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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Aside from nationalistic pride, there are several practical reasons:

    1. Azof sea + Crimean peninsula are a natural chockepoint for Russia’s exports from the river Don, basically all Russia’s black sea inports and exports pass though there

    2. Donbass is incredibly rich in mineral resources

    3. Ukraine’s ports are where the largest Soviet Union ships were built, Russia can’t build larger frigades/aircraft carriers without Ukraine’s facilities (mainly Mykolaiv port I believe).

    4. The dominance over the black sea is extremely important for Russia, as it may affect both its nuclear deterrence and its control over Georgia which opens the gates to central asia (yes Turkey is in Nato but it plays its own game)

    Also consider that Russia started the war hoping for a quick ukrainian capitulation, so they would have absorbed the hugely important ukrainian aerospace industry, and its massive farming industry.

    They probably ‘just’ want the Donbass and the coast now, so the last point is no longer relevant, but it played a role in deciding to push forward with the invasion.




  • As far as I can tell, that theory is quite fringe and does not have much support from peer reviewed tests.

    The quarry is basically next to the pyramids, and the main issue with transportation was most likely space constraints: there’s only so many people that can work at a given time on the pyramid itself, regardless of how much manpower the Pharoah could muster.

    Carrying up millions of tons of powder sounds way less practical than carrying the solid stones to me, and making them off-site just to carry them up doesn’t seem to make sense.











  • I have gpt4 with copilot at work so i mostly use that, it is pretty good for programming, you see its limitations when you start relying on it a lot on autocompletions, maybe because the code itself is not too coherent and gpt gets confused

    Maybe chat tasks are simpler because it writes the whole thing from scratch, though I mostly ask it for limited functionalities, eg write a function that takes x and returns y or use a certain ORM to change a value.

    I would suggest you try both gpt 3.5 and the free huggingface minstral 7b version (you can probably run it on pc too, it’s not huge) for programming tasks and see for yourself. For general knowledge though, gpt wins hands down over minsral 7b