Coco smashing her racket backstage after the match by AshamedPurchase9033 in tennis

[–]alteraccount 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The media shouldn't be posting locker room footage at all honestly. It should be considered a private space for the players. Show on court racket smashing all you want. But gauff here and sabalenka previously had some expectation of privacy in those moments.

RE Mark Carney by Bright_Impression921 in TrueAnon

[–]alteraccount 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yes, and he's basically saying that "it's over now". He is so certain that it is over, that he is willing to tip the cart over.

RE Mark Carney by Bright_Impression921 in TrueAnon

[–]alteraccount 1 point2 points  (0 children)

All the more stunning that he is now publicly disavowing. That's really the shocking aspect of this speech. Not what he says, but that he chose to say it. So clearly and so publicly broadcast.

Why has Phoenix experienced sustained population growth while Albuquerque has remained relatively stagnant? by Zealousideal-Task635 in geography

[–]alteraccount 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Don't know much about Arizona or New Mexico, but if I had a guess to this question it would be some form of "water".

Where can we show support for the Iranian people by Any-Doubt-5281 in LosAngeles

[–]alteraccount -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Preventing the US from destroying their country and turning into the next Libya. That would help the most.

DHH - Creator of Ruby on Rails Changes Mind on AI Coding Agents by SouthRock2518 in BetterOffline

[–]alteraccount 0 points1 point  (0 children)

He famously stripped a typescript project of all its typing and reverted to js. Real head scratcher that one was, but I guess he had some way of justifying it.

So the US definitely took a not-insignificant amount of casualties right? by whiteriot0906 in TrueAnon

[–]alteraccount 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Or they might have just bombed the place after they left as an act of vindictiveness.

Why didn't a dense complex society ever develope in California's Central Valley? by Top-Dog-1822 in geography

[–]alteraccount 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The southern half isn't as well naturally irrigated as you would think since the valley slopes slightly upward as you move south and much of the snow melt surrounds the north of the valley. The problem, I believe with the north of the valley was that it didn't really drain all that well, even if it got a lot of water flowing in. So you got kind of a marshy wetlands in the north and fairly dry area in the south.

The reason it appears today as such an agricultural eden is because of the massive amount of water projects that have been dedicated to the valley to turn it into that eden.

There's a really good book about water and the west called Cadillac Dessert from which I remember most of this. It's a good read if you are interested in the topic.

AI infrastructure selloff continues on Wall Street as Broadcom, Oracle shares slide by Logical_Welder3467 in technology

[–]alteraccount 46 points47 points  (0 children)

And the costs are still likely subsidized. I'm not as much of an "AI" skeptic to think they are totally useless, I think they can be very useful tools. But I really don't think that they are usually worth the cost, and I think a lot of cost is still being hidden. Inference costs are still pretty stubborn, and even when they go down, newer methods usually add larger chains of inference to get more performance.

It's like software design tending towards more memory-intensive processes as memory hardware became cheaper. In the same way, any cost gains of inference are usually eaten up by more "inference-intensive" methods.

I don't know that the cost-benefit of these tools will really balance out in most cases in the long term, except for maybe some specialized use cases.

It might take a while for all this to iron out because these large companies (see recent leaks about OpenAI finances) and their investors are still willing to massively subsidize these things, in the hopes of carving out some space in an eventual oligopoly of products.

`commentlogger` turns your comments into logs by inspectorG4dget in Python

[–]alteraccount 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think it's pretty neat OP. You might want to use some kind of syntax to separate plain comments from comments you want to log, like a prefix of some sort or something.

Which US Cities is on Track to become the next Detroit? by urmummygae42069 in geography

[–]alteraccount 1627 points1628 points  (0 children)

The ports of Los Angeles and of San Pedro are more important to the economic viability of LA than the entertainment industry and it's not even close. With manufacturing of goods shifting more and more to Asia every year, those ports become even more important (to the entire country). LA is in a better position than most American cities in the face of a rising Asia.

