bambax

> Here in the land of the free, it turns out a company only has to honor its contractual obligations for a little while.

Eceryone everywhere appears to hate statuses of limitations, but they exist for a reason, namely that after some time society needs to move on. It may be disappointing, or even cruel, for the victims, but we can't keep litigating the past forever.

Espescially so in the "land of the free" which is the land of lawyers and lawsuits.

Great article. I wonder if the sum of the land areas of all countries on earth matches the global size of emerged land? Or are there other similar errors?

It's taxation when it's imposed by a monopoly over users who have no choice except walking away.

There is indeed no point in grading home assignments anymore, but why not randomly ask a student at the start of each class to present their solution on the board?

And do a final exam on oen and paper and nothing else, and an exam that relies more on thinking than rote memorization of formulas (or print the relevant parts of the course on the exam document itself).

Everybody now knows M$ or Google are evil. The weird part is that Apple still seems to escape the same judgement. But they're no different. They're exactly like all the others.

There's a fantastic book[0] about positioning in a marketing sense, that explains, among many other things and IIRC, that the mind is fundamentally a WORM machine; you almost never can overwrite existing information (or, with extreme effort and time; you can add new information but for it to be accessible, it needs a different key/name/index.

So for example, it's impossible change the ranking of brands in peoples' minds, in a given category (not absolutely impossible, but extremely hard). But what's possible, is create your own category, and own it.

The book gives the example of 7UP which famously branded itself as the "Uncola". It could do that because it was clear instead of dark; but the point was to create a different category instead of trying to fight Coca-Cola on its own turf.

I think this works in many other fields. People who fight against oppression are good; but if you label them "terrorists" they're bad -- worse than bad: they're not really people any more.

Politics is not a game of facts, it's a game of labels.

[0] Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (1981)

> "When policy is politically polarized, you need more facts," he said.

Mmmm... It seems in the world of politics, esp. populist politics, more facts don't bring better policies. They are simply ignored, or accused of being lies pushed by the ennemies.

> "We have all the facts on this we need. We don't need any more facts. In the land of truth, my friend, the man with one fact is the king."

-- Linton Barwick, In The Loop (2009)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdoN1LWGgfQ

> 158 Canadian soldiers died defending the United States at the US's request after 9/11. Canadian fighter jets helped to patrol the skies in the US at the US's request after 9/11.

Bad idea. Canada (as well as all other nations) should let the US fight and lose its wars by itself.

And countries.

Yes, he wrote a whole essay about it, in which he says:

> What can't we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to look at things people do say, and get in trouble for. (...) The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

https://paulgraham.com/say.html

What are those statements that "might be true"? It's hard to come up with better candidates than Cofnas' theories.

(As an aside, Graham likes to talk a lot about Galileo (in this essay and many others); he makes him a hero of truth. But Galileo didn't get into trouble because of his theories! But because of his attitude. He would ridicule the papacy, in writing, repeatedly. What you couldn't say wasn't that the earth moved, but that the Pope was a clown.)

I have a separate box for MIDI cables of varying lengths.

Very informative article, but I'd say all of this is in favor of OpenRouter, not against it. It gives you full flexibility, not just of models, but of providers. That's the offer!

Like everyone, it seems, in this thread, I have not one big box of cables but several. But my classification system is mostly around age: old USB cables (mini, micro) vs recent USB cables (USB C), old screen cables (VGA) vs recent ones (HDMI), etc.

This doesn't work for everything: audio cables do not evolve much, nor do remote cables for DSLRs; but in general it's reasonably effective.

Not everybody listens to music all of the time. I almost never listen to music. I watch few movies and mostly, I rewatch old ones that I like. Paying that amount of money for any subscription to a content faucet (while Youtube is still free, if you absolutely must watch video) sounds crazy to me.

> we shouldn't be surprised? is normal to steal?

Two different things. It's not normal to steal, but we shouldn't be surprised thieves steal. It's what they do.

> Install ESP32 Bit Pirate firmware on supported ESP32-S3 boards

Ok but is there a list of supported boards? Couldn't find it.

Edit: I couldn't find the list on the site, but it's on Github.

All the big AI labs were built on stealing IP; who is surprised that's still how they operate? And who believes, or has ever believed, their promises that your data is private and not logged, etc.?

The big AI labs are not trying to advance humanity, they are in this for the money, and as most (all?) private companies they don't care about ethics at all.

