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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Algorithmic patents amount to patenting maths which, by very longstanding precedence, is not a thing, for good reason. Same goes for business methods and other stuff.

    In the EU there’s only one way to patent software and that’s if you’re using it to achieve direct physical ends. E.g. you can patent washing machine firmware in so far as you patent a particular way to combine sensor data to achieve a particular washing result. Rule of thumb: If, 30 years ago, you’d have an electromechanical mechanism to do the task then you can patent the software that’s now replacing it.

    Oh: It’s also possible to patent silicon, that is, you can patent your hardware acceleration methods for video decoding. That doesn’t extend to decoders running on general-purpose hardware, though.

    If you want to monopolise your brand-new hash algorithm there’s a simple way: Don’t publish the source, use copyright to collect royalties… though that doesn’t mean that reverse engineering is outlawed, especially if necessary for interoperability. Practically speaking nope hash algorithms just can’t be protected which is fair and square because it’s academia who comes up with that kind of stuff and we paid for it with taxpayer money. Want to make money off it? Get tenure.



  • Now I don’t know where you’re from but around here four year olds are unsupervised in public. It’s also not about the concept, but about what is considered right and what’s wrong, and the self-control to not act on an overwhelming impulse from the unconscious. May I remind you that the frontal cortex, that which gives us the ability to pause and reconsider, is not fully developed at his age.

    You have no idea what his psychology looks like, yet you’re condemning him, and thousands more, by your principles. Unseen, unheard, and yep that – unseen, unheard – is one of the possible depth-psychological reasons why kids lash out like that. Not only do you, self-righteously, condemn him, you also might have created him by the habitual way in which you regard – or rather don’t regard – people.


  • Not to mention ARM chips which by and large were/are more efficient on the same node than x86 because of their design: ARM chip designers have been doing that efficiency thing since forever, owing to the mobile platform, while desktop designers only got into the game quite late. There’s also some wibbles like ARM insn decoding being inherently simpler but big picture that’s negligible.

    Intel just really, really has a talent for not seeing the writing on the wall while AMD made a habit out of it out of sheer necessity to even survive. Bulldozer nearly killed them (and the idea itself wasn’t even bad, it just didn’t work out) while Intel is tanking hit after hit after hit.


  • He doomed himself.

    You locked him up and threw away the key. That is your action, directly affecting his psychology, directly harming him. You may be the judge, the legislator, the juror, the jailer, the voter. You have to account for it.

    You justify locking him up by protecting others, but how do you justify the harm you’re inflicting?

    Then, you’re assuming agency on his part. Choice. The kid is 15 FFS, go back in your own life, consider how much, at that age, it was yours, or that of the environment. You also need to argue that he was the reason he killed, and not his environment. Humans don’t generally kill other humans, they also don’t grow up to do so, something must’ve happened to him and I very much doubt it was his fault.



  • See there’s the stuff that happened, there’s the version that tankies want to believe (complete denial), which is actually different from the official CCP stance (“necessary and proportionate police action to ensure stability”, with the implication “enough questions, comrade, nothing more to see”), which is different from western public… myth, I have to say. Back when the stuff went down western journalists didn’t know what was happening, there were confusing reports, there were reports of violence, and then there was the tank man – taken the day after (IIRC, but definitely later and no he didn’t get run over). The collective imagination somehow constructed an image of the Chinese army rolling over students. Which is… metaphorically true, but not literally. And then the CCP is using that western imagination to spin their own tale of how the evil west is slandering them.


  • Lore books eh you’re giving me ideas. Hard to justify spending budget on that kind of stuff even if you have money to work with… how would one even get one’s hands on a woodprint artist? You know, the chisel and printing press kind? Imitating it is going to be hard indeed and figuring out how to do it not worth for a couple of one-off images you could just as well do without so either generating from prompt or telling the model to re-paint an input image in that style seems like the obvious solution.

    I think a similar rule applies as when it comes to code, and NIH syndrome syndrome: Whatever it is that is your primary focus you should write yourself, use libraries for the rest. If you write a shooter, you’re going to write the gunplay, but can take the renderer off the shelf. I you’re writing a walking simulator that happens to have a gun somewhere but is generally focussed on graphical atmosphere, go grab the gunplay off the shelf but write the renderer yourself.

