palordrolap

It is worth noting that the same metric is the exact reason that web browser version numbers are so ridiculous. What's that saying? Something about the moment a metric is used to measure performance, it ceases to be a good metric. That's what's happening here. In one of the stupidest ways possible.

because some languages allow you to write statements that wrap over multiple lines in order to space things out that would otherwise be crammed onto one line, so for the compiler to know when the statement ends a character is needed so that it doesn't think the next line is part of the previous; statement number 2 goes here Without that semicolon, you might have continued to read "previous statement" which makes sense at first, until the words that follow. Without the allowance for multiple lines in one statement, that second physical line makes no sense at all, despite the first one making perfect sense on its own. And without the spacing, the run-on sentence would be a lot harder to read. Sometimes you have to write code a particular way. Here I was making a point. In a programming language there are other reasons.

Semi-serious answer: Sometimes your PC has only two working monitor ports, and you choose to solve the "need more monitor space" problem by getting bigger monitors. The way I have my two monitors set up is fairly similar to that single curved display, so I could see this being a natural upgrade path for me.

Wait until you learn what the other seven parts of a byte are called when the first one is called a bit.

orange = { you = "glad", I = { didn\'t = { say = "banana" } } }

The people who are seeking AGI will be happy when an LLM appears clever enough to fool them, not anyone else. They may even realise this, because they think everyone else is less clever than they are. This is why the whole thing has been called AI in the first place.

Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 1919. This case found and entrenched in US law that the primary purpose of a corporation is to operate in the interests of its shareholders. Therefore OpenAI, based in California, would be under threat of lawsuit if they didn't do that. This goose is already cooked.

The DDR4 sticks I got 18 months ago now cost 300-400% the price they were, so it's not just DDR5. ... and I just realised the title doesn't actually mean "DDR5 prices", but that was an easy misinterpretation on my part, so I guess I'll post this anyway.

Some people genuinely do not understand the concept of GUI windows and how they work. They do not generate a full mental model of the desktop and the windows on it and only see the whole screen as one bewildering interface. They focus on what they do know in order to get by. This may be especially true of people who learned their IT with small screens or low resolutions where running an application full screen (or as the only active application!) is required to get anything done. Your colleague saw you click on part of the interface they were ignoring because they didn't understand it and magic happened.

Fake AGI is like fake banknotes. Some of them are really good approximations. Nigh indistinguishable. A lot of people will be fooled by it but eventually it will be discovered to be a fake and people will get hurt in some way or another. And it won't be the people who are pushing for "AGI".

Actually, Minecraft 26 comes out this year. They dropped the "1." and bumped the sub-version from 21 to 26 to match the year. They've also changed the way the new second tier works to be related to the quarter-year. 26.1 is due next month. So yeah, there'll never be a Minecraft 2.0. The versioning no longer allows for it. (This doesn't rule out a game called "Minecraft II" with its own set of unrelated but identical version numbers. Minecraft II 36.1 drops in ten years. Maybe. But probably not.)

I'm about 50/50 on grammar errors. They bother me either way, but sometimes I feel the need to correct them and try to explain why. Today I seem to have worded it in a way that's rubbed people the wrong way. It has gone better. You win some, you lose some. And yes I know I sound like an LLM. I used to not be able to communicate my ideas at all (flashback to not being able to string a 500 word essay together at school) but then I got a job working technical support and I had to figure out a way of getting my ideas and explanations across. And this is now how I communicate, for better or worse. Unfortunately, LLMs learned how to communicate in a not dissimilar way. And so we sound alike.

As I've said before, once Linus is gone, we might well end up with splits at the kernel level rather than at the distro level. And we would be wise to avoid any one organisation's stock kernel, even if there are some very large organisations providing a lot of code for the kernel at present. I can see a future where, say, GNOME, start producing their own kernels to support their vision of the Linux desktop from the ground up. And it's all but certain that Canonical and Red Hat would be very interested in things going their (respective) way(s) when the time comes.

*whose

"who's" is "who is"[1] or "who has"[2], and it can be wrestled into a possessive if you make "who" all or part of a name[3], but it's the wrong sort of possessive for this context. If you really want the possessive form, it ought to be phrased "which person's", which is mostly what "whose" means.

(An actual linguist would speak more about the genitive and how it works in English, but I'm not as capable.)

[1]: e.g. "Who's there?" [2]: e.g. "Who's let the cat out again?" [3]: e.g. "This is you-know-who's box of tricks."

I was going to suggest using pro-ICE rhetoric dripping with over the top sarcasm, but there are too many sufficiently smart pro-ICE people who'd see through it and too many anti-ICE who might have trouble discerning it. And then there's the issue of getting the tone right in a stressful and dangerous situation.

Is it any more maintainable with four levels of abstraction?

Most of the age verification things I've seen are wise to that and require a video camera, not a still one.

And here's me thinking it was called Vintage Story.

Any C-levels, current or former, who were in charge during the unethical behaviour should be made to pay this. Either they knew or they should have known. Seize their assets, take them back to basic income and lifestyle and only then take the remainder of the fine from the company. Yeah, I know this is a pipe dream. These people have their arms lodged so deep in politicians it makes their mouths flap, so it'll never happen, but it would stop this sort of behaviour right quick.

It says "was" not "had".

I envy these linguists' ability to either not be irked by grammar errors at all or to be able to deal with their irritation when errors arise.

