• 5 Posts
  • 527 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 17th, 2023

help-circle












  • It did though. Hitler could have gone after Britain and france earlier. However, he thought Britain was staying out of things, and so played more safe and slow. This brought Britain the time it needed. Hitler honestly didn’t expect Britain to declare war on him, and that slowed his assault on that front. If WW2 had gone serious even 6 months earlier, Britain would have been in serious trouble. The RAF would have collapsed under the luftwaffa, and WW2 would have been very different. Appeasement traded lives for time.

    Don’t get me wrong, it was a dick move, and threw others under the tanks tracks to save Britain. It’s also worth noting that this is not what Trump is trying to do. He’s just being a boot licker to the most powerful person who will talk to him. Appeasement at least had a positive goal.



  • To his credit, Chamberlain wasn’t as bad as he’s made out. When he implemented his policy of appeasement, Britain was not actually capable of meaningfully resisting nazi Germany. He basically brought time to bring Britain back to a war footing. When it became obvious to the public that war was coming, he fell on his sword. This cleared the way for Churchill to take charge, without significant infighting. He also inherited Britain on a far better war footing, and even then it was a close thing.

    Basically, Chamberlain knew his plan wouldn’t work long term. He took one “for king and country”, likely knowing how it would be perceived. I can at least respect him for that.


  • The weirdest thing is that steam doesn’t have a natural or self reinforcing monopoly. It wouldn’t take much for another company to copy their business model, and provide a competitor. In practice, however, they all fall flat on their faces.

    Steam’s model is to give up short term gain for a smaller long term gain. Over time, this has snowballed into what we see now. Gabe is happy to get ever richer from his golden goose laying away. The competitors get started, then try and gut the goose for a quick buck.





  • It’s depends purely on how it’s used. Used blindly, and yes, it would be a serious issue. It should also not be used as a replacement for doctors.

    However, if they could routinely put symptoms into an AI, and have it flag potential conditions, that would be powerful. The doctor would still be needed to sanity check the results and implement things. If it caught rare conditions or early signs of serious ones, that would be a big deal.

    AI excels at pattern matching. Letting doctors use it to do that efficiently, to work beyond there current knowledge base is quite a positive use of AI.