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aragilar

1,387 karma · joined October 26, 2020

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aragilar··on Upgrade your desktop: Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS is now available
Unless you only use what's in the "main" section (which is surprising small, far more things are in "universe" than you'd expect), then you are getting the same software (or sometimes even older) than Debian.
aragilar··on Linux from Scratch
Debian and Arch are the same, grub at the end.
aragilar··on Everyone should slow down AI development except for me
Pretty sure it's supposed to be parody.
aragilar··on A Small Telescope That Surprised Me
Planets travel along the ecliptic, so they're pretty easy to map.
aragilar··on Hang on to Your Firefox
No, that is not what I said, and you repeatedly misreading what people write is noticeable.
aragilar··on Hang on to Your Firefox
Except Thunderbird now does run on donations (though is looking a relevant additional funding sources, e.g. providing hosted email: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/). This is not to say Mozilla can't seek out other sources of money, or develop appropriate ancillary services, but the absence of an option to just give money for Firefox (and Firefox only) is noticeable.
aragilar··on Hang on to Your Firefox
And killed its add-on ecosystem. If the choice is between (as it was then) a slower browser missing the add-ons you were used to, and a faster browser missing the add-ons you were used to, then you're going to need some other motivation to stick with (as I did, to be clear) the slower browser.
aragilar··on Hang on to Your Firefox
Pocket (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_(service) for those who aren't aware of it) is an excellent example:

1. Pocket was an external company, which Mozilla bought (and claimed they would open source), which already had a web extension. There was no need for the pre-acquisition integration, or to buy it later on.

2. After buying it, Mozilla did nothing with it, including failing to open source it, and seemingly failed to get enough revenue from that they shut it down last year.

This saga provided no benefit to Firefox users who did not use pocket, and at best for pocket users left them with a dying solution that they would need to migrate from (given the failure to open source it). It's not clear how much Mozilla paid for Pocket, but those funds could have been spent on something more valuable.

aragilar··on Hang on to Your Firefox
Then let me pay for Firefox. I don't need a resold Mullvad (which incidentally took forever to come to my country) or an AI chatbot (which seemingly are the options Mozilla provides to give them money), and donations to Mozilla don't go to Firefox. It took them ~20 years to work out that was the solution for Thunderbird, they shouldn't spend another 20 years flailing about for Firefox.
aragilar··on Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
The questions is, how much are you willing to pay (because the cost of this is not free, especially in this cloud era), and what is the scientific return for access to the uncalibrated data? There is significantly more value in a well designed pipeline for everyone (which is where anyone who would work on the pipeline would slot in) than bespoke pipelines which are poorly built and unmaintainable.
aragilar··on UC Berkeley indefinitely suspends international student work authorizations
This isn't normal?
aragilar··on AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward
The obvious question is what limits getting more data? Astronomy (especially in Australia) has been quite good at designing surveys to answer multiple scientific questions with reasonable amounts of data (and then fed into ML systems like the cannon). Sadly one of the consequences of the LLM hype is the increasing cost of doing this, so "AI" is actually making things worse not better.
aragilar··on Facebook is paying controversial creators to produce rage-bait content
"an invitation-only programme that lets you earn money from the performance of your eligible public reels, photos, stories and text posts." implies this is only available to a subset of people?
aragilar··on Controversial creators are benefiting from monetization programs run by Meta
I think it depends on whether what Meta states about the "Content Monetization" program being invite only is true? If it is, that's effectively commissioning, if it's not, well Meta is lying and then the question is why lie?
aragilar··on Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center
I'm not aware of the issues with the SF <-> LA high speed rail, but I had in mind https://www.abc.net.au/news/2006-03-30/many-factors-behind-t... (where an apartment block started collapsing causing the whole of northern Sydney to lock up for multiple days, delays to the project which nearly bankrupted the owners, and residents naturally suffered significantly) and https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-19/nsw-government-strike... (which hasn't caused as many issues thankfully). Both were pushed through quickly and suffered for it.