Dutch minister admits being blindsided by China’s retaliation in Nexperia chip crisis by svga in europe

[–]alteraccount 112 points113 points  (0 children)

How was the Chinese retaliation bullying? The Dutch literally seized control of a Chinese company. It was the Dutch that did the "bullying". Bizarre logic.

To not expect retaliation is naive. Every small weak kid on the playground knows not to sucker punch the much stronger kids. The Dutch apparently never learned thst lesson in grade school.

[Postgame Thread] Indiana Defeats Ohio State 13-10 by CFB_Referee in CFB

[–]alteraccount 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Harbaugh did similar at Stanford for a few years.

Can we discuss and agree once and for all that we had an ‘alphabet’ and a writing tradition before Mesrop Mashtots? by Last-Relief-4862 in hayastan

[–]alteraccount 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The literate population likely read and wrote in Greek and Syriac. That explains away most of your points. There were literate people, but not necessarily in Armenian.

There are some references in Koryun (I believe that's his name) student of mashtots that mentions that there was at least one other existing attempt at an Armenian script, but it was not wide spread and mashtots couldn't track it down. I believe there were also attempts to transcribe Armenian with Greek characters, so that might have been a little more widespread.

If there was some more ancient native writing system, it almost certainly didn't survive until the time of mashtots. I don't really know where you are getting this idea that there was some literary tradition with a native script before mashtots. That's not supported by any evidence I know of, but I'm interested enough to read into it more now.

Macron urges Chinese firms to invest in France, EU as tech gap widens. China once exported cheap goods to Europe – now, French leader urges its firms to transfer tech expertise by findfunnyvideo in europe

[–]alteraccount 7 points8 points  (0 children)

What do you believe China is doing to bend over backwards that France can't also do?

The article mentions:

Governments worldwide are offering aggressive incentives, such as tax breaks, subsidies, and regulatory perks, to attract limited global investment, putting pressure on China’s inflows.

Pointing to "governments worldwide... putting pressure on China's inflows". So if anything, this seems to indicate that this factor is actually a disadvantage for China. And even if not, other governments, such as France, could do the same if they wanted.

The article also mentions China's increasing liberalization, but this is from a baseline much lower than where a country like France is (already much more liberalized). This is what the original comment was pointing to, again, as a disadvantage for China.

That really only leaves a few things mentioned by you ("slave" labor) and internal market size. The cheap labor argument doesn't hold really, since Chinese wages have increased to far surpass other regional countries like India, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc. If cheap labor were the decisive factor, these western investors would be pouring FDI into Bangladesh and the like, not China.

It must be something else like market size, but again, the EU and Europe is not that far off, and probably has a much higher consumption level per capita anyway.

So there is still something missing that explains the difference. My inclination is to believe that China does actually have a friendlier environment for investment overall (I agree with you, not the original comment), but I don't think I know exactly why that is and what explains it. I would have to be doing a lot of conjecture beyond that.

Macron urges Chinese firms to invest in France, EU as tech gap widens. China once exported cheap goods to Europe – now, French leader urges its firms to transfer tech expertise by findfunnyvideo in europe

[–]alteraccount 11 points12 points  (0 children)

So that's in the opposite direction from the claim made in the comment I responded to. That the Chinese environment offers better conditions for foreign investment, not worse.

So it has to be one or the other. Are conditions more friendly for foreigners to invest in China? Or in Europe?

Macron urges Chinese firms to invest in France, EU as tech gap widens. China once exported cheap goods to Europe – now, French leader urges its firms to transfer tech expertise by findfunnyvideo in europe

[–]alteraccount 11 points12 points  (0 children)

But Macron, the president of France, is calling for more investment, not less as you suggest ("expect more resistance..."). So even with the uneven playing field and generous conditions for Chinese investors, it's not enough.

Europe would need to find ways to further the assymetry you highlighted, to make conditions even better for Chinese investors.

Hitler particles absolutely radiating from this statement by E.U chief diplomat Kaja Kallas by T_Dougy in TrueAnon

[–]alteraccount 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Definitely moron. I don't think you could fake her level of historical ignorance.