frankohn

Is this another failure of the US government to provide one of the most basic protection to its citizens? Normally the government should establish rules that prevent this sort of thing to happen.

This also happens because the Italian television dumbs people down. Now we have also the social media so there is very little hope things will get any better.

> I particularly love iActive Directory, iExchange, iSQLserver, iDynamics ERP, iTeams. Apples office products are the reason noone uses Excel any more.

I see your sarcasm backfire as most you are listing is just Microsoft dog-food with no real usefulness. The only good thing in your list is Excel, all the rest is bloatware. Teams is a resource hog that serve no useful purpose. Skype was perfectly fine to send messages or have some video call.

I admit I don't have experience as an IT administator but things like managing emails, accounts, database, manage remote computers can be done with well estalished tools from the linux/BSD world.

The Windows ecosystem typically deployed in corporate PCs or workstations is often insecure, slow, and poorly implemented, resulting in ongoing issues visible to everyone. Examples include problems with malware, ransomware, and Windows botnets.

In corporate environments, IT staff struggle to contain these issues using antivirus software, firewalls, and proxies. These security measures often slow down PCs significantly, even on recent multi-core systems that should be responsive.

Microsoft is responsible for providing an operating system that is inherently insecure and vulnerable. They have prioritized user lock-in, dark patterns, and ease of use over security.

Apple has done a much better job with macOS in terms of security and performance.

The corporate world is now divided into two categories: 1. Software-savvy companies that run on Linux or BSD variants, occasionally providing macOS to their employees. These include companies like Google, Amazon, Netflix, and many others. 2. Companies that are not software-focused, as it's not their primary business. These organizations are left with Microsoft's offerings, paying for licenses and dealing with slow and insecure software.

The main advantage of Microsoft's products is the Office suite: Excel, Word and Powerpoint but even Word is actually mediocre.

EDIT: improve expression and fix errors:

I created a similar project for the book Madame Bovary, but in French using the ElevenLabs API.

A sample of the first chapter is available here:

https://fairpublishing.org/index.php/ebooks/sample-audiobook...

The voice quality and pronunciation are excellent. However, the system struggles with acting, so the tone and emotional expression are often wrong during dialogues. Additionally, I have to fragment the text into short paragraphs, making it challenging to set appropriate break durations, resulting in an unnatural rhythm.

Despite the technical quality and my appreciation for the reading voice, I won't continue in this direction.

ElevenLabs is quite expensive, but it would be worth it if the final result were good enough for listeners to purchase the audiobook.

I don't know if using OpenAI's API in English would yield better results. However, OpenAI's performance in non-English languages is not satisfactory.

Interesting to know. For the moment, several months, I still have no login attempts but so that means my server didn't get picked up by any port scanner.

Some time ago I set up a server for a website and I was appalled, like many others, by the number of SSH connection attempts. I decided to open SSH only in a randomly chosen port number above 1024 and now I have essentially zero probing attempt. It is trivial but for me is a satisfying configuration.

I agree with your analysis but Greek weren't merely conqueror, they are part of Sicily because they established themselves there and remained. Large part of Catania and Syracuse are of Greek ascent.

About the arable land, I don't know, Sicily is extremely fertile in general and there also some large plains as well like in Palermo. Sicily was extremely rich and prosper during the Normad period and for the Arabs who came before it was nothing short than a paradise.

I am from Sicily, near Palermo. In my humble opinion the main reason of emergency of Mafia was injustice and bad government, most prominently from Bourbon family but also from previous kingdoms. When there is injustice and bad government you learn to despise the authorities and the laws and your priority is the survival.

Sicily was great when it was governed by the Normands but that didn't last for a long time.

I live now in Switzerland and I am studying its history. It seems one of the reason of Switzerland prosperity and order was they never got a prince or a king but cities were autonomously governing themselves.

I see that my post was down voted because it was written by an LLM in a verbose and pretentious style. That's okay but the idea I expressed are my own, the LLM did only the wording.

I regret also that the discussion derailed to discuss about LLM generated contents. I will be more careful the next time.

I do not agree with your generalisation, the Meson build system is well thought, it has a clear declarative syntax that let you just express what you want in a direct way.

The designer of Meson explicitly avoided making the language turing complete so for example you cannot define functions. In my experience this was an excellent decision to limit people tendency to write complex stuff and put the pressure on the Meson developer to implement themselves all the useful functionalities.

In my experience the Meson configuration are as simple as they can be and accommodate only a modicum of complexity to describe OS specific options or advanced compiler option one may need.

Please note that some projects' Meson file have been made complex because of the goal to match whatever the configure script was doing. I had in mind the crazy habits of autotools to check if the system has any possibly used function because some system may not have it.

Yes, I told ChatGPT4 what I wanted to say and I left him the wording. I don't really like the style he adopted but, in some way, it is better than my approximative, rough, English.

I have made my own tool to solve this problem:

https://github.com/franko/lhelper

It is currently used by nobody except me but it serves me well.

Its strong points are:

- it works on macOS, Linux and Windows - it is possible to choose the options you want to enable for each package - compiles packages using your own compiler toolchain - create static libraries by default but you can choose a shared library.

