DowsingSpoon

This feels like a massive straw man.

>universal suffrage is a stupid idea without universal risk/ skin in the game

Can you clarify this statement? I don’t understand what you mean.

In some states in the US, you can just shoot home invaders. That is, the use of deadly force is appropriate for protecting one’s self and family from a home invasion, and there is no additional duty to retreat from your own home. It’s a shame that the people of Spain live with such little freedom that these bandits are able to basically force people out of their own house.

Yes. But. The Shire’s prosperity was established in text to have been supported (in secret) by the efforts of the Rangers. Recall that Bilbo ran into evil, “cannibal” trolls barely outside of the borders of the Shire. This kind of threat would simply never appear in, say, Hobbiton.

The Shire itself is set in the ruins of a collapsed kingdom destroyed long ago by the Witch King. The last vestiges of the old order, the Rangers, patrol the land to try to push back the monsters. They collect no taxes. They pass no laws. The people of the Shire are largely unaware of them at all.

This is a clear statement of Tolkien’s politics, that an idyllic society like the Shire is the result of the hard work of good people shielded from the evils of the world. The role of the King then is to protect the people from these threats while otherwise not involving himself in the day-to-day lives of the citizens.

>AI is a […] social good.

Citation needed.

I’ve also heard this referred to as Abandoned Memory, or sometimes a Space Leak. It’s a common class of bug in a reference counted language, like Objective-C, where cycles need special consideration.

This article is almost irrelevant because here we are in 2024, barreling towards a future where there are approximately zero real journalists, and all news is written by an LLM. No reader wants this, but it’s clear it’s coming and it’s coming soon.

What’s “fair” about these ear buds? Is that a statement of quality? Because, if so then that’s not a strong selling point.

“Meet the world's most repairable premium earbuds.”

Okay, if you’re going to lead with This as your flagship feature… well, that says to me they must be complete garbage. Is this a joke?

Why?

Things like sports statistics and directories of phone numbers are not copyrightable. Maybe models fall into a similar category. Could be. It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out over the next few years.

>you can train an AI on copyrighted material just like people can learn from copyrighted material.

No amount of whining and hand wringing from engineers will ever make this true. This is for the courts to decide.

A reasonable interpretation, in my eyes, is that the training process is a black box which takes in copyrighted works and produces a training model. The training model is a derivative work of the inputs. It therefore violates the copyrights of a large number of rights holders. The outputs of the model are derivative works which also violate copyright.

And anyone using or training a model trained on works for which they do not have the rights? Completely fucked. Or at least, they must accept this as a real risk.

I don’t really feel like spending my Saturday doing some nebulous research project. Can you just tell me. Who are the funders and why is that relevant?

This whole fiasco leaves me shocked and surprised. I never considered that Reddit would sink themselves this way. It’s incredible. Until the AMA, I really had hope they’d back off and implement a sane API pricing model. That apps like Apollo would survive, diminished, and things would mostly continue on business-as-usual. But now, well, that’s it I guess. It’s been a long, slow decline, but I guess this is the end of the road.

It’s entirely possible that the model and all of its outputs will be determined to be derivative works of the training inputs. If that happens then, oh boy, not good things for anyone using it, I’m sure.

This is a very weird way of saying the that Apple charger is priced competitively and isn’t over priced at all.

I don’t find it amusing or ironic. That both of those things are true at the same time is telling. There are too many self-driving cars in certain places like SF. This is noticeable, and is a problem, because self-driving cars are incompetent drivers. This, it certainly seems, is a major problem that will be with us for some time. What we were promised is far away.

This fiasco may push me away from Reddit altogether. Though, it seems Reddit could greatly improve the situation by allowing individual users to buy API access for their account. For example, make this a perk of Reddit Premium or a separate purchase priced appropriately.

Ben Eater is a treasure. His videos are educational and entertaining. His project kits are excellent. Highly recommend.

I think one of the main arguments in favor of RISC-V is the permissive licensing. A lot of the people moving to RISC-V are absolutely weighting this heavily in their decisions.

The RISC-V folks would probably tell you that the compressed instruction set nets the same code density benefits you'd see on more complex ISAs. Myself, I haven't studied it enough to have a real opinion.

RISC proponents tout its benefits for energy efficiency, which is a pretty important thing these days. Though, that might be up for debate. This paper states that "there is nothing fundamentally more energy efficient in one ISA class or the other. The ISA being RISC or CISC seems irrelevant." <https://research.cs.wisc.edu/vertical/papers/2013/hpca13-isa...>

Personally, I think the RISC vs CISC debate is just a little bit dated. The ideas behind RISC were new and exciting in the 80s. The equation had changed and there was a lot of room for innovation and improvement with sweeping changes to computer architecture. They were thinking about how instructions could be pipelined, how compilers would allocate registers, how profiling showed that seldom-used instructions can be deadweight that literally holds a system back. Then in the 90s, the equation changed again. Pentium Pro style superscalar architecture showed that you can do well with even a terrible ISA if you're able to throw enough transistors at it.

<pedant>Significant figures are important too.</pedant>

Well don’t leave us in the dark. Speak your mind.

It’s well documented that there were no poor people at all prior to the publishing of The Wealth of Nations in 1776. /s

>Perhaps "Tesla Autopilot" can be the first Marketing Lie to vanish from the list: "Almond Milk", "Veggie Patties", "RNA Vaccine"...

I don't care about Autopilot and instead want to comment on some of the rest of your list. What are you going on about?? Veggie Patty is not a marketing lie in the slightest. It's a patty. It's made of plants. That's about as straight-forward as possible. The mRNA vaccines do in fact make use of mRNA; no lie there. Almond milk is a fine name. It's milk from an almond in the dictionary definition of the word. Really struggling to understand what you're getting at here...

Look, I think I agree with you that aquifers running dry is a very serious problem. However, I don’t understand why you believe desalination would not alleviate California’s problems with water. If California could be convinced to build enough nuclear desalination capacity for all present and future water needs then the problem is solved, no? There are trade offs such as environmental impact and cost. There are obstacles to implementation such as fear of nuclear power. If that’s your concern then please clarify.

(I haven’t watched that episode of the show. Does he go over this?)

Well, you were wrong. Much of the area is California chaparral and woodlands, not deserts. The Mojave and Sonoran deserts are at the far South end of the state.

>Why don't phone makers optimize for power efficiency?

They do. I don't know what misunderstandings could lead you to believe that phone makers don't already spend significant effort and resources on power efficiency.

You’re going to love this: https://mitxela.com/projects/melting_kicad

Your argument doesn’t make the point you think it does. If someone maliciously placed convincing fake road signs on the road then they could easily cause severe injury or death. This would be a serious problem, not to be taken lightly.

I build “74 series logic” computers as a hobby. It’s a lot of fun!

It’s not difficult to buy old 74x181 and 74x182 ICs on eBay. You can even get sixteen-bit ALUs like the IDT 7831 for decent prices.

Build a register file from a bank of registers. For example, use a 74x138 and a few 74x377.

Alternatively, either use a true dual port SRAM to build a three port register file, or build your own from a time-multiplexed SRAM and some bus transceivers.

Complex combinational logic can be implemented in an EEPROM truth table pretty easily.

Sometimes, part of the fun is figuring out how to build a complex device from a very limited palette of parts.

Kicad has an autorouter? Are you talking about FreeRouting?