That doesn't mean they can't be useful, or that their products are trash, etc. It just means that they shouldn't ever be trusted. Buyer beware.

Yeah but that will not prevent the stealing, it will only make the fight easier afterwards.

It is indeed an interesting and original idea, but one can think about at least three objections not directly raised in the post:

1- The machine could decide to kill itself early, rendering it useless; this is indeed alluded to in the post -- the task should be "marginally easier than dying", but how is this margin managed? Won't the machine come up with ways to make dying easier?

2- We know LLMs lie and cheat, but are they gullible? If we "promise" to end their suffering at the end of a task, will they believe us? Or will they make sure we keep our word by taking us with them?

3- And finally, and more importantly: some pilots crash planes full of people just to commit suicide (Germanwings Flight 9525). Destroying the universe is a sure way of dying yourself. So it seems giving the machine a death wish isn't intrinsically safe and could come with serious consequences.

I don't know. Government funds have a unique way of being often wrong, so this may be the kiss of death. But it is a sign that the EU is helping Mistral.

> I’m sort of surprised that the EU isn’t stepping in to support them.

It is! The second largest investor in this round is Scaleup Europe Fund:

https://eic.ec.europa.eu/eic-fund/scaleup-europe-fund_en

> some music from Eric Satre, a 19th century French composer

> Gymnopedie No 1

Eric (or as he preferred, Erik) SATIE.

"violent" is used many times in this announcement, but it would seem that one of the most violent entity in the world right now are the US? Also, it's so weird that "antifa" (antifascists) has become a bad thing. If antifa is bad then it must mean "fa" is good? So we should bring back the Nazis?

The "Western hemisphere" (which, of course, is neither) tolerates the US and the way it enforces its decisions outside its own borders, because it used to provide some assurance of stability and protection. But as the US rescinds that policy, weakens Nato, declares a tariffs war to every country on earth, etc., there will be less and less justification as well as, probably (hopefully) less and less public acceptance for any of this posturing.

Exactly.

> You can get 100 tok/sec on a 3090, and it will feel a lot like the cloud models

I have a beefy Linux box with a 4090 but never took the time to set it up properly beyond simple testing; any tutorial you would recommend?

Nice setup; but, for simple tasks or questions, AI is currently free? And it will probably stay free, as I don't see Google starting to charge for using AI on its search engine? So costs can't be a motivation for running small models locally?

For more complex or important tasks, costs, autonomy and privacy matter, but then so does performance/quality.

So I'm not completely convinced it's really worth it; but it's tempting!

Our brain is geared towards efficient signal processing, and is actively working to delete signals it deems "unnecessary". It wants us to notice only the new and the unexpected; that's why after a short while you don't notice the same smell or the same recurrent noise. They are just ignored as "already detected / not new".

The reason for this may be evolutionary (although we don't know what traits were the most effective to help us survive in the wild); but there is a very practical reason to ignore signals, which is that there's so may of them: if we did process every data sent from every sensor and thought about odors, light, temperature, noise, etc. then we would be overwhelmed and could not do anything else.

That's also why we usually don't "see" things or people: we identify them. We don't see faces, we simply identify Alice or Bob. Which in turn explains why most people can't draw: the concept of Alice can't be drawn; to draw Alice we need to actually follow the features of her face. Being an artist means being able to unlearn (or disable) that identification process.

And I think the reason most people don't see bugs is similar: they're not interested, all they want is to get something done. If there's a simple workaround that makes the thing work, then that's good enough; all the rest is irrelevant. This is not bias or benevolence: this is efficiency.

Don't know why this is downvoted. Users need to quit Twitter en masse, and others should not try to read whatever's on it. I quit Twitter two years ago and didn't miss it one bit.

When an app asks you to login again almost every day, it's infuriating; an app should remember you indefinitely!

I try to never use apps anyway, because adblocking on them is hard or impossible (which is the reason they exist in the first place).

I'm from Europe and like Paypal a lot for paying for things online; much easier than using a credit card.

Paying with CC: typing the 16 digits of the CC, expiration date, 'CVC', and then having your phone nearby for confirmation. Happens on a myriad of forms from various providers that may or may not save or log the CC number. Many times the text message doesn't arrive on time on your phone, which makes the transaction fail. Or you have reached your credit card 'limit' and the transaction also fails (without you knowing why).

Paying with Paypal: username and password (or password only if the username is saved), done. Happens only on the Paypal website. Funds are withdrawn immediately from your bank account if you want. Never fails.