I personally haven’t bought anything from Amazon for years now (or really anywhere online, I think maybe 8 things in the past year?), issue is even within the last week I’ve spent hundreds if not thousands on AWS through work… Sure it’s not me paying, but it’s also pretty hard for me to not to given they have such a monopoly

Also Europe… A significant amount of Europe’s content is hosted in UK & Ireland (AWS EU-West) and Sweden (AWS EU-North) which would mean the two remaining major datacentres (Germany and Italy) would struggle

That’s what I’m saying

It’s better to not even half-way seed a torrent with low availability than it is to seed one that everyone else is seeding, regardless of how high your ratio goes - it’s a point on how pointless it really is to waste your resources seeding something like that

Seeding shouldn’t be done on ratios - being the only one seeding 10 seasons of a tv show and getting it to 0.4:1 is way more helpful than seeding the same movie as everyone else and getting to 20:1, you’re noy contributing anything there other than decreasing your bandwidth for things that aren’t already at 100,000% availability

It was all about “Encouraging more digital adoption by nudging customers to go online to self-solve,” and “taking decisive short-term action to generate warranty cost efficiencies.”

If you wanted customers to go online to self-solve, you’d write proper manuals, provide well-documented and granular error codes and allow people to run diagnostics on their own devices… By not providing either it’s clear the warranty cost efficiencies they’re talking about are people giving up on trying to resolve their issue and just buying a new one

I’ve found Gemini overwhelmingly terrible at pretty much everything, it responds more like a 7b model running on a home pc or a model from two years ago than a medium commercial model in how it completely ignores what you ask it and just latches on to keywords… It’s almost like they’ve played with their tokenisation or trained it exclusively for providing tech support where it links you to an irrelevant article or something

The issue for RPGs is that they have such “small” context windows, and a big point of RPGs is that anything could be important, investigated, or just come up later

Although, similar to how deepseek uses two stages (“how would you solve this problem”, then “solve this problem following this train of thought”), you could have an input of recent conversations and a private/unseen “notebook” which is modified/appended to based on recent events, but that would need a whole new model to be done properly which likely wouldn’t be profitable short term, although I imagine the same infrastructure could be used for any LLM usage where fine details over a long period are more important than specific wording, including factual things

Or avoid a decrease in profit, which is why you get so many posturing bandwagons which slow down once enough people have forgotten that it won’t affect profits anymore, eg all the statements and policy, name, logo etc changes due to BLM in mid-late 2020

Product placement is advertising, and as such saying “no ads” while not blurring out product placement would be misselling the service

I was under the impression it was the intersection of the venn diagram of communists and imperialists, as long as imperialist means imperialist (defined as using economic, military, diplomatic and cultural power to influence countries around you in a way that is beneficial to you, and may be either beneficial, inconsequential or detrimental to them) and not just “western and capitalist”

No - there’s fuses in the plugs themselves, the switch is largely for convenience and safety - if you want to unplug something broken and potentially live, it’s much safer to switch it off at the wall than risk a shock given the current limit is on the breaker is so high

That’s a lot of expense compared to just importing US-grown hops, as there’s a lot of soil to adjust

And yeah, trademarks on plants are no joke, there’s a bunch of restrictions on buying/selling them etc.

Hops are highly sensitive to the soil acidity and minerals in terms of the compounds the plants produce, so sharing plants is largely infeasible, plus because it’s the US many of them are trademarked so there’s no sharing for that reason

I get it’s a big jump, but I’ve been clear I’m restricting it to the most popular types of beer and explained why US bred and grown hops had the good fortune to be the most aromatic disease resistant hops, so I still don’t think it’s unreasonable

Again, none of this applies for styles beyond 3-7% golden beer fermented with yeast only, and even then there’s a few exceptions for certain styles where the aromatics are different (eg bitter, which is less about the aromatic hops and more about the earthy notes of the bittering hops), but for the most popular lagers and pale ales I think it holds

So there’s obviously a split between objective fact and opinion and conjecture, but:

• Outbreaks of powdery mildew in the early 20th century meant it became somewhat infeasible to grow most aromatic and flavoursome hops, leading to research and breeding programmes to produce disease resistant hops with other desired characteristics
• Most of the mildew-resistant hops were wild and from the US and Canada
• Hop breeding and research started in the UK but ended in the 2000s
• Oregon State University has been breeding hops for almost 100 years
• The USDA also has their hop research center in Oregon
• The US is responsible for 40% of hop production, of which over 98% is in Oregon, Washington and Idaho
• Cascade hops, from the USDA research center in Oregon, started the craft beer movement due to the combination of high flavour and disease tolerance
• German hop research started in 1926, but only had any real success after the 1980s

So essentially, the US has just got very lucky when it comes to hop production with good soils and disease resistance, while German beermaking was set back leading other styles to become and remain popular, such as very lightly hopped wheat beers, sour beers where the acidity comes from the fermentation instead of hops, and more recently Belgian style beers that are stronger abv so the stronger alcohol taste substitutes for some of the strength of the hops

There probably are also studies, but they tend to look into mechanisms/variations whereas this is more of a series of coinciding factors which don’t really need much research to make sense

That’s why I said average at best - average beer is going to taste way better than bad beer and also perfectly acceptable, I don’t mean it in a negative way, just that in the standard 3-7% golden beer fermented with only yeast category, Cascadian & New Zealand hops provide the best and widest array of tastes regardless of what you’re after, as that’s where the soil is best and where the breeding is generally done

If you’re drinking beer from hops that aren’t from the US (or New Zealand but that’s a way smaller market) then there’s a very good chance your beer is average at best (unless it’s a stout, wheat beer, bitter, sour etc. rather than a lager or pale ale, but those two are most likely)

if they mattered they’d be errors I’m sure

Thanks for proving my point that you reject even being offered evidence because you don’t want to see something that challenges your worldview.

I could’ve spent time compiling a list, but you’d either ignore it or say it’s a biased source because it’s non-chinese or something.

incontrovertible

The issue is, genocide deniers are very keen to dispute any readily available facts - Holocaust, Armenian Genocide, Holodomor, etc deniers, along with flat earthers and other far-fetched conspiracy believers are willing to reject swathes of evidence and released documents that show intent and execution; I could link you interviews with Uyghurs saying they were forceably steralised or reeducated from respected sources (and am happy to) but it seems like you’ve already made your mind up so will just be selectively blind when reading them