Based on your comment, it appears to me that there may be a correlation between the number of X or Y chromosomes and an individual's height. Typically, individuals possess either XX or XY chromosomes. However, variations such as XXY (Klinefelter syndrome) or XYY syndrome do exist and are associated with increased stature. The question of whether this correlation is scientifically substantiated and the mechanisms behind these phenotypic expressions are intriguing and worth exploring further.

I tried with the following function that produce the power set, the set of all possible subset, in the similar spirit of the function that create all the possible permutations:

Explain simply what this function does:

  ```
  def func(ls):
    if len(ls) == 0:
      return [ [] ]
    elif len(ls) == 1:
      return [ [], ls ]
    else:
      x = ls[-1]
      prem = func(ls[:-1])
      p = prem[:]
      for e in prem:
        p.append(e + [x])
      return p
  ```

GPT-4 aced the answer which is remarkable but I think that it is because it have seen this "pattern" in its learning database being a fundamental function in mathematics.

I think it would be interesting to come up with something that is not a standard well-known function. I have to think to something else.

You need to engineer a system when the AI state something it has to give a command that should support what it says and explain how the command shows that it is true. At this point the command should be really executed and its output or error fed yo the AI so that it can confirm the statements or correct it.

I am crazy how they think a system with no feedback loop can be always accurate. Only perfect mathematics can work like this, any -like system need to have a feedback loop.

I agree that the best thing is to not give them smartphones but sometimes parents do not agree between them. Sometimes close friends and family will say you are too hard on your kids.

Some parents just don't realise how bad this is or they don't care.

Sometimes it's the grandparents who give them the smartphone and what you wanted to do is nullified and you are seen as bad because you deny to give them something "so good".

No, all in all, a global, robust solution need to be imposed by the governments. Like for tobacco, like for alcohol or drugs.

I have the problem with my daughter and I hate all this social media and stupid ad-based videogames in the smartphones.

This is when technology makes the world worst, the companies just seek their interest.

I do not like when people take a shortcut and say that ChatGPT is from Microsoft. ChatGPT is from OpenAI. OpenAI is not part of Microsoft. They made an agreement of some sort but OpenAI is not part of Microsoft.

In the book the The game of Thrones what happens at Saltpans with Arya and Sandor Clegane ?

Here the link with the answer of ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/share/7c46a3bd-efa8-49e9-8018-554e1e... and also a follow up question.

I don't know but I think google bard had access to the book's content as well because it mentioned correctly some characters and some places I didn't mention in my question.

Just tried out Google Bard, now available in Europe, and I have to say, my first experience was rather disconcerting. I threw at it a relatively obscure question about an event in the third book of A Song of Ice and Fire series, involving characters Arya Stark and Sandor Clegane.

To my surprise, Google Bard's response, while confident, was a bizarre mix of actual characters and situations from the book series, but the event it described was pure fabrication. It seemed as if it had hallucinated the entire scenario. Not exactly what I was expecting from such a sophisticated AI model.

As a point of comparison, I posed the exact same question to OpenAI's ChatGPT-4. It responded with a spot-on account of the event, complete with rich detail and an impressive level of accuracy. A stark contrast to Google Bard's confabulation.

In the light of this initial test, I can't say I'm ready to utilize Google Bard for anything serious just yet. The comparison with ChatGPT-4 is night and day. Despite this being just a single data point, the difference in quality and reliability was apparent. I'll be sticking with ChatGPT-4 for the time being.

Lua can be run without using C or C++ just by running the interpreter. The shortcoming is that the standard library is intentionally very limited so there is very little you can do using Lua alone.

The main path is to implement with C or C++ bindings to the libraries you want to use and expose them as Lua module. This is the way Lua is supposed to be used.

The author was struck by the fact that you don't really own the things you purchase on Google platforms and the fact that they can block your access for any reason directed by an algorithm with no way to get back to them to recover the access you had.

I will argue about the first problem: one doesn't really own the things we buy on Google platforms.

This is a general trend with many platforms nowadays like Amazon and Kobo ebooks for example but also Netflix, Spotify and almost everything else. They just don't want to let you to download the content in DRM-free format. They say they are legally obliged but in reality this is what the content industry wants. They have used their lobbying power to obtain from the government the laws they wanted.

I sustain that this system is unfair to the users because:

1. users can be deprived of the goods they purchased with little or no possibility to have their rights restored. 2. users cannot, even temporarily, lend something they purchased to a friend or a familiar 3. users cannot sold back of give away what they purchased and no longer want to use

Please note that all these problems did not existed when the goods were physical objects like a music CD or a book. You owned them and you was free to lend or just give them to a friend or just someone else.

Please note that the fact you had these rights was not thanks to the benevolence of the content creation industry but it was just come from the simple fact that they sold you a physical objects and it was not practically possible to restrict people rights on the object they purchased.

In addition the laws we have since centuries protect the right of private property. These laws are a pillar of our society and has not been done under the pressure of some industries' lobbies.

