To be fair the Antichrist, being a prophesied entity from several millennia ago, is probably not super up to date on twenty-first-century business best practices. They probably still use waterfall.
There is a fantastic book to be written about the Antichrist finally rising to lay waste to the world, only to be astounded by air travel, the internet, etc. A demonic horde of a thousand flaming knights riding through Rome is largely written off as a new burning man thing, etc.
The Antichrist is NOT a prophesied entity. There is no, "the Antichrist". Antichrist isn't even mentioned in the Book of Revelation.
Antichrist is only mentioned in the 1st and 2nd letters of John, where it refers to many antichrists (1 John 2:18), who are identifiable because they deny the Father and the Son (1 John 2:22), and that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (2 John 1:7). The term simply means, 'against Christ', so anyone who is against Christ could be labelled such, even if they didn't match the description in 1st and 2nd John.
So antichrists existed when these letters of John were written and an innumerable number of them have existed over the past 2,000 years and exist even today. While antichrists would likely continue to exist while the events in Revelation occur, they are not described as having any role in the events described in Revelation.
The reason people link antichrist to the beast or false prophet in Revelation is not due to the writings in the New Testament stating that there is a link. It is more that any being who is against Christ, including those in Revelation, are likely to deny the Father and the Son and deny that Jesus came in the flesh, so, it isn't difficult to find numerous antichrists throughout the past 2,000 years that Christians could identify as being an antichrist and since, for each generation, their time was, to them, the end of time, because the future hadn't happened yet, it was easy for them to think of these antichrists as potentially being the beast or false prophet of the end times described in Revelation.
Over time, this traditional link between antichrist and the beast or false prophet became very strong, in spite of not being stated in scripture and more tradition has grown up around linking antichrist with the beast or false prophet, creating traditions upon traditions, upon traditions, not of which is substantiated by scripture or any other early writings from the Christian community.
> If you can afford to pay an army you can afford to pay the opposing side instead.
Aside from all questions about how such an agreement is to be enforced once you no longer have the money but the invaders still have their weapons, the article shows very clearly that this is not true. Early states are seriously cash-strapped, and rarely pay their armies in easily portable goods. They can "afford" to raise armies consisting of soldiers who bring their own weapons and, by-and-large, their own food. That does not make for good tribute and so, in fact, they cannot afford to pay off an invader.
You are right in the longer term but surely wrong in the shorter term since history records The Byzantines paying off Attila the Hun from the 430s to the mid 440s, so a 10 year window.
The Danegeld lasted over 150 years. It undoubtedly failed in the end, but it certainly worked in the short to medium term.
The Sassanid and Byzantines paid off each other for ages. The persians paid tribute for a long time to border states.
The pre-french kings paid off The tribes who eventually became the Normans.
It's a shit long term strategy. Doesn't mean it didn't work in the short term for the states using it.
Remember, these tributes were clearly liquid cash, or equivalent. When they ran out of money it seems to turn into land. The implication they could NOT have been used to raise forces internally begs questions. The counter argument I suggest is that you raise an army (that you don't have to pay) when you CANNOT pay off the other side, or don't want to cede land.
Perhaps where we meet is that history records states doing it but it didn't work in the medium-to-long term. Did it happen? Yes. Did it work? "no" for a long term view but the immediate effect, for some period of time? Depends how you view it.
The same might be said for the condottieri. Groups like the English "white company" in the extended wars of europe in the middle ages. Paying them to switch sides might be more effective than putting up your own guys to fight them.
[Edit: I invite people to think about the average lifespan in role of ancient leaders, and what a decade or a hundred years means for "success" or "failure" against those measures. Bear in mind that most modern democratic states operate on a change of leadership in a 4 to 6 year timescale, with some cycling much faster and some cycling much slower, and it is rare for a successor leader to entirely endorse his predecessors choices. Now cast that into pre democratic times and ask yourself what success looks like.]
We know about instances when it was tried, and usually failed, but we also know about the rest of history when as far as we know it wasn’t tried or even contemplated for the exact reasons the OP stated.
> The pre-french kings paid off The tribes who eventually became the Normans.
Probably the worst decision any French leader, possibly any European leader, ever made. It could be argued that this lead to at least 600 years of pain until the Normans aristocracy (now English) gave up trying to take France.
