I’m also not thrilled about the obsession with copyright. I was against copyright in the 90s. I was against copyright in the 2000s. I was against copyright in the 2010s. And now these people want to call integrity lack of ethics just because I’m not willing to endorse yet another extension to a legal monopoly forbidding me from running arbitrary algorithms on data supposedly owned by someone else?

I’m sympathetic to the environmental arguments. Though I also would point out there are much greater areas of marginal waste to cut on. Online advertising uses more energy than AI. I look forward to the day it’s banned.

But the whole “we’re going to play pretend that I can ban you from transposing text I wrote through a matrix” thing? Absolutely not. Nothing good comes out of that.

Is the EU deliberately designing an inferior tech stack for itself or something?

On one hand, eurobonds are sensible policy. A currency issuer will benefit from better rates than smaller sub-units.

On the other hand, the annoyance that this is the thing that’s finally forcing them to do it… that’s kind of fucked.

Translation sets a certain distance between you and the work, that is inevitable. But so does time, for example. Should you not read anything from earlier than the 1950s because language has changed?

Good news on nuclear, awful news on gas, but considering the German fake energy transition is powered by it, it’s perhaps inevitable.

Also this just annoyed me more than it should:

Nuclear power is a carbon-free source of electricity but it is not typically labeled as green energy, like solar, wind and other renewables. Generating power this way requires mining and processing uranium to create nuclear fuel, an energy-intensive process that produces emissions.

Unlike wind turbines and solar panels, which are made from butterfly shine and faery sighs.

My understanding is that Firefox can’t generate and store them by itself, it needs some other mechanism.

I’m not very convinced by this article. A lot of the “realities” are not, they’re policy choices. Just as an example, the notion of the non-driving elderly adult having to be taken by their child to some office to get an ID is just a consequence of the US choosing not to have compulsory and free or nominal charge ID for all residents. Most of the other objections are equally dependent on specific policy choices, which may apply in some places and not others.

Oddly, I have a friend who’s not much into SF but absolutely loved Quicksilver (and the whole Baroque Cycle). She also enjoyed Anathem. But Cryptonomicon or other Stephenson’s books left her uninterested.

I suppose it’s a matter of taste then. I don’t really mind the expository style. Incidentally, Greg Egan is also one of my favourites, and I’d say he does use some amount of exposition, for example in Diaspora, or the Orthogonal Series (amazing work).

I liked Anathem a lot. I think I enjoyed all of Neal Stephenson’s books up to (but excluding) Seveneves, whereupon I gave up on him. Anathem is one of my favourite books.

The whole notion of monks in space seems absurd because of how people see monks. But this is both ahistorical and contrary to the way they work in the book. Copernicus and Mendel were monks. And these particular ones were all about learning maths and theorics (physics). They didn’t optimise for technology, because they weren’t allowed, but they optimised for learning, for extracting information out of tiny details. I think they’d do alright in a scientific(ish) mission.

I get why people say this, but I like his digressions. It’s not just a matter of learning something new (though occasionally one does) but of how he uses language to express it.

Fantastic! I’m back in. Thank you so much.

I think PTH is not around, not sure about Apollo.

Heh, wrong type of tracker. :)

Excellent job, Wolfkiller.

Oh, and buying fossil overpriced energy in the bargain too. How truly good.

What was it that did it for you, the hypocrisy, the lack of contact with reality, or the blood lust?

Interesting article, and I definitely agree I prefer clear instructions when those are possible.

I only have an objection. When it’s said that no matter how well chatbots behave, it’s bad design, and that they’re being used to substitute expensive people; well, expensive people’s interface is chatting too. So in that regard I’m not sure there’s a meaningful difference. Obviously there is if the chatbot is badly behaved, but the article says that it’s a problem even setting that aside.

It’s an NVDA add-on. It substitutes role announcements with specific 3d located sounds. And fortunately it does work. I should change the manifest to indicate it.

I’m going to be trying that today. I hope my Unspoken version still runs on this.

I’ve tried deep research from ChatGPT for legal issues. It’s almost right. But still requires significant human oversight. For example I asked it for a set of norms that govern an issue and some of them were out of date.