> But there have been no wars between major powers in the last 80 years. Maybe people in power have realized that all-out wars are no longer productive.
People talked like that before WW I. There hasn't been a major war in Europe since 1870 almost half a century and trade is such a large war would bankrupt all the major powers and so would never happen. The Great Illusion was published in 1909 and was positively received at the time:
> In The Great Illusion, Angell's primary thesis was, in the words of historian James Joll, that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."[4][5] For that reason, a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long.[6] He argued that war was economically and socially irrational[7] and that war between industrial countries was futile because conquest did not pay.
There was a major war between Russian and Ottoman empires in 1877–1878. And if you look outside Europe, there was an even greater war between Russia and Japan in 1904–1905.
0.15% of world population was mobilized to fight in the Russo–Japanese war. That would correspond to ~12.5 million combatants today. Napoleon's invasion of Russia saw more casualties from combat, starvation, and disease, but it involved a smaller fraction of world population.
I assume you're going off the 1.365M + 1.2M combatant strength listed in the Wikipedia article?
Those are figures for the total size of those national armies at the time. It'd be like saying the Iran war involved 3M people because the U.S. has about 2.1M in uniform and Iran has just under 1M counting reservists. Meanwhile there've been precisely zero boots on the ground in Iran, and the total number of military personnel directly affected is on the order of tens of thousands.
The text of the article has the Russian far east strength at about 95,000 at the start of the war, with another 410,000 trained in over the course of the war. The best proxy for Japanese (and Russian) combat strength might be the Battle of Mukden [1], which had about 250K Japanese and 292K Russian troops. These numbers are smaller by a factor of about 5x.
The present-day Russo-Ukrainian war is significantly larger. Estimated Russian deaths are 500K+, higher than the total number of Russian soldiers involved in the Russo-Japanese war.
If you continue reading the article, it mentions that Russia had mobilized almost a million soldiers in the Far East by the end of the war, and that mobilization largely happened after the Battle of Mukden. Without the naval defeat at the Battle of Tsushima, Russia would have had the upper hand at that point, and the war would likely have reached a different conclusion.
Industrial armies were massive. By the standards of that era, current US military strength exceeds 60 million. But they mostly relied on reserves, which were slow to mobilize. Japan's quick decisive victories ended the Russo–Japanese war before it had a chance to escalate further, potentially reaching the scale of the Eastern Front in WW1. But even then, the Battle of Mukden was one of the largest land battles in history until that point
It seems to be a vibe coded joke that implements a database in the worst way possible. For example, it appears to store post data in the timestamps and permission bits of the file system.
Besides Firefox, I don't think many of the browsers are user-agents anymore, but more like corporate-agents, as they don't seem to act in the interest of the software user anymore.
Practically? Quite a few codebases from *nix systems rely on the case sensitivity. To do a successful git clone you need a file system that handles both Makefile and makefile, or whatever.
I ran into it more than once back in the day when I used Mac OS X as my primary OS.
More generally -- case sensitivity is a conceptual nightmare in the Unicode era. Should Cyrillic or Greek be case-insensitive as well? Etc. Do you really want the full complexity of Unicode string handling in your file system?
I would suggest treating file names like raw bytes. On modern Linux, anything but NUL is valid.
It wont be adopted because we unconciously need to avoid responsibility of showing up as responsible human beings. Hence western civilization will crash and burn unless we start rethinking the way we operate.
Very cool. I've been working on something similar. My cutoff date is 1994 as Usenet changes substantially in nature then.
May I ask how you collected the data? Usenet is not fully archived anywhere. No one has a complete set.
I am aware of:
* the NewNews disc series on CD from '91 - '93 which has a substantial text feed for the big groups during that era (most of these are on IA.org, but some are not!)
* The Dejanews archives via Google up to c. 2013. Also up on IA.org These are lacking large amounts of early posts, and are highly spotty before about 1994 (when Dejanews started).
I got so desperate as to go scanning zip and tar files on old ftp sites for anything with a Usenet header. That scored a few hundred thousand articles mostly from the 90s.
The big spike in the early 90s is from those CDs archives in the months where I had access. It gives an idea for how limited those Giganews/Google and other surviving archives are.
I figure less than 50% early text Usenet survives, unless someone has vast hordes of data that they are not disclosing.
As for the Utzoo archives - they're legally encumbered and some of the posters sue anyone who hosts them. (They're not available from the IA - taken down.)
You have a takedown page but the legal and copyright issues were one of the main back-burner items keeping me from making my archive live. Some of the more eccentric Usenet personalities are still alive.
Same with privacy issues. I notice you have full text search. I was reluctant to do that for privacy reasons.
I discovered very early on how to index by email but that felt quite invasive. I took that out, and built a graph of all the X-refs: which turned out to be more interesting (walking the discussion trees) and somewhat more privacy preserving in that you can explore but not search.
I was also thinking of an AI-based content warning filter, because I have a "random post" button and it is sometimes wild what that lands on.
