This is pretty much a “all Tech companies have to jump on the AI hype train” pressure on publicly traded companies and those who need lots of investor money, and little if at all customer pressure.

All investors want their money to be in the same place as those who invested in Google before it made it big, and the AI hype promises exactly that to the “winners” of the AI race.

Customer needs and demands are well below secondary to investor pressure, especially for companies which have dominant market positions (so general customers have no decent alternatives) and startups whose entire business model is AI.

God forbid people want the compute they are paying for to actually do what they want, and not work at cross purposes for the company and its various data sales clients.

I think that way of thinking is still pretty niche.

Hope it’s becoming more widespread, but in my experience most people don’t actually concern themselves with “my device does some stuff in the background that goes beyond what I want it for” - in their ignorance of Technology, they just assume it’s something that’s necessary.

I think were people have problems is mainly at the level of “this device is slower at doing what I want it to do than the older one” (for example, because AI makes it slower), “this device costs more than the other one without doing what I want it to do any better” (for example, they’re unwilling to pay more for the AI functionality) or “this device does what I want it to do worse than before/that-one” (for example, AI is forced on users, actually making the experience of using that device worse, such as with Windows 11).

Vietnam was definitelly “all out” but I grant your point that America wasn’t trying to make it part of its territory, not least because since the days of Puerto Rico and taking territory from Mexico, America’s Imperial strategy has always being one of installing puppet governments rather than direct control.

As for the rest, I disagree on it being possible for even America to 100% occupy Greenland unless the locals agree - remember it’s 25% of the territory of America, most of it being far harsher. As long as support for a Resistance keeps on arriving from Denmark and Europe, an American occupying force would keep suffering casualties.

This is actually the basis of my point: America invading and occupying Greenland’s cities is probably easy, its actually controlling a territory the size of 25% of America with very specific characteristics that totally favor the locals over American troops (hence my reference to Afghanistan, were the territory was equally large and almost equally harsh and Poshtun were in a very similar situation vs the American occupiers) is impossible unless to locals overwhelmingly side with America.

IMHO Greenland would quite possibly turn in the kind of quagmire war that happens at the stage of empires when they’re starting to fall and engage in reckless military adventures to try and prop-up the elites, which end up overextending their military and draining most of their power.

Truthfully we’ve never seen the US engage in a total war to conquer a nation.

Ahem: Vietnam.

Also I think you’re missing a massive point here: You can’t “topple” Greenland by totally destroying or taking over Greenland because it’s part of Denmark and the seat of the Danish Government isn’t there, nor are their main military assets, and this is before you even consider their European allies.

If Greenland was a country relying only on itself, it would totally make sense that it could be taken by just taking its major cities, but it’s not, it’s an independent region of Denmark, a country which in turn is allied with almost all other European countries.

The US can invade and totally crush Greenland’s big cities and that will still do very little to crush resistance because that’s not were most of it will be coming from. This also brings us around the whole carrier group thing: the carrier group would be how the US would be trying to stop the feeding of resistance in Greenland from Europe, since that would be coming from the very opposite side of the island (and as “islands” go, Greenland is huge, with 25% of the area of the US, so that’s a pretty insane task).

IMHO what the Greenlanders and more in general the Danish should be doing is not to try and stop the elements of warfare that the US does best - such as the actual initial invasion - but actually try and make that as costly as possible whilst at the same time setting up the conditions for a long term Resistance effort from the areas outside the cities to turn Greenland into a graveyard for American soldiers, something which is far more likely to end up with an outcome like Vietnam were the daily procession or american coffins turns an overwhelming majority of the population against the War and the end result was that America ultimatelly lost it.

Finally on the last point, fighting Greenland is fighting Denmark and there are way more people in the rest of Denmark than in Greenland. That said you are right that many (if not most) of the people living in Greenland who know the whole place including the hardest and most remote areas, are probably descendants of the Innuit rather than of the Vikings (both people colonized the place).

Well, sorta.

The US’s main power projection strategy is still (and has been for decades) to have an aircraft carrier group parked about 1000km away from the coast of whichever nation they’re attacking, pouding their target with airpower and cruise missiles whilst being far out enough that most cruise missiles can’t even reach them and those which can take so long that the carrier group has plenty of time to prepare and defend itself.

The Chinese and the Russians both developed hypersonic missiles exactly to counter that, as such missiles get there much faster so the carrier group has maybe half a minute of advanced warning to try and take them down rather than 10+ minutes.

This strategy has been very successful against militarilly second and lower tier nations, which is why the US has been using it since the first Iraq war.

However, for all its underinvestment in its military, Europe isn’t second tier (and neither is China).

As for the second part of your post, “boots on the ground” is exactly were the US massivelly sucks beyond the initial invasion stage: they’re great at getting there and breaking shit up whilst completelly sucking at actually holding territory. Personally, from the videos I’ve seen of US troops trying to “create good will with the locals” in places like Afghanistan, they seem to be completelly shit at understanding and respecting the way of life of the locals and they reeking with a mindset of “I’m a member of a superior civilization trying to civilize the barbarians” (which, as an European, I find hilarious, since America isn’t actually all that culturally or societally civilized - especially in treating people as actual human beings - compared just about all European countries).

