The kind of farming that makes any money isn’t slow work.

It is, however, tangible work with tangible results. Unlike spending months changing the polarity of nanoscopic silicon structure for the non-appreciation of an utterly clueless salesperson whose braindead ideas will have left the world in a worse state than you found it despite anyone’s best efforts.

I should seriously get into woodworking. Kidding. Sorta.

I don’t think there is one beyond “hey look we all know this thing”.

Americans: “We are a diverse patchwork of cultures and saying the US is one gigantic boring monoculture just because we share a common language is offensive”

Also Americans: hundreds of millions of people literally all relate to the same quirky element of childhood imposed through immense conformist institutions, can’t even process the idea that other cultures exist that do not relate to this specific element.

I need to hear what this connector would sound like when connected to an actual Dolby Atmos system. Do the crackles and pops get spatialized and make an impromptu symphony going around your room? The people must know!

If the prices are as legitimate as you suggest then surely that will be easily revealed by the subpoena’d accounting books and Novo Nordisk will be cleared of suspicion. Wouldn’t that be the system working as intended?

I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.

What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than “we can”), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.

Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft’s meddling.

• Greenfield (new) nuclear’s LCOE is higher than renewables. This does not account for the additional GHG emissions from the fossil fuels that supplement renewables’ intermittency issues, and if we put a carbon tax on those then the maths would surely change (whether it justifies greenfield nuclear over things like energy storage or just paying the carbon tax I do not know, I haven’t seen a study on that).
• Existing nuclear is cost-competitive with renewables. Yes, as with any 50 year-old infrastructure it will require maintenance. Refurbishing is still cheaper than shutting everything down and replacing that capacity with gas+renewables. The decision to shut down existing NPPs was political; so political in fact that the government had to put the nuclear shutdown into law (otherwise the energy operator would have done the economically sensible thing and refurbished the NPPs for an additional 10-30 years.
  Since the energy crisis we are planning to refurbish the NPPs that were shut down anyways. Of course the cost analysis is much murkier now that we have years of delayed maintenance to catch up on since the operator expected a complete phaseout in 2022.

The debate over new nuclear is one thing. It’s not happening in Belgium anyways as literally no political party supports that. But shutting down existing nuclear is a moronic strategy that was only undertaken due to intense lobbying from anti-nuclear (and therefore pro-oil, whether they realize it or not) activists that cannot even remotely pretend that in the early '00s they correctly predicted that existing-nuclear-vs-new-renewables would reach a rough economic equilibrium twenty years later. They were killing the planet and they knew it, and didn’t care because it meant less nuclear (whatever relative intrinsic benefits that supposedly entails from an environmental perspective).

The fact that they had 10+ years to revert the decision and didn’t is that much more damning.

I would know, my country (Belgium) did the same. I will forever hold a grudge against those reality-denying environmentalists who recklessly misrepresented the drawbacks of nuclear to the public and killed any dream of energy independence well before I was old enough to vote.

You were the chosen ones, Greens. You were supposed to fight the oil lobby, not join them.

Beta road signs: Unreadable if you don’t speak English, take a while to process, do not stand out

Chad Vienna convention signs:

Another long term goal of the EU is to promote peace and democracy across Europe.

Allowing Orbàn to further democratic backsliding at home and undermining of the EU’s democratic processes and missions goes contrary to that goal, and the usual withholding of EU funding isn’t a sentence at all to a quasi-dictator who revels in the fact that reduced funding means more social misery means easy elections for a populist who blames every problem on the EU.

Kicking out Hungary is a solution of last resort and we aren’t there yet, but in a system where Member States could turn totalitarian (and as Sovereign states we have no legal means to force out a dictator), exclusion must be on the table if we are to uphold our democratic values.

Depends on how they were trained, if they aren’t actively used to lots of human touch early on the default mode for cats is “pets on my schedule, if I feel like it”.

I don’t… think it’s bad? Such cats aren’t unhappy or evil, they just don’t crave affection which kinda makes sense for a barely domesticated species whose wild counterpart is non-social. Raising a cat to be cuddly definitely goes against its innate instincts.

Many of those boomers retired comfortably without ever learning the slightest bit of computer literacy. Even now, plenty of jobs require little-to-none.

Furthermore, we are in the “dotcom bubble” stage of “AI”. The people least knowledgeable about it are the ones throwing billions of dollars at whoever claims to “use AI” for literally anything. We are on, (or maybe for those of us who are paying attention, right after), the Peak of Inflated Expectations.

