Perhaps it would be useful to define what we mean by "commoditization" in terms of software. I would say a software product that is not commoditized is one where the brand still can command a premium, which in the world of software, generally means people are willing to pay non-zero dollars for it. Once software is commoditized it generally becomes free or ad-supported or is bundled with another non-software product or service. By this standard I would say there are very few non-commoditized consumer software products. People pay for services that are delivered via software (e.g. Spotify, Netflix) but in this case the software is just the delivery mechanism, not the product. So perhaps one viable path for chatbots to avoid commoditization would be to license exclusive content, but in this scenario the AI tech itself becomes a delivery mechanism, albeit a sophisticated one. Otherwise it seems selling ads is the only viable strategy, and precedents show that the economics of that only work when there is a near monopoly (e.g. Meta or Google). So it seems unlikely that a lot of the current AI companies will survive.
spain was no longer a major player in world politics by 1800s, but they had a good 2-3 century run. not sure if the monetary crisis was really did them in, or more just it being the ebb and flow of history. britain's world dominance is long over too. if they did "fuck up", it was because charles v was the first global hegemon, nobody know how to do that, he was in uncharted territory. and obviously no, the merino sheep weren't a better bet long term, that's absurd. global dominion required a cohesive domestic home country to serve as the wellspring of power, not the fractured foedal remnants of a mediaeval europe that required constant war to keep together. and then of course, industrialize early.
> In the Paleogene and Neogene Periods (~66 million to ~1.8 million years ago), the mountain chains that today constitute the Atlas were uplifted, as the land masses of Europe and Africa collided at the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula.
But it also notes,
> The Anti-Atlas Mountains are believed to have originally been formed as part of the Alleghenian orogeny. These mountains were formed when Africa and America collided
Anti-Atlas? If we jump over to the Anti-Atlas article we see,
> In some contexts, the Anti-Atlas is considered separate from the Atlas Mountains system, as the prefix "anti" (i.e. opposite) implies.
and
> The summits of the Anti-Atlas reach average heights of 2,500–2,700 m (8,200–8,900 ft),
So in addition to subsequent events, the portion of the Atlas originally formed with the Appalachian is geologically distinguishable from the other portions of the Atlas chain, and actually significantly lower than the parts of the chain formed later, though not as low as the Appalachians.
what i'm reading here then is that those 7.999999999B others are braindead morons.
OP is 100% correct. either you accept that the vast majority are mindless automatons (not hard to get onboard with that honestly, but still, seems an overestimate), or there's some kind of structural unbalance, an asymmetry that's actively harmful and not the passive outcome of a 8B independent actors.
Glad to see 2d mapping is still of interest. 20 years ago, information visualization, data cartography, exploratory analytics, etc.. was pretty alive, but it never really took off and found a reliable niche in the industry, or real end user application. Why map it, when the machine can just tell you.
Would be nice to see it come back. Would love to browse for books and movies on maps again, rather that getting lists regurgitated at me.
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