What follows from these considerations is:

- the practice of restrict people from content they purchased in unfair to the user - the laws that govern these practice serve the interest of the content industries and are contrary to the user's right.

This means people should say "no" to purchase content on all these platforms and only purchase digitally when they get a DRM-free file with the content they purchased. It is also fine to pirate things because the system is just broken and unfair.

I would like also to add that even when they sell you a physical object or give you a DRM-free file, the relation between the user and the vendor is unfair. The reason is that, if we look to all the users together, the vendor can extract an unlimited and potentially disproportionate amount of money from their creation. I consider this unfair because the reward they get should be proportionate to the value of the content and the work it took to produce it but this is not actually the case.

To cite some example: an Elsevir article written and peer-reviewed by University researcher, may be thirty years ago, and if you want to read it you have to pay a ridiculous disproportionate amount like 30 dollars. They can extract and unlimited amount of money for something they contributed very little to. The system is flawed and unfair and the law are not there to fix things.

Another example: the copyright for US created content have been extended to the unreasonable to protect the interest of the content industry. Initially the old copyright law dictated a more reasonable duration before the copyright expired.

This means that the system of the copyright was already unfair since its beginning but now it is even more unfair than before.

We are trading our rights for a better system and good laws for convenience but sometimes, because of an accident, we are struck all of the sudden about how unfair the system is.

The fault is to the users that are not able to say "no" to these bad practices.

The author of the post seems to use Windows which is the worst in term of crap software and abusive practices. Just use Linux, you will have less but at least you will not be abused.

> Surely you can’t believe this anymore with the discovery of computer science, AI, type theory , etc?

Well, I guess in some way we observe that now mathematics can be coupled, in addition to physics, to some new fields like AI, computer science and cryptography.

In any case I still think that mathematics becomes more interesting and worthy to study when it is applied into another field like the one we mentioned. In some sense its applications give more sense and more depth to mathematics itself.

Some people don't want to learn mathematics because they don't see how it is useful and they don't see its beauty neither. Yet sometime it happens that, later, they discover some applications where mathematics is needed and at this moment the understand how useful and deep mathematics is, just because they see its applications and they understand its meaning.

I noticed this too but I found it distracting and not useful. At first I thought it was a particle of dirty on my screen and realized it was a ligature once I looked more carefully.

I guess a good ligature is one that a reader hardly notice at all.

Pretty agree with the post but it is funny he discovered that "truth" so late in his life.

I generally consider mathematics and physics as being the higher achievements of human knowledge and it is normal to "worship" them as the most important field of study so much that some people dedicate their entire life to them with the same devotion of true monks.

It is surprising that the author didn't include Physics in the fields that provides valuable and durable knowledge worth to acquire. Mathematics alone is sort of "sterile" when is not used within physics knowledge. Without physics it is a sort of highly abstract beauty that people pursuit only for the sake of it's beauty.

On the other side we have to recognize that both mathematics and physics capture nothing about the experience of life as a human being. For this we need real life experience, knowing other people and exchange with them, study history and read historical and social essays in addition to literature classics.

One will not find in them the sharp accuracy and simple laws that physics and mathematics provides but I guess there is no other way to learn what life is and its partial, imperfect truths.

I also cannot resist to recommend, for those who love reading Dostoevsky, to read also Bulgakov's master and Marguerite which is a true masterpiece of beauty and gives a sharp and deep view of what humanity is.

Thank you, that looks interesting too. In addition I like Lua because is much more light weighted than python and being embedded is nice to reduce dependencies.

The only problem I see is fragmentation. People are already considering cmake as the de facto standard despite all its flaws. If the cmake alternatives are too fragmented it will play in favor of cmake.

On the other side projects like xmake are interesting propositions. I will have a look at it in any case, thank you.

Thank you, that looks interesting. I will check how it works with my projects.

My experience aligns well with your. For any moderately complex project makefiles are inadequate and trying to make them work is a frustrating experience even in GNU make is pretty capable.

Ninja is a fine tool but it requires an higher level language to generate it's build files.

Cmake is just horrible, I just cannot stand it. I choose Meson instead and I am quite happy with it. Meson developers focus a lot on doing the right design decisions. They keep the language very simple and offer mostly one logical way to do a thing and Meson ensure it works right in every circumstance. Yet it offers advanced options when they are required but they are always well thought out.

If you compare meson to make at first you may think make is more flexible but ultimately it leaves to you many problems it doesn't solve and it turns out to be inadequate.

With make, declare automatically dependencies from header files? You are alone, that's your problem. There are some tricks using GCC but they looks like hacks. Maintain projects build logic across subfolders? That's your problem. Make only provide a very rough, inadequate mechanism.

Want to do parallel build by respecting dependencies across folder? Sorry, that's your problem but it may work using some tricks.

Want to build out of tree? Hmmm not supported in a standard idiomatic way. You need to use tricks.

How you create a static library in a cross-platform way? That's your problem. The same for shared libraries.

Personally I think that make is an obsolete tool whose design is inadequate very much like CVS that was replaced by git.

To me the only downside of Meson is that it requires python but I can accommodate with that.