Remember when 5-ish years ago all anyone would talk about in the tech space is how being a truck driver would be an obsolete job in the near future? I remember.

There is without a doubt a connection to ScarJo. They asked her to voice the AI, they asked her again right before release, and the CEO tweeted “her” on release.

The only question is whether, backlash aside, they could technically get away with it (which does not make it right).

There is almost certainly internal communication that basically reads “hey let’s get an actress who sounds as close to ScarJo as possible”. There’s also the CEO tweeting “her” on the day of release.

Is that legal? IANAL, but OpenAI’s reaction of immediately shutting that shit down leads me to believe they realized it is, in fact, illegal.

Your comparison is also incorrect. You’re not getting a JEJ soundalike, you’re getting a JEJ soundalike to do a Darth Vader impersonation. Meaningfully different semantics. They don’t just want “white american woman who vaguely sounds like ScarJo I guess” they have proven beyond doubt that they want “The AI from the 2013 movie Her starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson”.

Also legality aside, it’s really fucking weird and ethically wrong. I don’t care if it’s legal or not, you shouldn’t be able to make an AI replicate someone’s voice without their consent.

First time that Liège has ever been described as Northern in basically any context. It’s in Southeastern Belgium in Western Europe.

“Belgium is in Northern Europe” sounds like something ChatGPT would hallucinate. Or it’s bait to drive engagement.

The cruelty is the point.

I don’t think twitter users in authoritarian hellholes are acting like NPCs going “Glory to Artsotzka” every five minutes.

It’s tourism, coupled with low twitter use from the local population. Belgium has a bigger population than Belarus and unlike it isn’t an authoritarian hellhole. But it’s way more touristy. So Belgium has its own flag as the most used emoji but Belarus doesn’t.

You can see this pattern pretty clearly in the ME as well. Jordan, Yemen, or Syria don’t have their own flag as their most used emoji (despite being both small and undemocratic), because there ain’t any tourists there. Qatar does. (A bit surprised about Cyprus though, do they use twitter a lot?)

The data is probably sound, but the methodology is insane.

A bunch of countries just have their own flag as an emoji… The author barely managed to identify which emoji tourists use when posting about their trip on twitter.

Well do I have exactly the brand new 1h37min queer video essay for you!

TL;DW: The modern concept of gender as separate from sex was not (originally) a progressive move. It was conservatives’ reaction to the medical discoveries of the nebulous nature of biological sex, to justify imposing the gender binary on trans people and especially intersex children.

Conservatives claim to care a lot about protecting trans kids from “radical decisions”, but the places that enact legislation to prevent teenagers from using puberty blockers are the same places that still allow and encourage mutilating surgeries on intersex babies.
It is not an accident. It is ideologically consistent with conservatives’ drive to impose their religious and cultural vision of the binary gender as a completely fixed universal truth, and they’ll use extreme violence to ensure it remains binary, fixed and universal.

I know Brave browser has had a lot of controversy in the past regarding their business practices, including rolling out their own crypto-coin.

They apparently make the really bold claim of using their own index exclusively. If true (given their track record I am not 100 % willing to accept that as truth without seeing some independent analysis), that would do wonders for the search ecosystem. I’m definitely interested to see how it pans out.

Wow, looks like they just updated that page and removed all references to their external indexes. Very shady stuff, Kagi. I’d go as far as to say they are now lying by omission.

The archived version of that page from March does open with (emphasis mine):

Our data includes anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Mojeek and Yandex, specialized search engines like Marginalia, and sources of vertical information like Apple, Wikipedia, Open Meteo, and other APIs.

Then it goes on to say:

Kagi’s indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and “small web” discussions surrounding a particular topic.

Now reading between the lines, and more importantly knowing how much sheer capital goes into indexing the entire web, I can say with much certainty that Kagi is probably powered mostly by Google since it and Bing (which they aren’t using) are basically the only meaningful players in the space. Yandex is for the Russosphere, and Mojeek is nice but nowhere even close to Google or Bing’s coverage. By their own admission Teclis is more narrowly focused and not meant to replace Google’s index. So I’m going to go ahead and call them big fat liars.

I wouldn’t even care that Google is their main index, that’s fine and they can’t be expected to compete with the billions of dollars Google spends on indexing. But the lack of transparency and shady business practices are a big turn-off for me.