The day they codify in law that public services should not make a profit, the lawsuits will begin. Those to reclassify all and sundry that we think of as public services as not being public services. A necessity argument would result. Do people need electricity, gas and municipal water treatment? No. They can live off-grid. Therefore these are not public services. Do people need public transport? No. They can walk or buy rent a car. Therefore public transport is not a public service. Do people need police, fire, medical? No. Most people can go months, years without needing any of those. Therefore they can't be public services either. etc. etc. I'm not saying I agree with any of that, but the expensive lawyers will be arguing these points and they'll continue to argue them as long as there's a profit to be made.

What's your opinion of the word "neologologist" and are you proposing that these "most linguists" are in fact described by it? And what do you think their opinion of it would be? ;p

Although a processor might be nominally capable of accessing a bus of a certain width, it does not mean that all address or data lines need be connected.

Yes. The institution in question is human society. We generally grant the permission to make rational decisions over our lives to other humans who know better that we do or are more skilled than we are. Sometimes, yes, those humans turn out to have been deceitful or dishonest, but there are mechanisms in place for when that happens. And yes, sometimes those mechanisms are wilfully avoided by the deceitful. Politicians and rich people are especially good at this. Guess who's pushing "AI"? The thing that has no contract with human society and cannot be held accountable. And neither will the people pushing it. This is why we should have as little to do with it - at least as it is in its current form - as possible.

Wikipedia seems to agree with you. Dropping the J was probably a good idea considering the people who would have to read it on a regular basis, and how J sounds in English.

I assume they're using (year - 2000) as the version number, which happens to match "last two digits" and will do until 2099. So any version of Minecraft released that year under the new system would be Minecraft 1002.x, not 2.x.

Ha. I've heard of Amazon offloading heavier parcels to municipal mail carriers, so I don't see that working out.

You can also try signalling the parent with a SIGCHLD. Most of the time it does nothing, and hey, you'd be using a stronger version of the kill command anyway if it doesn't work.

In an ideal world, she'd win every penny and the money would come out of the assets of each and every person involved in her arrest, including their immediate superiors so that lessons would be learned. She lost her assets through no fault of her own. Seems only fair that they should lose theirs, if not worse, because they actually did something wrong.

"People who live on a volcano are more worried about it erupting than the rest of the world."

The problem with the implicit size comparison in the Crocodile Dundee reference is that Australian spider size is inversely proportional to their actual danger.

I'd like to believe that this means that these three pieces of software actually work and that someone in high office has decided that that is unacceptable. Paranoid authoritarians really do not like ordinary people having access to secure communications and personal privacy. That might be an avenue they can use to organise and elect someone who isn't a paranoid authoritarian, and that won't do. On the other hand, these pieces of software might already be compromised and this is all an elaborate double-bluff. In which case it's time for a few well placed communications over purportedly secure channels that would be guaranteed to generate an authoritarian response. Which they'll then have to pretend they didn't read until it's too late. I'm talking organising - horrors - peaceful protests. They really don't like those. They have to use their brains, or someone else's, in order to find a good excuse to stick the boot in.

I would be very interested to know how they are able to identify a specific CPU. The article speculates but does not answer this question. The fact that this is even possible is a security nightmare. OK, I've done a bit more digging and pieced it together. Acknowledgement to @dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world for prompting me to try (again) to find a command that might do it among other things. IMO, this sort of information shouldn't be in processors in the first place, but apparently it is there and needs admin/root access to, well, access it. ... and the game in question requires kernel-level anti-cheat, so of course, it has the necessary access. The command for Linux is sudo dmidecode -t processor, which dumps a lot of info including an ID field, which is supposedly the CPU's specific identifier. It can be grepped for or otherwise filtered out. My own Ryzen gives 8 hexadecimal pairs, so it's a 64-bit value. I would not know that that was unique to my specific individual processor if I had not been told, but I'll assume that at least part of it is not unique between Ryzens of the same calibre. (I won't be posting any of it for comparison, for obvious reasons.) So the upshot is, if you don't want to be identified right down to your CPU, don't run programs as root if there's any chance of them phoning home.

Is it worth getting? Maybe someone else will have a better answer. I used it once in a blue moon to naively hack at some audio, and will install it or Tenacity to do the same in future as and when the need arises. In fact, I'll probably end up going for Audacity and a wary eye for telemetry opt-ins because Debian seems to have a native package for it. Tenacity seems to be Flatpak-only.

Surprisingly, the Internet seems to look mostly favourably on Audacity these days. I never really kept up with it at the time, but apparently all the allegedly heinous (mis)features were opt-in. (Further verification of this may be required.) I can't tell if that's the result of a really good scrubbing of bad search results or whether they genuinely cleaned up their act. Either way, Tenacity, the fork that came about as a result of the controversy, still exists, and apparently has themes to change the look just like Audacity is claiming to have done now, so if you're uncertain, that's always an option.

What I've read just now is what I'd deliberately not gone looking for up to this point in case I found this out. Linux and Windows happen to require that the executables that access that information be run with root privileges, but it looks like that's merely an affectation. It seems that any old piece of software, without root or other privileges, can independently run the CPUID instruction that obtains a processor's serial number. I do not like this one bit.

" 'I was only following orders' [...] The refuge of scoundrels since the dawn of time. " - Patrick Ness No, I've no idea who Patrick Ness is either, but it's a quote from one of his works, and it happens to be true.