All this to say that the US invading Greenland would succeed, but directly cost the US far more than even Afghanistan and in a far shorter time, and they would almost certainly lose control of it in at most a decade or two, not least because they totally suck at getting the locals around to support them: trying to take on the most hardcore and resilient of the descendants of the Vikings in a land which in some ways is the polar equivalent of Afghanistan - huge, harsh and with massive uninhabited and hard to occupy areas - whilst the people there don’t at all feel they have an inferior culture to America’s (so they’re hardly attracted by the prospect of becoming American citizen) seems to me like an impossible task.

Code made up of severally parts with inconsistently styles of coding and design is going to FUCK YOU UP in the middle and long terms unless you never again have to touch that code.

It’s only faster if you’re doing small enough projects that an LLM can generate the whole thing in one go (so, almost certainly, not working as professional at a level beyond junior) and it’s something you will never have to maintain (i.e. prototyping).

Using an LLM is like giving the work to a large group of junior developers were each time you give them work it’s a random one that picks up the task and you can’t actually teach them: even when it works, what you get is riddled with bad practices and design errors that are not even consistently the same between tasks so when you piece the software together it’s from the very start the kind of spaghetti mess you see in a project with lots of years in production which has been maintained by lots of different people who didn’t even try to follow each others coding style plus since you can’t teach them stuff like coding standards or design for extendability, it will always be just as fucked up as day one.

Even my shitty-shit country - Portugal - which most definitelly can’t afford the costs of a single aircraft carrier even though it has a massive exclusive economic area in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, some years ago had a submarine win a NATO exercise when it popped up undetected in the middle of the carrier group.

Even with its main focus of “force projection” being on Trade rather than Military power, Europe is a whole different beast to face militarily than Latin America, and not just because it’s far more likely to be united in its response.

This is probably why Trump hasn’t invaded Greenland yet - his military people know very well it would be a very different story militarily and his diplomats know it would be a very different story in terms of the broader consequences.

I don’t just mean that person, I mean anybody who would believe that “I’m a God fearing person” is actually the right thing to say.

I mean, if one thinks about it, it’s curious that anybody would openly states that their relation to one’s God is “Fear” rather than, say “Love”, even if they are being entirely truthful in that.

“God loving” sounds a lot more respectful of a Deity, IMHO.

Further, even for that specific person my point still fits in a twisted way: that person chose that specific expression because deep down they believe people only restrain their bad actions because of fearing retribution.

It’s a variant of Psychological Projection and thus still betrays that person’s moral makeup: even as non-believers they use the “Fear of God” mantra because they themselves think that claiming that one has one’s behavior under constant oversight from a deity which will punish bad behavior is the best way to convince others that one behaves in a good way, and they think so because they themselves restrict their negative behavior towards others through fear of external reprisal rather than through internal mechanisms such as guilt or a personal moral.

Even when people lie, you can still tell a lot about somebody by which lies they think will work best at convincing others.

A Mini PC with an N100 (exact same performance as the microprocessor in the Pi5 according to this) and 8GB RAM will cost you around $140, which per what a previous poster dug out is exactly the same price as a Pi4 with only 4GB if we’re talking about something with the equivalent kit (i.e. with box, dissipators, power supply and HDMI cable)

Funny enough I recently bought an N100 Mini-PC with 8GB (as a Christmas present to replace somebody’s aged Windows 8 PC) for just a bit over $140 (more precisely €123, so $143 at today’s exchange rate).

According to this the performance of the microprocessor on the Pi5 is at the same level as that of the N100.

So basically if you buy a Mini PC with an N100 and 8GB memory you can roughly get the performance of the Pi5 at the price of a Pi4 with only 4GB.

I think the point of the previous poster that “this is wild” is exactly right.

Unless you actually need the actual pins with I/O ports, I2C, SPI or such for controlling some electronics, you’re better of with the Mini PC and even if you do, you’re probably better of with a Banana Pi or an Orange Pi.

You almost certainly could do it with an ESP32 (a microcontroller with Arduino support and which supports WiFi and bluetooth).

An ESP32 Super Mini board costs about $5.

Of course, forget about an UI other than web-based for the ESP32 or proper OS (like Linux) support, as that stuff is on the embedded systems side of things (though kinda powerful for one) rather than the Single Board Computer side.

“I have no Ethics or Morals, so I only ever do the right thing because I fear the wrath of an All Knowing and All Powerful entity if I don’t”

Exactly.

It’s a coping mechanism for having a purely emotional relationship (i.e. pure tribalism) with a political “side” that has now been going on for so long and so intensely that it has become part of their personal identity, and then being negativelly impacted by the choices of the leaders of “their” side.

By this point such people would have to accept that what is now a huge part of their personal identity is bullshit, and people with the psychological and intelectual maturity required to be able to accept something like that and move on wouldn’t have become tribalist muppets in the first place.

They will never, ever do that, rather what they do is invent excuses and deflections of blame.

