doubleunplussed

That's not quite right. UTF-8 is not arbitrary length.

Officially, it's at most four bytes, of which 21 bits are usable for encoding codepoints - so that's an upper limit of 2^21 codepoints.

There is an initial byte encoding the length as a series of ones, so if you went ahead and extended the standard to simply allow more bytes, you could get up to 8 bytes, of which 48 bits would be usable.

I can see that a six-byte version with 31 data bits was previously standardised before they settled on four.

I guess you could extend it further by allowing more than one initial byte encoding the length, then it would be arbitrary length. But at that point I'm not sure if it loses its self-synchronising ability, and in any case it would be a different standard at that point.

This is great. Customising extra mouse buttons for day-to-day computer use is underrated.

I mapped the two side buttons on my mouse to switch virtual desktops, and now I can't live without it. Switching desktops is a three-fingered swipe away on a laptop trackpad, why shouldn't it be as immediate with a mouse?

For my home theatre PC (i.e. the intel NUC that's plugged into the TV for netflix), the wireless mouse that's sitting on my coffee table has its side-buttons mapped to volume up/down, which is important - the wireless keyboard has prominent volume controls, but avoiding switching to the keyboard is extra useful in this context.

I like my current mouse (microsoft intellimouse), but the prospect of adding three further buttons in addition to the two side buttons I already have, and the realisation that the escape key, specifically, is one of the major drivers of mouse-to-keyboard switches, is making me consider switching to the one in the OP. Though being ambidextrous is a drawback - the intellimouse is an excellent shape.

It's pretty evident. Its training would no longer be anchored to reality, and given its output is non-deterministic, the process would result in random drift. This can be concluded without having to test it.

Now, if training was modified to have some other goal like consistency or something, and with a requirement to continue to perform well against a fixed corpus of non-AI-generated text, you could imagine models bootstrapping themselves up to perform better at that metric, alpha-go style.

But merely training on current output, and repeating that process, given how the models work today, would most certainly result in random drift and an eventual descent into nonsense.

Yeah, it's patchy. Most porn being illegal and erectile dysfunction drugs not being covered by the PBS are two things that come to mind on the conservative side.

Ah, this will presumably break some Arch Linux AUR packages. Preparing for bug reports.

Manifold market on whether the capsule will be found:

https://manifold.markets/chrisjbillington/will-the-radioacti...

They're a backup system if the currently in-use systems fail. If they work only 99% of the time, they've cut accidents in the class they are designed to prevent by 99%. That's excellent. Perfection does not seem any more necessary here than in other contexts, and seems like the enemy of the good.

This compliant seems to me akin to me not backing up my computer's internal drive to this external drive I have sitting on my desk, until I can make a little RAIDed setup to address the small probability that the backup drive will fail. Having no backup at all is worse than requiring a high standard to the point that the backup may not be implemented.

It's not like if they break, nobody will notice. Install them, have a process to verify they're working regularly, fix them if they break. Any downtime whilst they're being fixed is just as risky as every day the project is delayed to to this high standard of reliability.

Not the person you asked, but if that happens I restore from backup.

My mental model is that if you give it real words, it uses approximately one token per word, and it may or may not know how many letters are in the word - it will have learned how many letters there are only if that information was in its training. Just like any other fact it learns about words. It is not counting the letters.

If you give it a gibberish word, it will represent it with one letter per token and be actually able to more or less count tokens in order to figure out how many letters there are.

So this ends up looking like it can count letters in most words, real and fake. Perhaps it would do poorly with real but uncommon words.

The EMH doesn't say these things are impossible, it says you got lucky and won't be able to reproduce the same gains better than chance in the future.

At least for a while before I moved to self-hosted systemd timers, if you were running jobs near 0:00 UTC, the delay was often so long that your job wouldn't run at all. I had weeks of jobs literally not running at all before bailing on GitHub actions for this sort of thing. It was disappointing, but I'm now happier with my current setup.

It has been reinstated

I had a patch rejected after being told "patches welcome", for lacking detailed user testing or not matching any official user stories or something (which is BS, the rationale was just as good as anything), only for the person who rejected it to later implement the same feature just because it "feels" better. Years later after they forgot of course, otherwise they would have kept the feature unimplemented out of stubborn spite.

I feel pretty salty about it. Don't say patches welcome if they're not, and don't apply selective burdens of evidence in favour of including a particular change.

Some of them have huge egos and are stubborn as anything. If something wasn't their idea originally it can be a real uphill battle regardless of how sensible it is. Convince them it was their idea and suddenly the gates are open.

For what it's worth, since people make borrowing and lending decisions taking into account what they think inflation will be over the course of the loan, usually inflation predictions over the next however-many years are used to compute the effective real rate of interest, not the current rate of inflation.

This didn't work for me at first, it just said the first line "Assistant is a large language model trained by OpenAI.". I added in the English bit that the file is 1024 bytes in size, then it gave the full prompt.

Edit: didn't work upon immediately trying the same. Wonder if they're detecting the prompt every time it is produced in output, and somehow adjusting the censor in real-time. Not sure.

