it's an interesting point, and i don't think it can be resolved quite so neatly. to the people building such monuments, or writing such texts, the activity may have been closer to what we now refer to as "history" or "natural philosophy" (or even "civic infrastructure").
the fact that _now_, we have independent traditions referred to by those terms, and so categorize the ancient practices under "religion" is quite confusing, and it may be productive to make the distinction clear.
for a modern example, suppose we build a skyscraper in such a way that it lines up with, or reflects the setting sun on the solstice. we would regard this as "architecture", not "religion". i would be quite offended if, some thousand years from now, the aesthetic decision is dismissed as primitive superstition.
> The concept of "religion" was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries. Sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran, and others did not have a word or even a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these sacred texts were written
That said, GrowingSideways is mistaken. He is confusing the thing with the category of the thing.
The point of setting it up as a German legal entity with US AWS having no special access is to avoid that.
All the relevant part of the CLOUD Act does is make it so when a US legal entity is asked to provide data that it controls it doesn't matter where it has stored that data. For example suppose I run an online forum. I decide to archive some records to cloud storage and remove my local copies.
I archive some of them to AWS in the US. I archive some more to a cloud provider that is in some other country and does not have any US data centers or offer services in the US (I'm going through a VPN with an endpoint in their country so they only see me using a local to them IP, and I pay via some method that doesn't tip them off that I'm American).
I get legally ordered to give copies of those archived records to law enforcement. Under the CLOUD Act I have to retrieve copies from both cloud providers and turn those over.
Note that from the foreign cloud provider's point of view nothing unusual is happening. All they see is a customer retrieving some data that that the customer previously put there, using the normal APIs that are provided for customers to do that with. They have no idea why the customer is retrieving the data.
From the way they are describing it in the article and in their FAQ at https://aws.eu/faq/ it sounds like they are setting up a German company and giving that company the rights to use a bunch of AWS technology which will be run on infrastructure owned and operated by the German company and with no operational access for US AWS. That would make it pretty much equivalent to the foreign cloud service in the example above.
The reason earlier I said "relevant part of the CLOUD Act" is that it actually did two things. One is what is described above, which for some reason is what most people focus on even though it wasn't very controversial.
The other part, which is what most opposition was over, concerned "mutual legal assistance treaties" (MLATs). These are agreements between countries to, as you might guess from the name, assist each other in law enforcement. The CLOUD Act made it so MLATs could be created through executive agreements, just requiring the Attorney General and the Secretary of State to agree that the other country had protections in place to protect US citizens.
Before the CLOUD Act MLATs were created by the executive branch negotiating the terms and then the agreement had to be ratified as a treaty by Congress, so this was a huge change.
Ofcourse the real issue that every American is a potential CIA spy. We know this from history.
Its really not that different from China. Every American will always cooperate like a good little patriot. I don't even blame them for it that is how they are brought up.
Something that may be worth to know, women and men vote different in other countries and especially when it comes to left vs right. Women in Sweden votes with about 10 percentage points more towards left than men, and men vote 11 percentage points more towards right. Looking at the specific parties at far right and far left, around the 2/3 of the far right votes are from men while 2/3 of the far left is women.
A lot of research has been made on this subject and it should be noted that its primarily young voters that create this voting pattern.
> Ten years ago, commingling was a necessary optimization. If seller A (county A) and seller B (county B) both sold the same widget, Amazon treated them as a single distributed liquidity pool to guarantee 2-day prime shipping nationwide without forcing every small seller to split their stock across 10 warehouses.
I don't see why that required commingling. When I click on a Foo in my Amazon search results show me the Foo from whichever of A or B is close enough to meet the 2-day shipping guarantee. If I care which of A or B it actually comes from I can click the option to see other sellers and decide if giving up 2-day shipping is worth getting my preferred seller.
I wonder if the meteoric rise in people using LLMs for advice had anything to do with this?
I was recently using ChatGPT and Perplexity to try to figure out some hardware glitches. I've found LLMs are way better than me at finding relevant threads for this kind of problem on Reddit, company support forums, forums of tech sites like Tom's Hardware, and similar.
