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schnitzelstoat

3,257 karma · joined May 9, 2018

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schnitzelstoat··on Spain orders blocks on Archive.today and its mirrors
It was blocked for me on O2, which is part of Movistar - have you tried it now?
schnitzelstoat··on Spain orders blocks on Archive.today and its mirrors
Yeah, I'm on O2, which I think is part of Movistar? And it's blocked.

Fortunately, I already have a VPN anyway :)

schnitzelstoat··on Tiny village votes for 'independence' from UK amid asylum seeker row
> Piddington — home to roughly 350 residents

> the Government announced plans to house 1,256 male asylum seekers in a nearby former military base.

It seems a bad idea to put them all in one place where they will outnumber the local residents almost 4-to-1

schnitzelstoat··on New $100K H-1B Visa Fee Pushes Tech Jobs Offshore
Given that a lot of the 'offshoring' comes here to Europe (due to our much lower salaries) if the US starts encouraging their firms to cut jobs here via tariffs then the EU should absolutely respond - if this is how the US treats it's allies then perhaps closer relations with China are warranted?
schnitzelstoat··on New $100K H-1B Visa Fee Pushes Tech Jobs Offshore
But at the moment there are quotas right? So it's basically the same - there are N visas to give out so you rank by salary and pick the top N.
schnitzelstoat··on Sam Altman spells out why the AI industry wants to slow down
It's just a textbook example of regulatory capture.

OpenAI and Anthropic are in the lead now so it makes sense to 'slow down' and ensure Qwen, DeepSeek etc. aren't given the opportunity to catch up.

schnitzelstoat··on AI Robots – When will they be in our homes
I stopped using my Roborock because it was such a pain to move everything out of the way (chairs etc.) so it could do a good job. Once I had a toddler, it was basically impossible to use.

Given that this is a much simpler problem than a fully humanoid robot, I'm not going to hold my breath for those.

schnitzelstoat··on AI Robots – When will they be in our homes
What sort of robot would you need to load and unload a dishwasher, collecting and storing the crockery etc.? What sort of robot would you need to load and unload the laundry, fold and store the clothes?

The biggest reason for humanoid robots is that they will need to function in environments designed for humans and used by humans, sometimes even alongside the robots.

This is very different to something like a factory or even a warehouse, that can be designed to be used almost exclusively by the robots.

schnitzelstoat··on Japan halves speed limit to 30km/h on all narrow city streets
In Spain it's 30km/hr in the city on most one-lane roads. Most people comply, maybe people will go 40 but I can't imagine people going 60 down them.
schnitzelstoat··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
I think the joke is that he massively simplified the line down into simplified English.

But I think that's fine as I don't want Claude to write literature, I want it to solve problems.

schnitzelstoat··on Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set today (2026-08-04)
Roomba made some of the first robotic vacuum cleaners and they were based in the US.

Nowadays, they are just more expensive and inferior to the Roborock ones though. But thanks to the wonder of protectionism soon the customer won't be able to pick the better product.

schnitzelstoat··on Cyberpunk Video Games
Yeah, I wasn't a great fan of the story - it felt like they put a lot of emphasis on Keanu Reeves given he's a big celebrity and helped promote the game.

Hopefully, the sequel (which I believe is already being worked on) won't have such a story.

That said, I really liked the story in Phantom Liberty. In fact, that entire DLC was really well done.

schnitzelstoat··on Battle of the Beams
The Oslo Report was crazy too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Report

Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.

schnitzelstoat··on Xiaomi-Robotics-1
It's one of the most annoying.

I have a dishwasher so I do minimal washing up. I don't have a dryer as I air-dry my laundry but I could get one if I wanted to. I have a Roborock although I don't use it much since having a toddler.

But folding laundry is the one chore which still can't be automated. Even cooking itself has become much easier with air fryers etc.

schnitzelstoat··on Xiaomi-Robotics-1
Or we can use the free time to go to the gym.

Anything that frees us from labour is good.

schnitzelstoat··on The kids with phones are alright
In Europe, I think it is more common tbh. Even in the UK my dad would let me try making cocktails etc. at the weekend when I was 17.

It meant when I got to university I knew how much I could drink (although as a student I was too poor to drink much anyway haha) whereas there were people drinking like half a bottle of vodka.

I don't drink any alcohol nowadays so it's not like it turned me into an alcoholic either.

schnitzelstoat··on Germany set to restrict its Freedom of Information Act
You can also be a resident, paying plenty of taxes, yet not be a citizen.
schnitzelstoat··on No Spanish reading crisis?
It's not uncommon to see people (and young people) reading on public transport here in Spain. The odd thing is how popular actual paper books are vs. e-readers. Since I got my Kindle in 2015 I haven't read a paper book since.

