Nitrolo

To be fair, Mistral doesn't list Ukrainian as one of the supported languages.

I've recently been given a MacBook for work for the first time and this was driving me crazy, thank you!

Now I just need to figure out how to make Word stick to these commands and not decide that right half of the screen means the right 3/4 of the screen.

Any particular template you'd recommend? My resume is LaTeX too but I'm not 100% happy with it (about 98% happy and much happier than with anything else however).

For years YouTube would randomly change my language to Italian and auto translate all the titles, which was annoying but I can change the language back to English and it was fine.

Thing is, I haven't lived in Italy for well over a decade. I don't consume much Italian content. I've tried my best to purge my Google account of any possible trace of Italian language settings, I've never saved an Italian address etc.

And yet Google must be convinced that, because I was in Italy over a dozen years ago when I made the account I must be Italian, and that cannot possibly change.

That's already how this works, basically. You have to keep paying a fee to keep your patent, and the fees increase with each year of the patent.

The fees are fixed, but the effect is pretty similar to what you describe.

In some jurisdictions you get a discount on the fees if you declare that you are open to licence out your patent. Then everyone can use your invention without having to ask for permission,as long as they pay the license fee.

EDIT: I looked it up, in Germany (§ 23 PatG) the patent office can set the licence fees that others have to pay, so you can't play games by just setting the fee to a trillion euros.

Why are you not allowed to hire a cook, painter or child carer?

Does anyone know of a nice UI wrapper for something like whisper.cpp?

I need to write a lot of long texts for work and some good dictation software would be great. I know there's Dragon, but somehow I have not been able to find something that fits my need and is free.

Lawyer in training here!

Trademarks do get grouped into classes (the so called "Nice Classification", like the French city [0]). The classes are very detailed, and the first 34 refer to "Goods", the rest to "Services".

Specifically class 9 refers to (among many other things), "computers, computer software", class 42 to "design and development of computer hardware and software".

However those are mostly just to simplify searching for and dealing with the huge amount of trademarks. Each trademark comes with its own list of goods and services it's supposed to cover. Their trademark in the UK [1] covers "computer software, software and apparatus for the extraction of business information and knowledge".

They also appear to have registered a trademark this september [2] with a much broader scope, so after Meta started using threads. I'm not familiar with UK law and how it relates to trademarks in this case, however.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_(Nice)_Classific... [1]: https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00... [2]: https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00...

Quite a bit, but Wikipedia provides sources! So I checked [0].

In section 3.3 it says that GSK argued their patent on the new form was being infringed because "there were batches of anhydrate that converted almost entirely into hemihydrate when stored at 40 °C and 75 % humidity within one month."

So "if you keep it wet and warm it will partially convert over the course of a month", and as far as I can tell the "seeding" aspect was not clarified, at least not in the article.

Also it bugs me that the Wikipedia author decided to call the loss for GSK a "technicality". It was decided that it was not relevant that microscopic quantities of the new form were created by accident, I think that is the correct decision and not a technicality.

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4479028/

Is there something like oobabooga to easily run this in a click-and-run way? Where I can load up a model, a text, and ask it questions?

As a comparison, an estimate for the cost of World War II is $5T, for US spending at least [0].

Obviously there's differences in methodology etc. but seems to be the same ballpark. Not sure I'd call WWII cheap.

[0]: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2020/february/war-...

Depending in the demographics, a fertility rate below replacement level can still lead to a rising population even when excluding migrants, as the people who would be "replaced" by the new births might live for many more decades.

I.e., we'd probably still have a housing crisis in Europe even if not a single foreigner came in.

I'll guess that this is referencing asylum seekers and migrants.

I keep seeing this argument pop up all the time online and in person, but it's never really made sense to me. Population growth in most European countries is lower now than at many periods in the past, yet we were able to house rising populations somehow.

Do people think cities like Berlin and Paris just got plopped down fully formed at some distant point in the past, together with instructions reading "Population: 3 million max., never exceed or add anything"? They and their infrastructure have grown over time as the population has grown. There's no magic maximum population limit that every city in the western world has just happened to hit right in the last 20 years.

I know you're joking, but at least in Germany you couldn't _steal_ electricity because electricity is not a _thing_ (according to German law)[0]. They fixed that well over a century ago by just making electricity theft itself a specific crime though.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entziehung_elektrischer_Energi...

I don't know how complete the digitization of old texts is, but if you go to worldwide.espacenet.com, search for "airship" and reverse sort by date you get documents from the 1880s.

In fact I'm downloading a whole batch of patent texts right now because I wanted to experiment with semantic search on patent texts.

Anyone here have any pointers on what the state of the art method for semantic search through a large corpus would be? I've just started researching and BERT and friends seems like it was popular about 2 years ago but things move so fast I wouldn't know what I should do now.

What about a medium sized corpus of text, say 100.000 pages of text?

I once read somewhere that an estimated 70% of all technical knowledge has only ever been published in the form of patents. I always find it fascinating to see these ideas described in detail and with technical drawings in old patent applications, a quick google search results in this one [0] describing a mooring mast, filed by the same company that built the R-100.

[0]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1636354A/

Are parents disputes decided by a jury in the US? I know we have a different system in Germany and don't have juries to begin with, but patent disputes are generally handled by specific courts here and, given how specific and technical these cases can be, I wouldn't trust twelve random people to decide them.

I don't think that's correct. The church tax goes directly to the church, not into state coffers. The salaries of bishops and priests, however, are paid directly by the state.

In addition to that Germany is still paying reparations for land that was expropriated from the church in the early 19th century, at a tune of half a billion Euros per year, for eternity.

