cpleppert

A bunch of reasons.

1. Napoleon's goal was to pursue and defeat the Russian army in the field, not necessarily capture cities. Going north would have meant releasing the pressure on the main russian field armies and let them engage his main force at their discretion while exposing his flank.

2. St. Petersburg remained the political and economic capital of Russia; St. Petersburg never displaced Moscow in real world importance.

3. St. Petersburg was shielded from land and sea with prepared fortifications on both and Napoleon lacked a fleet to effectively blockade it.

4. Its in the middle of a very dense forest and swamp, not the the best logistics and ability to maintain a siege.

The Nazis made the same choice in WWII and even though they were able to control the Baltics and had Finland as an ally never seriously threatened to take the city.

Short answer: yes. The AGPL should be avoided at all costs because it has never been robustly tested in court and its unclear what the licensing implications actually are.

There are various explanations in plain english sometimes offered about how the AGPL will apply. None of these are true.

Companies that have a made a business decision to provide AGPL licensed code do so with the understanding that no serious business will ever consider using such a product in their software stack. If you choose an AGPL licensed product it will (rightly) become a gigantic headache at some point. It will certainly become a problem if anyone does due diligence.

There isn't any evidence that models are doing any kind of "system 2 thinking" here. The model's response is guided by both the prompt and its current output so when you tell it to reason step by step the final answer is guided by its current output text. The second best answer is just something it came up with because you asked, the model has no second best answer to give. The second best answers always seem strange because the model doesn't know what it means to come up with a second best answer; it 'believes' the output it gave is the correct answer and helpfully tries to fulfill your request. Sometimes the second best answer is right but most of the time its completely nonsensical and there is no way to distinguish between the two. If you ask to choose it will be strongly influenced by the framing of its prior response and won't be able to spot logical errors.

Asking it to do lateral thinking and provide examples isn't really helpful because its final output is mostly driven by the step by step reasoning text, not by examples it has generated. At best, the examples are all wrong but it ignores that and spits out the right answer. At worst, it can become confused and give the wrong answer.

I've seen gpt-4 make all kinds of errors with prompts like this. Sometimes, all the reasoning is wrong but the answer is right and vice versa.

This isn't a simple composition; entire details were ai created. You can see sections around her hair that look like stable diffusion inpainting. The texture will immediately be cut off and a very softer blurred ai generated part will continue. There are details all around the image that look like that. The jacket and both sweaters aren't original for instance. Large sections of the background on the left were clearly added in as well.

Virtually the only original parts of the image that are unmodified are the faces and hair from the neck up and fingers on the two older children. The person who made this clearly had nothing to go on.

The Mayan and Aztec conquests were completely different. The Mayan polities were situated in terrain that was much harsher for an invader, military capability doesn't mean much when a military force can't be effectively maintained in the field against. There also wasn't much incentive for the spanish to extend their domains into the mayan polities at that time. The spanish were far more focused on populous areas where they could extract wealth which was the only way for spanish conquistadors to gather volunteers. Even under these conditions the actual military engagements were very one-sided with most of the Yucatan conquered within thirty years of the Aztec conquest.

>>but it might be the second foremost reason why Cortez was able to conquer them - the first being Montezuma’s reticence to slaughter them in the jungle when he first heard of them and his subsequent religious obsession with the white conquistadors, until it was too late and they were well established.

Montezuma was never in a position to slaughter the conquistadors in the jungle. The Tlaxcalans (a rival state to the mexica) engaged the conquistadors in a series of brutal skirmishes (most with the advantage of surprise) on their home turf but failed to make any real progress. Its very clear that the attacking Tlaxcalan warriors suffered horrendous casualties when they engaged the castillans in close quarters combat due to the superior steel weapons(mostly swords) of the latter. Since the Tlaxcalans vigorously defended their independence its hard to argue the Mexica could have done any better fighting at a distance that would have stretched their supply lines.

As for his supposed religious obsession, its unclear and isn't necessary to explain his actions. There is certainly no evidence that Montezuma was confused or acting irrationally; he repeatedly tried to deter the conquistadors from coming and made attempts to play them off against the Tlaxcalans.

Their most recent scientific paper they published 3 months ago only says that scientific breakeven (Qsci > 1) is possible. Which has been claimed many times before pesky engineering challenges and unmodeled behavior starts to interfere. The paper actually mostly just rehashes their marketing so its impossible to judge how realistic their claims are. Regardless, they don't seem like they are close to any kind of actual prototype let alone one that can demonstrate scientific breakeven or the order of magnitude harder engineering breakeven.

Their claims seem very hard to believe to put it mildy.

Helion has never demonstrated that their technology actually works on any scale. Even if they magically made breakthroughs and were able to hypothetically build a prototype plant it would be almost impossible to solve the operational challenges to build a commercial scale plant in seven years. It would be far more challenging than building a nuclear plant for example. That ignores all the complexity of their D-He3 aneutronic fusion cycle; they probably cannot operate a commercial scale power plant (that would presumably use D-He3) without having first constructed D-D reactors.

When economists talk about production in the context of an economy they always mean the value of that production. Economic growth never implies the raw quantity of economic production increased regardless of its value. That's a contradiction in terms. If an economy increases production of some finished good by 50% yet the value of that finished good declined that was not economic growth it was a contraction.

Economic growth literally means the value of goods and services produced by the economy rose. It does not mean "monetary value" in one place or "number of widgets" in another place. Robin Hanson is not confused here by what he means by economic growth and his argument does not rely on some ambiguity in terms.

>>You can produce the exact same amount of potatoes, if the value of a kg of potatoes increases, the GDP rises.

Yes, of course.

>>If you look at the value of oil to gauge its production, there's one day in 2020 when we sent oil back to earth[1].

I'm not sure what this is supposed to illustrate. If a finished good or service does not have value then it cannot contribute to economic growth. The entire point of an economy is to produce goods that have value.

>> Also, as usual, what's the definition of economy being used there? Money? Production?

Production. The first result on google for "Economic Growth" defines it.

Its 'dropping' fertility and population into the mix because his thesis is that declining population will lead to less innovation thus retarding economic growth. Innovation happening in a recession is not in any way a counterexample whatsoever.

GDP is literally a measure of aggregate production. The entire point of GDP is to measure production in an economy. GDP does not measure money any more than mass measures kilograms. It measures the value of all goods and services produced in the economy.

>> It is an alternative to the built in macOS automatic mode which only switches when the user steps away from the computer.

Huh? Setting a schedule/location for nightshift and setting the dark mode setting to auto will always change instantly. If you use a launcher or spotlight then a simple one line applescript can change the setting as well. (tell application "System Events" to tell appearance preferences to set dark mode to not dark mode).

I looked at the highest quality and the artifacting is just crazy here. There are no artifacts around the instrument at all, just on the supposedly levitating rock. The quality on this and the other video from the user looks like its very good so I don't really buy this.

The context here is rather strange as well, the same user uploaded another video that no one would believe actually demonstrated the meissner effect. Its a very small magnet on just a piece of paper. Did the user try again with this video?