palordrolap

When you’ve been around a while, you begin to notice certain trends.

This particular trend being the one where the young, bright, ethical start-up turns into the sort of monster they originally rallied against, ensh*ttifying their product and spouting all the same reasons for it.

Signal is relatively young, bright and ethical. The cynic says “for now”.

There have been periods where one of my accounts was getting an ad-length black screen with buffering throbber (I hate that name) and, the most recent time, it was accompanied by a pop-up asking me if I’d like to find out why that was happening. Yeah. I know why that’s happening, thanks.

Then that stopped happening again. Either they gave up or UBo have worked around it somehow. Never ending arms race.

FYI: Depending on your politics, you may also want to avoid Proton.

Fair point. From what I can tell, refined tungsten is actually an order of magnitude cheaper(!) than refined silicon, but molybdenum is over two orders or magnitude more expensive. ~300USD per ton, ~2000USD per ton and ~60000USD per ton respectively.

I assume that if this got up to scale industrially, savings could be made by recycling high purity molybdenum waste, but yes, it’s not going to be cheap.

The article seems to imply that the intention is to replace silicon entirely, but agreed, there might be niches where it can replace silicon even if full replacement might be unrealistic.

A promising start, but a thousand transistors at 25 kilohertz puts it where silicon tech was 60 years ago, so they’ve a long, long way to go.

If it scales, they can use modern tech and know-how to accelerate their progress and they can get funding, maybe this will be viable in a decade or so.

Surely you jest. Gates has almost nothing to do with Microsoft these days, let alone interface design. In fact, he’d probably be the one to roast any stupid design decisions if he was still active there.

“France considers requiring Musk’s X to get users to lie about their age”

FTFY

Ah, but the clueless code monkeys, script kiddies and C-levels who are responsible for writing the AI companies’ processing code only know how to scrape from someone else’s website. They can’t even ask their (respective) company’s AI for help because it hasn’t been trained yet. (Not that Wikipedia’s content will necessarily help).

They’re not even capable of taking the ZIP file and hosting the contents on localhost to allow the scraper code they got working to operate on something it understands.

So hammer Wikipedia they must, because it’s the limit of their competence.

Hard to say. I feel like it’s about as likely he would have found LLMs to be an overcomplicated false prophet or false god.

This was a man whose operating system turned a PC into something not unlike an advanced Commodore 64, after all. He liked the simplicity and lack of layers the older computers provided. LLMs are literally layers upon layers of obfuscation and pseudo-neural wiring. That’s not simple or beautiful.

It might all boil down to whether the inherent randomness of an LLM could be (made to be) sufficiently influenced by a higher power or not. He often treated random number outcomes as the influence of God, and it’s hard to say how seriously he took that on any given day.

We seem to be headed in that direction though. My most recent motherboard has built in LEDs for no practical reason other than “ooh shiny”. Took me a minute to find the UEFI setting to disable that. “Stealth mode” apparently.

It’s also increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to find wired mice, keyboards and headsets in that ever-increasing gulf between “all singing, all dancing, expensive gaming device full of unnecessary LEDs” and “cheap, awful, bare minimum”. If it plugs in and there’s a 5v rail nearby, gotta draw on that to be shiny! Anything else would be sacrilege!

OK, it’s been a few hours. I’ll do the clumsy thing that everyone else has avoided and point out that it’s deliberately set up so that people who have never heard of operator precedence - those who do things purely left-to-right - don’t get a weird fraction when the division step is done, making them think that the answer they’ve reached must be the right one. You’d still get a handful who’d argue regardless, but that whole number ropes in a whole bunch more.

Couple that with the fact that the value reached this way doesn’t match the value obtained from using operator precedence and you get arguments about what the right answer is. And a comment like the one you’re reading right now that’s too long for the hard-of-thinking to read.

“More engagement, baybee [sunglasses smiley emoji] [cash bag emoji]” etc.

