EXIST is very narrowly tailored to technology start-ups founded by graduates based on their research.
Out of curiosity I was spot-checking the the founders of the latest YC 24 Winter batch at https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=W24 , and the requirements would exclude at least 90% of them from EXIST if they lived in Germany.
Google also opted to pull out of China instead of selling their Chinese operations to a domestic company. Does it imply that Google had interests beyond financial when operating in China?
I think it's more likely that they don't want the brand name dilution that comes from having a separate TikTok US that's probably going to be a shittier version of the original since it doesn't have the original algorithm (which isn't allowed to be exported) or the original TikTok engineers working on it.
> Google also opted to pull out of China instead of selling their Chinese operations to a domestic company. Does it imply that Google had interests beyond financial when operating in China?
Yes. At the time Larry & Sergey still ran the place and did have a somewhat idealist approach to running Google. When it turned out that it was impossible to bring an uncensored search engine to China, they shut it down.
The TikTok branding and user base are already firewalled from ByteDance's Chinese operations.
Their Chinese variant of TikTok is called Douyin, so there wouldn't be any brand dilution from spinning TikTok off.
I also have doubts that the technology behind TikTok would be difficult for a western engineer to understand. It's a relatively straigtforward algorithm, and it's details have been shared in a public paper.
I must have missed the part where Gondorians and Orcs where sitting for months in trenches opposite to each other fighting for the same few kilometers of ground?
The entire war of the ring lasts less than a year, and most battles are won after at most a few days of fighting by glorious charges on horseback with the leader in front of his men. Making them far more similar to the battles of Arthurian legend rather than anything contemporary to Tolkien.
That's the "hot" period of the war. Before that there were several centuries long war of attrition between Dunedain, their allies and proxies of Sauron.
The capital city of Gondor, Osgiliath, was turned into ruins, front going straight through. And before that, the same thing happened to Minas Ithil. Those big towers next to Black Gate? Those were fortifications built by Gondor. But after Great Plague, which was probably a biological weapon of sorts, there weren't enough people to man them.
What we see in lotr, is essentially last days of war. When one side is barely clinging on, and can muster only localized offensives.
Tolkien has specifically stated that the Dead Marshes were inspired by the appearance of Northern France after the battle of the Somme. And that Sam is a reflection of the privates and batman he served with. That said, he explicitly denies that WW1 or WW2 had any influence on the actual plot.
I don't know how much you want to take the Tolkien's word for it (death of the author and all that) but there it is.
Trench warfare thing is a thing, a big thing, about WW1. But it isn’t the only thing that happened in WW1. It looms large in our imaginations, probably because it impacted the geopolitical situation, and that’s what we see through the zoomed out lens of history.
But Tolkien experienced WW1 in first person. When people say his books were influenced by WW1, I think they mean the experience of soldiering.
Somebody already mentioned the marshes. The Nazgûl are also described as spreading a sort of deep, supernatural sort of dread; not normal fear, but something that shatters the will of hardened soldiers, just by looming over the siege of Gondor. That could be influenced by the experience of artillery bombardments, without explicitly referencing it.
It is also a story in which the good guys are agrarian, and the bad guys are industrial; this was possibly influenced by the experience of being on the receiving end of industrial warfare. I hear it is unpleasant.
from ww1 we know that Tolkien took a strong dislike in industrialisation which made war and killing much more effective than before. Hence the "good" hobbits as traditional farmer-like society, and evil portayed as destroying the natural realm.
It was one swift attack that managed to push the Gondorians out of the eastern half of the town, that also marked the beginning of the war, and one surprise attack with boats 9 months later to take the western half that a few weeks before the end of the war.
I don't know if it's mentioned anywhere what happened in the meantime, but Denethor says he's expecting an enemy strike against Osgiliath shortly before the second attack happens, so it can't have been an active frontline at the time.
Unlike 40 years ago these commits will be reviewed by an experienced colleague and automatically unit and integration tested, so there's no benefit anymore to training people separately before being allowed to touch the real codebase.
Back in the day people with SVN/CVS commit access would push directly to the main branch after testing locally, and testing would be done as part of preparing a release, so it was more necessary to have a "safety" period where new people could get used to the new codebase.
You can apply the same logic to conclude that Mesopotamians shouldn't have invented the wheel while they still fought wars with their neighbours and had people living in reed houses.
While it is true that the Mesopotamians faced many challenges at the time they invented the wheel, it is not an apt comparison to the development of advanced AI. The wheel was a simple technology that greatly improved the lives of the Mesopotamians, whereas AI has the potential to vastly surpass human intelligence and fundamentally alter society in ways that are difficult to predict.
The development of AI requires careful consideration and planning, particularly in regards to potential negative outcomes. In contrast, the invention of the wheel was a relatively straightforward decision that did not carry the same level of risk.
Even if your neighbor hosts a website for your local football club or whatever, it will almost certainly use some hosting service and not a local machine. The number of websites self-hosted from a residential home must be a tiny, tiny fraction of all "interesting" websites.
There are several power companies in Germany that are offering 100% green power after X years, in the sense that they're committing to constructing or buying new green power plants with a generating capacity at least as high as the amount sold X years ago.
The actual power from your outlet is going to be the same no matter which company you buy from, but it's still buying "green power" in a more meaningful way than a zero-sum relabeling.
There isn't really a slope here, this completely in line with earlier applications of the same law. For example the IS flag and various Nazi symbols are also banned. This is part of the tradition of "wehrhafte Demokratie" (defensive democracy) that was established after the bad experiences from the Weimar republic with anti-democratic forces abusing the democratic structures.
Keep in mind that Germany is not the US, and human dignity is actually placed above freedom of speech in the German constitution.
I disagree. Spotify is practically a monopoly and is a rent-seeking entity. The reason artists can't go somewhere else is not because Spotify efficiently operates at cost (their gross margin was 26.5% in Q4), but because it's the only brand most customers know.
Out of curiosity I was spot-checking the the founders of the latest YC 24 Winter batch at https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=W24 , and the requirements would exclude at least 90% of them from EXIST if they lived in Germany.
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