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sampo

12,260 karma · joined April 17, 2010

sampo.smolander@kapsi.fi
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sampo··on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
> What I don't understand, based on this: https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195775 the votes are the other way around

They voted for "Proposition de rejet". It's written there, but it's in French.

sampo··on EU Council forces Chat Control via fast-track
I mean, if the electoral college would have enough faithless electors to swing the result away from the president whom the majority of the electors had pledged to vote for.

There has been so far 5 elections where the electoral vote chose a different president than what the popular vote count would have chosen. But this is a different thing than what I was talking about.

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

sampo··on EU Council forces Chat Control via fast-track
> So is the US president (Electoral College)

It has never happened, but if there once would be enough faithless electors to swing the election (choosing a different president than what people voted for) it would be a huge scandal and it would be widely condemned as undemocratic.

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

sampo··on Farmer, marketer at odds over sales of white nectarines
Seedless watermelons are my favorite!
sampo··on Farmer, marketer at odds over sales of white nectarines
This is what you wrote:

"The impact of their wild propagation should be studied first, not unleashed upon the local ecosystem."

So by "wild propagation" you meant farm-to-farm propagation? And by "local ecosystem" you meant "farmers' fields"? And you accuse others of redefining words.

sampo··on Farmer, marketer at odds over sales of white nectarines
Monsanto ceased to exist 8 years ago. It was acquired and absorbed by a bigger company.
sampo··on Farmer, marketer at odds over sales of white nectarines
If we understand "in the wild" to mean outside of farmers' fields, then rapeseed pollen flying from one rapeseed field to another nearby rapeseed field is not "in the wild".
sampo··on Farmer, marketer at odds over sales of white nectarines
Breeding new crop varieties is relatively scientific and sophisticated work, like any other advances in technology and products. If you couldn't parent your work, there wouldn't be much incentive to do the work. America has had plant patents since 1930, there is nothing new about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Patent_Act_of_1930

sampo··on Farmer, marketer at odds over sales of white nectarines
> their wild propagation

In general, crop plants don't propagate well in the wild. The whole point of breeding a crop plant is to remove their chemical defenses (to make them edible) and to make them produce lots of edible parts. This is usually the direct opposite of what plants need to survive in the wild.

sampo··on Claude Science
Biosciences mostly don't use arXiv, they have their own https://www.biorxiv.org/ but it's usage is not as common as arXiv is in e.g. physics.
sampo··on Medical students are using popular research tool to pump out misleading studies
> You get a 4 year degree in college

This is pretty uniquely a US-Canada specific system, that you first do a different 4-year BSc degree, before entering a 4-year medical school.

In most countries, you go a 6-year medical school right after high school.

sampo··on Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
> Because Anthropic has terms of service

Not following terms of service doesn't necessarily constitute a fraud. It just means Anthropic can close an account that breaks the terms of service.

sampo··on Thomann takes legal action against Fender
> You can probably

No need for "probably". That absolutely works.

sampo··on Why does paper fold so well?
It was this paper folding video (and the guy's unapologetic Finnish accent) that launched Hydraulic Press Channel to fame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuG_CeEZV6w

sampo··on The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
"Nuclear holocaust" is a somewhat common expression both in and outside of fiction.
sampo··on The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
"Butlerian jihad" comes from a science fiction novel from 1965 (Dune, by Frank Herbert). They didn't know about current political correctness 60 years ago.
sampo··on The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun
2 months ago also:

> A politician’s home was shot at 13 times over a data center vote.

> A shooting at the home of an Indianapolis city councillor is bringing new attention to a fight that's been building in communities across the country: the growing backlash against new AI-focused data centers.

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/politi...

sampo··on Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]
> But I guess I couldn't read the future in terms of which one would win out!

After Linus Torvalds gave this talk at Google in 2007, it was clear he would win. (Is there a better quality video somewhere?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idLyobOhtO4

But I agree: Mercurial was definitely friendlier for people who didn't have time time to go through the technicalities of git. To use git smoothly you pretty much need to learn how it works internally.

sampo··on Meta deletes popular 1M follower account after Kuwaiti request
> wouldn't that violate free speech though?

Free speech can mean two things:

(1) The general philosophical postulate, that society is better when there is a high level of freedom in the exchange of ideas and critique of other's ideas.

(2) One aspect of the above is that government should not censor speech. Like the 1st amendment in USA.

But if most public discourse takes place on forums owned by companies, and the companies start to practice high levels of censorship, then we might formally satisfy (2) but still won't get the cultural benefits of (1).

sampo··on California's Battery Array Is as Powerful as 12 Nuclear Power Plants
> California's demand commonly goes from 18GW to 30GW in the same day.

That extreme intra-day variation is also partially caused by California's cheap solar power: Cheaper prices draw demand to those hours.

In other locations, (some) people (partially) adjust their consumption patters to follow the cheap wind energy hours, and this leads to different consumption patters. Less intra-day variation but but inter-day variation.

If California's prices were wind-dominated (typically a little more wind at nightime), or nuclear or burning dominated (stable), it would not cause such large variation in the intra-day consumption pattern.

This electricity price figure is readable, but 10 years old, so today the variation in California must be larger than it shows:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=32172

sampo··on California's Battery Array Is as Powerful as 12 Nuclear Power Plants
Good point, and good financial strategy. But the morning discharge seems to be about 5%–7% of the evening discharge, so I assume the batteries near empty.
sampo··on California's Battery Array Is as Powerful as 12 Nuclear Power Plants
> California's Battery Array Is as Powerful as 12 Nuclear Power Plants

From this graph we see that in the evening when solar power goes out, for next 3 hours (7 pm to 10 pm) California's battery array is as powerful as 12 nuclear reactors. Then the batteries are drained empty, and the rest of the night California survives by importing electricity from other states. And partially by running hydro power only during the nights, keeping it at zero during the day.

https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso?date=2026-05-15

sampo··on Building ML framework with Rust and Category Theory
You don't need category theory to describe the Result type. But the people who first introduced it to programming languages, were thing about category theory.

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

sampo··on Floats Don't Agree with Themselves
I wish the blog would reveal the values of the 3 floats that make their

    cross_sign(A, B, C)
to give different results in different platforms.
sampo··on 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews
> but now all AI conferences are demanding I review or hurt a student, where I'm the middle author.

What about you not putting your name on the paper? Or does it hurt the student if they publish in their own name only?

sampo··on 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews
> Maybe suspend for 6 months instead?

Suspend for 6 months from a conference that is held yearly?

sampo··on 2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews
Took me a while understand. So, the same person has both submitted their research article to the conference, and also acted as a reviewer for articles submitted by other people.

And if they in their review work have agreed to a "no LLM use" policy, but got exposed using LLMs anyway, then their submitted research article is desk rejected. Theoretically, someone could have submitted a stellar research article, but because they didn't follow agreed policy when reviewing other people's work, then also their research contribution is not welcome.

(At first I understood that innocent author's articles would have been rejected just because they happened to go to a bad reviewer. But this is not the case.)

sampo··on Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)
Estonia has lots of oil shale (not same thing as shale oil). They never needed to import coal, because they have their own fossil fuel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Estonia#Oil-shale

sampo··on Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
> and give them another shot

Isn't this rather giving yourself another shot.

sampo··on British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
> and even permanent daylight time is far superior to changing clocks twice a year

This paper implies that for health, permanent standard time would be best, and permanent DST would be the worst. And even keeping the current clock-shifting would be better than permanent DST.

"The combination of DST and winter would therefore make the differences between body clocks and the social clock even worse and would negatively affect our health even more."

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/07487304198541...

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