We already can detect direction of infrared radiation, it’s called being warm on one side but not the other. Technically also possible by, say, lying half-way under a blanket and half-way not, but sensory integration takes care of the ambiguity.

More interestingly, did you know we can see the polarisation of light?

As a small aside “Open Source Free Trials?” If it’s open source, can’t they just disable the trial part?

Yes. There’s a number of projects which distribute binaries which aren’t as liberally licensed as the source they’re built from. E.g. Ardour is another one. There’s a demo version, subscriptions start as low as $1/month, $45 buys you the current major version and the next major version with all its updates, perpetual license. There’s also the implicit understanding that if you don’t pay up and want support, your bug reports better be developer-grade.

Basically it’s a way to get artists who are used to either freeware or commercial offerings to donate. Also as far as DAWs go it’s a fucking steal.

Under Article 80, the GDPR foresees that non-profit organizations can take action or represent users.

Emphasis mine. Just in case anyone is still denying that Euro-English is a thing. It provides for it, which implies it anticipats it, so if we get rid of unnecessary Romance it foresees it. Plans for, as Wikipedia puts it, but not only the French etymology (prevoir) works, there’s also German vorhersehen/vorsehen which collapse when you calque them into English. Gives Brits all kinds of headaches, they were writing lots of huffy memos before Brexit.

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I think there’s some „reasonable” keyword in the right to be forgotten.

The original case was a Spanish cook being haunted by the first google result for his name being an article in a local newspaper about his restaurant going bankrupt decades ago. No scandal or such, just an ordinary bankruptcy, but he could demonstrate that it was impacting his current business.

He sued, and google had to remove the thing. Not when you search for his name and bankruptcy, not when you search for “what happened to that restaurant”, and the newspaper itself also didn’t have to do anything. As far as I know you can still find the article.

If you’re a journalist writing the guy’s biography, you’ll find it, push come to shove in some offline archive. But random people won’t see him nailed to a virtual pillory, that’s what all this is about.

I don’t think it’s really an issue for AI, but it has to be engineered in. Ultimately it’s about judging relevancy.

I don’t know whether you’ve been alive during the “games make people violent” craze, where the establishment was trying to pin school shootings on a harmless hobby: The same establishment which caused the systemic issues driving youth into desperation was now blaming an escapist hobby for the issues they, themselves, caused. It’s like framing jugglers for knife attacks. Do some jugglers juggle knives? Yes. Does that have anything to do with anything? No.

Is that in any way comparable in scale and intensity to what various groups had to go through historically, or are now, no of course not. But gamers, as a wider culture, know what it’s like to be victim-blamed. The average person who picks up playing games as a hobby is not any more racist, misogynist, or drivelling rape apologia than the population average. They do it because they enjoy it, no further qualifications necessary.

But OTOH, nope. The copypasta is pumped-up to 11 when it comes to the capacity of gamers to be a community, to organise, take joint action, be a force, everything. I’d be easy to go “no true gamer” on some people but face it “gamers” as a group are still pre-ordering games and letting GPU scalpers have their way with us. Just as powerless as, say, football fans are powerless in he face of FIFA corruption. Concert goes in the face of ticket platform monopolies. We’re a hopeless case in any other aspect but whinging: That, we are masters of.

I would guess it’s pretty hard to reconstruct data with a different LLM

I think the idea is to have compressor and decompressor use the exact same neural network. Looks like arithmetic coding with a learned function.

But yes model size is probably going to be an issue.

So… crystal ball, I don’t have access to the paper either. Think arithmetic coders as neural nets are function approximators. You send an initial token and the NN will start to generate deterministically, once you detect a divergence from the lossless ideal you send another token to put it on track again. Make it a sliding window so things don’t become too computationally expensive. You architect the model not to be smart but to need little guidance following “external reasoning” so to speak.

The actual disadvantage of this kind of thing will be the model size, yes you might be able to transmit a book in a kilobyte (100x or more compression) but both encoder and decoder will need access to gigabytes of neural weights, and that’s just for text. It’s also not going to be computationalliy cheap, though probably cheaper than PAQ.

Not the customer’s problem. Also, fraud.

But probably failure of due diligence because any seller who’s not a complete idiot would rather let the sale fail and let the company go bankrupt than risk committing fraud.

Austrian and Bavarian gibberish indeed is the same, one tribe, different states. The rest of the sign isn’t in Boarisch though so in Bavaria you’d expect it to be completely in Standard German. Bundesrepublik Standard German, that is, not Austrian Standard German with heuer, Jänner, Paradeiser, and whatnot.

The green sign reads “Please don’t leave empty boxes here. Bring them to the bin outside”

No it doesn’t. It has a bad slogan in big font: “If we all unpack here, we can all pack up” (the idiom probably works if you squint hard enough). Then “Please don’t leave waste paper (carton) in the self-service-zone. Carry your empty package to the container. The environment will be just as happy as us”.

