palordrolap

There have been periods where one of my accounts was getting an ad-length black screen with buffering throbber (I hate that name) and, the most recent time, it was accompanied by a pop-up asking me if I’d like to find out why that was happening. Yeah. I know why that’s happening, thanks.

Then that stopped happening again. Either they gave up or UBo have worked around it somehow. Never ending arms race.

FYI: Depending on your politics, you may also want to avoid Proton.

Fair point. From what I can tell, refined tungsten is actually an order of magnitude cheaper(!) than refined silicon, but molybdenum is over two orders or magnitude more expensive. ~300USD per ton, ~2000USD per ton and ~60000USD per ton respectively.

I assume that if this got up to scale industrially, savings could be made by recycling high purity molybdenum waste, but yes, it’s not going to be cheap.

The article seems to imply that the intention is to replace silicon entirely, but agreed, there might be niches where it can replace silicon even if full replacement might be unrealistic.

A promising start, but a thousand transistors at 25 kilohertz puts it where silicon tech was 60 years ago, so they’ve a long, long way to go.

If it scales, they can use modern tech and know-how to accelerate their progress and they can get funding, maybe this will be viable in a decade or so.

Surely you jest. Gates has almost nothing to do with Microsoft these days, let alone interface design. In fact, he’d probably be the one to roast any stupid design decisions if he was still active there.

They periodically update the back-end code to try new things, and they A-B test, so that some users get an update and others don’t. Then they monitor their logs, and maybe even social media, to try to determine who’s seeing what and when, and if anyone’s having trouble.

They may even generate a pop-up asking you if you’re having trouble, and especially to tell you that you have to watch ads.

Anything that works in their favour will be rolled out to everyone. And then the good people (person?) at UBlock Origin (which is the one you should use if you’re going to use UBlock) work their butts off to find a way around it, in a never-ending arms race.

Anecdotally, I recently noticed that one of my accounts/profiles that has UBo wasn’t able to load more than 2 seconds of 360p video. I thought that was it for my viewing. Was getting a “null” tooltip on the settings cog and everything. Then I force-reloaded the tab and everything was alright again. They’d clearly changed something on the back-end for me and I was using an outdated interface (a day old! the humanity!) that couldn’t handle it any more.

But back to the topic of ads: One day they might find a way to completely lock out ad-blockers. That is the day you learn to use the stats for nerds right-click menu on an ad video. From there you can learn the video ID of the ad and visit it directly. That way you can find the advertiser’s account if not also the comment section, where you can leave a comment telling them exactly what you thought of their ad. Maybe also give it a thumbs down.

Eventually the cowards will turn off their comment sections, or else YouTube will prevent people from finding specific ad video IDs, but that’s what other social media is for.

Got a turboencabulator ad in the middle of your Elsa vs Spiderman binge? Let Encabulator Inc. feel your wrath.

Be sure to include something like “as a result of seeing this ad when I didn’t want to, I will not be buying or recommending your products for the period of <however long>” and then do your best to follow through on that.

They can make us watch the ads on their platform, but they can’t make us like it.

“France considers requiring Musk’s X to get users to lie about their age”

FTFY

Two things that haven’t quite been mentioned yet:

1) Real life has effectively infinite FPS, so you might expect that the closer a game is to reality, the higher your brain wants the FPS to be in order for it to make sense. This might not be true for everyone, but I imagine it could be for some people.

More likely: 2) If you’ve played other things at high FPS you might be used to it on a computer screen, so when something is below that performance, it just doesn’t look right.

These might not be entirely accurate on their own and factors of these and other things mentioned elsewhere might be at play.

Source: Kind of an inversion of the above: I can’t focus properly if games are set higher than 30FPS; It feels like my eyes are being torn in different directions. But then, the games I play are old or deliberately blocky, so they’re not particularly “real” looking, and I don’t have much trouble with real life’s “infinite” FPS.

Unglaublich !

Agnosticism is a thing. He might be off in his own weird non-declarative void-like corner but the whole intermedium isn’t like that.

Ah, but the clueless code monkeys, script kiddies and C-levels who are responsible for writing the AI companies’ processing code only know how to scrape from someone else’s website. They can’t even ask their (respective) company’s AI for help because it hasn’t been trained yet. (Not that Wikipedia’s content will necessarily help).

