Well you must read a different article, since whenever it mentions defense, its pretty damning from some made up virtual higher ground. Have to agree with the others, that person lives in naive fairy tale world, she should probably travel hard ie backpacking in 3rd world countries to understand it better.
I come from Europe, actually eastern part of it, having Ukraine as a neighbor. My country, my parents and grandparents, just like literally everybody else, were enslaved by soviets cough cough russians for over 40 years. Their military bases everywhere, people being regularly shot/electrocuted/torn apart by dogs on the border with Austria/Germany for the horrible crime wanting to escape that communist paradise. Non-conforming were put into gulags, uranium mines etc to die slowly. Those more visible were squished by regime ie by forced manual working (if you didn't have a job thats a straight ticket to long jail), and so were their whole families including children.
What russia is currently doing is an outright attack on whole western world and they don't even hide it, just listen to them, and only its lack of real military capabilities prevent them to steamroll across whole Europe.
Thats a naivety thats outright dangerous these days, and caused more stupid European leaders like Merkel to basically give up on army, so current Wehrmacht is a proper joke, ie current Polish armed forces would steam-roll them in a weekend. Why Polish? Well they have a wonderful history of persecution and murder from both russians and germans. Some nations learn from history and watch whats happening around them, some don't...
Well, I'm struggling with this myself. Should we be cynical because the world around us has been cynical historically? I prefer not to be cynical - to be blunt I don't mean to belittle anyone, but being cynical is just boring. I am an empathical being so I understand that some people might think "boring" is inapropriate, but I try to elevate the discussion. Sadly Russia often through history has chosen to be cynical and the war in Urkaine is of course no exception. Cynism is a yoke that enslaves and prevents innovation. Humans are able to follwo different patterns of behavior, lets call one pattern the "clan vs clan" pattern. In the "clan vs clan" pattern hierarchies are created through violience and groups fight against each other for power. This pattern is what runs the matrix that criminal gangs operate in. The pattern is "self balancing" since its basically the people with most violence capital that calls the shots. However, this pattern fails to provide for the many, abundance flows to those with power and there's not so much cause for innovating for your own sake since your work will just end up in the hands of the powerful. I beleive you can see in Russia and in countries where cartels run the business that they are less effective in providing for the many. In Russia the answer to this is to work with spirituality - the Russian orthodox church has been tied into the power structures and Russia tries to promote its orthodoxy abroad in attempts to gain influence, but just like the rest of the power structures it is corrupt.
I beleive that Europe deserves a better future than falling into cynicism, not least the eastern parts. Its like resuming the dark ages. Its hard to predict the future and I don't know what will happen. Sadly weapons and armed conflict will most likely play a role, but I think that we must reason more broadly to really solve the conflict. Beating cynicism with cynicism is just cynical. People have an abillity, even if it may be suppressed in some people, to be reasonable.
Sure but the article wasn't focus on defence, it was talking more broadly. If you wanted it to somehow rationalise building weapons for warmongering nations i think it would be a hard job.
In my opinion its likely not naivety at all but a campaign following standard socialist ploys in subversion (cultural contagion).
They hit most of the common rhetoric talking points, and its common knowledge in some circles that these types promote narratives that attempt or build support for various stages of divide and conquer under communism.
Be it, demoralization, destabilization, crisis, or re-normalization (genocide).
The article promotes cancel culture, which is just another derivation of marxism. Reads like some of the more skilled propaganda pieces I've seen.
Knowing this, I wouldn't trust the author for anything that requires credibility.
So there is no such thing as individuals conspiring to achieve a goal; colonisation wasn't a thing, national socialism was just some random frat parties, communism was just a book club.
The problem is assuming that everything is a conspiracy just as much as nothing is a conspiracy.
This somewhat related to universals and how they are view from Platonic idealism and Aristotelian realism. With language we capture a symbolic representation of the ideal form, the red apple, or do we just imagine the last particular apple we saw. Or maybe if you're really modern you imagine the molecular structure and photonic reflective spectrum.
My theory is that someone came up with the bright idea of allowing more open source in the stack and that that would allow them to get it all done via crowd sourcing and on the cheap. But if true it was a quite naive view of how it might work.
If instead they said let's take the money we should invested in internal development and build an open developer community that will leverage our hardware to build a world class software stack it might have been a little better.
AMD has just never had good developer software. For ages the best BLAS on AMD was… Intel MKL, as long as you figured out how to dispatch the right kernels.
Actually, it could be really cool if everybody acted like AMD. The fact that Intel and Nvidia put out the best number libraries for free means you can’t sell a number crunching library!
I'd recommend Henri Bergson's Time and Free Will for mind opening view of time. Imo it elaborates on the distinction between space time and our temporal experience.
Philosophically, one could argue that the distinction between organic and inorganic matter is somewhat arbitrary since, at the most fundamental level, everything is simply matter. If you wanted to go in that direction, it would probably be fair to say something like it deteriorated, simply because it's programmed to.
It would also make sense evolution would choose not to change this programming.
I don't think you need to constrain that question to organic matter. Entropy applies to all forms of information including the information that organizes all known biological life out of mostly water and carbon.
Is it destroyed? does matter some how disappear or is it just it transformed from one form to another?
Why did consciousness arise from matter at all, does it disappear or is it transformed.
If you only limit yourself to what you can see then existence is rather dull and seemingly mechanically. Every time we look we see little more, and so is there really anything to suggest there is not more beyond what we can or will ever see.
Directly from the linked article: "On average, first quarter 2024 earnings results were solid. Four sectors — Communication Services, Utilities, Consumer Discretionary and Information Technology — generated the strongest earnings growth for the quarter"
But that was just a link I came across quickly. You can look at almost any economic statistics you want and see that the economy (at least in the US, you mentioned the S&P 500 so I assume you are US-based) is quite strong right now.
Average != Median and that is what the commenter above mentioned.
The S&P500 and others don't remove the outliers going to the moon which is good for investors but as a data metric would make for a pretty large deviation.
I think the point, the author maybe didn't intend it as such, is that Lisp generally encourages the creation of many domain specific languages. You have the tools to fundamental define completely new language abstractions that feel very much like first class constructs both syntactic and procedural.
The comment about C++ is probably mostly for the edge factor but if i was to try to delineate what is different about C++ melting pot vs Common Lisp it would probably be the homoiconicity of CL which for the most part allows far more seamless integration at the syntactic level whereas C++ is required to include an ever increasing and bewildering array of differing syntax constructs.
If the AI is at the stage of understanding these topics, debatable as that is, then why would you learn them as you can't compete against the computer, it can work 24/7 with no sleep.
If the AI doesn't understand then you are just learning a script you are being fed.
Some automation is obviously useful for transmitting information about various topics but the way this is being framed would seem to undermine the very need to learn in the first place.
This is it exactly, it's the cost of capital and living that is the problem.
If our countries had control over their own capital and provided utility at cost the economic development would be easy. Instead we're charged monopoly rents for everything from water to electricity, taxed to oblivion and charged horrendous usary on all capital.
Pretty sure they intentionally screw it up. It means that the populous will generally think that the government can't provide effective utility at cost and so private equity can move in and provide equally bad utility at monopoly rent prices.
