mindlesscrollyparrot

@mindlesscrollyparrot@discuss.tchncs.de
0 Post – 65 Comments
Joined 11 months ago

Losing 2,000 litres of helium is possibly the worst part of this.

2 more...

They'll probably publish the abridged version, sadly. The full version reads, as we well know:

Thou shall not commit adultery but, if thou doest, thou shalt pay off the other woman so that it harmeth not thy chances in the presidential election. Nor shall it turn thy supporters against thee when they heareth of it.

12 more...

He's just a confused old man.

You're thinking about Mr Biden again, sir. Don't you worry about it. Let's check your diaper and get you back to the TV Room, OK? Don't forget your special red hat.

As far as I can tell, Microsoft tried to hold off these anti-trust lawsuits by intentionally making the interoperability and feature-parity between its products shockingly bad.

I basically agree with all of that, but it was totally possible to upgrade the auth system and keep it separate from Microsoft. Obviously Microsoft wouldn't do that, but that's kind of the point, isn't it?

In this post I use the word “OOP” to mean programming in statically-typed language

So Smalltalk is not object-oriented. Someone tell Alan Kay.

2 more...

CDs are digital files plus ownership.

11 more...

None of what you said makes me think the situation would be worse than having Putin in charge. It's a stretch to say Putin came from the civil sphere, and he assassinates his enemies in foreign countries using nerve agents and throws people out of windows at home.

1 more...

So he was trying to work the flashlight when he accidentally pulled the trigger. Is there no safety on these guns, or did he disengage that when he was trying to use his radio?

13 more...

The rule of law must be upheld, sure, but which law are the protesters supposed to be breaking?

1 more...

We know perfectly well that the art is behind glass and will not be damaged because they did it before. So it's complete nonsense to say that it will potentially destroy the art.

The author mentions that some of the changes broke things, but it's a long way into the article before the word "test" appears. It's only point 6/7 of his recommendations.

Making changes with no test coverage is not refactoring. It's just rewriting. Start there.

The insurance companies saw this coming. That's why they have the clauses that exclude flood damage.

If you have listened to Electric Avenue, you will understand why Eddie Grant may have been particularly outraged by Trump using it.

They probably think he's resisting putting his hand into cuffs, not having worked out that cop 3 is causing all his muscles to spasm uncontrollably.

They say "she was being fed the questions". What would be the point of being fed the questions while you are on stage?!

I know that what they really mean is that she was being fed the answers. It just shows exactly how little effort they put into these claims.

We found the solutions a long time ago - it's just that nobody wanted to implement them.

No, a CD that carries the actual CD logo cannot have DRM. It is true that the music industry has often pushed 'enhanced' formats that look like CDs that do; SACD, for example.

Ownership is different to possession, and I want to actually own my music, not just possess the files.

4 more...

The 5 bullet points do not sound like slang terms to me.

A huge step towards dictatorship? Even Putin has to pretend to follow the law. This ruling would mean that there is no law that the US President has to follow. On top of that, they can also pardon anyone else of any federal crime. That isn't moving towards dictatorship, that's already despotism.

This seems to be a really long way of saying that you agree that current LLMs hallucinate all the time.

I'm not sure that the ability to change in response to new data would necessarily be enough. They cannot form hypotheses and, even if they could, they have no way to test them.

2 more...

AI developers: your copyrighted work is such a small contributor to the AI's output that copyright doesn't apply. Also AI developers: but our AI won't work without it.

The news story is precisely that the judge has decided that it doesn't matter why the protesters are doing what they are doing - whether they have evidence or not. His wording was something like "that may or may not be occurring".

According to the judge, only the fact that they damaged property is relevant. That they did it to demand action against a significant threat to humanity, is not.

It wouldn't be so bad if they planned to start following them as well.

There certainly are some services where you can legally download MP3 and FLAC files. Bandcamp, for example. If you download your music like that then, yes, you do own it.

But I'm not aware of anywhere you can get music from the major music labels nowadays (Amazon used to sell MP3s and so did Google Play Music, but neither does any more). If you do, I'd love to know.

On the other hand, you can still - although it's getting harder - buy CDs for major label artists and then you own the music (that copy of it).

2 more...

You can definitely put DRM-protected content onto the physical CD media - that is exactly what SACD is. But then it isn't an audio CD, even if it will play on a regular CD player. Search for "nonstandard or corrupted" on the Wikipedia page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio .

It's my understanding that only conforming CDs can carry the CD logo. It's usually on the case, not the disc itself, and it isn't always there, particularly when the case isn't a jewel case. All the same, I think that most things that look like CDs are conformant.

2 more...

I wish Altman would read Accelerando.

2 more...

But we do know how they operate. I saw a post a while back where somebody asked the LLM how it was calculating (incorrectly) the date of Easter. It answered with the formula for the date of Easter. The only problem is that that was a lie. It doesn't calculate. You or I can perform long multiplication if asked to, but the LLM can't (ironically, since the hardware it runs on is far better at multiplication than we are).

The attraction of Linux is precisely that it isn't one of the two 'standards'. Your working environment doesn't get determined by some product manager in a far-away office, who has a set of target users in mind, which he's given fictional names, biographies and mugshots.

Yes, "home" and "zuhause" mean the same thing but they aren't exactly the same, zuhause is a compound word. English also has compound words, for example "aboard" and "abed". The English word isn't "ahouse"; it is simply "home".

3 more...

If we can spot these trends while working 9-5, then an idiot can probably spot them if they spend 40 hours a week on it.

I think it's quite clear that we did.

I don't think China wants that.

This is just obviously untrue. Not least because we did build lots of nuclear power plants. One significant reason why we didn't build more was their high price compared to ... coal and gas plants. But sure, it's Greenpeace's fault and not Exxon Mobil.

2 more...

Thank you. I hadn't checked what they're issued with.

So then I'm wondering why he didn't demount the flashlight. I guess he was worried that he might accidentally fire the gun into his foot while doing so. He's obviously a little bit prone to that kind of thing. Safer to leave it on the rail, I guess.

4 more...

The author trying to make a connection is not clarifying which bias Tlaib meant. It is just as likely to be misrepresenting what Tlaib meant.

And, when you think about it, Tlaib said biases - plural - so this 'clarification' - if it was a clarification - is ignoring the other biases.

They don't only say static types. They add classes, inheritance, subtyping, and virtual calls. Mind you, the difference between the last 3 is quite subtle.

So, since I've started nit-picking, Self is also OO and has prototype-based inheritance (as does javascript, but I'm not sure I'd want to defend the claim that javascript is an OO language).

The downvotes are because it seemed that you were asking in bad faith. You said "I believe it is true", but now you say (admit) that you were questioning it.

2 more...

The Megane E-tech has functionality in its satnav that lets you plot a route with charging stations on the way, showing how much capacity you will have left when you get to them. Not essential, but very useful for somebody who is new to EVs.

Software that communicates with power companies to allow the car to charge overnight at advantageous rates, or even feed energy back into the grid. Again, not essential, but good for the customer and helps with the transition to green electricity.

2 more...

Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that the leaking process will be the next process to try to allocate memory after you run out. It might actually be your window manager, for example.

The OOM killer is a last-ditch attempt by the OS to keep running, but it is very likely to leave your system in an unstable state.