kergonath

> Is -elle still a living suffix in French? I was under the impression that -ette is the standard.

Yes, both are used commonly. In names, there are Isabelle, Gabrielle, Cyrielle, Annabelle, Axelle, and many others. I am not sure there is any rule.

Danièle is the French spelling of the female name. It should have an accent, but in the US those get dropped regularly.

> I don't know any women named Daniele or men named Danielle.

I wouldn’t be surprise to meet a (female) Daniele. The second L is already dropped somewhat regularly in Michelle. Which is interesting because it came from the French, but since then the French spelling drifted to "Michèle" (and then more or less fell completely out of fashion, and then seemed to come back for a while). In any case, both are pronounced exactly the same way.

You are moving the goal posts. No single Flock camera can do that, either. Instead, what they offer is a network of cameras they can access remotely and they can use with facial recognition. And yes, this can be used to track people over long distances or across states.

There are precedents with Ring being very cozy with police departments, e.g.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/08/police-can-get-y...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/amazon-ring-stop...

And many more over the years (all the way until February of this year, when they cancelled a deal with Flock). Amazon is not a company to trust.

> Ring footage requires a court order, warrant, or subpoena outside of customer consent and access per legal process is generally limited to a small subset of footage

Weren’t there regular scandals about local law enforcement regularly accessing Ring footage without the owner’s agreement or knowledge? Ring absolutely is a surveillance tool that can be used without oversight. See here for example: https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/corporate/amazon-ri...

> I cannot see a problem if forest weight is maintained through replenishment and replacement

It does not scale. That’s how they are cutting down ancient pristine forest in Central Europe. It’s useful as a supplement to use wood waste; it cannot be a major source of energy.

Strong Kaleidoscope vibes. I love it!

The nice thing is that once it’s been published, you can re-read it at any time, and then compare it with whatever book you want. I don’t see how the publication year is really relevant, books don’t just expire after 6 months.

Yes, coincidence. It was submitted for publication but rejected in 1863 (and then lost in a pile of papers and re-found in 1989). Anybody familiar with e.g. how most of Tolkien’s works were published posthumously won’t be surprised. Jules Verne wrote a lot, and he did not have a Christopher to comb through the boxes of papers he left. There are 200k pages of drafts, letters and manuscripts in a museum in Nantes, and not everything ended up there.

And I don’t see why the Internet is relevant: not everything that happened since the mid-1980s are internet-related conspiracies.

He’s a rational actor, acting in his own interest. This, along with the other arseholes in similar situations acting similarly, ought to result in optimal allocation of ressources. That is the philosophical foundation of capitalism.

Greed is good, remember?

Exactly what I was thinking reading through this. This is amazing and also frightening and hilarious. It’s like a deformed version of how normal groups of humans would operate. Very rules and process-oriented humans. I found the no-blame inquiry into chicken tossing that resulted in what is effectively written law particularly striking, and adorable, and depressing. And cute.

> Arguably hardware companies like Nvidia have incentives to subsidize open models to drive GPU demand.

This does not mean that they would necessarily subsidise consumer demand. They may be very happy to sell palette-loads of GPUs to datacenter and large corporations.

Polymarket is very unreliable. People believe it because of survivor bias: they heard about all times when it turned out to be right, often associated with insider trading. You never hear about the thousands times it was wrong.

Yes, perpetual wars can be used as a tool of domestic control. The benign use is the rally around the flag effect. More harmful is using them as justifications to do anything without oversight. It’s one of the patterns shown by the vast majority of dictatorships and totalitarian governments. One of the aspects of fascism in Umberto Eco’s definition.

Someone posted and other people upvoted. But don’t worry, it will get flagged and drop out of the front page soon enough.

Le Pen is more or less dead politically. The RN is currently twisting itself into knots because they want to use the anti-government protests but are still supposed to be about law and order.

> do you think, if there was real oppression people could even vote democratically and change their government?

Sorry, they get no bonus point for accepting the elections’ results. It’s the bare minimum if they want to pretend to be in a democracy. It does not make them any less oppressive. See also Orban and the PiS.

Now they have some time in the opposition to build something credible to get back into power if they really want it.

Indeed. I know it’s a lazy way out because I don’t have to assume anything about the actual correctness of either, given that they are famously incompatible in the details.

But as a physicist I have no illusion that any of our theories are actually true. They are all models that help us making sense of an unimaginably complex universe.

I cannot stop fidgeting with the crown. This thing is addictive.

My iPhone did the same (as your Android). I am not sure I like it either, because I tend to listen to very different styles of music in my headphones and in my car. Anyway, it’s actually the car that tells the phone to start playing when it is connected. I just disabled it. It’s not an iOS versus Android thing.

Both cannot be “exactly correct” at the same time. And most likely, neither are.

And Musk, and Hegseth, and so many others…

The scale is almost never useful. You cannot quantify most things. Even with humans you get inconsistent results and confusion. As the parent said, a binary (ok/not ok) or ternary (bad/ok/good) choice is what’s appropriate, most of the time. If this is not granular enough, the vast majority of the time it means that you need more axes.

You know, it’s really not what happened. All these people, Gruber, Siracusa, and the usual suspects, were unanimous in their displeasure.

You don’t have to make it up, it was only one year ago. All their blog posts are still visible.

Don’t worry, there’s plenty of true believers as well.

> CERN was built on the premise that nuclear technology was too dangerous for anyone single nation to have

What? It’s not that kind of nuclear. The members collaborate because it’s insanely expensive to build these huge accelerators and not many countries have internal pools of scientists big enough to justify having one.

> Today they’re one of the biggest compute in the world

Not really. They have cool computers but the biggest are in the US and China.

> In my opinion, high energy particle physics is a dead end

Out of curiosity, what do you base this opinion on?

> Clearly, there is a path there where a fraction of that money, infra, and a fraction of the incredible geniouses that work there could be rerouted into a Opus/Mythos/Astra shape open / European system

No. People, even smart ones, are not interchangeable, universal geniuses. They end up in one position because they are good at something, it does not mean that they would be productive in a different position. And understanding our universe better is well worth the pennies we spend on CERN. Other people are already working on LLMs.

Besides, it’s not at all what is happening here.

> Also how do they avoid being eaten by predators if they are slow and vulnerable?

They mostly don’t. They just breed fast enough to compensate.

French escargots are smaller. I can see how the texture would be off-putting in a snail that’s about ten times as big.

Photos is fine, and it is still improving. The same cannot be said about Music, which is just garbage.

These issues are solved with dedicated bus lanes, which are desirable even for double deckers.