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cedilla

2,105 karma · joined July 31, 2020

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cedilla··on The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s
I don't know why it would matter, but Einstein didn't hate quantum mechanics. He literally got his Nobel prize for his role in discovering quantum mechanics. He is one of the earliest people to propose that light exists in quantised packets.

He had some strong opinions around interpretations of quantum physics, but that isn't even a question of science, it's a metaphysical discussion.

While we're at it, Einstein also wasn't a bad student, and he didn't hate mathematics.

cedilla··on LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions
Allowed to do? Not prevented from by technical measures, but certainly not allowed to do.

Considering the goal is to identify people, this is undeniably PII. As the article demonstrates, it also pertains sensitive information.

cedilla··on LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer
If other people collect data like that it's probably also illegal.
cedilla··on Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder
Voyager 1 and 2 are 25 and 21 billion kilometres away, respectively.

Even if we built a rocket just designed to get stuff as far away as quickly away as possible, it would take decades to catch up to where they are now.

cedilla··on ISBN Visualization
Strange. If you compress complex topics into one four-word sentence, they are not as coherent any more.
cedilla··on Office.eu launches as Europe's sovereign office platform
Microsoft never called their productivity suite "simply" office, nor have they registered a product under that name.
cedilla··on Office.eu launches as Europe's sovereign office platform
Microsoft does not have a trademark for "Office", which is clearly a type of product and can't be used as a program name (just like you can't name your oatmeal "Oatmeal" and expect trademark protection).

Microsoft does have a figurative trademark for "Office" with the rectangular icon: https://euipo.europa.eu/eSearch/#details/trademarks/01141355... - office.eu's logo does not bear any resemblance.

The only way this would be infringing is if office.eu usage could be confused with Microsoft other's trademarks - like Microsoft Office - but I don't see that.

So no, office.eu will have a calm Monday on that front, just like hundreds of other companies offering products with "Office" in their name.

(I'm not a lawyer. Talk to a lawyer before deciding to take on a trillion dollar company).

cedilla··on Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
Brains are not doing linear algebra, and they don't follow a concise algorithm.

What LLM do is even farther away from what neural nets do, and even there - artificial neurons are inspired by but not reimplementing biological neurons.

You can understand human thought in terms of LLMs, but that is just a simile, like understanding physical reality in terms of computers or clockworks.

cedilla··on Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
Fair use is much more narrow than most people think, it's just that most rights-holders are not very belligerent. For example, streaming video games does not fall under fair right, most video essays critiquing films or series use way too much material commentated for fair right, remixing as a whole is not fair use, and most fan works are definitely not fair use. Legal protections don't help here, but the shit-storms companies like Nintendo of America had to endure when they tried to tighten the screws.

And that's in the US, other countries have similar exceptions but they are also usually quite limited.

cedilla··on "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name
I know for sure that each and every AI I use wants to write whole novellas in response to every prompt unless I carefully remind it to keep responses short over and over and over again.

This didn't used to be the case, so I assume that it must be intentional.

cedilla··on I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)
There are a few exceptions though, like most mobile games, visual novels (many of which use Python of all languages, due to an excellent framework called ren'py), and of course games written using Unity or XNA, which use .NET languages.

Also, three decades is going a bit too far back, I think. In the mid nineties, C was still king, with assembly still hanging on. C++ was just one of several promising candidates, with some brave souls even trying Java.

cedilla··on 1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?
You've got it exactly the wrong way around. And that with such great confidence!

There was always a confusion about whether a kilobyte was 1000 or 1024 bytes. Early diskettes always used 1000, only when the 8 bit home computer era started was the 1024 convention firmly established.

Before that it made no sense to talk about kilo as 1024. Earlier computers measured space in records and words, and I guess you can see how in 1960, no one would use kilo to mean 1024 for a 13 bit computer with 40 byte records. A kiloword was, naturally, 1000 words, so why would a kilobyte be 1024?

1024 bearing near ubiquitous was only the case in the 90s or so - except for drive manufacturing and signal processing. Binary prefixes didn't invent the confusion, they were a partial solution. As you point out, while it's possible to clearly indicate binary prefixes, we have no unambiguous notation for decimal bytes.

cedilla··on Why software stocks are getting pummelled
Companies pay millions and millions to get away from bespoke software, but not simply because of the costs. Companies want to do their core business, they don't want to also be a software enterprise, and assume all the risks that entails. Even if AI makes creating software 10 times less expensive, that doesn't really change.
cedilla··on Like digging 'your own grave': The translators grappling with losing work to AI
> billions of people now have access to better translations on deman

As a German speaker, I experience the quality of German language technical documentation steadily declining. 30 years ago, German documentation was usually top notch. With the first machine translations, quality went notably down. Now, with LLM translation, it's often garbage with phrases of obvious nonsense in it.