If you speak German, this is an informative read: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchenfinanzierung

EDIT: Someone linked to the Wikipedia article for uranium tiles, which says that the majority of the radiation comes from the decay products and is beta radiation[1]. Beta radiation has a weighing factor of 1, which means it's about 0.1 mSv/h. For comparison Wikipedia says:

"90 μSv/h: Natural radiation on a monazite beach near Guarapari, Brazil."

================

EDIT 2: Looking more closely it appears that the dosimeter in the video is switched to µSv/h, so it's reading 0.1 mSv/h anyway and the whole discussion below can be skipped if you're not interested in the difference between Gy and Sv.

==========

Seems to be milliroentgen/h according to another commenter, which is an older unit. Today you'd use Gray (Gy), which is 1 J/kg of energy deposited in material, and Sievert (Sv), which is Gy adjusted by a factor to account for different radiation types and body parts to get comparable biological effects.

For soft tissue (~= humans) 1 R = 0.01 Gy, so the dose would be ~0.1 mGy/h. Converting that to Sievert is more complicated. Uranium is an alpha emitter, for which you'd use a weighing factor of 20 [0], getting 2mSv/h.

1 mSv/h = "NRC definition of a high radiation area in a nuclear power plant, warranting a chain-link fence." [0]

However alpha radiation also gets blocked by very flimsy barriers, such as a few cm of air, or the layer of dead skin cells on your skin. So the effective dose might be closer to 0!

You also have to consider that the decay products or Uranium are beta emitters. Beta rays have a weighing factor of 1, but they do penetrate deeper (stopped by a few feet of air, can penetrate the skin).

The real effective dose in Sv depends on the exact ratio of decay products to U-238, and how deeply the beta rays of those products penetrate your body (there's different weighing factors for different body parts!).

In conclusion: probably not too much, but radiation and radiation shielding is a complicated subject we managed to spend a whole semester on.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_tile

EDIT: Someone linked to the Wikipedia article for uranium tiles, which says that the majority of the radiation comes from the decay products and is beta radiation[1]. Beta radiation has a weighing factor of 1, which makes your calculation pretty much correct!

==========

EDIT 2: Looking more closely it appears that the dosimeter in the video is switched to µSv/h, so it's reading 0.1 mSv/h anyway and the whole discussion below can be skipped if you're not interested in the difference between Gy and Sv.

==========

If I remember my lectures correctly (Wikipedia did help me here), the conversion is 1 Roentgen ~ 00.1 Gray (Gy), which is a slightly different unit from Sievert (Sv).

1 Gy is 1 J/kg of absorbed energy, however the biological effects change depending on the type of radiation. Sv is Gy adjusted by a weighing factor. It's 1 for gamma rays, where 1 Gy = 1 Sv, but for alpha particles it's 20 [0].

Uranium-238 emits alpha particles, which get stopped by a few cm of air or even dead skin. So the effective dose you are receiving from the decay of U-238 is probably closer to 0 mSv/h.

Or, if you eat it and it's inside you, 2 mSv/h, at which point you should probably be quite worried.

The decay products of U-238 however are beta emitters, which changes the calculation again. The beta particles can penetrate the skin, but the weighing factor for beta radiation is 1, so it can reach you but is also less dangerous. So what's the actual final value? I honestly don't know, radiation can be complicated, and I just wanted to share the difference between Gy and Sv!

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_tile

I was pretty confused when they said Canada but I checked and it turns out, Canada is part of ESA!

As a "non-full member", sure, but I'm still surprised. Fancy that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Space_Agency?wprov=sf...

There's a concept in engineering called "Reißlänge" (≈ breaking length), which is how long a cable of a certain material can be before it would rip due to its own weight if suspended by one end [0].

The values for some materials are actually much higher than I remembered, with Kevlar reaching ~250 km. From a purely hold-its-own-weight perspective it seems like it might actually be possible!

Obviously there's a ton of other problems that wouldn't make it feasible, the first I can think of is the weight of a 50 km tether wouldn't allow the balloon to even take off. I'm sure you can think of another million reasons it wouldn't work.

[0]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rei%C3%9Fl%C3%A4nge

I'd assume she'd still receive her UK pension, right? Depending on the exchange rate and possible tax implications it may end up being less than it would be back in the UK, but having contributed to a pension scheme she'll still presumably get something back, just not from the German system.

Funny that, I'm wearing the Heattech Ultra turtleneck right now, it cost 30€ and is probably the comfiest top I own. The reason I was asking for alternatives is simply that I can't get a non-turtleneck one in my size because they sell out immediately.

Overall I'm really happy with all the clothes I got from Uniqlo.

Can you recommend any brand with a reasonable price tag?

I've checked the big brands but merino is a lot more expensive than synthetic stuff.

Any particular brand you'd recommend?

I don't need anything fancy but the higher range stuff (Helly Hansen, Arcteryx, Patagonia, etc.) is easily triple that.

Warning, annecdata: we turned down our heating signifcantly this winter, and both my roommate and me have gotten quite a bit of mold on and around our windows.

The thermostat is now back up to 19.5°C.

I always imagined these antarctic stations as a kind of spaceship, with a lot of technology and effort poured into them but maybe a few dozen scientists at most operating everything.

Instead this is a whole town! Wikipedia says the population is 1000 people in the summer, which is probably 20 times more than I would have guessed.

Fascinating, thanks for the link!

When you say "mostly optional" I assume you mean working out will drastically reduce the rate of muscle loss. Is that what you mean or are there other intervention?

That is incredible. In the literal sense of the word, I thought you were joking until I was halfway through your post.

Do you have any more links? I'd love to learn more.