dragontamer

Good question.

Followup question: do you know the story of how the Frankish Kingdom of Charlemagne the Great got split up into Lombards, France and HRE (basically modern Germany) ??

Kings juggled the conflicting tasks of choosing an inheritor, as well as preventing their sons from rising up and... let's just say "William the Bastard-ing" everyone.

Yes, on occasion a random bastard son will take over all of Normandy and Briton.

So I don't really know what your question is. That happened, constantly. Brothers killed each other, and sometimes their fathers, in a mad game of power for damn near a thousand years.

But clearly the kings of the time thought the risks were worth the reward. A hereditary title of king means that your followers know who is charge if you died in battle. The risk of your sons deposing you was accepted, because the risks of dying for other reasons (disease, famine, war...) was greater.

That's mostly a feature of monarchies. Even in European settings, monarchs claimed divine right to rule.

That's why ex: El Cid (a great knight/military commander in Spain) was a threat to King Alfonso. (Doubly so because El Cid is a local hero who could raise a combined Muslim+Catholic Army, while King Alfonso was Catholic only. El Cid actually comes from Al-Sayyid, the nickname the Muslim locals gave to El Cid )

This happened enough in the Catholic monarchies that I have to believe it's really just the shape of Monarchies. Like the King of the Franks King Charlemagne the Great is basically known for his military exploits, with Paladins (his royal guard) forever influencing future Europeans and creating the image of an ideal Holy Warrior.

Did I say military exploits? I mean spreading Catholicism to the pagan Saxons. By conquest. During the Dark and Middle Ages, they spread Catholicism the old fashioned way, with the sword.

I do believe that Kim Jong Um military Uncle was put to death as well, likely as court intrigue and a preventative measure to prevent a powerful well respected General from overstepping his king.

Kings are always worried about their generals. Or better yet, Kings are themselves a general to prove their divine authority.

You know that GPUs are more flexible than just linear algebra, right?

GPUs are simply faster at fundamental algorithms like sorting (which has huge parallelism), and hashing. This is because both sorting and hashing benefit from endless growth of parallelism, offering enough "work" for these 10,000 SIMD-core systems to crunch work upon.

And because of modern algorithms/libraries with 'Mergepath sort' (a GPU-SIMD parallel sorting algorithm), its not even that difficult to implement anymore.

Naturally, this then leads to parallel Sort Merge Join, as well as parallel Hash-Join (two ways to implement left or right joins in a GPU that benefit from significant parallelism).

So yeah, Joins. https://www.kenchoi.dev/papers/gpu-joins.pdf (This paper also has a description of "Mergepath sort", a GPU parallel way of sorting)

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Even if GPUs weren't fundamentally faster at these kinds of operations... the RAM is simply 10x higher bandwidth and we all know its a RAM-constrained problem.

Your typical SQL query is going to need multiple joins, probably a sort and possibly some "group" operations. As long as you have more than 10,000 elements or so (IE: can saturate all 10,000+ SIMD-units of a GPU), you'll be able to at least benefit from the faster RAM.

If you have a LOT of joins (a recursive join or some other kind of deeply nested computationally complex query), you probably benefit even more from the greater compute-power offered by GPUs. These operations (joins really) are nominally over the entire set of data, and cleanly break down into obvious parallelism.

Parent post was talking about an 8GB dataset.

8GB isn't even CPU RAM these days. That's GPU super-mega-awesome ram. Ordinary Server CPUs are regularly pushing 2TB capacities.

GPUs are in the 8GB to 32GB typically, at least for smaller and more regular GPUs. This GPU RAM is also well known to be at least 10x the bandwidth of CPU RAM.

With a 4B parameter model that probably ran through 8GBs of RAM multiple times to run.

At a certain point we should seriously talk about CUDA accelerating Postgres instead.

NYC had a deficit of $12 Billion before the current mayor.

Leaded Gasoline.

If we don't like a technology we can easily get rid of it in practice.

And by that, I mean that Leaded Gasoline is infeasible to be profitable anymore. So no gas station serves it any more.

And please, it will be easier to regulate all public camera companies than to regulate all independent gas stations. So don't give me any crap about difficulties. Especially when said companies are all individually being purchased by government services like police.

So name one. These politicans have names, do they not?

We do have the name of one politician who balanced the New York City budget though. Its probably not going to please a lot of people to hear that guy's name though. But that's what people want, right? Balanced budgets?

