One nitpick, Jesus was almost certainly a real figure. There are many records indicating someone with that name was in the area at the time, and that they were executed by crucifixion.
The religious stuff, obviously no way to prove. But as a person, the historical consensus is they existed.
Victoria 3 was just boring - I say this as a huge fan of Victoria 2.
I played a few weeks after launch, and - for every one of the 4 countries I tried (Russia, Japan, Denmark, Spain), simply building all the things everywhere and ignoring money made everything trivial.
The economic simulation was super barebones, the entire thing could be bootstrapped just by building. An entire population of illiterate farmers would become master architects overnight and send GDP to the double digit billions in a few decades.
A token is not a concept. A token is a word or word fragment that occured often in free text and was assigned a number. Common words, prefixes, and suffixes are the vast majority of tokens, and the rest are uncommon pairs of letters.
The algorithm to generate tokens is essentially compression, there is no semantic meaning embedded in them.
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.
Role of thumb is an employee costs roughly twice their base salary, as the employee still needs to cover insurance, taxes, sick time, and other benefits.
That leaves an average salary of 190K for the 50 employees. That isn’t much for tech.
There are plenty of things that can cause fires that are not oxygen, and don’t contain oxygen.
The halogens, Fluorine and Chlorine in particular, are powerful oxidizing agents on their own and can produce flames in the same manner as common flames.
Here’s a report on the spectra of flames produced by combustion in a Fluorine atmosphere (PDF warning).
paying a peasant to work
Peasants (serfs) were not paid. They were bound to the land they worked, and were given a fraction of the harvest they produced. The rest was property of the Lord who’s title controlled the land.
There was a (very small) artisan class where the concept of payment existed, though often it was payment-in-kind - smith the plow for my oxen and I’ll give you some food after the harvest. Money was rarely encountered for the vast majority of people.
Haskell isn’t really that hard to learn
A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors
You can fly in space towards the planets you can see. When you get there, you won’t be able to land and will be able to fly straight through the planet itself.
Planets outside of the fast travel menu aren’t really planets
Those without respiratory issues don’t have oxygenation issues while wearing masks.
The same air is going into your lungs, the only difference is your diaphragm has to work harder due to the filtering effect of the mask. If it can’t manage that, then you are likely already on oxygen due to low tidal volume and chronic hypoxia.
You can buy a pulse oximeter from CVS for like $20 and test this yourself if you don’t believe me.
In many cases, getting something out quickly is more valuable than having it be clean.
Part of being a senior is knowing when fast is more important than perfect. Not saying your senior did everything right, just that a single example of someone’s code isn’t enough to judge the value of a person to an organization.
A cleric can be a competent martial class for the beginning of the game. Falls behind true martials after those get extra attacks, but by then clerics have 3rd level spells.
Most of the combustion products from gas are ‘clean’ - water and CO2. They don’t contribute to particulate air pollution.
CO and NOx are output in much smaller quantities, and are contributors to air pollution, but not to particulate air pollution.
From the tailpipe, the only real particulate matter is a very small amount of soot, and this is a small fraction of the overall combusted mass - engines are designed to minimize soot in order to increase performance and fuel efficiency.
Tires and break pads, in contrast, simply abrade into the air essentially in their entirety.
The porn bit gets headlines, but it isn’t the core of the issue.
All of these models retain a representation of the original training data in their parameters, which makes training a violation of copyright unless it was explicitly authorized. The law just hasn’t caught up yet, since it is easy to obfuscate this fact with model mumbo-jumbo in between feeding in voices and generating arbitrary output.
The big AI players are betting that they will be able to entrench themselves with a massive data advantage before regulation locks down training and effectively kills any future competition. They will already have their models, and the worst case at that point is paying some royalties to people whose data was used in training.
That doesn’t need to be a distributed ledger, that can just be a database. The only use cases for DLT/Blockchains is where it is undesirable to have a central authority.
Games will always have a central authority - the devs - so there’s just no point. Nothing is gained by decentralizing trust, and quite a lot - especially speed and simplicity - must be sacrificed.
That would give politicians another reason to raise the retirement age, in order to stay in power.