They’re not even capable of taking the ZIP file and hosting the contents on localhost to allow the scraper code they got working to operate on something it understands.

So hammer Wikipedia they must, because it’s the limit of their competence.

Hard to say. I feel like it’s about as likely he would have found LLMs to be an overcomplicated false prophet or false god.

This was a man whose operating system turned a PC into something not unlike an advanced Commodore 64, after all. He liked the simplicity and lack of layers the older computers provided. LLMs are literally layers upon layers of obfuscation and pseudo-neural wiring. That’s not simple or beautiful.

It might all boil down to whether the inherent randomness of an LLM could be (made to be) sufficiently influenced by a higher power or not. He often treated random number outcomes as the influence of God, and it’s hard to say how seriously he took that on any given day.

We seem to be headed in that direction though. My most recent motherboard has built in LEDs for no practical reason other than “ooh shiny”. Took me a minute to find the UEFI setting to disable that. “Stealth mode” apparently.

It’s also increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to find wired mice, keyboards and headsets in that ever-increasing gulf between “all singing, all dancing, expensive gaming device full of unnecessary LEDs” and “cheap, awful, bare minimum”. If it plugs in and there’s a 5v rail nearby, gotta draw on that to be shiny! Anything else would be sacrilege!

Alcohol is a known muscle relaxant. That fact is even a plot point early in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but I digress.

It’s also something of a mind relaxant. If your pain is made worse by tensing up worrying about the pain, then alcohol is going to help both ways, because you’ll be less able to worry and you won’t be able to tense quite so much anyway.

I’d be surprised if neither ibuprofen nor diclofenac have any effect at all - but don’t take those with alcohol in your system. Liver damage is not something you want to add to your list of ailments.

Consult a physician, etc.

Off the top of my head:

Spelt - past tense of “to spell”. Valid in Britain and British Commonwealth countries, though “spelled” is also accepted.

Cleft - One of the three past tenses of “cleave” that have fossilised into particular subjects at various stages. “Cloven” is ancient and “Cleaved” is the more recent.

Felt - past tense of “to feel”.

Smelt - past tense of “to smell”. This might also be more common in British English.

Past - used many times in this post(!). Derived from the past tense of “pass”, though its usage has split somewhat from “passed” even though they’re generally pronounced the same.

Spilt - past tense of “spill” not to be confused with split, (which is its own past tense). Might be another one more acceptable in British English

And none of this counts the irregular verbs that use ablaut (vowel change) and have past tenses that end in -t like taught, caught, lit etc.

OK, it’s been a few hours. I’ll do the clumsy thing that everyone else has avoided and point out that it’s deliberately set up so that people who have never heard of operator precedence - those who do things purely left-to-right - don’t get a weird fraction when the division step is done, making them think that the answer they’ve reached must be the right one. You’d still get a handful who’d argue regardless, but that whole number ropes in a whole bunch more.

Couple that with the fact that the value reached this way doesn’t match the value obtained from using operator precedence and you get arguments about what the right answer is. And a comment like the one you’re reading right now that’s too long for the hard-of-thinking to read.

“More engagement, baybee [sunglasses smiley emoji] [cash bag emoji]” etc.

Maybe, but they wouldn’t want to give away that such a thing definitely already exists. Also, any intelligence gathered that way would likely be inadmissible as evidence if it was used to prosecute someone.

By getting an overt backdoor installed, both those problems go away.

The current US administration is unpredictable. Prepare for the worst. Full deportation if you’re unlucky, or merely (your son) getting kicked out of academia. If you have money, you might be able to sweeten a deal to get him to stay, but you might be better off spending that money to have your son study in a less volatile environment, i.e. a different country entirely.

Be aware that lots of people have already had this idea. Applications to academia in other English-speaking countries has increased significantly in recent months.

Has any study been done on how efficient they are as heaters? The electricity they use when idle doesn’t vanish; it’s given off as heat. In the winter it might be worthwhile to not bother to unplug them because what they’re giving off could offset what other, more conventional, heat sources might otherwise provide. i.e. you leave a charger plugged in, and your house heating goes off half a second sooner, saving you the pennies there that the charger costs otherwise.

Admittedly, this doesn’t apply to summer and hotter climates, so most people, most of the time, probably ought to be unplugging them, but there’s a small percentage of cases where the reverse might actually be beneficial.