As for fast tracking, there's a reason property developers are banned from donating to political parties here (corruption findings relating to property developers are fairly common, the latest one has caught up the opposition leader of Australia). Make the process open, make it fair, have a proper plan and then less money need be wasted.

aragilar··on Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center
But if new evidence comes in which changes the basis for approval (e.g. lets say you need to do some earthworks and as part of performing them it becomes apparent these earthworks will damage nearby buildings), presumably the approval can be revoked until suitable changes can be made (or if that's not possible, the approval no longer holds)? The linked Wall Street Journal appears to give more details, suggesting this went through a fast-track process (with seemingly minimum community input). I'd argue fast-tracking projects is always a bad idea, as is trying to route around community consultation (given it's likely more expensive in the long run).
aragilar··on Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center
I think it's the zoning rules (based on https://www.wsj.com/us-news/how-amazon-built-a-data-center-i...), which seem to provide an expedited process (which for large scale projects like this always seems a bit odd, and seems like it would increase the risk of corruption)?

Arguably if new information arrives which changes the risks or impacts of a project, especially if the project was initially on some kind of fast-track process, then projects should be subject to re-reviewed and scrutiny (which I would expect to have a standard legal process).

aragilar··on Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library
Why not give everyone access for free?
aragilar··on LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals
Copyright law varies across jurisdictions, and it's not obvious how training for AIs would align with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing (and it appears a recent push to re-examine copyright law in Australia ended due to AI companies getting involved).
aragilar··on AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
I think it's not clear from the article why they left (e.g. could be anything from retirement to going to work at another firm/contracting to being fired to switching careers), and likely it's going to be a mix, plus not all were previous Ford employees. Similarly the "AI" isn't clearly defined (but like you I would be surprised if it were LLMs). I suspect though why the article exists (and a possible source of your downvotes) is signalling against "AI", which if Ford wants more expert employees (given their issues), is something Ford wants to present.
aragilar··on Real-Time LuaTeX: Recompiling Large Documents in 1ms [pdf]
The answer is fairly obvious, Typst (like ConTeXt) is not LaTeX. Typst is a perfectly fine solution if you're giving the typeset output (i.e. a PDF) to someone, it not a solution if you need to give the document source to someone (if the person expects LaTeX, or .doc(x), or some other format). Many of the issues people raise with LaTeX are due to needing to pass on the document source to someone (otherwise you could use whatever packages or engines you wanted), but that is fundamental to interoperability and why LaTeX (and Markdown) stick around.
aragilar··on Two Case Studies of NaN
I would say the complexity of IEEE-754 is warranted (given the history of the standard), but the issue is those writing languages are typically not aware of numerical computing (it's rarely a course at university), and so do not design their languages with it in mind (or predate IEEE-754). This leads to implementations and ecosystems which do not consider it, and we end up with systems where giving the required control to implement IEEE-754 conflict with other requirements (e.g. security, imagine if you could control rounding mode via the browser).
aragilar··on Two Case Studies of NaN
Specifically, 0/0 (or inf/inf), not any division by 0.
aragilar··on Two Case Studies of NaN
Of what, IEEE-754? Given how poorly most languages implement it (and how many shortcuts are taken in the same of speed), I'm not sure IEEE-754 is the problem.
aragilar··on Two Case Studies of NaN
You don't need NaN (or Inf) to have unexpected behaviour with floats and naive loops in lua, using 1e52 is enough. Conflating floating point and integers (independent of encoding) is always a bit of a trap.
aragilar··on Australian energy retailers must provide three hours of free daytime electricity
There's too much available power then (curtailment/negative prices are fairly common now on sunny days), and not enough during the evenings, so it's an incentive for those who don't have/can't get batteries (e.g. renters) to shift their habits. It also can be spun as a cost-of-living action.
aragilar··on A native graphical shell for SSH
ssh -X works fine depending on the toolkit you use (i.e. not Gtk, because of its rendering pipeline) and the distance/latency you travel. For distance/latency, at some point (i.e. at sufficient latency) you're going to need to think about you present this to users (this is true independent of the medium, there are hard physical limits that cannot be waved away), and so for any tool that promises remote graphical access will need to design with distance/latency in mind (e.g. vim works great over latencies as you basically queue up instructions).
aragilar··on The Doorman's Fallacy in action
In my experience, anywhere using an app/QR code is better served by me walking up to the counter and ordering.
aragilar··on Europeans should learn to love the air-conditioner
Personally, I think AC vs. no AC isn't the issue, it's the lack of fans and air circulation that is the problem. I suspect there are building where installing AC is going to be required, but the majority of building really just need to install fans.
aragilar··on Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
I hate writing, but I don't send LLM output, because I'm not the asshole who sends junk.
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