But no. That's not what people want and we all know it.

Once upon a time, one of the largest companies of the USA, Bell Labratories, was declared an illegal monopoly and eradicated.

In the correct political environment, entire companies can be dismantled with one executive action. Not our current political environment, but in the 1980s one it could happen.

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Oh, also, companies were literally an act of Congress when this country started. We can change the rules back and dismantle any company that refuses to work for the benefit of this country.

Remember that one time when a large global company (The Dutch East India company) got a tax break from the king, and it angered the population so much that we took a bunch of tea (a symbol of the Dutch East India Company) and threw it into the Boston Harbor?

Ahhhhh yeah. I remember. Oh right, we teach that situation a bit differently today don't we? People probably don't remember exactly how easy it used to be or how this country used to treat companies that betrayed our values.

We can go back. But lets start with understanding that we _can_ go back. Step 2 is electing people who will agree with this political message.

Oh, and finally. AoE2 is played on "Random Map".

This means that scouting has a degree of importance. In general, you should scout on chickens maps, and you should mix up scouting vs luring on deer maps. Chickens cannot be lured, so scouting is your only option. Deer can be lured, meaning micro-ing your Scout to push a deer into your base and capture an early source of food. Luring is necessary for some builds (ie: rushes which need more food than other builds).

It also means that "SimCity" is based on map layout. Arabia (most common map generator) sometimes spawns "closed" (long woodlines that act as walls), which sometimes makes walling cheaper/easier.

Or sometimes Arabia spawns "open", or fat tree lines spaced far apart. In these, large "base walls" are impossible and people tend to favor "small walls" (maybe a few to protect farms, and like 8 tiles of walls max to protect gold). Top tier pros prefer "quick walls", only walling after the opponent's attack arrives. This is very difficult / micro/APM-intensive, so feel free to just small-wall by default and/or large base wall if the map generates something useful.

If you "large wall", integrate necessary buildings (ex: blacksmith, market, barracks) into your walls. Full scale buildings tend to have ~2000 HP or so, while palisade walls only have 250 or so HP. In fact, most players use "house walls" (the AoE2 equivalent to Supply Depos), because you need tons of houses ANYWAY, and because Houses have 900 HP, its usually better to defend with houses.

If you plan to make the jump from SC:BW to AoE2.... Some tips.

* Four resources. Stone runs out first and is the key for Castles, a 4000 to 6000 HP building that deals 11x4 damage. Strategically speaking, the castle locations DEFINE the middle game (aka the Castle Age) and still have huge influence for Imperial Age.

Gold is basically the same as Vespine Gas. Gold is +technology or +advanced units. The middle game is determined by your gold unit choice (usually either Knights or XBows, but some players choose mass Monks, Siege or other compositions). The end game is basically when Gold runs out and players are forced to play with so called Trash units (aka wood and food only).

Wood and Food are basically the equivalent of minerals, except Food is made from wood. (You first cut down a tree then make a farm and then finally food comes out). In many ways, it's best to think of food as processed wood, highly available on most maps but slower to gather than Gold/wood.

* Gold units set your main army, Trash units (aka: units that only cost food+wood) TEND to set up the counter to your opponent and are more of a reaction (or prediction). Remember, gold tends to be easier to gather than food in the middle game. Only in the late game does gold run out.

* As such, start the game thinking of Wood == minerals, Gold == Gas except Gold runs out. And you'll actually be pretty good for the feelings of which units are useful for what.

* Food == processed Wood is probably easy enough for you to figure out by feel. I don't expect issues for StarCraft players trying to understand food.

* Stone needs special consideration because nothing in SC:BW or SC2 feels like an AoE2 castle. My overall recommendation is to pretend stones make castles and nothing else important (Towers can be useful but beginner players should focus on thinking about the castle). Play with the Castle first, get some experience and then work backwards to understanding stone.

* Counters are far stronger and swingy in AoE2 than SC:BW or SC2. Let's take a Feudal Age engagement for example: 1 spearman ties with 3 scouts in an engagement... So we are talking about 10 Spearmen trading with 30 scouts in combat kind of counters.

Another counter: Monks counter Knights. Knights are like Battlecruisers if Battlecruisers were the 2nd fastest unit in the game and appeared in the middle of the tech tree (Castle age) ready to go with very few necessary upgrades.... Like seriously Knights are good. Fast, high damage, high armor but costs a ton.