For that type of structured data (logs and such), a custom dictionary can be extremely effective. Zstd among others support generating a custom dictionary. You just run zstd --train over the data first, and then feed that in when you run zstd. For example: I found ~10 gigabytes of Usenet headers compress to ~700 MB using Zstd and 1 MB shared dictionary -- and that's with each header individually compressed, so o(1) lookup time.
Back in my data hoarder days, I downloaded one of those torrents that had all the world's books in it. It was dunno how many terabytes, but way more than I had HDDs.
So I stripped out formatting, got rid of dupes, and tried out zstd, which was the hot new thing, along with the dictionary feature you describe, figuring it'd help. It didn't. I tried having one per book, one per multiple books, one for the whole archive.
It didn't work, or the gains were so marginal that I ended up scrapping the approach.
So it's not impossible that it can work, but stuff like regular json already compresses extremely well, I haven't found a scenario where it's a major boon.
When I studied at school, I used ZFS with lz4 enabled on my working machine. During that times I had a task of parsing Wikipedia's data. I had enough brain cells to find compressed dumps and download them with aria2 but not enough to leave the file compressed. I ran a decompressor. It'd been taking longer than I expected so I went out to walk a dog.
Imagine how fast me and the dog ran back 30 minutes later when I realized how cooked I was. I only had 10 GB left on my disks after I downloaded that 20 GB file. This decompressed file would have blown the machine up. I was terrified to find a frozen system with no storage space left.
Instead, the process finished and `df -h` reported 8 GB of the free space left. Files were decompressed. I could `less` them! That made no sense! Only many many minutes later I finally figured out to run a `zfs get compressratio` command which showed ZFS successfully and transparently recompressed everything on the fly. That was too impressive for that teenager and he never switched to a different file system.
Solaris has had so many cool features, like ZFS or doors. What I liked about ZFS is you coul make snapshot, which is basically the solution to how to treat data files a single, cheap to access unit, yet still use standard apis for file management, great for containerizing apps, making copies for experiments, or shipping stuff. Node.js just received this as a bespoke, app-level feature. But these things are too many to count, and make a ton of sense if you know how filesystems actually work. useful Also copy-on-write, temp overlays.
Pretrained dictionaries have never been intended to help with book sized or bigger compression. zstd automatically learns the most efficient dictionary it can within a few kilobytes. Pretrained dictionaries are only useful when you're independently compressing very small records.
Note that the dictionary options are only needed to improve compression ratios when compressing lots of small messages. If you have a bigger file (eg a tar file of Usenet messages) the regular Zstd compression will build a good dictionary without additional options.
Effective natural language processing of sign languages. Current LLMs are almost completely incapable. And it's a steep hill to climb. No text corpus. Must be learned from video. I do not believe current LLM approaches are capable of this with the amount of training material available, regardless of compute. Though I'm eager to be shown wrong.
> What is your reply when someone asks your profession? Computing Engineer? Numerical Analyst?
Data Processing Specialist? To say "Computer" sounds like a machine, and "Programmer" has been
confused with "Coder" in the public mind (if your particular segment of the public knows what you are talking about at all!)
> It would help our profession to be widely recognized if it had a brief, definitive, and distinctive name. This should be general enough to cover a variety of subfields--from numerical analysis to data processing, but specific enough to imply that computing applications are involved. Consider the solid professional sound of such terms as "Petroleum Engineer" or "Nuclear Physicist." What can we use that will be equally clear-cut--and at least half as impressive? So far our ideas have been supremely uninspired. Any suggestions?
> (signed) Editors of DATA-LINK (Los Angeles ACM Chapter Newsletter)
> [Several names have been suggested to represent various phases of our profession. Though the suggestions are inevitablty facetious I list them for your attention: Turingineer, Turologist, Flow-Charts-man, Applied Meta-Mathematician and Applied Epistomologist. -- Editor
-- Letters to the Editor, Communications of the ACM, Volume 1, Issue 4, April 1958
> Sextides sells research compounds intended for laboratory research use only, not for human consumption.
That seems completely incompatible with the ad copy earlier on the page where they are clearly selling these for human consumption
My friend in the United States got an ad (on Instagram) yesterday, for a service that promises to sell peptides and it includes a free monthly subscription to Grindr - a sex hookup app: https://www.woodwork.com/glp1-treatments
As we both said to each other: "This is legal?!"
Even if it isn't legal the regulators have completely forfeited all responsibility.
People talked like that before WW I. There hasn't been a major war in Europe since 1870 almost half a century and trade is such a large war would bankrupt all the major powers and so would never happen. The Great Illusion was published in 1909 and was positively received at the time:
> In The Great Illusion, Angell's primary thesis was, in the words of historian James Joll, that "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous."[4][5] For that reason, a general European war was very unlikely to start, and if it did, it would not last long.[6] He argued that war was economically and socially irrational[7] and that war between industrial countries was futile because conquest did not pay.
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