There was that leaked video of a Cambridge Analytica exec bragging that they came up with the handcuffs in the Crooked Hillary meme. Except that was hardly a big thing. The phrase Crooked Hillary was arguably “linguistic killshot” by Trump; CA’s little riff on it was insignificant - and that was them trying to sell their services with their most impressive feats.
People seem to love attributing the success to memes rather than a decades long campaign to destroy the media, the legal system, education, political checks and balances and unlimited funding by billionaires.
When future supreme court judges are writing their manifesto to business interests on how to stop Ivy League graduates from caring about the environmental impacts of capitalism in the 70s, le funny memes were not mentioned.
On Hillary specifically, she was the subject of the the movie that the Citizens United court case was about!
And sad thing is they will
be mostly scrolling through pictures and videos, with extremely low information density, when the could be scrolling high quality text like HN comments or a well curated X feed.
Well under Dubya it was pretty successful. Firstly, there was never a repeat of 9/11. Secondly, they pulled off one of the most overwhelming military victories of all time against Iraq, a full-blown invasion completed in weeks with hardly any losses. This also secured Israel’s long term prospects in the region, which seems to be one of the most sacred directives of American policy. It did also lead ultimately to civil war in Syria and political destabilisation in Germany/Europe (from refugees), but that is no skin off Uncle Sam’s nose. You may not like it, but in the history books that’s what peak foreign policy looks like.
A wouldn’t say the Iraq finished in “a few weeks.” They knew if they just left it would go back to the same business as usual. So the USA stayed for years playing Sim City. Trillions of dollars all said and done doesn’t seem like a win. These proxy’s are just that, proxies, because foreign policy on a grander scale is harder to accomplish like with China or Russia. USA won one proxy in the region but it’s more akin to winning the battle not the war. Iran is showing this as I type.
Looking forward to the future where Americans wake up to learn why they are the most hated country in the world. They’ll still think it’s only because of Trump.
> This also secured Israel’s long term prospects in the region, which seems to be one of the most sacred directives of American policy.
Not really—it massively increased Iran's influence in the area, which is why in 2007 they had to panic, reverse course, and start backing al-Qaeda again ("the redirection").
Israel is currently in the position where it can bomb Tehran, using American tech and logistical support, with complete impunity. This is the golden age of Israel.
author here - apologies for it not being clear. the idea here is:
step 1: sparse index retrieval (FTS/BM25) - say with k = 10
step 2: re-rank the 10 records using embeddings
the difference in this approach is during step 2, you convert text to embeddings on the fly - when you're running the retrieval pipeline, meaning you don't need to have all of your corpus pre-embedded in a vector db
Just use an LLM to make a good knowledge base for the databases. Based on schema info and production queries. An agent can use that to write queries that work.
When people put together memos or decks in the last, even if that weren’t read very carefully, at least they reassured management that someone had actually things through. But that is no longer a reliable signal.
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