Maybe, but they wouldn’t want to give away that such a thing definitely already exists. Also, any intelligence gathered that way would likely be inadmissible as evidence if it was used to prosecute someone.

By getting an overt backdoor installed, both those problems go away.

Has any study been done on how efficient they are as heaters? The electricity they use when idle doesn’t vanish; it’s given off as heat. In the winter it might be worthwhile to not bother to unplug them because what they’re giving off could offset what other, more conventional, heat sources might otherwise provide. i.e. you leave a charger plugged in, and your house heating goes off half a second sooner, saving you the pennies there that the charger costs otherwise.

Admittedly, this doesn’t apply to summer and hotter climates, so most people, most of the time, probably ought to be unplugging them, but there’s a small percentage of cases where the reverse might actually be beneficial.

Using the same logic, it is “implausible” that we would not take money from those who have it and give it to the sheer volume of people who need it.

Oh. Suddenly it doesn’t work that way. Huh. Funny how that is.

Samsung aren’t exactly good guys either. At this point I’m not sure there is a company who isn’t out to put profit over everything else.

There’s another, more DNS-related, reason why it was usually preferred to have something before the domain part. It’s possible to alias a subdomain to another subdomain, but not so with the root of a domain, which must point directly at a single IP address.

If your IP addresses are more subject to change than your hostnames, or your site was hosted on a third party service, then it made sense to point www at a particular hostname rather than its address. e.g. you might point www.your-domain-here.biz at a-hostname.the-hosting-provider.tld. That’s not possible with a root domain. IP address or nothing.

Similarly, it’s possible to point a subdomain at multiple IP addresses (or multiple hostnames) at the same time, which was a cheap way to do load balancing. i.e. For a site a user hadn’t visited before, they’d be basically told one of the listed IP addresses at random, and then their local DNS cache would return that one IP address until it expired, generally giving enough time for the visitor to do what they wanted. Slap 8 different IPs in the www subdomain and you’d split your visitors across 8 different servers.

Root domain has no such capability.

Technically it would be possible to do all of that one level higher in DNS where your domain itself is the subdomain, but good luck getting a domain registry to do that for you.

I haven’t done DNS in over a decade at this point, so things may have changed in the intervening years, but this was all definitely a thing once upon a time.

You do realise that even though it’s not one of the official Mint variants, it’s still possible to install Gnome on Mint with minimal fuss?

There are people that still install and run KDE and that hasn’t been a Mint variant for some time now.

Or are you saying that Gnome should be the default variant because it’s “modern”?

The monkey’s paw curled a finger when they took off in that direction. Most old Linux/X applications will run fine under any window manager / desktop environment and, by and large, inherit the look and feel of that environment. Modern Gnome apps say “no” to that and look like Gnome apps wherever they are.

Since the Mint team are forking Gnome apps precisely to avoid that behaviour, I’d say Mint isn’t going to adopt Gnome proper any time soon, but as I said, you can install it if you really want.

The Chinese AI paradox: Either it will be allowed to criticise the CCP and be ultimately shut down by the CCP because such criticism is not allowed, or it will not, hence being untrusted by anyone who is not a fan of the CCP.

You might be thinking of lzip rather than lz4. Both compress, but the former is meant for high compression whereas the latter is meant for speed. Neither are particularly good at dealing with highly redundant data though, if my testing is anything to go by.

Either way, none of those are installed as standard in my distro. xz (which is lzma based) is installed as standard but, like lzip, is slow, and zstd is still pretty new to some distros, so the recipient could conceivably not have that installed either.

bzip2 is ancient and almost always available at this point, which is why I figured it would be the best option to stand in for gzip.

As it turns out, the question was one of data streams not files, and as at least one other person pointed out, brotli is often available for streams where bzip2 isn’t. That’s also not installed by default as a command line tool, but it may well be that the recipient, while attempting to emulate a browser, might have actually installed it.