I've found Gemini overwhelmingly terrible at pretty much everything, it responds more like a 7b model running on a home pc or a model from two years ago than a medium commercial model in how it completely ignores what you ask it and just latches on to keywords... It's almost like they've played with their tokenisation or trained it exclusively for providing tech support where it links you to an irrelevant article or something
The issue for RPGs is that they have such "small" context windows, and a big point of RPGs is that anything could be important, investigated, or just come up later
Although, similar to how deepseek uses two stages ("how would you solve this problem", then "solve this problem following this train of thought"), you could have an input of recent conversations and a private/unseen "notebook" which is modified/appended to based on recent events, but that would need a whole new model to be done properly which likely wouldn't be profitable short term, although I imagine the same infrastructure could be used for any LLM usage where fine details over a long period are more important than specific wording, including factual things
Or avoid a decrease in profit, which is why you get so many posturing bandwagons which slow down once enough people have forgotten that it won't affect profits anymore, eg all the statements and policy, name, logo etc changes due to BLM in mid-late 2020
Nah, it was originally about making sure your population had good morals, then about controlling your population more generally, then about making money, then about banning fun for some reason, then about making money again
It's been quite the wild ride
Product placement is advertising, and as such saying "no ads" while not blurring out product placement would be misselling the service
The Italian economy always used to be on par with UK, France, Germany, but look at it now...
Better a muzzled monarchy than a power vacuum every time, it's worked in the UK, Spain, (um... probably elsewhere but it worked well enough in those two places after their autocratic dictators kicked the bucket, and look where it left Russia and to an extent Italy - mafia, economy stagnating etc)
Everyone also thinks their country has the worst human rights because "some clause buried in the constitution means you can't eat fish on a Tuesday if you're from X religion" or "somebody lost a court case against a corporation so they didn't have to make Y accessible" which is room for improvement, sure, but then you've got places like Malaysia where you get drastically reduced rights per the constitution if you're not both ethnically Malay and Muslim (other places with bad human rights exist, this is just a hopefully non-controversial example)
No - there's fuses in the plugs themselves, the switch is largely for convenience and safety - if you want to unplug something broken and potentially live, it's much safer to switch it off at the wall than risk a shock given the current limit is on the breaker is so high
The lack of rich people doesn't imply freedom - people who are forced to hunt, gather, fish or farm for subsistence only with no reward beyond that are enslaved to the need to produce food and find shelter, but that differs from a society where there's sufficient food and shelter, it's just hoarded by those who have too much
Additionally the presence of rich people doesn't imply a lack of freedom - you could have a "safety net" system where everyone is guaranteed housing and enough grains and beans/similar to survive, and if they want more they can work for it (some of the taxes from this go towards compensating farmers and builders), giving people the freedom to not have to worry about survival, while also allowing for people to earn lots of money and buy nice things if they want and/or can
That's a lot of expense compared to just importing US-grown hops, as there's a lot of soil to adjust
And yeah, trademarks on plants are no joke, there's a bunch of restrictions on buying/selling them etc.
Hops are highly sensitive to the soil acidity and minerals in terms of the compounds the plants produce, so sharing plants is largely infeasible, plus because it's the US many of them are trademarked so there's no sharing for that reason
I get it's a big jump, but I've been clear I'm restricting it to the most popular types of beer and explained why US bred and grown hops had the good fortune to be the most aromatic disease resistant hops, so I still don't think it's unreasonable
Again, none of this applies for styles beyond 3-7% golden beer fermented with yeast only, and even then there's a few exceptions for certain styles where the aromatics are different (eg bitter, which is less about the aromatic hops and more about the earthy notes of the bittering hops), but for the most popular lagers and pale ales I think it holds
So there's obviously a split between objective fact and opinion and conjecture, but:
- Outbreaks of powdery mildew in the early 20th century meant it became somewhat infeasible to grow most aromatic and flavoursome hops, leading to research and breeding programmes to produce disease resistant hops with other desired characteristics
- Most of the mildew-resistant hops were wild and from the US and Canada
- Hop breeding and research started in the UK but ended in the 2000s
- Oregon State University has been breeding hops for almost 100 years
- The USDA also has their hop research center in Oregon
- The US is responsible for 40% of hop production, of which over 98% is in Oregon, Washington and Idaho
- Cascade hops, from the USDA research center in Oregon, started the craft beer movement due to the combination of high flavour and disease tolerance
- German hop research started in 1926, but only had any real success after the 1980s
So essentially, the US has just got very lucky when it comes to hop production with good soils and disease resistance, while German beermaking was set back leading other styles to become and remain popular, such as very lightly hopped wheat beers, sour beers where the acidity comes from the fermentation instead of hops, and more recently Belgian style beers that are stronger abv so the stronger alcohol taste substitutes for some of the strength of the hops
There probably are also studies, but they tend to look into mechanisms/variations whereas this is more of a series of coinciding factors which don't really need much research to make sense
That's why I said average at best - average beer is going to taste way better than bad beer and also perfectly acceptable, I don't mean it in a negative way, just that in the standard 3-7% golden beer fermented with only yeast category, Cascadian & New Zealand hops provide the best and widest array of tastes regardless of what you're after, as that's where the soil is best and where the breeding is generally done
Personally:
Upvote = I like it or it contributes well to discourse
Downvote = repeated trolling (first comment gets a pass, as do unpopular opinions, but doubling down on unambiguous and apolitical truths doesn't), spam, scams, etc.
This looks to be completely political, their profits are huge and from the article it seems like the closures are largely just reshuffles, with the real job losses coming in management... I really wouldn't be surprised if they end up refilling the positions though and just wanted to make a point that they don't like being taxed on their huge profits
If you're drinking beer from hops that aren't from the US (or New Zealand but that's a way smaller market) then there's a very good chance your beer is average at best (unless it's a stout, wheat beer, bitter, sour etc. rather than a lager or pale ale, but those two are most likely)
Edge cases exist, some people are xxx, xxy, xyy etc.
General concensus is that if there's a Y in the mix you're biologically male at birth but it's a bit of a grey area
Meta exist to make a profit, however they're never going to be able to advertise to most people in the fediverse, who also happen to be some of the most knowledgeable people in some fields. If they accept that they're never going to be able to advertise to those people, they go for the next best thing: monetising their content. Some here may rightfully have an issue with a corporation monetising their content, however by federating with the fediverse and being the first company able to monetise the content within it, Meta have a vested interest in not extinguishing the fediverse.
Complain about their privacy violations or them monetising content they don't generate as much as you want, but remember they're smart & money hungry, and the smartest thing they can do in their position is to make money out of people they otherwise wouldn't be able to.