If you read the full article, it seems as if the Saudi religious establishment was infiltrated by Egyptian extremists fleeing a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood following the assassination of Sadat. Their ideology meshed with Wahhabism and Bin Laden’s religious vendetta against the United States. The Saudi state apparatus did not have effective oversight over the religious establishment and so this all happened under the House of Saud’s nose. The countries in red are (at the time) places with either US puppet regimes or some form of Arab Revolt descended, nominally secular/socialist regimes. The religious extremists pushing Islamic rule operated in these countries under various militias and terrorist groups, notably Al Qaeda, backed by the newly radicalized Saudi Wahhabi establishment, and of course, Iran.
From that perspective, the US was waging war against militias and terrorist groups with roots and support in Saudi Arabia, but the House of Saud was not considered to be complicit. The article goes on to say…
Astonishingly, the attacks of 9/11 had little effect on the Saudi approach to religious extremism, as diplomats and intelligence officials have attested. What finally changed royal minds was the experience of suffering an attack on Saudi soil. In May 2003, gunmen and suicide bombers struck three residential compounds in Riyadh, killing 39 people. The authorities attributed the attacks to al-Qaeda, and cooperation with the U.S. improved quickly and dramatically.
Interesting stuff, to be sure.
In the US, there are positive and negative stereotypes, too. German efficiency and Japanese perfectionism and perseverance are among them. Jewish intelligence and commitment to education, too. These things have a basis in reality, of course, but they shouldn’t be mistaken for reality itself. It seems to me these things appearing in your textbooks were probably attempts by your own government to get its people to emulate what it sees as positive traits in other cultures, rather than an attempt by foreign adversaries to paint Chinese people as inferior. Of course, when the message was a little too unclear or negative as in the “toxic textbooks” incident, your government deflected blame.
But have you considered the heat death of the universe?
Without even reading it.
A Windows update broke my wife’s install earlier this week. Her laptop has Manjaro on it now.
Yes you can get dial-up, DSL, cell network data, or even satellite! These services are clearly equivalent to cable or fiber in the ISP marketplace.
Let’s just take NYT for example. Subscription costs $325/year. Why would I ever pay that much? It’s not 1954. I’m not sitting down with my morning coffee and reading the damn thing front to back. I’m reading maybe one article a week from 15 different sources. Am I supposed to pay $5000/year just to cover my bases?
As with everything else in [CURRENT YEAR] the value proposition is so absurdly out of step with reality that fixing it basically relies on rolling out the guillotines.
Looks like the headset she’s wearing in that video (EPOC X - 14 channel EEG headset) is available from Emotiv for $1k, and the software she’s using to map controls (EmotivBCI) is something they provide for free. They have 2 and 5 channel headsets for cheaper and 32 channel caps that are more expensive. Seems pretty consumer-ready to me, but I’m sure your EEG activity data gets shared with Emotiv, which isn’t ideal.
Commenting to remind myself later because I’d love to check into this. My hands are achy from years of overuse, so an alternative to physical controls would be amazing.
The base game is quite playable as is. I’m happier with the cities I’m building in CS2 than anything I ever built in CS1, even with a dozen mods and 35 gigs worth of custom assets. It looks way better and the cim behavior is as good or better than CS1 + traffic manager. There are issues with land value, but it really doesn’t impact gameplay that much.
I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but I’m honestly baffled by just how negative the reaction to this game has been.
While I agree for the sake of clarity, a bigger problem is that it only goes back less than 2 months. Has the number of installs been steady at 7k for a long time? Or does it fluctuate wildly like this occasionally for reasons totally unrelated to laws?
To be fair, both bikes and fences are made of pipes. What else is made of pipes?
Pipe bombs.
VTOL VR is awesome too. The problem with a lot of games that support VR is they don’t support the controllers to the same extent. Playing VR with an Xbox controller instead of the motion tracking Index controllers just ain’t the same.
I guess I’m wondering if there’s some way to bake the contextual understanding into the model instead of keeping it all in vram. Like if you’re talking to a person and you refer to something that happened a year ago, you might have to provide a little context and it might take them a minute, but eventually, they’ll usually remember. Same with AI, you could say, “hey remember when we talked about [x]?” and then it would recontextualize by bringing that conversation back into vram.
Seems like more or less what people do with Stable Diffusion by training custom models, or LORAs, or embeddings. It would just be interesting if it was a more automatic process as part of interacting with the AI - the model is always being updated with information about your preferences instead of having to be told explicitly.
But mostly it was just a joke.
It’s amazing the way you NOTICE TWO THINGS.
Basically, the more vram you have, the better the contextual understanding, their memory is. Otherwise you’d have a bot that maybe knows to only contextualize the last couple messages.
Hmm, if only there was some hardware analogue for long-term memory.
The population is in the screenshot. The guy on reddit who does the benchmarks has better hardware than I do and uses a slightly bigger city, and he gets 60+ fps average depending on settings.
I’ll quote you again…
best existing hardware its not running without scratches the 20 fps line from below on lowest settings
Maybe just, like, don’t make shit up. K? You’re making me take CO’s “toxicity” statement a little more seriously.
You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?
Yeah, I love the game, but I’ll absolutely admit it was released too early. The simulation is broken in multiple ways, but it appears to be fixable as evidenced by progress in patches and some mods as well. Then again, personally, I’m glad I have the opportunity to play it now rather than waiting another year, even in the state it’s in. The cities I’ve been building are very satisfying, and like you said the road tools are a dream.
Code mods are great, maps and assets are in there but not officially, so compatibility going forward probably isn’t great for those. Full modding support is being worked on and is one of their highest priorities, so I’m not surprised there wasn’t much discussion about it. Asset mod support is “before summer” so they’ve got another month according to their last statement on it. PDX Mods has some bugs but overall it’s actually pretty slick and functional, and they’ve made a few highly requested improvements to it already.