version_five

If true, would that still hold now? There is so much politics and polarization and agendas - I'm not aware in Linux specifically but in tech and open source generally. Without benevolent dictators I think a lot of projects would fragment very badly and leave big openings for companies like Microsoft. I think we're going to see that as a failure mode in big open source projects more and more.

Yes. I posted in it yesterday, in my own "threads" I see the posts' age reflecting that, when I look at this thread they are now only a few hours old.

I think you've found the solution! We could probably solve more problems by banning things!

Everything about Amazon is deceptive. It's the digital equivalent of going into a shady bazaar somewhere and haggling with slimy merchants that know all the tricks to rip you off. I've all but stopped using it and cancelled prime (which is a joke now anyway) many years ago.

It was posted on BBC, that's why it got more attention. I posted this article yesterday too, having searched for it and not found it posted.

I think the endgame is having a different understanding of privacy, modesty, etc. There's no way this is going to go away or be regulated away somehow. Heavy handed punishment of young kids who generate images just creates more problems (though I imagine we'll go through that phase). Eventually (in a generation or two) it will equilibrate and nobody will take the pictures seriously or be interested in making them. There's novelty now, it will go away.

I can't see any other realistic direction this will go.

Quebec has enacted all sorts of discriminatory rules centered on their insecurity about culture and hatred of English canadians. Montreal is a bit insulated because it has large English and immigrant communities and less nationalist politics, but people and businesses are being driven out. 20 years from now if things don't change it's going to be the backward and insular monocultural paradise the nationalists want.

I see this on HN frequently. Someone posts their thing and you get some low quality banter about the name choice or hosting provider or whatever, and then the top thread is a big unsubstantiated criticism plus some pilers on. You never really know what to make of it but it feels pretty much the same as if the post was just ignored.

As a positive, maybe we can consider this a bit like wfh vs in-person. We had this Dickensian workhouse version of work as somewhere you go for the day and give someone else your time. And in the best cases, this turned into outcome based work where you got paid to deliver some result.

Likewise, the idea of school as a place we lock our kids in for a fixed number of hours per day is potentially dated, and it would be interesting to see how it could transform to something more aligned with what we actually want to achieve as opposed to the process.

There is also a link, school prepares you to tolerate spending your day somewhere being told what to do. Maybe we can do better.

Right, look at conferences, MBA programs, etc. There are/were "remote" options but they essentially have no value, it was just a placeholder we tried. Some kinds of work can be remote of course. But learning and networking only really works in person.

The focus is on white supremacists but from what I've seen "activists" would be more reasonable. There are extreme activists from all sides trying to corrupt institutions like this. I'm hopeful the white supremacists don't succeed, but unfortunately others have had more luck.

The US has socialized healthcare, it's just run my insurance companies. That means it has all the bad incentives of socialized healthcare, ie the incentive is to minimize (locally) the amount of care provided, and it also has all the price gouging that comes from private companies being in charge of health. Lose/lose. The solution is charging per use for primary care, and insurance for big stuff.

Sure, and the faster you did that the more you would have made. I don't think AI is equivalent, the emperor has some clothes on here, they're just not quite as nice as he's been led to belive, but the same principle applies. Move fast, break stuff, sell while the cat's still in the bag.

See "CHAOSS DEI Badging Initiative"

https://chaoss.community/diversity-and-inclusion-badging/

It's what I guessed, "community health" actually means a toxic focus on personal and political garbage instead of the software project. No thanks.

If this was NFTs, what would the winning strategy have been? Strike when the iron is hot and hype is at the maximum and hope to get some exits or subsequent rounds asap, or draw it out. From a portfolio perspective, it's just one batch, might as well go all in and maximally capitalize on hype, no?

What is the reason for such an angry reply? They're pushing the boundaries and going against the spirit of free software. It's apparently legal but damages open source. There's been lots of discussion about it.

It's not you, it doesn't make sense, it's just signaling membership in a club/cult

  Our results demonstrate that the power of language models can be attributed, to a great extent, to the auto-regressive next-token training scheme, and not necessarily to a particular choice of architecture.

I think that's obvious isn't it? Neural networks are universal function approximates, the question is how to make the efficient, either in parameters or computation or whatever, as well as all the usual stuff like encouraging convergence, avoiding big gradients, etc. That's why transformers are popular, nobody thinks they especially can compute a function that other models can't.