“Home delivered freshly made”

“Directly from the producer”

The jokes on that one just write themselves.

I did not know that.

Took them two decades but better late than never!

Lets put things this way: nations which hold Universal Humanist Principles will always treat their citizens well (or at least as well as they can), but nations which treat their citizens well don’t necessarily hold Universal Humanist Principles.

As for the rest, it’s just circling back to my original point that few or no nations are civilized, but the citizens in some nations are civilized whilst the elites holding power are not.

Good to know Denmark has changed its position in the Genocide. When are the sanctions on Israel starting?!

I also noticed you didn’t address my point on Denmark’s government push for broad civil society surveillance for all of the EU with Chat Control, something which in my view is the very opposite of “civilized” in the modern era.

I think we differ mainly in that I think that in this era Civilization must be broader than just “Doing what’s better for us”.

So in that sense the Scandinavian model of governance by itself (absent all else), whilst more civilized than most others, isn’t enough for Civilization - there needs to be some kind of broad holding of Universal Humanist Principles rather than merelly just the nation treating its own citizens well.

By that metric and looking at the awful position of Denmark in regards to the Israeli Genocide and even in things like pushing for broad civil society surveillance at the EU level in the form of Chat Control, Denmark is NOT a civilized country, even if it’s better for its own citizens than the vast majority of countries are for theirs.

I totally agreed with that: their Server OS is superior to their Desktop OS.

I just think it’s mainly because their Desktop OS has fast enshittified after Windows 7 rather than because Windows server is actually all that great as a server OS.

In fact, thinking about it, one might even say that Windows Server is better than the Desktop version because it’s to a very great extent a Desktop OS (in terms of having things like having an a complex UI layer and set of support applications integrated) the very thing which is actually a large part of the reason why its an inferior server OS for typical server-side scenarios because there what you most value is maximum computing resources made available to the server applications (which tend to be heavy users of computing, memory, networking or a combination of those) and an integrated UI layer actually uses more of those just for the OS (both directly for its own work and indirectly from the added complexity of a bulkier OS resulting in less streamlined execution paths) making fewer resources available for the same hardware.

If you look at the Linux distros and distro variants for server deployment they are actually vastly inferior to the Windows OS Desktop - for starters because they’re command-line only, though nowadays there’s often web-based management interfaces which are still a much lighter option than a directly integrated UI layer - exactly because absent an intergrated UI layer, not adding the UI support on top via something like XWindows or Wyland on a server Linux distro actually makes them better for server tasks.

Sure, my country too had a revolution and overthrew a Fascist dictatorship. That doesn’t make it a measure of civilization though.

I’ve lived in several countries of Europe and the web controlling Brits is exceptional in its breadth and depth and quite subtle: for example watch the BBC and look for language that subtly classifies different people as having different implicity trustworthiness, for example how they will report Israeli authorities as “saying” or “stating” things whilst Palestinian authorities “claim” things - this kind of technique is not just used for the Israeli Genocide, it’s used for everything and pretty hard to internally compensate for even if you’re aware of it because it mainly affects you at a subconscious level. Brits are constantly being indoctrinated and manipulated, all done with way more subtlety than run of the mill dictatorships.

Or look at how their level of civil society surveillance as shown by the Snowden Revelations was even worse than the US.

Further, do you know they have a Press censorship scheme called D-Notices? Most Britons don’t even know this.

In many ways Britain is a lot more like an Authoritarian Regime with a bit of performative voting (think Russia) than a Democratic country, only it’s all done way more subtly with far more advanced manipulation techniques as the structures supporting it have been developed over, literally, centuries.

(That’s why I said that I left the country thinking it was basically the closest to Fascism we have in Europe, just disguised as posh)

Yet plenty of people over there still have very strong principles to the point that 1.5% of the population went out and demonstrated purely for their principles and not at all their own personal good and people are still going out and risking being arrested by the government as “terrorist supporters” for demonstrating against a Genocide that doesn’t actually affect them personally.

Granted, at the same time there is also a large fraction of the population who are complete cunts, from Financiers in the City and the Political class, to Racist Nationalists.

Don’t get me wrong: British Society itself is quite backwards as European nations go in many things, it’s just that a significant fraction of the population do hold personal humanist values and are willing to at least go out and demonstrate and even face the authorities for them. I compare it with my own country - Portugal - whose society isn’t quite as ill (it has its problems, mainly different ones) but activism for actual principle around here is almost non-existent (sure, people will demonstrate and even strike for their own personal good, but for example a far smaller fraction of people was demonstrating against the Israeli Genocide here than in Britain) and don’t get me started on just hugely unlikely people around here are to do thinks like avoiding having a car for Ecological reasons.

PS: In fact, now that I think about it, a lot of the reason why I think that Revolutionary Capability is not the same as Civilization is the observation on my own country of how people can be perfectly capable of fighting for themselves to the point of overthrowing a dictatorship and yet won’t at all fight for others. In my view, “civilization” must include fighting against certain things happenning to anybody and only just fighting against those things happenning to oneself is merely Survival.

We’re talking about Britain, not the US.

Britain doesn’t even have a written constitution.