overwhelmingly geared towards keeping a VERY low profile. Their whole purpose is to be quiet and subtle.

For every "loud" cartel action in MX, there are twenty that you never see, and then ten that exist as different recyclings and exaggerations and attack ads in the US to (now) perpetuate the current administration's favorite scapegoat, or (then) to prevent people from emigrating from the US.

It's been like that since '07 or so: take a story from Ciudad Juárez or Tamaulipas, then magnify it and convince Americans that the entire country is like that, so that they don't pay attention to the fact that they could get cheaper healthcare, out of pocket, by driving across the border to an equally well-equipped hospital... than they would for the cost of a single ambulance ride in the States... while living in a house that cost 10-100 times more than a house of the same size and quality across the border. All the while, the cartel hums happily along, truly wanting absolutely nothing to do with you.

Fear sells, and fear controls. Just like whatever series of headlines got you wanting to believe that they've infiltrated the American govt. ;)

Not much if at all at the national level. US government is infiltrated by other harmful entities, drug trafficking can't compete with MIC, Big Oil, Sugar, Pharma, government contractors etc

Cartels are the largest non-state owned business operations in Mexico.

I love 0 A.D., and I’m endlessly grateful to all the developers and volunteers who made it happen. Your dedication and skill deserve a monument — my genuine admiration.

I install it every few years, and it’s always a blast, somehow, and I do not know why I never do more than experiment with it..

Gameplay-wise, I find that Beyond All Reason is, as far as open-source RTS games go, a few orders of magnitude more fun and mature. I don’t think there’s any commercially available RTS that can compete with Beyond All Reason in terms of fun and performance.

I haven't played Beyond All Reason but looking at the system requirements I'm not surprised it is more fulfilling. 0 A.D. runs on a potato if you look at it threateningly, which makes it a good option to have on a throwaway machine for kids or somesuch.

My experience is the opposite: 0ad will lag on my laptop once thing become big. BAR will warn that it’s not compatible with my low end intel integrated potato gpu, but it works just fine..

I had problems with lag years ago but not lately, though I don't do big multiplayer matches with several players and the like.

I'll check BAR out.

BAR runs fine on low end CPUs...until you have like 2,000 units on speed metal

Those are lowball system requirements too.

You can easily play or spectate a low-unit count game of BAR on any decent 2010+ quad core.

Such a computer won't allow you to play 8v8 that goes into the late-game stage. Sometimes not even 4v4 or 2v2 with players scaling to high unit counts. Some players try anyway. Ignoring player disconnections, half the drama of large-scale games is the one player who's lagging because they're on a potato computer. If the sim doesn't lag, the game will at least be down to single-digit fps.

That means you can't really play multiplayer comfortably, at least not beyond 2-4 players.

For that, you need a recent ryzen or intel. I'd estimate recent as post-covid.

I don't know what combination of things is important; there's larger cpu caches, faster sustained CPU frequencies (TDP and cooling matter there), hardware mitigations for speculative execution bugs, faster ram, resizeable BAR support... but in my experience going from a 6-core skylake-era cpu to a ryzen 9xxx, with the same gpu, made a massive difference. I saw no massive improvement going from a 4-core 2010-era cpu to a 6-core skylake-era cpu; I'd classify both as potatoes for BAR purposes.

Thank you 0 A.D. team. My son and I play, it is one of the few things we can do together. Nothing has brought me so much joy as fighting my son: king of the Persian army.

0AD's web site is rather bad at describing the game, but Beyond All Reason is even worse. I rarely play, so I had never heard about it. Both focus on details, forgetting the main points.

After reading BAR's homepage and the FAQ, I still have no idea what to expect. It could be a purely online game with ads and in-game buys, through a central proprietary server. It could also have a single player campaign.

Good points, the BAR FAQ's first question is "Best Twitch Stream Settings for BAR (OBS)", and the Gameplay page talks about physics, terrain, economy, units and weapons but answers nothing like: is there a single player campaign? Are there AI opponents? what's even the theme/setting of the game?

There are single player scenarios in Beyond All Reason, though not yet a campaign with a narrative.

There are AI opponents and you can configure friendly and hostile AI players. There are also two dedicated "beat waves of enemies then final boss" pve modes.

There's not a real theme other than "robot armies built by commanders with exponentially scaling economy".

There is a lore/backstory/setting planned to be released on March 8th.

BAR is incredible, probably best RTS right now

Find this to be plausible, meta needs to do more science of how to make things more addictive…

Plz enlighten me about the payment. As in meta bought advertisement in wsj?

Can anyone witch a TT account replicate?

But you also do not need paper to think, but surely much of modern physics would not have happened without paper or blackboards…

There is nothing to suggest LLMs will be as revolutionary as paper. The PalmPilot didn't lead to new field of science just because people had a new way to write things down.

The internet is as arguably as revolutionary as paper. And while LLMs haven’t proven to be an internet-level revolutionary technology (yet), they are closer to that than the PalmPilot.

As cognitive-offloading devices go, paper is completely neutral. It doesn't flatter you into believing you are a genius when you're not; it doesn't offer to extend your reasoning or find references in the research literature and then hallucinate and lead you astray; it will never show you advertisements for things you don't need; it will never leak your ideas and innermost thoughts to corporations owned by billionaires and totalitarian governments... I could go on but you get the drift, I'm sure. Paper wins by a mile.

Really pessimistic and mostly incorrect understanding of LLMs. No they don’t flatter you, try using ChatGPT once.

No they don’t hallucinate that much.

Since paper this is one of the most important inventions. It has almost infinite knowledge and you can ask it anything mostly.

? They certainly flatter you, openAI even felt compelled to give a statement on the sycophancy problem: https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/ And South Park parodied the issue. I use chatGPT and claude every day.

the new models don't do it

> No they don’t flatter you, try using ChatGPT once.

You're absolutely right!

On a more serious note, if it has almost infinite knowledge, is it even a cognitive-offloading tool in the same class as paper? Sounds more like something designed to stifle and make my thoughts conform to its almost infinite knowledge.

edit: I'll admit ChatGPT is a great search engine (and also very hallucinatory depending on how much you know about the subject) and maybe it helps some people think, sure. But beyond a point I find it actually harmful as a means to develop my own ideas.

There’s no winning is there?

Expected value calculations are terrible unless applied to a situation of hundreds or thousands of outcomes.

Otherwise you be stupid NOT to buy a lottery ticket each week.

The expected value of a lottery ticket is lower than its nominal value, for obvious reasons.

I agree with your point, though.

Well there’s potential counter suit or court order to pay legal fees of the other party that might affect the profitability. I am not a lawyer

No because penalty amounts are routinely slashed to a tiny fraction of the original claim.

IAAL (not legal advice) and find your comment confusing: first, because standing is a question of whether you can even have your complaint heard by a court; and second, because “brazenness” doesn’t necessarily make a case stronger.