fractallyte

Why would you assume the population cap is arbitrary? There's a calculable limit to the population an area of land can sustain. (Yes, some agricultural practices can mitigate that, but that should also be weighed against culture and history, and how much change is acceptable.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity

It's being proposed in order to maintain quality of life. No one wants to be overcrowded. This is a sane solution: collectively agree on the maximum tolerable population. Then it's down to individual responsibility to obey the norms of one's society.

Edit: unless you're Swiss, your opinion is irrelevant. Swiss voters have a right to decide how they want to live. They're not beholden to EU laws; they can make their own sovereign decisions, and everyone must respect that.

You're not bad at writing. You have your own style. Keep it up! This was an interesting article.

I strongly disagree. I found the whole article interesting and enlightening – I certainly wasn't aware of the topic before, and I'm glad it was posted on HN.

Furthermore, it didn't feel LLM-generated to me. Quirky, yes; nothing wrong with that.

I am a native English speaker, and I find accusations of LLM-writing exceedingly annoying – to the point where I sometimes intentionally write in that style, just so I can hit back with a profanity.

Because it's exactly relevant, and adds more to the discussion.

I have a PeriPage A6 Mini Bluetooth Portable Thermal Printer (https://www.peripageglobal.com/products/peripage-2-a6-mini-p...), the 304dpi option.

There are many similar models from other companies; however, while Bluetooth is advertised as its primary connection, this one also has a USB port, which works with Linux!

Bluetooth also works, but it was too unreliable for me. I ended up using Claude to write a small CLI tool which prints via raw USB: rock solid and simple.

You're downvoted, but correct. And I challenge anyone to dispute this. I'm sick and tired of people trying to justify piracy. If you want to read a book – the product of someone's hard work – pay for it (fairly).

That said, I also support Anna's Archive. We need access to books.

There's an LLM for that too...

https://www.hypercubic.ai/hopper

Many (human) translators use DeepL (https://www.deepl.com) in their daily jobs. It employs deep learning (hence the name), but not necessarily LLMs. And it's way better than Google Translate for many languages.

So this offers an alternative, legitimate, route to exactly the website content you're suspicious of.

What are the Claude "indications"?

Because there's a danger now that any writing (human or otherwise) can be labeled LLM-produced. So we need accurate heuristics, or none at all.

Patents are a much smaller space than the vast legal one in the article, so it's tractable for a human. The raw DSL spec length is roughly comparable to Lua or Go. It's a genuine grammar, with types and an AST; but no conditionals, control flow, expressions, etc. like a regular programming language.

A patent document can be represented in a graph. That opens it up to various transformations, refactoring, and validation – all mathematically rigorous! This is far more reliable than asking an LLM to check a document.

Using git enables not only regular diffs, but also structural diffs, which compare legal elements rather than just lines.

The LSP (yes, that too!) makes drafting much easier, with autocomplete and validation as I type.

I plan to open-source the DSL, and the tool that processes its files and outputs jurisdiction-aware, nicely formatted documents...

I have no idea.

A few months ago, for the first time in my life, I had to write a patent document. It was very complicated – too complicated. Noting the structure, I searched for tools, but found only LLMs. So I wrote my own tool.

The amusing thing is, LLMs prefer the DSL-structured document!

Interesting synchronicity: I've written a patent-drafting DSL which exactly parallels this – and which is now shaping up into an "IDE" for patent drafting...

Patent texts read as prose, but are actually precisely structured legal documents. The latest developments in this domain involve LLMs to create and modify patent documents, but even though the legal profession seems to have fallen all in on it, it's essentially rather fragile and error-prone.

I've gone the deterministic direction, which has opened up some very cool, previously unexplored, possibilities!

I went into this imagining something like Synfig Studio (https://www.synfig.org/) or Moho (https://moho.lostmarble.com/). "Studio" here is quite far from what it actually is: lip-syncing in static characters.

Also, Moho offers far more comprehensive (and comprehensible!) lip-sync: https://lostmarble.com/papagayo/

I get that you're using AI to boost capability with less effort, but at the moment, I think the more specialized tools are still a better avenue for this.

