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freehorse

3,883 karma · joined January 17, 2023

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freehorse··on I dumped Apple’s word list
> Someone went out of their way to add one and not the other.

And it worked! It has been so much censored that neither of us even knew that word.

freehorse··on I dumped Apple’s word list
First time I heard that word too. Which proves the point /s

People are reading too much into this.

freehorse··on I dumped Apple’s word list
> Would anyone be offended by the text “don’t forget to bring your Trump to band practice”?

Trump could be offended. It is obviously there to avoid offending Trump.

And it is not considered "offensive" but "sensitive".

freehorse··on Efficient algorithms, the Exponential Time Hypothesis, and losing the plot
I would say that there is nothing in intuition that goes against infinities, really. Quite the opposite, eg most ancient greek philosophy assumed matter could be divided indefinitely while retaining its properties. It was scientific and mathematical development that actually showed that finite/discrete models are enough to describe physics.

Moreover, even if finitism is not enough, as I said in mathematics infinity is specific concepts/abstractions, and there are even infinities with different cardinalities, not to mention the axiomatic system within which it is defined produces different properties of infinity. Which infinity is the universe of all these? I am not even sure if this question can be really meaningful, unless we get to a completely different description of the universe than the ones we have where such statements can actually make sense. The best we can get imo is to show that some accurate physical model requires infinity, and that seems already quite hard thing to show.

freehorse··on Efficient algorithms, the Exponential Time Hypothesis, and losing the plot
Infinity is an abstraction. The universe cannot be "infinite" in the mathematical sense, as the mathematical infinity is an abstraction. The only meaningful question is "is mathematical infinity required to produce good models of the universe/physics?" and the answer so far is "no". We use infinity because it is convenient, but it is not really needed.

There is no reason to think that "infinity" will be essential to describing the universe any more than any other possible abstraction that we have not so far constructed.

freehorse··on The $6.3B Binance hack was pulled off in just 20 minutes
Yeah, temporarily. I doubt that being out of service for a few days gives enough grounds to sue, even merely due to ToS provisions. And that is indeed irrelevant as it is about being temporarily out of service, not having "lost customer money".

Again they cannot be charged for losing billions of their own money, and there is no way to somehow consider the lost funds as "customers' money". I am all for companies getting sued due to negligence when eg they fail to protect customer data, but this is just between binance and the hackers.

freehorse··on The $6.3B Binance hack was pulled off in just 20 minutes
What negligence? They got their own money stolen. You do not get sued for being robbed of your money, normally. If they do not have the liquidity to let people withdraw money that is another issue, but it does not seem to be the case.
freehorse··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
The touchscreen laptops I have seen last years are just normal windows laptops that happen to have a touchscreen, which I assume is what you refer to as "half way experience". How are you supposed to use it any differently anyway when you cannot actually turn it into a tablet anyway by separating screen and keyboard? And my impression was not that anybody was unhappy anyway.
freehorse··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
"Tablet mode" was not necessary to use for touchscreen, though. As far as I remember you can have full touchscreen functionality in the default mode of windows. I had a surface pro 4 for some years and I do not remember using tablet mode ever.

Windows 8, which was tablet-oriented, was one of these skip generations of windows that nobody cares about in the end, and when the next comes everybody forgets. I never installed it anyway. I have not owned a touchscreen laptop myself since then, but from friends that have and I have used theirs, it is like OP described as a "harmless additional feature/why not", something that just makes certain interactions a bit faster.

But especially on an actual laptop, one that you cannot just separate the screen from the keyboard, stuff like "virtual keyboard" and "tablet mode" matter much less because it is not like you will take it and use it as a pure tablet anyway.

freehorse··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
13-inch M5 MacBook Air: 2.7 pounds (1.23 kg)

https://support.apple.com/en-us/126320

Macbook airs are lighter because they are smaller and lack fans (and maybe for other reasons too) so it is not comparable, but it is one of the reasons I like fanless laptops (whatever cuts a bit the weight for mobility is welcome).

freehorse··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
I agree, but that is due to social struggle not just because more efficient means of production got invented, which is also what I think is the point and the reason I asked the question.
freehorse··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
The question is not whether working hours have decreased in history, but whether this has been a direct result of productivity increases as opposed to due to other factors, not just due to increases to productivity. I don't think most commenters here address that at all.
freehorse··on The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False [pdf]
Also most of the results come from "spray attacks". In addition to the results that are found there are also tons of failed attempts on other problems. So merely through how large the whole space is one should not necessarily expect groundbreaking results in cryptography specifically (even though it can also be true that some results be withheld, at the same time).
freehorse··on The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False [pdf]
The issue is that if a country's agencies find an efficient attack to modern public key based cryptography with LLMs, there is no reason to think that other countries will not find the same in a few months with their LLMs. So, finding a vulnerability could offer a short term advantage, but one would want eventually to protect their own, too.
freehorse··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
Was it the case before the 70s?
freehorse··on Proton to 'Re-Interview' Staff About AI to See Who Gets to Keep Their Job
There is not really a *pay*wall, just an registration-wall.