> It could be argued that this lead to at least 600 years of pain until the Normans aristocracy (now English) gave up trying to take France.
You're rewriting history here. "The normans" were completely integrated in the French aristocracy, and that's why the kings of England took part in the successoral struggle. The 100 year war was started by the grandson of Philippe IV, of the french Capet dynasty, fighting against a nephew of Philippe IV for legitimate motives. Other cousins fighting it out included the dukes of burgundy, the house of Anjou-Sicily, etc.
If anything, a few normans lords marrying into the Capet family was just a little gene refill to stave off inbreeding.
I am not rewriting history, just giving a perspective.
The Norse raiders were given land and in exchange they would stop raiding. Paying off the aggressors.
These Norse became known as the Normans, took the English crown only a few generations after settling and then claimed the French crown.
Taking England gave them enough power to war with France for hundreds of years.
Paying off raiders, time and time again, cost France and never ended the threat. William The Conqueror’s descendants didn’t stop claiming France until around 1800.
But I totally do give you that by the 100 year war they were now English not Norse.
But in the modern West we have a very short 24 hour attention span. In other cultures and other time periods people had long memories. I could imagine Rollo telling his son to finish what his ancestors started. And eventually William telling his sons.
That people did things at some point or another in history does not mean those things were good ideas on any time scales. People both make bad decisions and face conflicts of interest. History is chock full of incredibly dumb things that nevertheless happened.
One tiny UI nitpick: I found the squares' hitboxes to be unintuitively small, requiring more-than-expected precision to get Chazz to land in the square I wanted. (I was initially confused about whether I was making an illegal move.) You might want to either increase the size of the squares, or make the "this square is the target" indicator more obvious.
Points for effort, but this will do literal nothing to appease the opposition, since the "water use" thing is a myth anyway. It's probably good, it sounds like it will be more efficient and efficiency saves resources for other uses, but politically it's completely useless.
Doesn't matter that's it's a myth, it's salient and has become a layperson talking point. This is an official post on nvidia.com that can be quoted: "The NVIDIA DSX reference design for AI factories has zero water consumption"
Do you have any references for this comment: '"water use" thing is a myth anyway'. I would like to show my kid who keeps complaining to me about AI water usage.
The original paper that started this meme said "data centers consume water indirectly through the water used for electricity generation" and then counted water evaporating out of Lake Mead behind the Hoover dam as water use. This made the numbers seem gigantic, people got mad at it on social media, and 1 year later here we are.
even in the article you linked, it admits AI data centers CAN harm water supplies
"Individual data centers can sometimes stress local water systems in the way other industries do, but when you use AI, you are not contributing to a significant problem for water management compared to most other things you do in your day to day life. "
What is the point youre trying to make?
He also posits in the popular NYT article about a data center sucking up all the water: "But the reason their taps ran dry (which the article itself says) was entirely because of sediment buildup in groundwater from construction. It had nothing to do with the data center’s normal operations (it hadn’t begun operating yet, and doesn’t even draw from local groundwater). The residents were wronged by Meta here and deserve compensation, but this is not an example of a data center’s water demand harming a local population."
And its like he claims "its not ai data centers themselves, its the construction of them" as if its an important distinction that exempts data centers from harm. It's not.
One day, the data center wasnt there, now it is. And the sudden presence of that DC caused the water problems.
"And its like he claims "its not ai data centers themselves, its the construction of them" as if its an important distinction that exempts data centers from harm. It's not."
But this has nothing to do with data centers, it has to do with construction. I think getting every mad at all new construction in general is a very dangerous path to go down.
Yeah but that's not what the discourse around water and AI is. When people speak about water and AI/dc's, they're indicating that water is being "taken" from other uses. As if a AI usage will oneday cause you to turn on your facet and nothing but an auto-tuned cackle comes out. That the well has gone dry. That water is a scarce resource (which, sometimes it is, esp. if you're drawing from an aquifer in the southwest)
A data centre's construction sentiment clogging pipes is fixable; an acute issue. The discourse is that AI causes chronic strain.
But like... the same people will watch 2-3 hours of HD Netflix or post on TikTok right after lodging their complaints on Reddit. The MW/h of AI isn't that big compared to these services. And the carbon sync of digital goods, including data centres, pales in comparison to the supply chain of Blockbuster. Nobody gave af then.