That said, I find it odd that people assume that reading a book is always higher quality than reading the internet etc. - many books are pretty low quality.

And if we look at stuff like the PISA scores, it doesn't seem like this supposed higher rate of reading is paying many dividends.

schnitzelstoat··on Resetting Xbox
The new Xbox CEO was on the guest list. But yeah, I agree it's a bit like a conspiracy theory.
schnitzelstoat··on Resetting Xbox
He's referring to this list of invited guests: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/24/peter-...
schnitzelstoat··on Resetting Xbox
They are talking about purchase plans like Klarna etc. and like people have for their iPhone. Because it's going to cost as much as an iPhone.
schnitzelstoat··on Resetting Xbox
Yeah, there's lots of stuff in Steam that I never use and don't even understand. Like the Steam Points and the Trading Cards and Steam Level and so on.

But the purchasing experience is top notch and they even have a generous refund policy. It's just lightyears ahead of the competition.

schnitzelstoat··on Resetting Xbox
It's good for emulation too and it'll run GTA6, so I'll get mine out of storage.
schnitzelstoat··on Resetting Xbox
Yeah, they could have spent the money on founding new studios. With that sheer amount of money you could pretty much poach any talent you wanted too, but it wouldn't be as obviously anticompetitive.

Instead, they paid way over the odds for IPs that seem past their prime.

schnitzelstoat··on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again
I lived there for around 6 months like 15 years ago so perhaps it's changed a lot since then.

But even as an Englishman, it was very different to home. I remember the supermarket was shut all Sunday and was only open until 12 on the Saturday, and it shut early in the week too (at like 5pm or 6pm or something?) so by the time I'd got the train back home from work it was already closed. I had to get up early every Saturday just to make sure I could get the shopping done.

I remember once I waved at my neighbours who were sitting eating in a common garden area and they acted super confused that I would wave to them.

It didn't seem like an especially friendly place and there were so many rules about everything too, like just being able to take the rubbish or recycling out you had specific days and times.

schnitzelstoat··on GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex
I'm not American so I don't really care if it's Chinese or not.

But at work I can only use the approved Enterprise Plans we have and we only have those with Anthropic and OpenAI.

schnitzelstoat··on GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra will be in Codex
It gives them a massive advantage because they can cut the cost per token by a lot and eat Anthropic's market share.

In what universe is any company going to give that advantage away?

In any case if they take away a lot of market share it's basically the same in the end - most people will be using these optimisations.

schnitzelstoat··on When AI Costs More Than the Engineer
My company has a Claude Code and Codex one and I use Claude Code because I am more familiar with it. That said, I just use Opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation and it's pretty cheap. Codex seems decent too so I should try it out some more.

But you can get an awful lot done even with just like $200 a month at API pricing if you are careful not to waste a powerful model on an easy task, or carry around a bloated context window etc.

I think a lot of the 'tokenmaxxing' people spending thousands every month are simply using the tools ineffectively (like having loads of Opus agents doing tasks that Sonnet or even Haiku could do). I suspect this will only get worse now with the release of Fable, but Anthropic must love it.

When you say the cheaper models do you mean like Deepseek or GLM? I haven't tried those but they look interesting. It'd be nice to shift to open weights and not be tied to one company.

schnitzelstoat··on Bring back crappy forums
Thanks! I don't tend to use the GitHub discussion very much (just commenting on a few Issues) so I didn't know!

The Talkyard example is interesting - how does it differ to the algorithms Reddit uses to sort by "Best" or "Hot" when looking at comments (I think Best is the default now too, not Top, so presumably it takes recency etc. into account somehow).

schnitzelstoat··on The Private Capture of Public Genius
The troubles over copyright infringement in AI training data remind me a bit of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin.

There he suffered massive patent infringement, that basically stopped being enforced due to the sheer economic importance of the cotton gin.

In a similar manner, I think there is a reasonably strong argument that it was wrong to use copyrighted material for AI training without paying royalties nor even asking for permission. But equally, every country wants to have the most powerful models and enforcing such royalties would make it effectively impossible to train them as the amount of material required would cost an insane amount in royalty fees.

So I expect the law will continue to turn a blind eye (perhaps enforcing some token payments like that $1.5B mentioned in the article) because "if we don't make these models, the Chinese will" etc.

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