Their rational: https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-email-addre...

For the question, they say that the interview will determine stuff like roles and continued employment.

freehorse··on New iPad mini
What you definitely notice between 60Hz vs 120Hz on a phone is the battery drain.

Depends a lot on the usage I guess. In a tablet where you may draw etc you can notice the difference definitely. Or if you play games on the phone. But otherwise I don't think the difference is that important as it is sometimes claimed.

freehorse··on Iron Age salt-mining complex found beneath Hallstatt in Austria
> He changed the –ce in words like defence, offence, and pretence to –se; abandoned the second, silent "l" in verbs such as travel and cancel when forming the past tense; dropped the "u" from words such as humour and colour; and dropped the "k" from words such as publick and musick.

Isn't most of it just the difference between british and american english? I was definitely taught the "old" style in my english education and still see it being used. So it does not seem to have been really universally acknowledged/adhered to as a reform?

Not that english language has not changed but it seems that there is not as much of a centralised, widely adopted and intentional reform to match the written form with the spoken one.

freehorse··on Iron Age salt-mining complex found beneath Hallstatt in Austria
"You speak what you see" does not mean that every letter or combination of consonants is pronounced the same, but that there are clear rules that determine how every thing is spoken (with exceptions being rare). The fact that "ch" is pronounced differently depending on the vowel before is a consistent rule. In contrast in languages like english you do not have consistent rules like that for a big part of the language, to the extent that a native speaker encountering a new word (eg a street or town name) may not know how to speak or write it.
freehorse··on Google illegally cut down 250K trees in Finland for data center
Yes there is, in the "middle ground" fantasy land. In reality, there is no middle ground when such power is involved.
freehorse··on Google illegally cut down 250K trees in Finland for data center
> If you sell Google a great big slice of land to build a DC, I don't think it's very surprising they cut down the trees

When you own a piece of land containing a forest area there are typically (in most of europe at least) certain rules and regulation as to what you can do and what sort of permissions you need. Eg you may be required to keep some patches of the forest vs just cutting down everything, there can be places you cannot clear the forest completely etc.

Even if google could eventually anyway build some datacenters in that area, it does not mean that they were allowed to do what they did.

But otherwise I agree that this transaction should never have happened in the first place.

freehorse··on Google illegally cut down 250K trees in Finland for data center
As opposed to megacorporations doing whatever the fuck they want, and fuck everyone.
freehorse··on France needs to read my paper
"Value creation" is euphemism for making profit. It forces use of land towards the currently most profitable in an area, which is not necessarily what is socially valuable, because if you do not get enough money to pay for the hypothetical value you cannot do anything else. Eg in places where tourism is a prevailing source of making the most money it would mean that you cannot do anything else than short renting to tourists or stuff directed to tourists, which can be destructive for a lot of local businesses and communities (there are already problems and this would make it worse). Similar to other types of using land that may or may not be always attainable for every single piece of land even.

It also sounds like a mechanism to induce appropriation of property of small landowners to big corporations and interests, and not sure this furthering of concentration of land and wealth is great for local communities either. It basically gives more power to those who already have more power.

freehorse··on EA is shutting down BioWare
Sadly, the studio behind disco elysium (za/um) is a primary example of "can't shake the startup mode", as the company was somehow bought by investors who then fired the original team, there has been a huge controversy around this.
freehorse··on EA is shutting down BioWare
BG 1 & 2 were definitely developed by bioware, interplay was the publisher. Interplay (black isle studios) developed icewind dale and planescape:torment, which were based on bioware's infinity engine. NWN1 was bioware and NWN2 was obsidian (came from black isle studios).

Source: memory and crawling through wikipedia articles

freehorse··on In Hilbert space, all things are quantumly possible
Aren't Fock spaces still hilbert spaces?
freehorse··on I Became a Citizen of Japan
That is what many people think before risking deportation for no other reason than not taking this seriously enough.
freehorse··on Woman who rescued injured crow keeps getting 'thank-you gifts' from birds [video]
She eats only stupid animals.
freehorse··on Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit
It there is no "paid labour" then they are not employees.
freehorse··on Wanted to download an ISO, ended up writing a kernel exploit
Which is why I used "may". Is "fuck you" a valid expression of user frustration or is it cruelty? Who decides that? Considering anthropic is likely automating any function through claude, and that claude instance stated that they did not like it, it is reasonable to think that another claude instance doing some checking could flag this interaction as a violation.

In any case, the ToS change is vague enough that it could be a violation or not.

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