The reason they're cherry picking AI is because we're all sick of seeing tech billionaires thrive when everyone else is pressed by inflation and stagnant job markets.
> What actually happened here was that [...] two water hookups at a data center construction site weren't properly registered or linked to a billable account. When the utility noticed the problem, they sent the data center a retroactive bill for all the water, for $147,474 covering ~29M gallons. The data center paid it.
> Did the data center cause the low water pressure? The article very strongly implies a connection, but doesn't give the reader the right numbers to judge whether this actually happened. To figure this out, we need to know over what time the 30 million gallons was drawn [...] That's about 1% of the county's daily water output. There are a ton of ways a water system like this can experience low water pressure, and a 1% dip just isn't one of them.
> [...] the complaint about low water pressure [which led to discovering the billing problem] was coming from a private well that the data center didn't even draw from
It always seemed weird - where does the water go, after all? I gather it isn't turned in to H2 and O2. I assume it leaves the data center hotter than when it came in, which seems like the real issue?
Yeah and it's a myth that fracking makes water undrinkable.
I'll bet anything you'd be the guy that won't drink a glass of the "perfectly safe, completely unaffected" water while making such utterly absurd claims.
> the r>g observation (due to Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century) is that both historically and recently the returns to capital exceed the growth rate of the economy.
They do if you cherry-pick your economies, starting points, definitions of "capital" and "growth", and cutoff points, yes.
That's not even necessary. The fact that it could create panic is enough.
And by the way, a terrorist is (by definition) someone who wants to incite terror in others. So any person knowingly broadcasting "we will all die” is a terrorist already.
Or a nihilist, or a fatalist, or a pessimist, or an antinatalist, or a realist.
Don't go putting people into boxes. That's the path of persecution.
You have the inalienable right to say what you want on a plane, limited by what the government is allowed to prosecute. In a confined space, that is a bit riskier. That's a solely personal choice - no laws are being broken. The Captain has the right to ask you to conform or leave, but that's a separate issue.
People are being overly sensitive. A wifi name is not a protest. It does not disturb personal privacy and tranquility. It's about as offensive as an article titled "We’re All Gonna Die!" from your favorite news outlet - which by the way, is not an uncommon headline.
What if my wifi name was "peanut butter for all!" but unbeknownst to me and by some rare cosmic coincidence everyone on the plane was deathly allergic to peanut butter. Does that make me a terrorist? No! But I swear someone would try to drag me through decades of litigation regardless. These people seem to have divorced words and meanings from the mechanics of how the world works. Like, "this piece of paper says you shouldn't say this, so off with your head".
> The Captain has the right to ask you to conform or leave, but that's a separate issue.
It's not a separate issue, because the captain very likely will err on the side of caution if he has to decide whether you are a terrorist or a nihilist.
Then at put that person in jail, not the person with the tacky device name.
Do you hear yourself? You're saying we should be irrational because there's irrational people. That we should send people to jail because they might upset an irrational person? You're sending the wrong person to jail. Are you crazy?
You're interpreting a lot, as I didn't say any of that.
What I'm saying is that the decision whether or not something is considered a risk is completely at the discretion of the captain. And by accepting the terms of the airline when boarding the plane, you agree to follow the orders of the captain.
So if that captain says "turn it off", you turn it off. It's very simple.
But I give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don't want to understand for the sake of confrontation, so I'll leave it at that.
terrorist/terrorism are words that should be removed from anyone's vocabulary as they have lost their meaning.
Similar to woke/wokism, these have become words used by far right extremists and politicians around the world to name anything that is against their hatred and opinions.
Propaganda is a very important part of terrorism so I would not put that past them. Imagine the headlines if something like that does happen in the future.
In short, a Pascal's wager and a demonstration that it is not easy to have good things.
Indeed. The Jira rules implement test-then-decrement correctly, but the notation was ambiguous. I’ve fixed the pseudocode so that the test explicitly precedes the decrement. Thanks for the careful read!
What are those artists successful at? Making art, or marketing it? The New York art scene is a curious example in this context, because it is notoriously all about who you know rather than what you do, and that's not usually considered a good thing.