Lastly, I followed the link to Jellypod (https://www.jellypod.com/). It's pretty good, but falls into a vocal "uncanny valley". Even a human reading from a script wouldn't sound that perfect; the enunciations immediately come across as artificial.

Now, if this was an extension to Synfig (also open source!), it would be a much more interesting venture...

An Amiga 4000T with a SCSI interface, and the SCSI Zip drive worked perfectly with it – I could even boot the Amiga from a Zip disk!

However, since the Zip disks were formatted with an Amiga file system – I used PFS3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_File_System) – they couldn't be used with a PC.

I'm curious whether the data is still readable, after 30 years...

Unfortunately, I never got around to using it! I bought it with high hopes, but my Zip disks turned out to be so convenient and spacious that the VHS-backup need never arose.

That said, it's not too late... I still have my Amiga system in storage, and a VHS recorder.

VHS video cassettes could be used as tape drives!

There was this, from the same era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid

And I have this for my Amiga, also same era: http://www.hugolyppens.com/VBS.html

One feature missing from almost every mainstream word processor: REVEAL CODES! (https://kb.corel.com/en/127364)

This is a famous "killer" feature from WordPerfect: the ability to view and edit the low-level formatting for a document. It's invaluable for fixing weird bugs.

However, it works only because WP uses the "text-stream" paradigm, where a document comprises a linear stream of text with formatting codes (Bold, Font, Hard Return, etc.) embedded directly at the point at which they're applied.

In contrast, Word uses the "nested containers" model (characters inside words, words inside paragraphs, paragraphs inside sections, etc.), where this feature can't be replicated.

I didn't look closely at your code, but just thought to mention this feature.

The name gives it away:

UA 571-C remote gun sentry

Obviously developed in Ukraine ;-)

My friend works at Billa AT; I could ask her – but that would be cheating ;-)

Just last week I needed to output a formatted document, and my choices were constrained to: HTML+CSS, Markdown, docx (OOXML), or odt (ODF).

The formatting had to be manipulable in code; the first two options were unsuitable for my use case. That left OOXML and ODF.

Both docx and odt are zip files, with XML content. Any guess which one turned out to be the better choice? I was left wondering why docx even exists in the first place.

Anyone using OOXML can rightly be regarded as stupid. There are far superior formats, and we should insist on their usage.

It's a fascinating paradigm – as though it dropped here out of some future.

However, I'd never use it. Reason: having everything dynamically created JIT means there's a trade-off somewhere else; in this case, it's energy consumption. I'd rather "cache" applications (ie. have them as installable software, which has been built just once) than endlessly recreate software from scratch each time, with all the energy usage that entails.

I don't really understand this. What was stolen?

The computer doesn't "enjoy" books – it assimilates them as data. That data isn't stored verbatim; it's used to train a system. In return, ChatGPT is made freely available, and millions of people benefit from it.

What is morally wrong about this?

English Bull Terrier - closely related to a pit bull

My dog bit me accidentally while playing, a few times. Every time, he apologized. (That is: he stopped playing, made a characteristic sound, and licked me to make sure I was OK.)

A smelling pistake

Regarding the issues of banking apps: if the EU is serious about tech sovereignty, it's up to members to mandate that banks allow their apps to run on Sailfish, or other alternative operating systems. It really is as simple as that.

(But whether any EU member is capable of rising to this (very shallow) challenge... well, I'm justifiably cynical.)

I dispute your assertion: Sailfish's UI is WAY ahead of iOS and Android. It's simple, consistent, and intuitive; a complete contrast to the mess of iOS and the clunkiness of Android. As for stability, native Sailfish apps on my Xperia XA2 seldom, if ever, crash.

And, to my eyes, it simply looks better.

Libre Computer makes a range of SBCs and supports mainline Linux. I use their products, and I'm very happy with them.

"Most ARM single board computers depend on proprietary binary blobs to boot or ship with outdated vendor kernels that are never upstreamed and quickly abandoned. Libre Computer takes a different approach: we fund and contribute to the mainline Linux kernel and U-Boot directly, ensuring our platforms run on upstream open-source software with minimal proprietary firmware."

https://libre.computer/