ignirtoq

I don’t follow Mexican politics closely, but this could be part of an effort to curb obesity. I’ve heard they introduced taxes on sugary drinks for this, so this might be another avenue.

If people are wanting cheap snacks, and private companies are only making unhealthy ones, you can introduce regulations to micromanage what they can produce, or you can introduce a complex taxation process to disincentivize sugar snacks. Or you can introduce your own product that meets a perceived unmet demand in an underserved market.

Part of the reason that this jailbreak worked is that the Windows keys, a mix of Home, Pro, and Enterprise keys, had been trained into the model, Figueroa told The Register.

Isn’t that the whole point? They’re using prompting tricks to tease out the training data. This has been done several times with copyrighted written works. That’s the only reasonable way ChatGPT could produce valid Windows keys. What would be the alternative? ChatGPT somehow reverse engineered the algorithm for generating valid Windows product keys?

The thing is it’s been like that forever. Good products made by small- to medium-sized businesses have always attracted buyouts where the new owner basically converts the good reputation of the original into money through cutting corners, laying off critical workers, and other strategies that slowly (or quickly) make the product worse. Eventually the formerly good product gets bad enough there’s space in the market for an entrepreneur to introduce a new good product, and the cycle repeats.

I think what’s different now is, since this has gone on unabated for 70+ years, economic inequality means the people with good ideas for products can’t afford to become entrepreneurs anymore. The market openings are there, but the people that made everything so bad now have all the money. So the cycle is broken not by good products staying good, but by bad products having no replacements.

Oppenheimer was already really long, and I feel like it portrayed the complexity of the moral struggle Oppenheimer faced pretty well, as well as showing him as the very fallible human being he was. You can’t make a movie that talks about every aspect of such an historical event as the development and use of the first atomic bombs. There’s just too much. It would have to be a documentary, and even then it would be days long. Just because it wasn’t the story James Cameron considers the most compelling/important about the development of the atomic bomb doesn’t mean it’s not a compelling/important story.

They keep tasking these LLMs with things that traditional programming solved a long time ago. There are already vending machines run by computers. They work just fine without AI.

Honestly the computer controlled vending machines are already over-engineered since many of them play ads when you walk up. The last customer-focused feature added was credit card support, and that just needs a credit card reader and a minimal IoT integration. They really shouldn’t even have screens.

The change doesn’t reflect unprecedented temperatures, with Fairbanks having reached 90 degrees twice in 2024, Srinivasan said. It’s purely an administrative change by the weather service.

I think this is a bit disingenuous. Sure, it’s not technically “unprecedented” because it has happened before, specifically last year, but the change is because they want to better help people, and better helping people means making this change because hotter temperatures are happening more because of climate change.

Thoman also clarified that the term swap doesn’t have anything to do with climate change.

They may not be directly citing climate change, but it’s absolutely the root cause. I wonder if they’re just trying to stay under Trump’s radar so he doesn’t make them roll it back because they said the C phrase. In bad political times doing good sometimes means speaking the party line while doing good works behind their backs.

It’s mixed with other artificial sweeteners (I know of at least the monk fruit in my pantry) to get better weight to sweetness ratios. Most of the most popular artificial sweeteners are far stronger, sometimes hundreds of times stronger, than sugar. So they mix them with erythritol, which is less sweet than sugar, so you can replace 5g of sugar with 5g of the artificial sweetener in recipes and get the right sweetness.

The human brain is not an ordered, carefully engineered thinking machine; it’s a massive hodge-podge of heuristic systems to solve a lot of different classes of problems, which makes sense when you remember it evolved over millions of years as our very distant ancestors were exposed to radically different environments and challenges.

Likewise, however AGI is built, in order to communicate with humans and solve most of the same problems, it’s probably going to take an amalgamation of different algorithms, just like brains.

All of this to say, I agree memorization will probably be an integral part of that system, but it’s also going to be a small part of the final system. So I also agree with the article that we’re way off from AGI.