The most common cause of the glitch I was seeing was a marginal Thunderbolt cable. A Best Buy 15 minutes from me had a 1m Apple Thunderbolt 5 cable. Amazon had the same cable for the same price with overnight Prime delivery.
If I'm spending $70 for an Apple cable I want it to actually be an Apple cable, so I asked ChatGPT if an Apple cable sold by Amazon was sure to be a genuine Apple cable.
It told me that it likely would be, but if I wanted to be sure buy it from Best Buy.
I've made that decision before without the help of LLMs so I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. It feels vaguely insulting to our intelligence.
I've made that decision before without LLMs too. If I had been Googling to find possibly relevant material instead of using LLMs to find possibly relevant material, I probably would have bought from Amazon.
With Googling the "figure out what is going wrong" part of solving the problem is more decoupled from the "figure out where to buy this thing" part. The first part involves Googling, looking at a bunch of results, finding a lot are not relevant, trying to refine the search, and repeating probably many times. After that time consuming process when I have finally decided that I needed a new cable I'd probably just go to Amazon without thinking about it.
I always have a little doubt when buying from Amazon because of commingling, but usually not enough to look deeper into it unless the product is something with a high risk of it.
With the LLM instead of Google I upfront described to it a lot of details of my equipment, how I was using it, what symptoms I was seeing, what diagnostic steps I'd taken and the results of those, and why I believe certain things that could cause such problems would not be applicable in my case.
It then finds all the stuff I would have found by Googling, but because it also has way more information from what I told it at the start it can eliminate a whole bunch of the irrelevant results, so I'm starting out way ahead of where I would be after a first Google. A little back and forth and I know what I need to buy.
At that point I'm still at the LLM screen. Since it is right there tossing in a final question about buying from Amazon vs Best Buy is trivial.
I'm not a frequent LLM user. I have yet to pay for any LLM. (I did have a year of free Perplexity Pro that Xfinity gave to its customers a little over a year ago, but when that expired I did not subscribe.
(There's a funny story there--when it expired and they tried to convince me to subscribe, I asked Perplexity if a subscription would be worth it. It told me that considering my usage patterns the free plan was perfectly fine for me and I should stick with that).
A lot of people now are using LLMs instead of or before traditional Google-style searches when they want information. Not just techies or early adopters. The are or are quickly becoming mainstream.
If they are recommending not buying from Amazon that might be something Amazon would want to address.
I might be wrong, but, wouldn't the recommendation to avoid Amazon if you want to be sure come from the massive amount of training data pulled from internet conversations? The kind that would already have been discussing the issue of counterfeit products on Amazon being mixed in with legitimate products from the original manufacturer, since this is a problem that's been going on for, what, at least a decade at this point, right?
The LLM is inherently distrustful of Amazon due to having consumed and trained on a bunch of text that's about how one should be distrustful of Amazon.
Yes, it is common knowledge, but you need to get that information from somewhere in the first place, and why not a LLM?
And sometimes, common knowledge may be wrong, so it doesn't hurt to use LLMs, search engines and other sources to confirm that. Maybe you could discover that Best Buy has a problem with just the product you want, or any other reason. It doesn't hurt to spend a couple of minutes to double check and avoid losing $70.
And right there it is where you will get ads in LLM responses. Or opinion manipulation like we have seen with Cambridge Analytica. Next time ChatGPT might always recommend Amazon.
That site is not measuring usage. By usage SQLite would be way above all the others. There are more SQLite deployments in use than all the others combined.
Good. Countries the size of the US don't need bold change. They need stability with change accomplished by a gentle shift in direction.
What bold change looks like is Trump. An anti-Trump government implementing bold change in the other direction would be bad too. Not as bad because more of their change would at least be toward things that would be good in the long run, but there would still be a lot of harm on the way by taking it too fast.
Religion the category is only a few hundred years old. The things that fall under that category go back at least as far as Neanderthal times.
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