China aren't strictly speaking allies. They get a lot of oil from Iran and have plenty of deals in place, to the point that many people believe that the Venezuela coup and Iran war are a US ploy to destabilise China specifically.
China basically stay out of geopolitics far more than people assume. They are very unlikely to enter the Iran war on either side, ever.
27 here, back to university too for similar reasons and seeing the same thing.
I don't actually blame the lecturers or teachers. A huge part of higher education is self motivated learning with access to people who are incredibly knowledgeable, who also happen to be your teachers / lecturers.any lectures are there to guide the topics of independent learning.
Until a certain point, the purpose of most education was education itself. The matter half of the 20th century into today has seen a shift of the purpose of university being for employment on the other side. This is an enormous difference, it no longer appeals only to people who are passionate about the subject. If 70% of the lecture theatre is there not to learn but graduate, it changes the learning itself. People by nature want to optimise their tasks to get their goal; if the goal is to be as educated on the subject as possible, then you're motivated across the board. If the goal is to get a job and the degree is a checkbox in the process, or even if you're going because "that's what you do", then the motivation is to pass. There is no bare minimum to learning, there is to graduating.
The goalposts move on difficulty too. Universities are for-profit companies, who sell qualifications. Inevitably the difficulty of the qualification will creep downwards, as the expectation of difficulty from the learner does the same.
I think this has been happening for long enough that in all but the most prestigious or passionate corners of higher education, the staff and teachers also first entered higher education in establishments where everyone was motivated by either employment or profit.
Don't get me wrong, I do believe plenty of people in higher education are motivated by education for the sake of it, but it's no longer the default expectation.
I'm guilty of using LLMs from time to time, and more guilty of finding it gradually replacing what I used to Google search.
If it's something that Wikipedia can help me with, that's still my first port of call, but gradually, for anything problem solving related, I just ask an LLM.
Even a year or two ago, I was googling things with reliable websites for advice at the end, like reddit, but clearly that has decayed as a reputable source for support.
Googling things that require more than just knowledge is difficult now, and asking the sometimes wrong machine is consistently more useful.
I'm guilty of using LLMs from time to time, and more guilty of finding it gradually replacing what I used to Google search.
If it's something that Wikipedia can help me with, that's still my first port of call, but gradually, for anything problem solving related, I just ask an LLM.
Even a year or two ago, I was googling things with reliable websites for advice at the end, like reddit, but clearly that has decayed as a reputable source for support.
Googling things that require more than just knowledge is difficult now, and asking the sometimes wrong machine is consistently more useful.
The only time I ever find myself getting preachy is when people who eat meat talk about halal meat as unethical. I have no idea why it bothers me so deeply when it's technically fighting for better treatment of animals, but there's something especially frustrating about the options are:
Kill them quickly.
Kill them slowly.
~~Don't kill them.~~
When I was still using Instagram reels, I was always amazed how quickly the algorithm figured me out. If I hesitated for even a second on a reel, it would amend my next ones immediately. I assume the real trick is comparing it to the average time spent on a reel, everyone spends longer on a wall of text reel, but when I stop on a Linux reel for an extra second, I'm immediately in the 1% for engagement.
I read something years ago about how your phone keyboard tracks your recommended words, it knows if you're more likely to type apple or Apple, or if you type soup more than average, and any app that gets that data and compares it to the baseline has an instant, in depth profile on you.
I do agree entirely. If I could use the internet of 2015 I would, but I can't do so in a practical way that isn't much more tedious than asking an LLM.
My options are the least rancid butter of the rancid butter restaurants or I churn my own. I'd love to churn my own and daydream of it, but I am busy, and can barely manage to die on every other hill I've chosen.
Compared to crypto and NFTs, there is at least something in this mix, not that I could identify it.
I've become increasingly comfortable with LLM usage, to the point that myself from last year would hate me. Compared to projects I used to do with where I'd be deep into Google Reddit and Wikipedia, ChatGPT gives me pretty good answers much more quickly, and far more tailored to my needs.
I'm getting into home labs, and currently everything I have runs on ass old laptops and phones, but I do daydream if the day where I can run an ethically and sustainably trained, LLM myself that compares to current GPT-5 because as much as I hate to say it, it's really useful to my life to have a sometimes incorrect but overalls knowledgeable voice that's perpetually ready to support me.
The irony is that I'll never build a server that can run a local LLM due to the price hikes caused by the technology in the first place.
I heard a theory (that I don't believe, but still) that Deepseek is only competitive to lock the USA into a false AI race.
As much as I don't disagree, I think the "Apple is closest to Nazism" comment touches on something different. Other massive American companies have awful practices but they don't care particularly how their way of making money looks. Apple wields a specific aesthetic power that generally dictates a hegemonic uniformity, that strays the line of being to their detriment at times. I don't think any other big tech company would care in the same way if not for their desire to copy Apple.
I'm 95% sure it isn't, I've obsessed over that game for years and this makes no sense to me.
Edit: It's the wizard of Oz