> ... where the indigenous population kills any outsider...
Ah yes. Romanticizing the noble savage. It's as old as, I don't know what exactly (I could ask a LLM but fuck it).
Why stop at killing outsiders? We can do better...
We could also romanticize cannibalism that was all alive and well when europeans discovered the americas (yup, both in north and south america there was cannibalism).
What about we forget about the enlightenment and the great philosophers and just take a shortcut: why don't we start writing articles about how we should we should start eating each other? Yup, just eating. Because, you know, the myth of the noble savage. So why not?
And let me one-up that: what about torturing kids as much as possible (which was a thing in southern america before it got conquered), to extract as many tears as humanly possible? What about we venere the noble savages who were doing just precisely that. Oh but it was "contextual". Yeah: explain me the concept, please.
Wait: I can one-up that. Cannibalism? Wanna me to romanticize slitting the throat of your enemies and then raping and then turning into slaves their wives and daughters?
Oh wait I've got an even better idea: combine that with eating their boys. Rape the daughters, eat the boys. Not many lost calories.
Rape and enslave the daugthers and wives, torture the boys so that they cry as much as possible, then eat them (alive, because why not).
Such noble savages.
Very connection to nature.
Much simplicity.
Deep down all of us (well, you mostly really) aren't we (well, you mostly really) deeply connected to these wonderful noble savages?
/s (just in case it is isn't clear that this is sarcasm... I wouldn't want to end up in trouble)
> Tis of no matter your Highness, I have seen their backs before
Don't know whether that's true or not (that the Duke of Wellington said that) but... One year later (1815), he handed the french's arses back to them big, big, big, times at Waterloo.
Basically the battle of Waterloo (a few kilometers away from where I was born) is considered the time when the UK overtook France as the world's number one superpower.
Since then both have only ever been falling in the rankings and it doesn't look like that fall is going to stop anytime soon but that's another topic.
> is considered the time when the UK overtook France as the world's number one superpower.
But unlikely a result of said battle, rather the instability of politics in France.
Us British oft think of Waterloo as a great victory, although the circumstances, participants and objectives were pretty nuanced. Wellington himself rejected congratulations and thought battle to have very high cost.
That's an anachronism, from the 19th to mid-20th century there were just "great powers", not perfectly matched but considered to be in the same class. The Ottoman empire falling off the league ("sick old man") was a bit of a shocker.
> Piketty, no conservative, has argued that UBI fails to address root structural problems: “unequal access to education and health, low-paying and low-productivity jobs, malfunctioning markets, corruption, and regressive tax systems.”
I don't think we should listen to Piketty for anything: it's a product from the state, by the state, to create state loving persons by hammering them with constant state-loving propaganda since they're a toddler till they're a grown up.
Speaking about "low-productivity job" I think every single job Piketty has been doing its whole life does qualify.
Corruption: yeah, the french state is very good at that. Public spending is, officially, 57% of the french GDP. But unofficially we all know it's above 2/3rd, with many of the "private" companies, like the utility ones, being actual state monopolies. France is nearly a full-on planned economy and crime is on the rise, quality of life in freefall, education level in freefall, the country is closing to defaulting on its public debt and we can all see how many tech companies France created: way to go. Hermes and Champagne are saving the country: go France! (typing this while sipping a "mojito royal" [mojito with champagne instead of sparkling water and wife's got many Hermes scarves: so I'm one of those bringing money to the french state btw... I wonder how finances are going to turn out once we stop buying the "french quality" bullshit).
Really: people should stop listening to that fraud as if what he wrote was the gospel. I could have shat is dumb mega-over-simplistic formula our of my arse too if I had been raised by the state to love state, teach for the state, to create state-loving persons.
And people have called the bogus numbers he used in his main "breakthrough" publication. The explanation have been wonderful too: "Yup my numbers are wrong, but my formula is still correct".
Just stop with Piketty.
P.S: that UBI is fucktarded: we all know. No need to reference a fraud to make that point.
> The future of the US depends on these people being held accountable by the next administration ...
OK but who was signing in place of the totally senile Biden? The autopen is a thing. That puppet wasn't functional anymore. Yet "he" was signing things.
Who's being held accountable for the deep state that was guiding Biden's hand?
Nobody. Just as this administration isn't holding anyone accountable for any of the misdeeds done under Biden, nothing is going to happen next.
So the year is 2026 and we cannot point a LLM at, say, this HN thread, and give it the instructions: "I don't want to look like a dumbass, so don't make these obvious mistakes / don't use these obvious tells"!?
This for me is one of the greatest cognitive dissonance moments with LLMs: on one hand we have the proposition “LLMs will do everything, take your job, automate anything that can be automated, produce novel research, lead humankind to a golden age” and other hand we have “no way to make it not sound like a guy who just learned this two sentences”.
Google needs to catch up on what? Devs mindshare? The latest Opus 4.8 carefully selected benchmarks made sure to pick Gemini 3.1 Pro and not Gemini 3.5 Flash: 3.5 Flash is beating Opus 4.8 on several of the benchmarks Anthropic posted but simply was ignored.
I don't think SOTA-wise Google has a lot of catch up to do.
Gemini 3.5 Flash is not good at coding in practice. Gemini 3.1 Pro too, in particular is known to be bad at tool calls. Many companies would love to have alternatives to Claude Code (as it's a significant risk to depend on one vendor), so far most of the buzz is about moving to Codex but much fewer talk about moving to Gemini. All these benchmarks are not very informative, the Chinese labs do better on these benchmarks than in practice, for example.
Ah yes. Romanticizing the noble savage. It's as old as, I don't know what exactly (I could ask a LLM but fuck it).
Why stop at killing outsiders? We can do better...
We could also romanticize cannibalism that was all alive and well when europeans discovered the americas (yup, both in north and south america there was cannibalism).
What about we forget about the enlightenment and the great philosophers and just take a shortcut: why don't we start writing articles about how we should we should start eating each other? Yup, just eating. Because, you know, the myth of the noble savage. So why not?
And let me one-up that: what about torturing kids as much as possible (which was a thing in southern america before it got conquered), to extract as many tears as humanly possible? What about we venere the noble savages who were doing just precisely that. Oh but it was "contextual". Yeah: explain me the concept, please.
Wait: I can one-up that. Cannibalism? Wanna me to romanticize slitting the throat of your enemies and then raping and then turning into slaves their wives and daughters?
Oh wait I've got an even better idea: combine that with eating their boys. Rape the daughters, eat the boys. Not many lost calories.
Rape and enslave the daugthers and wives, torture the boys so that they cry as much as possible, then eat them (alive, because why not).
Such noble savages.
Very connection to nature.
Much simplicity.
Deep down all of us (well, you mostly really) aren't we (well, you mostly really) deeply connected to these wonderful noble savages?
/s (just in case it is isn't clear that this is sarcasm... I wouldn't want to end up in trouble)
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