The counter unit... Monks.... their ability is to convert enemy units to your side. So uhhhhhh, hard counter. Monks appear at the same time as Knights (Castle Age) except Monks need a few more upgrades to really be useful.

Depends on the unit: XBows vs Elite Skirmisher or Mangonels is closer to StarCraft levels of counterplay. XBows can win vs equivalent Mangonel with elite level micro / mistakes from the opponent, but most agree that with "equal micro" Mangonels/Onagers/Skirmishers should usually beat XBows.

Speaking of which: AoE2 micro is defined by arrow dodging, Mangonel shot placement (manually predicting the future location of your opponent and aiming there), and finally quick walls / villager shenanigans.

The Red Bull Wololo is the #1 tournament each year for AoE2.

> But I always felt that it SC2 was more successful in taking out APM and "Deathball" mechanics

On "Deathballs", no. SC2 always allowed the player to select all military. SC2 always had smoother patching and better programmed "flocking" behavior.

In SC:BW, it's an APM feat to simply control 12 Dragoons/Goliaths/Siege Tanks across a bridge. Meanwhile, a hundred SC2 Stalkers can easily chain-blink across the same terrain no issues.

In SC:BW, the bad patching and bumping is part of the balance. In SC2, all units moved too smoothly and too easily, as such deathballs are always easier to setup.

SC2 allowed players to easily control Deathballs, so then they tried to balance that by making splash attacks more powerful.

In contrast, it's literally impossible to control a deathballs in SC:BW, because you can only ever select 12 units. Literally impossible to control more units (and even then, those 12 units were extremely wonky around bridges or other terrain features).

In SC:BW, the deathballs debate is innately moot. No human can control a deathballs anyway so it's not even a debate. Like controlling 48 zerglings is a feat reserved for top pros.

Further, because control of 48 zerglings is so hard, pros who COULD do it use the 4x groups of Zerglings on increasingly divergent points of the map (harassing multiple bases), rather than concentrating their efforts in one area. Might as well "tax the opponents APM" by attacking multiple locations if you have such good unit control or APM.

Sometimes SC2 was anti APM. Other times, SC2 adds chronoboost / MULEs for no other reason than to eat up APM and provide an outlet for physical clicking and increase APM.

As it ends up, SC2 is randomly anti-APM and pro-APM, depending on the patch, depending on the year.

By swinging back and forth trying to cater to both camps, all that was accomplished was confusion and ultimately a loss of trust between players and the balance team. In many regards, the community swinging back to SC:BW or AOE2 is because we don't like patches that change the game so dramatically.

AOE2 seems to have hit the correct balance point, major changes that the community desires (ex: Longswords being viable after 25 years of constant buffing) but never so major that it fundamentally alters the game the community likes.

Or ex: being brave enough to throw out all sea units / Naval Battles and basically start over from scratch. (Kind of a big change but one the community actually enjoyed).

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SC2 patches were more random feeling and more knee jerk.

Starcraft2's problem was that it was 3 separate games with incredible patches that completely changed everything.

The balance team had no idea of the game they wanted StarCraft 2 to be. By the time it all settled down the community went back to SC:BW.

I'm positive there was some combination of SC2 patches that was amazing, if only the patch/balance team stuck with it. I don't know which set of patches that was though.

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I have ranted before about deathballs. Beginners want deathballs but advanced players want something deeper than a deathballs.

For all of their faults, SC:BW and AoE2 are anti-deathball. SC:BW is somewhat "accidentally" anti-deathball because of map bumping and poor patching.

AoE2 has incredible siege and defensive emplacements (castles and bombard cannons and siege onagers) that counter deathballs, above and beyond SC2 anti-deathball options.

The AoE2 deathballs unit, the Crossbowman (line) needs like 30+ units before it really starts to feel oppressive, and universally everyone has rams and mangonels to kinda deal with them (or Skirmishers).

Everyone in Sengoku Era Japan had access and knowledge of guns and cannons.

The key for Nobunaga is "Ashigaru". Nobunaga gave the guns to the peasants. That also means that Nobunaga mass produced the guns to a level that no one else was doing.

Yes it was a technological brawl, but inadvertently it was one that worked with and uplifted the Ashigaru into a real combat force.

The President doesn't have an ability to officially change the names of these locations.

They have the ability to change name services in some database somewhere. But it's not actually an official name change.

