Having friends means that you can build bases where if you ask nicely, rather than having to invade. It prevents those friends from undermining you in a lot of cases. It makes them help you when you need, e.g. to get your hands on someone plotting attacks against you. It makes them more likely to trade with you under advantageous terms. I am sure you could think about at least a dozen other cases in a couple of minutes.
Soft power is spending pennies to convince other countries to do your dirty work.
I think it's instructive to compare the U.S. and Soviet stances in Europe after WW2. To maintain a military presence in Eastern Europe, the Soviets had to rely on repression, coercion, and occupation. This was expensive and fragile and eventually fell apart. The U.S. was openly welcomed into Germany and other countries in Western Europe. This was the value of "soft power."
Among the countries that host US bases, how many had to accept it under the threat of force, invasion, or occupation? I would guess Japan and Germany (initially). Look at the map here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Foreign_bases_2.png . Brute force was not a facto in the vast majority of them.
Some people mentioned the dollar as the global reserve currency, but there's also the use of English as the global lingua franca, the US being the largest global destination for talent and investment, and countries (previous) willingness to make sacrifices or deal with the US on less-than-perfect terms out of a sense of shared culture.
Some people really do think of soft power, propaganda, shady covert operations, etc. as something "the other guys" do (China! KGB-Putin!), but assume the US is somehow above all that.
Basically a neoconservative-esque sentimental view of the USA as "the good guys" on "the global stage" (although many would rightly recoil at the comparison to neocons).
I don't read any drama or hostility, just a discussion about names. OP says that kilobyte means one thing, the commenter says that it means two things and just saying it doesn't can't make that true. I agree, after all, we don't get to choose the names for things that we would like.
But without the extremity of the Auschwitz example, it suddenly is not a problem. Prism is an unbelievably generic word and I had not even heard of the Snowdon one until now nor would I remember it if I had. Prism is one step away from "Triangle" in terms of how generic it is.
1 more perspective to add: while i did not know the NSA program was called prism, it did give me pause to find out in this thread. OpenAI surely knows what it was called, at least they should. So it begs the question of why.
If they claim in a private meeting with people at the NSA that they did it as a tribute to them and a bid for partnership, who would anyone here be to say they didnt? even if they didnt... which is only relevant because OpenAI processes an absolute shitton of data the NSA would be interested in
Re: completely unmaintainable. He's freely admitted that he's never read the code and it's only written by agents. So to the extent that it's maintained, it is done by agents who seems to be doing something, somehow.
Agreed, airflow and dbt have literally nothing to do with the size of the data and can be useful, or overkill, at any size. Dbt just templates the query strings we use to query the data and airflow just schedules when we query the data and what we do next. The fact that you can fit the whole dataset in duckdb without issue is kind of separate to these tools, we still need to be organised about how and when we query it.
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