This is especially true with large companies like IBM, Microsoft or Oracle.

I guess the situation is better for languages where translations only became available with LLM.

cedilla··on Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Oral Exams
Is this a new thing or do you think that most professors were always unable to do their job? Why do you think you are an exception?

I don't believe that your argument is more than an ad-hoc value judgment lacking justification. And it's obvious that if you think so little of your colleagues, that they would also struggle to implement AI tests.

cedilla··on Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings
I assume that TVs have bad sound because better speakers just don't fit into their form factor.
cedilla··on List of domains censored by German ISPs
Well, when fascists are in power, paper won't help anyone. But at this point, as a European I enjoy enumerated human and civil rights from multiple constitutions and several international treaties, which are directly enforceable by courts at the state, national, and European level.

The human and civil rights guaranteed by the US constitution are a complete joke in comparison, and most of them are not guaranteed directly constitution, but by Supreme Court interpretation of vague 18th century law that can change at any time.

cedilla··on Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn
Deutsche Bahn ist anything but wasteful, it's underfunded to the tune of tens of billions per year. Cleaning out trees more up to ten meters away from railways was seen as to expensive, now 6m tall trees fall in them all the time during storms. Having two railways next to each other was seen as unnecessary, now we have no backups when one fails.

Swiss railway is seen as the ideal DB should strive for, but fact is that Switzerland invests more than double per capita into its rail infrastructure. German stinginess now compounded over decades, and that's not the fault of management.

cedilla··on Perl articles are being memory wiped from Wikipedia
I'll never understand the amount of vitriol Wikipedia volunteers must receive. Why is the deletion (or even deletion proposal) regarded as such a heinous act that people feel the need to attack and bully others?

I find this kind of behaviour and rethoric wholly unacceptable.

cedilla··on The gift card accountability sink
I completely agree. I struggle to think of any legitimate business that would allow only gift cards. Maybe some privacy oriented VPN providers?

In any case, I think this is almost a willful misunderstanding. Not only does it attack the straw man of "no one ever gets legitimately paid in gift cards", but literally the first counterexample, Paysafecard, isn't a gift card!

cedilla··on Upcoming Changes to Let's Encrypt Certificates
More forget than fire.

The longer certificates were valid the more often we'd have breakage due to admins forgetting renewal, or how do install the new certificates. It was a daily occurrence, often with hours or days of downtime.

Today, it's so rare I don't even remember when I last encountered an expired certificate. And I'm pretty sure it's not because of better observability...

cedilla··on Price of a bot army revealed across online platforms
I don't think anyone made the claim that requiring identification while providing German phone numbers would do anything about abuse from Russian botnets or abuse from non-German phone numbers.
cedilla··on Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
For some reason, many people think that gifting money is gauche, but gift cards are somehow okay.
cedilla··on Perl's decline was cultural
What incompatible versions of pythons do you mean? I'm entirely unaware of any forks, and the youngest version I have to supply at the moment is 3.9, which is over 5 years old and available in all supported platforms.
cedilla··on Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros
People were happy because they only needed one subscription and one app. Buying Warner Bros won't bring that back. If anything, it makes it less likely.
cedilla··on A Cozy Mk IV light aircraft crashed after 3D-printed part was weakened by heat
Ehh.

Everything you need to consider is really not that much when it comes to most typical consumer 3d printing projects. Mostly because they are usually about stuff like "fixing a broken tashcan". The engineers who made that bullshit plastic part that broke after a year probably knew all about area moment of inertia, but that doesn't mean I need to to print a replacement part that lasts longer - or not, in which case I'll just iterate on my process.

I really don't get the dismissiveness, and frankly, I've never experienced that from engineers in my life. They just seem delighted when someone, kid or adult, tinkes with additive manufacturing.

cedilla··on Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months
Uber was founded half a decade after the dot com bubble.
cedilla··on What will enter the public domain in 2026?
That's true of course, but the book series wouldn't have become a cultural phenomenon that makes billions.

Unlike, for probably the only example, Harry Potter, which was already a cultural phenomenon when the first film was announced.

cedilla··on Music eases surgery and speeds recovery, study finds
I don't understand why anyone would think that this kind of snark and condescension is furthering the discussion in any way.

A good thing for us all to keep in mind: we don't /have to/ share all our thoughts.

cedilla··on Is 30% of Microsoft's code AI-generated?
Up to 70% or more of statistics in sales calls are exaggerated, waffley or completely made up.
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