So all this hand wringing about official names or whatever ignores the reality of the situation. This is just another temper tantrum by Trump that we reasonable people can ignore.

The easiest way to do that is to just say Gulf of Mexico.

Yeah it's meaningless to fight. Except not really. If the powers that be are corrupt we can simply keep calling it Lake Ontario across the board, and use the difference to find who is or isn't on my side on that issue.

The only people calling it Gulf of America or Lake America are hardcore MAGATs in my social circle. Even former Trump voters in my social circle are annoyed and not using the new names. So it's an effective way to figure out who is or isn't going along with the Administration today.

Unless you have a hybrid vehicle, like the Prius. Which basically switches to electric during idle stops and barely has any downside.

More specifically, tragedy of the commons is inevitable in a purely capitalist society. It's a pro-regulation argument.

Focus???

These bands have names. The 2.4 to 2.5 GHz band (100MHz bandwidth) is named the 2.4 GHz band.

The 5.4 to 5.7 GHz band is called the 5GHz band.

The 5.9 to 7GHz band is called the 6GHz band.

Anyone discussing the bands should know the relative bandwidths of each. And the size of the channels also matters but we all know the 6GHz band has larger channel widths, it's part of the point of upgrading

Higher frequencies support higher bandwidths though.

I don't think the 2.4GHz band even has 160MHz free, for example. Literally impossible to support because 2.4GHz to 2.5GHz is all you get (100MHz or so).

5GHz isn't much larger than 160MHz. Like it can fit but some number of channels is better for everyone.

6GHz band is like 5.9GHz to 7GHz or something stupidly wide. Because of the new wider band, you can effectively have larger channels with fewer problems.

And furthermore, the unlicensed spectrum problem is complex. "Anyone transmitting" includes Bluetooth devices, and Zigbee, and many other protocols that will never even try to follow the 802.11 spec.

The electricity usage is off the charts. Every place that gets a data center has their electricity prices go up.

Consumers are now fighting to stop data centers from coming into their hometowns. It's not like Data centers have lots of jobs that benefit a community anyway. It's basically a building that eats a local city's resources and gives barely anything back in return.

At best, an AI data center is a year job for the local blue collar workers. A temporary benefit at best, while the price of electricity rises will negate any local benefits by a long shot.

Plus water and noise, and other such issues.

We still have the venerable 8051 for anyone who likes old architectures!!

Bring it up in a bar or otherwise off work.

There's a reason 3rd places exists. There's a social construct that off-work discussion (even when on-work) stays off work.

If your coworker is professional and cares about keeping channels open, they too will respect the unspoken rules that govern 3rd place neutral locations.

Blame it on the alcohol later on if it actually pisses someone off.

The Keely Engine continued to get investors until Keely died.

Sometimes, a conman outruns the con. They just die of old age before it falls apart.

It's the 1880s all over again. Conmen can outrun the press and overall information space. Back then you took investor dollars and shoved them into wagons that traversed the West selling stock.

Today, you can accomplish the same with a few Facebook campaigns.

Video games remain underserved. Video gamers do want movies, even if it's just slop.

In a few years probably not. Pokemon Pikachu and the Sonic movies were way better than Mario. And I think Zelda needs to be WAY better than Mario to get a real audience.

But Hollywood is so bad with video games that "Mario with proper sound effects" is currently the bar. Like it's either Mario or Mortal Kombat for recent video game movies and somehow the Mario and Minecraft movies are objectively better.

The precious powerful empire (before Britain) was undoubtedly the Spanish Empire.

The Spanish-American war was closer to the USA opportunistically feasting upon the remains of the fallen empire (The British already overtook the Spanish in terms of power).

It's hard to pinpoint the fall of the Spanish Empire. But it's even harder to point out military action between Spain and Britain (undoubtedly the rising star in the next centuries). There is the big war of Spanish Succession but that's more opportunistic and more like a major civil war that spilled out of Spain and across Europe.

Lots of war between Spain, HRR, France and other parties. But strangely not so much with Britain....

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In both Spanish and British cases, the real enemy the whole time was just a boatload of debt.

Rich _people_ yes.

But corporations were an act of Congress in 1776. Early America was decidedly anti-corporate (the Boston Tea Party was about a tax break to a corporation). Early Americans (and early thinkers who influenced Americans) were grossly distrustful of corporations and pools of money.

> The directors with of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own

Adam Smith, the Wealth of Nations