The size of the cut is what they use for the appeal to the public to build their social narrative, but legally/economically speaking it’s not really the problem. The problem is that Apple effectively forbids developers from having any other mechanism to transact with customers except through their marketplace where they take the 30% cut, hence the lawsuit being about monopolistic practices, not the amount they’re charging.

Valve handles things completely differently. Sure, listing on the Steam store requires giving Valve a 30% cut of the purchase price, but Steam doesn’t demand a 30% cut of any and all transactions that happen within or related to the game like Apple does. You also don’t have to buy a game from the Steam store to load it and launch it from the Steam client. And Proton works with a lot more games and applications than just those on the Steam store.

The fact that the two companies charge a similar price for a single relatively similar business case oversimplifies a lot of how the two companies operate.

“Almost half a dozen times” seems like a weird way to say 5.

This is great, but the devil’s in the details. What’s covered and what’s excluded?

The article talks about “Ultraviolet (UV) light boxes, which emit only a narrow bandwidth of light that is not linked to skin cancer,” so it’s possible the UV treatment and the drugs can be combined.

According to Hui’s attorney, she hoped to gain permanent resident status in the U.S. after paying “an American citizen $2,000 to enter into a sham marriage.”

She needs to get a new attorney.

Appeasing authoritarians only delays the inevitable, if it even delays it at all. Trump wants direct control over the Fed to enrich himself. Killing useful groups over the culture war issues he uses as a (weak) cover for his actions doesn’t solve this core problem.

Somewhere there’s a quality control engineer with tritanopia who got assigned this job one day without warning and is desperately employing the “fake it until you make it” strategy.

Even more surprising: the droplets didn’t evaporate quickly, as thermodynamics would predict.

“According to the curvature and size of the droplets, they should have been evaporating,” says Patel. “But they were not; they remained stable for extended periods.”

With a material that could potentially defy the laws of physics on their hands, Lee and Patel sent their design off to a collaborator to see if their results were replicable.

I really don’t like the repeated use of the phrase “defy the laws of physics.” That’s an extraordinary claim, and it needs extraordinary proof, and the researchers already propose a mechanism by which the droplets remained stable under existing physical laws, namely that they were getting replenished from the nanopores inside the material as fast as evaporation was pulling water out of the droplets.

I recognize the researchers themselves aren’t using the phrase, it’s the Penn press release organization trying to further drum up interest in the research. But it’s a bad framing. You can make it sound interesting without resorting to clickbait techniques like “did our awesome engineers just break the laws of physics??” Hell, the research is interesting enough on its own; passive water collection from the air is revolutionary! No need for editorializing!

The use of “quantum leap” isn’t about comparing the absolute size of the change to quantum phenomena. It’s about the lack of a smooth transition. Quantum leaps in physics are instantaneous transitions between states with no intermediate. That’s the idea with the colloquialism: a sudden shift from one state to another without a smooth transitional period.

France, for instance, has a national policy against the recognition of domestic minority languages like Basque, Breton and Corsican.

Trying to give France the benefit of the doubt, but this just sounds like oppression. Is there a good reason France doesn’t recognize minority languages in its territory?

Intent matters, and methods matter. But I think what the friend is missing is that the methods aren’t bad; op is using methods developed from scientific analysis of abused animals with the intent to ethically care for them. Coming back to intent, she clearly wants to help this guy who her training is identifying as having some kind of background of abuse. The methods might be a little crude in the sense that they were developed for animals and not for people (who are animals, but animals with several distinct qualities from other animals, like the ability to communicate complex ideas), and there are different, more well-adapted methods for people, but they’re only crude in comparison to those modern human-focused methods. They’re still quite effective, and I would still consider them ethical for use on humans when paired with an altruistic intent, which she seems to be conveying. As long as she still views the guy as fully a person, a peer, then I see nothing wrong here.

The criminal networks will just immediately switch to VPNs and using end-to-end encryption services hosted in another country. VPN technology for phones is already available and has been for a while. On day one this legislation will be useless for its primary (purported) purpose. No exceptions or winner-choosing necessary.

Then they’ll go after VPNs with the argument of criminals using the technology to skirt law enforcement backdoor requirements in end-to-end encryption.