It does not say where the container is (despite the definitive article in English, it’s not implied that there even is one at location), nor does it have relevant information in large letters, just lots of fluff. It’s accessively passive-aggressive, trying to give the impression that it’s all polite while simultaneously ordering you around. Trying to invoke social responsibility while completely ignoring that that’s a two-way street: Where’s the fucking container? You had one job with that sign, and you failed.

Here’s what would work: Big: “Waste paper container is around the corner”. Small: “Please. Thanks”. You don’t have to convince people, you just have to make it convenient and they’ll be happy to carry their stuff five metres instead of playing carton Jenga.

Also they’re using “Packerl” for package that’s probably Austria. Maybe Switzerland it’s not like I’m a specialist in mountain gibberish. Also not enough yellow for a Deutsche Post shop.

The Steam store is a nightmare for discovery.

It’s brilliant actually. I mean it’s still arguably a shitshow, but Steam is very good at letting shovelware sink to the bottom of their algorithms.

1000xResist was an indie title that was named GOTY 2024 by a few publications, but they only just crossed 100,000 copies sold about a week ago.

Not bad for a story-focussed adventure.

Sifu sold 3m, Baba is You about half a million. The game may be brilliant, the GOTY award may be perfectly deserved, still ain’t going to play it because it’s not my genre. “Story-focussed adventure” is like a quarter of a step above walking simulator when it comes to ludological complexity I’d rather read a book. That’s of course just me, for the general audience… well, it’s niche.

Also btw young people never drove sales. The reason is simple: They’re broke.

Damn hack journalists. It was popularised by Petra Kelly (page 768, 82 in pdf) founding member of the German Greens:

But when the laws of the state are in open rebellion against divine law, … then resistance is a duty, but obedience is a crime.

…she was dishing it out with the CDU that’s why she quoted a Pope, in particular Pope Leo XIII, in 1890:

10. But, if the laws of the State are manifestly at variance with the divine law, containing enactments hurtful to the Church, or conveying injunctions adverse to the duties imposed by religion, or if they violate in the person of the supreme Pontiff the authority of Jesus Christ, then, truly, to resist becomes a positive duty, to obey, a crime

It then percolated through general Green-adjacent political spheres as a slogan and became “Wenn Unrecht zu Recht wird, dann wird Widerstand zur Pflicht”, “When injustice becomes law, then resistance becomes duty”, losing the “and obedience a crime” part. Usually attributed to Brecht, who probably wouldn’t mind, totally something he’d say. “I can’t eat enough for as much as I want to barf” isn’t Brecht, either, it’s Dürrenmatt. Actual Brecht quotes include “Who does not know the truth is just an idiot, but who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a criminal” as well as “First comes fodder, then morals”. Also, movie recommendation.

Let me blow your mind.

People are probably running FreeDOS nowadays though which uses a different syntax.

I managed to shoot my windows install like half year ago by deleting the wrong stuff from my EFI partition (which is too darn small TBH) and still haven’t bothered to fix it. CP77, it figures, by now runs just fine under proton.

Happens. Something like ten years ago I decided to boot into windows for the first time in a year or so and you know what happened? It installed a service pack for half an hour. Just sat there, for a year, already having downloaded the files, waiting to be booted to annoy me. I just wanted to play some Skyrim.

Depending on when and how deep your Mac experience was, it might be an easy switch. Despite its numerous failings MacOS, from OSX onwards, is a Unix. In particular a BSD, via NeXTSTEP.

I was talking about the foundation itself, not foundation+subsidiaries. And yes ever since the writing was on the wall wrt. google funds they’ve been putting more and more money in investments to make sure they can survive, as opposed to grants. Still keeping with the foundation’s mandate, though, e.g. all their VC investments into AI are the polar opposite of what the likes of OpenAI are doing. Kinda sceptical e.g. huggingface will ever turn a profit, much less a significant one, but it’s important to have them.

Firefox is a way for them to make money for their charitable projects. Always has been.

They’ve been opening secondary streams of income – also via Firefox, like pocket and stuff, but it’s unclear whether that would even allow them to keep developing Firefox. It certainly would mean that Mozilla doesn’t have any money left over to give to others which is their main purpose of existing.

If you actually had a look at their actual numbers, they’re a charity you know, they’re public, you’d see that the bulk of money is spent on charity. Mozilla has never been a charity to develop Firefox, Firefox has always been the breadwinner for Mozilla’s charity operations.

The Commission already has an instance and the ECJ also has an instance. I didn’t find one for the parliament, they might not even want to have one but instead leave it to the parties. A parliament instance would amount to the EP president policing parliamentarian’s speech not just inside parliament but also outside of it, kinda iffy.