Is there ever a singular reason behind why conquerors conquer? Babur conquered and established an empire because there was an empire to be conquered and established. That reason in itself is enough.

The Mughals were of Turkic descent but were not Turco-Mongol nomads. Steppe nomad culture had died out for a long time before Babur's rise.

They were the last "Big" Empire in the subcontinent before the British Raj. The EIC inherited a lot of Mughal-standard bureaucracy in the territories they took over, despite the territories themselves belonging to Sultanates distinct from the Mughal. The Crown kept the same alive too. Traces of Mughal administrative vocabulary are found to this day in Modern India's legalese.

Linux Mint was my go-to but I have shifted to MX Linux, its KDE edition is a decisive upgrade in every way.

China is fundamentally anti-elite. It is the whole principle the PRC was founded on. China does not have "the same type of leadership" at all. It has well-raised technocratic cadres who compete within the system, not above it unlike the US.

ITT: we think the CCP is not "an elite"

Yeah, the same people who claim nazis were socialists and north korea is a democratic peoples republic.

A lot of semantics and no dsire to evaluate real world implementations.

There is an entire host of Chinese free models out there proving you wrong

Yeah, when Alibaba decides to give us a new, lower end Qwen.

They’re not coming from an altruistic guy with a couple gpus in his basement.

Unfortunate that it took so long for you to realize social networks are just a river of outrage and slop, because it has literally always been so for a decade before AI even became a thing - it's just that now AI has made the cheapness immediately visible.

Enjoy your newfound freedom and live a real life.

No. Something genuine has been lost.

I used to be able to curate my feed and pay attention to people I knew. I could see the photo projects my friends were working on, hear about life updates from past acquaintances, or reach out if someone was having a rough time.

Now, all cohorts, from recent coworkers to childhood friends I made before the first web browser, routinely spew paragraphs of LLM slop to shill a career coaching podcast. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Social networks are only a small part of it. It’s email, mailing lists, billboards, sheets of paper stapled to utility poles, newspaper articles, dentist office phone lines, jigsaw puzzles, home furnishings, homework assigned to grade schoolers, birthday cards and on and on.

There is no real life anymore because even if you realize how fucked up things are, people around you will keep swiming in that river of outrage and slop life became. World is so fucked up

Wise words

Strange, this is actually one of the most important things I learnt the hard way as an analyst having had the misfortune of being forced to do local-level data engineering after being tasked with doing extensive BI on heavy data volumes (I don't have engineering education) without cloud ETL. Had someone told me this simple statement before time it would have saved me a LOT of pain and effort.

like what? Gasolene in general?

Would be awesome if somehow coupled into Evidence.dev