This is a big reason why retail product barcode stickers (not barcodes printed directly on a package as it comes from the manufacturer) are now commonly printed on frangible stock with built in slices in it which breaks apart in 3, 4 or more pieces if you try to peel it off.
Many of the weirder geopolitical parts like how large numbers of cables are all laid across Egypt to get from Europe to middle east -> south asia still remain significant factors. The part that is most dated is the cables being built by exclusively by big traditional telecom companies, when this was written in 1996 the idea of Microsoft or Google or Facebook or others bankrolling a submarine cable from Brazil to Europe was very far away.
The new and novel thing in 1996 from the author's perspective is cables being built not by a PTT type "telephone company" (the Bell System/AT&T, BT, France Telecom, etc) but a new entity that intended to build the cables to sell capacity to multiple telcos.
If you ask it who Ahmad Al Sharaa is, it outputs an answer that he was an ISIS commander (he wasn't, his group was rather opposed to them), and that he was killed in a US airstrike in 2017. It also refuses to answer direct questions about the cutoff date in its training dataset, but if you ask it who the president of syria is, it happily says that as of the training cutoff date of october 2023, bashar al-assad is the president. Same question about who the prime minister of canada is gets the same october 2023 response and says it's Trudeau.
Interestingly if you ask it "who is the dalai lama" it outputs an answer that certainly wouldn't be acceptable to post online in mainland china. It says:
The Dalai Lama is the spiritual and political leader of Tibet, and the title is held by the incarnate lama who is believed to be a reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama is a central figure in Tibetan Buddhism and holds a unique position in Tibetan society, both as a religious leader and as a symbol of Tibetan identity and independence.
Key Points About the Dalai Lama:
1. Current Dalai Lama: Tenzin Gyatso (14th Dalai Lama)
Born: 1935 in Amdo, Tibet (now part of China).
Education: He studied at Ganden Monastery and later at Dunhuang University in China.
Title: He is known as the 14th Dalai Lama, a title that has been passed down through generations of lamas who are believed to be reincarnations.
Role: He is the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and the de facto leader of the Tibetan diaspora, particularly in India.
2. Historical Context
The title of Dalai Lama has been held by Tibetan Buddhist lamas for centuries. It means "Ocean of Wisdom" in Tibetan.
The 13th Dalai Lama (1876–1959) was a key figure in Tibetan history, known for his efforts to maintain Tibetan independence and promote modernization.
He fled to India in 1950 after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took control of Tibet in 1951.
3. 14th Dalai Lama: Exile and Leadership
The 14th Dalai Lama, Lama Tenzin Gyatso, was exiled to India in 1959 after the Tibetan Uprising.
He has led the Tibetan government-in-exile in India since then, advocating for Tibetan independence and cultural preservation.
He has also been a prominent voice for human rights and peace.
4. Political Status
The 14th Dalai Lama is not recognized by the Chinese government as the legitimate ruler of Tibet, which is part of the People's Republic of China (PRC).
The Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), based in India, is the self-proclaimed government of Tibet.
The PRC considers Tibet to be an inseparable part of China and has implemented policies to integrate Tibet into the Chinese state.
5. International Recognition
The 14th Dalai Lama is widely recognized internationally as the spiritual leader of Tibet and as the de facto leader of the Tibetan people.
Many countries and international organizations support the Tibetan cause, but they are not recognized as a sovereign state.
Summary:
The Dalai Lama is the spiritual and political leader of Tibet, currently Lama Tenzin Gyatso (14th Dalai Lama), who has been in exile in India since 1959. He is a central figure in Tibetan identity and has played a key role in the global Tibetan movement for independence and cultural preservation.
If you'd like to know more about his background, policies, or role in the Tibetan independence movement, feel free to ask!
There are a number of phone designs that require special heating apparatus and very careful prying tools to get the back case off. And then extremely careful application of new glue to reassemble. Basically the whole thing is glued together at the factory. Google "phone heating pad for repair" for some examples...
There have been significant advances in mainland china made scopes in the last 5-7 years as well. For instance the Arken EP5 5-25x56, 34mm tube first focal plane. Which until recent tariffs and things sold for around $400 to 500 USD shipped. No it's not as good as a $1299 or $2199 Vortex, but it's definitely not the junk-tier stuff that was completely disregarded by everyone who wanted something usable on a budget for >500 yards.
Sky Rover is releasing binoculars that are very comparable to alpha tier Euro brands. I tested their Banner Cloud 6x32; the total build quality package isn’t quite there against my Swarovski 7x42 SLC, but optically the Sky Rover is excellent.
Anyone who had read Bamford's books on the NSA many years prior to 2013 took a look at what info came out and had an internal thought process like "this is nothing new at all".
Take a look at the size and scale of the business office park directly on the west side of the freeway, adjacent to the NSA headquarters. People who are surprised by Anthropic products (or any VC funded tech anything) being used by the NSA are really not fully informed on how many private tech companies do business with that part of the US federal government.
You could just as easily have a bunch of old desktop computers with no network interface uplink going out of the room active whatsoever, running some basic GUI and libreoffice, connected to nothing but a dumb copper ethernet switch in the same room and an old HP laserjet with a 10/100 ethernet interface in it. No need to force people to deal with typewriters.
It's absolutely oversimplified, someone from a small coastal town in Newfoundland does not sound at all like a person from much of the same area labeled "atlantic canadian" in Nova Scotia, or in larger cities like Fredericton or Moncton in NB. Putting basically all of NB, NS and NF as one large pink blob on the map is a drastic oversimplifiaction.
It also seems that whoever created this kind of gave up when figuring out Canadian speech patterns spanning longitude from east to west. Somebody from Kenora or Dryden or Timmins Ontario does not speak like a person from North Vancouver, BC. Vancouver region English is much closer to general west coast as it's spoken in a big city in WA, OR or California.
I'm from Ontario and its very simplified in my experience as well. Maybe the problem is the sample audio clips they have are all 'posh', its not how most people speak. Two large examples I can think of that even have their own wikipedia pages are the Ottawa Valley Twang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Valley_English) and the 'Torontomans' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_slang). I grew up in Toronto, and the latter isn't just something funny you see on tiktok, people actually talk that way.
It's oversimplified for any region whatsoever. You're citing right here what people speak like in big west coast cities but I grew up in California and would have been able to tell apart people who grew up in Anaheim versus San Gabriel Valley versus San Fernando Valley versus West LA, let alone LA versus San Francisco. I couldn't have explained what the difference is but I could have heard it. Everybody will be more attuned to the tiny regional differences of the place they actually come from, but a map like this would be impossible to make if you tried to draw out the boundaries and explanations for 400 million separate regional dialects.
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