Wheres the part that starts off as a perfect half bagel at one side but is barely atoms thick by the time you get to the other?

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

By good morals I mean it came up about the time that people were moving from tribes where they knew everyone personally to settlements where it was impossible to… it sounds weird now but “don’t steal from strangers”, “don’t kill strangers”, “share your harvest with strangers in need” etc. were actually pretty novel ideas which needed to be taught and helped a bunch with ensuring people could co-exist with more people than they had relationships with

Nah, it was originally about making sure your population had good morals, then about controlling your population more generally, then about making money, then about banning fun for some reason, then about making money again

It’s been quite the wild ride

he had to saw (2004) his foot off

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

The Italian economy always used to be on par with UK, France, Germany, but look at it now…

Better a muzzled monarchy than a power vacuum every time, it’s worked in the UK, Spain, (um… probably elsewhere but it worked well enough in those two places after their autocratic dictators kicked the bucket, and look where it left Russia and to an extent Italy - mafia, economy stagnating etc)

Everyone also thinks their country has the worst human rights because “some clause buried in the constitution means you can’t eat fish on a Tuesday if you’re from X religion” or “somebody lost a court case against a corporation so they didn’t have to make Y accessible” which is room for improvement, sure, but then you’ve got places like Malaysia where you get drastically reduced rights per the constitution if you’re not both ethnically Malay and Muslim (other places with bad human rights exist, this is just a hopefully non-controversial example)

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

The lack of rich people doesn’t imply freedom - people who are forced to hunt, gather, fish or farm for subsistence only with no reward beyond that are enslaved to the need to produce food and find shelter, but that differs from a society where there’s sufficient food and shelter, it’s just hoarded by those who have too much

Additionally the presence of rich people doesn’t imply a lack of freedom - you could have a “safety net” system where everyone is guaranteed housing and enough grains and beans/similar to survive, and if they want more they can work for it (some of the taxes from this go towards compensating farmers and builders), giving people the freedom to not have to worry about survival, while also allowing for people to earn lots of money and buy nice things if they want and/or can

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

Personally:

Upvote = I like it or it contributes well to discourse

Downvote = repeated trolling (first comment gets a pass, as do unpopular opinions, but doubling down on unambiguous and apolitical truths doesn’t), spam, scams, etc.