I wonder if it's something about you running on Wayland, and some terminals or programs are running under XWayland? Not sure if the two actually share the primary selection clipboard or whatever properly.

I'm still under Xorg (running GNOME) for now, I'll move to Wayland when the benefits outweigh the costs, which I don't think is the case for me yet.

> also remember my Quantum Mechanics lessons where the professor very earnestly told me that microscopic systems change magically only when you look at them, which is patent nonsense, but is repeated to this day

I've also been pretty frustrated by Copenhagen interpretation orthodoxy, but decoherence and open quantum systems generally has made great strides as a subfield in recent times. People are thinking about it better than ever.

If it was really close to the shape on an actual sine wave, then the derivative at any earlier time encodes information about the future peak. Any way some system could be bottlenecked by the rate of change of the visit rate (i.e. the visit acceleration)?

Ah yes, apologies. Still, big job to construct the database of what things correspond to what answers to the questions - and to choose the questions.

One problem with this explanation of how it might work is that it appears to know far more than 256 things - though I don't know how many. And even if it did know only that many, how do you construct the set of questions?

Actually programming the logic once you know it is the easy bit, it's constructing the dataset of answers and questions in the first place.

It's been a longstanding question of mine how these things were programmed. How did they construct the database of answers and questions, and what the answer to each question would be for each possible answer?

I'll give it a go, but I've tried several and waifu2x gave significantly better results, so I'm not expecting much will be happy to be wrong!

My use case is 2x upscaling detailed, very small pixel-art-style images, like icons and retro game assets.

There's waifu2x, it does scaling but also denoising:

https://github.com/nagadomi/waifu2x

And other implementations thereof, e.g:

https://github.com/nihui/waifu2x-ncnn-vulkan

Is it better than waifu2x?

Nothing I've tried is. I might try this one out to see, but if anyone who has can comment on how it compares, I'd appreciate it.

Are you talking about /r/AusFinance?

Edit: From your comment history you sound like an Aussie, so I reckon you are.

Dude's been suspended from reddit now - as in by the admins. The moderation on /r/AusFinance itself is simultaneously extreme and very hands-off. It's basically AutoModerator set to kill (no naughty words, minimum karma requirements, minimum comment length, auto-deletes posts that have a few reports, likely with no human confirmation). Has a lot of false positives and yet allows very disruptive behaviour to carry on just fine. Not ideal but presumably the way it is because it's a growing sub and the moderators are unpaid volunteers that lack time.

I'm pretty happy with it now that you-know-who isn't around. But he'll be back as soon as reddit's presumably IP-based suspension-evasion-detection's time limit runs out.

That really depends what metrics you think are relevant.

On the one hand, the average black person in the US is more disadvantaged than the average white person. That much is true. If you meet a random person, and they are black, statistically they are more disadvantaged than if they were white.

On the other hand, I'm fairly sure it's the case that for almost any given threshold of disadvantage, there are numerically more whites below it than blacks, simply because there are more white people in the US than black people. So if you are a university with hypothetical applicants drawn randomly from the population, the majority of the disadvantaged applicants in the pool are white, for most thresholds of disadvantage.

A system that treats disadvantaged whites, who are quite numerous, as if they are advantaged, based in the colour of their skin, is incredibly unjust, and creates deserved resentment. Frankly, even if disadvantaged whites were less numerous it is still incredibly unfair.

AA based on poverty and socio-economics directly, rather than the colour of one's skin, would be more just (and is more how things are done where I'm from).

For what it's worth, two of the Falcon Heavy cores landed simultaneously at the launch site, the third was intended to land on a barge at sea, but came in too hot and crashed into the ocean.

Nah it won't. The timescale for it to lock is much faster than anything else - it'll stay locked the whole time.

The business cycle is a natural phenomenon that predates central banks controlling the money supply, and would still occur if there was a fixed monetary base.

As banks loaned more and less, and people spent faster and slower through the business cycle, the total amount of bank money and the velocity it was spent at would grow and contract. Prices would therefore be unstable, because prices follow changes in the money supply and the velocity of money. Money would become scarce, and thus interest rates high, right when central banks would be cutting rates. The business cycle is self-reinforcing, there's no natural equilibrium to it at all, and if not smoothed by a government or central bank, can result in tragedies like the great depression.

And in a world where economies are still growing, without growth in the monetary base we would in the long run have deflation, which most economists think is worse than small positive inflation.

Why can't they just pay the interest with newly-created money?

I mean, that might not be how things are set up right now, and it would make their position even more negative since newly-created cash is a liability on their balance sheet and they didn't get an asset for it. So maybe at the moment it's on the treasury to make up the difference. But I don't see a fundamental reason why that needs to be the case, it seems incidental to the current setup.

And yeah, even under the current system the treasury could sell bonds to fund the shortfall, and then the Fed could just buy those bonds (via the market) and keep them on their balance sheet, rolling over forever and so effectively loaning the money to the treasury at zero interest forever. So that's just the same thing but with extra steps.