I stopped using prime probably five years ago precisely because it became a bunch of stuff I didn't want and the shipping options got eroded. Most stuff seemed to be "add on" or "not available for prime" and without prime you get free shipping if you order enough anyway. I value the other stuff at zero.

Amazon has become garbage anyway, I buy stuff at retail stores now. What all this really means is that the "disruption" from free money is over and new economy businesses are resorting to the same legacy business crap in order to try and make money.

Ironically cnn types are the ones who want to cancel or rewrite Agatha Christie, in particular "And then there were none" to which I think they're referring.

Anyway, I was thinking how screwed up it is that we live in a world where supposedly we've come a long way civilization-wise, but we have major world powers where important people get "dissapeared" and we just sort of mention it off hand or maybe joke about it, when really our fellow men and countries that we do business with (while maybe not russia now) are just murdering their opponents. There's some pretty major doublethink or cognitive dissonance going on.

"Did you just murder a bunch of people?"

"Maybe"

"Um, can we have some oil/manufactured goods/whatever now?"

It's super screwed up.

Redhat and Nvidia have been pushing the boundaries of GPL recently, and Free software / open source as a concept continues to get watered down. I wouldn't be surprised to see MS try something.

What would you want to see in MS Linux? I'm terrified that having "embraced" linux they are scheming in the background to "extend" it in a way that they don't release the source. That's got to be part of their strategy. If they wanted to play nice and make a distro that would be cool, but I see no chance of that.

I used a windows computer this week for the first time in years. I was really happy with WSL and how well integrated it was, in particular how easy it was to setup GPU drivers which historically I've found is very touchy. I hate to say it but windows+wsl felt like a viable alternative for my current setup of a mac for office apps and a linux laptop for development.

That said, the only times I really interacted with windows was to install chrome (despite various pleading), to have it automatically bing search for whatever the screen background was when I logged in (only fell for that once), to have random news and other crap pop up, and to have to turn off the speaker because it kept making notification noises about whatever useless stuff it constantly is notifying you about.

As someone who is easily distracted, I don't know how people can work in windows, it always felt like it's not made for me, it's made for microsoft to push stuff at me. But for people who are less touchy it seems decent these days, particularly in light of wsl.

When models are released like this, it would be great to do it with a PR to ggml/llama.cpp giving support, or use a format that's already supported. Imo if I'm choosing between a 3B and a 7B, I'm using it in an edge or local model and I don't want HF/pytorch. It would be easier to evaluate and rank higher in things to consider if I could easily get it into llama.cpp.

Canada post scans address information from letters and sells it to marketers. Canadas privacy commissioner ordered them to stop, but they make $800M per year on it so they are challenging it.

Plus the slippery slope of what other identity groups should get seats reserved for them. It's also not democratic so I don't really see how it could work in a western country, but then I've been surprised a lot recently.

  ... reaching speeds of 125 mph (200 kph).

  ...the 3.5-hour, 235-mile (378-kilometer) trip between the state’s biggest tourist hubs — about 30 minutes less than the average drive between the two cities.

  Thirty-two trains will run daily.

It's really not that fast ie the travel time is not competitive with flying, it's more just regular train.

Otoh, they do have good frequency. Hopefully this means it's pretty painless ie you can just show up and get on, as opposed to having to book in advance to get a good price on a specific train, wait in line, go through some kind of security, all the other stuff that makes air travel worse. It won't be competitive of there's any of that. If you can just show up and get on maybe.

I agree with this statement. Unfortunately, an ineffective (though apparently safe) vaccine got pushed at all cost through various misinformation and confused messaging, probably irreparably damaging the public's trust in vaccines in order to score some political points.

Before covid, nobody would hav considered being against childhood vaccines to be a mainstream or intellectually tenable position. Now those vaccines get lumped in people's minds with the crappy covid vaccine that was forced on everybody.

I'd love to see hydrogen get more emphasis vs electric.

  “Our company can’t make hydrogen happen. It’s essential there is a long-term national strategy in which hydrogen is not disadvantaged. A [hydrogen] fuel production and delivery infrastructure and government-supported vehicle purchase incentives will be necessary.” 

I at least agree that regulation and government initiatives shouldn't disadvantage hydrogen. Electric is still not a serious technology, particularly for mass adoption and long range travel. For whatever reason it's taken hold first, but we need a proper alternative. I hope we'll see more of a push for hydrogen.

Carry a "burner" phone and give that to the criminal. Ideally just carry it, or at least keep the real one somewhere more secure and less obvious and produce the burner. Requires the discipline of using the real one when you're out because someone could see you have it.