TheChurn

American hegemony was a conscious American policy choice. We didn’t want the Euros having an independent foreign policy, we wanted them reliant on American military protection. This was how the US kept those bits of its empire in line.

Notice how the only Western European country that even pays lip service to independent action is France, the one Western European country with a military capable of independent operation. And then we get “Freedom Fries” and all that shit whenever they don’t do whatever the current US admin wants.

The single biggest thing Trump fucked up for the US was pushing NATO countries to spend more on defence. This will drastically reduce US influence over the continent in the coming decades, speeding up America’s worsening diplomatic isolation.

While Finland lost, the difficulty the Soviets encountered during their offensive was noted by the powers at the time. It was another factor convincing the Nazis that invading the Soviet Union wasn’t as terrible and idea as the balance of resources and forces would suggest.

Historians still debate whether the Soviets intended to conquer all of Finland at the onset of the war. While the eventual peace treaty left Finland ceding more territory than the initial Soviet ultimatum demanded, Finland retained its sovereignty, which was incredible given the disparity in military power and the existence of a puppet Finnish communist government.

No, that’s not a real problem either. Model search techniques are very mature, the first automated tools for this were released in the 90s, they’ve only gotten better.

AI can’t ‘train itself’, there is no training required for an optimization problem. A system that queries the value of the objective function - “how good is this solution” - then tweaks parameters according to the optimization algorithm - traffic light timings - and queries the objective function again isn’t training itself, it isn’t learning, it is centuries-old mathematics.

There’s a lot of intentional and unintentional misinformation around what “AI” is, what it can do, and what it can do that is actually novel. Beyond Generative AI - the new craze - most of what is packaged as AI are mature algorithms applied to an old problem in a stagnant field and then repackaged as a corporate press release.

Take drug discovery. No “AI” didn’t just make 50 new antibiotics, they just hired a chemist who graduated in the last decade who understands commercial retrosynthetic search tools and who asked the biopharma guy what functional groups they think would work.

“AI” isn’t needed to solve optimization problems, that’s what we have optimization algorithms for.

Define an objective and parameters and give the problem to any one of the dozens of general solvers and you’ll get approximate answers. Large cities already use models like these for traffic flow, there’s a whole field of literature on it.

The one closest to what you mentioned is a genetic algorithm, again a decades-old technique that has very little in common with Generative “AI”

With refresh rates like that, you must be talking about LED billboards.

These are different from consumer monitors, which mostly use constant LED backlights and a liquid crystal layer to determine color.

An LED bilboard is going to have a fuckton of singular LEDs - each of which can emit exactly one color - arranged in groups to form full pixels capable of displaying many colors. There is no extra LCD layer between your eyes and the billboard LEDs.

The reason for the high refresh rates is because each led must be extinguished and and relit to redraw the image, and the eye is very good at picking up this strobe effect.

The difference vs. a consumer display is that the backlight in a typical monitor is constant. Refreshes the screen involves sending updated instructions to the LCD layer, twisting the crystals and possibly changing the color they allow through.

To make a crude concrete example:

Imagine I am shining a white flashlight in your face. In front of the flashlight I put a colored piece of plastic so the light hitting you is colored. Then I change the plastic to one with a (slightly) different color. I do this 120 times per second. That is a typical consumer display.

Now imagine I am shining a colored flashlight directly in your face. Then I turn it off and grab a flashlight of a different color and shine it in your face. Imagine I do that 120 times per second. That is an LED billboard.

Which do you think is more likely to give you a headache?

One final complication - the brightness of the LEDs is variable over time, they received a modulated signal rather than a steady voltage, so at lower refresh rates there will be a noticeable ripple across the image, similar to how early CRT screens could look.

Increasing the refresh rate hides a lot of these problems.

Check it out to throw in the trash. Jared Diamond’s book is thoroughly condemned in anthropological and archaeological circles.