Taiwan has spent the approx 120 years on a very different political, economic, cultural track from the mainland. Taiwan diverged from the other subject of the Qing dynasty before Han nationalists began their century long project to forge a united Chinese nation. In particular, Taiwan did not go through decades of communist terror, but did experience the fruit of democracy.

• Hungary: 416 million euros ($488m)

• Slovakia: 275 million euros ($323m)

• France: 157 million euros ($184m)

• Netherlands: 65 million euros ($76m)

• Belgium: 64 million euros ($75m)

[2] suggests that China and India are the main buyers. I don't how reliable those sources are. There is also the problem of how to classify 'laundered' oil that was bought and resold by, e.g. India.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/3/how-much-of-europes...

[2] https://energyandcleanair.org/june-2025-monthly-analysis-of-...

Consider the program

   def f(x):
      return 17

  f(omega)

[1] B. G. Ryder, M. L. Soffa, Influences on the Design of Exception Handling. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/885638.885644

[2] G. L. Steele Jr, R. P. Gabriel, The Evolution of Lisp. https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf

Have you been at recent top conferences in computer science? Every year the number of top papers coming from China increases. A direct consequence of the sustained investment into education. China also leads most European in EV adoption.

You man know Kübler-Ross's Five Stages Of Grief [1]. Like most Europeans, you seem to be stuck somewhere between denial and anger regarding European relative decline vis-a-vis China. I suggest flying over there and taking a look for yourself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_stages_of_grief

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2015/08/25/tsmc_samsung_espionag...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/legal/samsung-hit-with-303-mln-jury-...

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1314374/south-korea-sams...

It would not matter if C == Lichtenstein, but China is currently the world's biggest semi-conductor market ...

More generally, parallel in space is interesting because it is a necessary precondition for parallel in time.

The Syrian Civil war was clearly (in parts) engineered by the west. Here is some evidence.

- Western government spokesperson in 2003: https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/18328

- In 2014, the West officially intervened in the Syrian civil war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_intervention_in_the_Syrian_...

- Western government spokesperson in 2018: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/...

- As of 2024 the West still has at least 1000 military personnel in Syria: https://theconversation.com/us-military-presence-in-syria-ca...

We have NO idea how the brain produces intelligence, and as long as that doesn't change, "neuromorphic" is merely a marketing term, like Neurotypical, Neurodivergent, Neurodiverse, Neuroethics, Neuroeconomics, Neuromarketing, Neurolaw, Neurosecurity, Neurotheology, Neuro-Linguistic Programming: the "neuro-" prefix is suggesting a deep scientific insight to fool the audience. There is no hope of us cracking the question of how the human brain produces high-level intelligence in the next decade or so.

Neuromorphic does work for some special purpose applications.

How would an experienced engineer score on the same task?

The term hyperplane already assumes that the hypothesis space that your learning algorithm searches has some kind of dimension and is some variant of an Euclidean / vector space (and its generalisations). This is not the case for many forms of ML, for example grammar induction (where the hypothesis space is Chomsky-style grammars) or inductive logic programming (hypothesis space are Prolog (or similar) programs), or, more generally, program synthesis (where programs form the hypothesis space).

I've just started a new project and we are using Scala 3. It's wonderful. (Admittedly, it's blank-slate, so no dependencies to previous Scala, e.g. the old Scala approach to meta-programming.)

> expressing how I think.

What you are saying is basically that you like ML-family languages, which also include Haskell, Ocaml, Rust, Kotlin. Increasingly, other languages take the ML-family lessons from 1973 on board!

Is the US the world's only country?

Throughout the history of the world, who counts as XYZ has been redefined many times to suit the political goals of the people at the time.

I recall when we stopped being Yugoslavian, and started shooting at each other, as Serbs or Croats. The Russian guy sitting next me married a Ukrainian woman a decade ago. Recently Russians and Ukrainians started shooting at each other. There's a great deal to read on this topic if you're genuinely interested.

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

The banks will reinvest this money. (Cf Fractional-reserve banking).