Well yes it’s relative. However the Church in the 1400s to 1600s or so was generally very permissive of scientific debate and not strictly dogmatic. See Galileo’s story, the issue is that when they rejected something (based on a reasonably valid scientific process albeit based on flawed evidence available at the time) that was kind of it and continued to challenging the consensus got you into some deep trouble (with a few exceptions).
One interesting thing is that in the 1400s open debate and heterodoxy was generally tolerated or even accepted IF you did it in Latin and only inside the “international scholar network” that existed at the time and didn’t go around preaching your ideas to peasants and such.
I’m certainly not implying that it was in any way good or let alone perfect in absolute terms, just that it.
Well yes it highly varied. However Romans were generally more motivated by plunder and subsequent economic exploitation. To an extent they didn’t really suppress local cultural practices or imposed forced assimilation in cases where it didn’t conflict with that and even often allowed alternative power structures to exist. Assimilation largely happened over time and was mostly voluntary. To be fair gradual voluntary conversion to Islam to enhance your social/economic status was the main mechanism in the Muslim empires as well. However in Rome the transition wasn’t as binary and “multiculturalism” was much more tolerated. Also Romans were way more open to integrating and assimilating foreign cultures and practices (which is why the Roman Empire eventually turned into a “Greek Empire”) what being a “Roman” meant was way more malleable and flexible than being a Muslim.
Many of the regions they invaded were still (or until quite recently) majority Christian. After all initially it was a defensive relief expedition organized by the pope and the Byzantine emperor to free the territories the empire lost in Anatolia very recently. Of course it was massively more successful than anyone anticipated and they just kept on going and then the whole thing got “slightly” out of hand..
But yes, as I said there were some huge exceptions. However early on the way Christianity spread was fundamentally different to Islam. It was usually not through violent conquest but bottom up.
European imperialism was quite mixed as well. Christianity played a huge part in the Spanish conquests of the Americas. Much less so in British India and other similar places.
To be fair in addition to the uncountable horrible things it did or took part in the Catholic church did build the foundations that allowed the concepts of modern scientific thought to develop. No other religion did that.
The Roman/Byzantine empire was pretty much destroyed by Muslims, though. Its a but like thanking the Franks/Goths/etc. for preserving Roman cultural identity in Western Europe by preserving some of their texts..
To be fair for the most part Christianity didn’t spread top down through violent conquest (obviously with some huge exceptions) at least in the Middle East and surrounding regions. Also it’s historically better at integrating local cultural practices and languages.
Unlike Islam which which usually wiped out local cultural and linguistic identities (during the periods of Arab conquests, that shifted quite a but later on of course)
It is somewhat different. Romans or Greeks didn’t really violently impose their culture, religion and language to a comparable degree. Without the Islamic invasions Egyptian would likely still be speaking Coptic these days.
To be fair if you are an English speaker and move to medium/lower CoL central/eastern/southern European country you will mostly have the same concerns and will realistically have to pay commercial prices for the most part.
How many countries can claim the achievement of developing nuclear weapons? Does that make North Korea somehow an inherently more successful country than Germany?
Spending money on a space program while hundreds of millions of your citizens are living in extreme poverty is obscene (unless it provides significant economic value)
They are not free, the costs are deducted from the gross income listed above. Not that fundamentally different than employers paying for your health insurance (besides the system being way more efficient etc.)
Or LLMs become a commodity if open models are ever good enough for > 95% of use cases. The product if fundamentally different than tv-shows or movies since its so interchangeable.
Then the cost would end up being deprecation + electric + some low operating margin (i.e. what non SOTA models cost on OpenRouter)
You can’t calculate what that cost is though regardless. If the gross margin is positive you can’t confidently challenge their longterm growth projections however optimistic or unrealistic they are.
Well if their gross margins are positive (I really doubt they aren’t) there isn’t much of a case to be made. You can expect meaningful R&D and capital investments to pay off short term and you can’t make any meaningful projections either to determine if they are dumping or not.
Yet… VS code somehow became the most popular IDE that happens to be generally viewed favorably by most of its users.
I personally hate it due to various reasons but I don’t feel like the Electron part is the issue (Java based Jetbrains IDEs generally seem way more bloated)
One interesting thing is that in the 1400s open debate and heterodoxy was generally tolerated or even accepted IF you did it in Latin and only inside the “international scholar network” that existed at the time and didn’t go around preaching your ideas to peasants and such.
I’m certainly not implying that it was in any way good or let alone perfect in absolute terms, just that it.
> same reasons power and money.
That’s highly reductive