    So unless the focus of your game is rummaging through books in an ancient library, go use that model.



  • Eh the massacring happened on side streets, local Peking residents were trying to keep the army from moving into the square not really knowing that other Peking residents had already briefed the army on who the protesters actually were, and what they wanted, and how they behaved. Once the army was on the square and set an ultimatum it was cleared with no or few casualties, the reports are a bit fuzzy.

    That doesn’t excuse the CCP in one bit, of course, or rather it doesn’t excuse the hardline faction who couldn’t stomach that others in the party were actually talking to the protesters as that would set a precedent that you can just turn up on the square and get an audience with the party, or maybe more precisely could boost the influence of one party faction over the whole.

    The whole situation really can’t be divorced from Hu Yaobang and his role in the party: The protests were essentially a wake for him and his ideas. Which the hardliners thoroughly buried afterwards and the situation in China hasn’t improved to the point where Chinese would even be comfortable to criticise that decision – you’d get invited for tea, if you can catch on to the euphemism.

    If it had been up to the hardliners yes the army would’ve massacred the whole square, if that hadn’t been their intention they wouldn’t have mischaracterised the nature of the protest towards the army. Without ordinary Peking citizens stepping in, and getting butchered for it, that massacre would have happened.

    And yes the Uygur situation is a genocide that’s without question or asterisk.




  • If only he was now in a situation where he can be dealt with by specialists who can increase the odds substantially, and only be released if another set of specialists evaluate his mental state to have, as you put it, won the lottery.

    Throw away the keys and you worsen the odds. Also, break the European Convention on Human Rights, which demands that there be a light at the end of a tunnel for everyone: Because denying it, no matter how far away it may seem, amounts to taking away his freedom to free development of personality. In other words, he has a right to work towards redemption. To, if not arrive, at least begin to learn to walk into the right direction. Everybody does.

    Who are you to make a judgement on the future of his life while the blood on the knife hasn’t even dried yet? Can you predict the future? Make a judgement for the here and now, instead.




  • ICANN isn’t really a massive organisation, it’s a technocratic non-profit with a buttload of advisory committees, including one for end users. The rules surrounding ccTLDs were tightened after Russia didn’t sunset .su, so they tried to take politics out of it, make it a wholly rules-based thing, but now it figures that the rule everyone wants to have is “decide on a case-by-case basis”.

    There’s also been various initiatives regarding reform of internet governance over the decades but in the end noone can agree on what would be better so ICANN keeps on chugging on.

    You know what would bring a quick end to this? If Mauritius doesn’t incorporate those islands into itself, letting them stay an autonomous territory. From British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritian Indian Ocean Territory.


  • It’s not about the economic model or the US wouldn’t be buddies with Vietnam. This is about United Fruit (now Chiquita), this is about Bacardi, all expropriated without a dime of compensation, and rightfully so for using de facto slave labour under the watchful eye of US-backed dictators, administrating the island as a de facto colony.

    The Cuban revolution wasn’t socialist, it was one for independence. The guerillas, once in power, were eyeing vaguely DemSoc politics and a good relationship with the US. The US answered with the Bay of Pigs invasion etc, driving Cuba into the arms of the Soviet Union and acquiring an unhealthy habit of authoritarianism and non-industrialisation in the process, becoming dependent on the block overpaying for their sugar, them underpaying for oil, fertiliser, etc.

    The difference to Vietnam? Vietnam was a French colony. The US got over the domino theory which made them wage war there, they never got over the expropriations and losing control over the colony, worst of all, driving it into the hands of their mortal enemy. To relent on the sanctions would mean reflecting on all that and I don’t think the US is politically capable of admitting such a gigantic mistake, both humanitarian and strategic, to themselves.

    In a parallel universe, with saner heads in Washington prevailing, Cuba would now be negotiating alongside Puerto Rico about the details of US statehood.



  • the training data is not stored in the model in its original form,

    It is not stored in the model, period. Same as you do not store the shape of the letters you’re reading right now, not even the words, but their overall meaning. Remembering the meaning of what I write here, you can then produce words and letters again and you might be close but even with this short paragraph you’ll find it very hard to make an exact replica. That’s because you did not store it in its original form, not even compressed, you re-encoded it using your own understanding of language, of the world, of everything.