“Ok, I was lying / exaggerating”?

$1.35/day to eat? No expenses for entertainment? I guess you’re posting this from the public library, because your expenses don’t include internet or a cell phone. The library must also be where you get your entertainment.

In addition: no laundromat or new clothing for a month and a half? Your clothes must reek. Speaking of which, no gym membership or hotel days, so is that 1.5 months without a bath or shower?

Also, 1.5 months and no insurance payments, so does that mean the vehicle is uninsured? I hope (assuming this is USA) that you have some kind of health insurance, despite not making any health insurance payments.

Something about this just doesn’t seem plausible.

If the RAM they were building for the datacenters was identical to the RAM for PCs, then maybe. Instead, I think they’ll have to slowly switch back to making regular PC RAM, and the shortages will continue.

What seems possible is China intervening. RAM isn’t as difficult to produce as other chips, so it’s possible they might spin up fabs and factories to supply their own domestic market, and eventually start exporting too. Currently 90%+ of RAM is made by Micron (USA), SK Hynix (South Korea) and Samsung (South Korea). China doesn’t like to depend on other countries, and it probably has the capacity to manufacture RAM. And, it probably knows that if it gets good at making RAM it has a good chance at outcompeting the other 3 in the long run. So, I don’t expect any short term fixes, but in the long run this might mean cheaper RAM with a 4th major supplier.

So, don’t fund the larger projects. Fund the smaller ones, they’re the ones that probably need support anyhow.

Besides, I would bet that if you asked Mr. Torvalds, he’d have a list of kernel contributors who live in the EU and would love to be paid for their work.

For number 2, require that the people doing the open source work live and pay taxes in the EU. That way you’re keeping the money in the union, and you’re investing in local knowledge and skills.

As opposed to proprietary software where you’re basically handing dollars over to American companies (or to supposedly “Irish” companies that just so happen to be named almost identically to American companies, but somehow are magically based out of Ireland and don’t pay proper taxes anywhere).

Two economists are walking down the street and pass by a pile of dog shit. One of them (a sadist) turns to the other and says “I’ll pay you $1000 if you eat that dog shit”.

The other performs an internal utility calculation and eats the dog shit.

Continuing their walk, the second economist sees another pile of dog shit and makes the same offer to the first. The first economist also agrees, and eats the dog shit. They walk on.

After a while the second economist says to the first “I can’t help thinking we’re worse off than when we started this walk. We both have the same amount of money we started with, but we both had to eat shit.”

The first economist replies “Worse off?! We’ve just engaged in 2000 dollars worth of trade!”.

Look, by certain ways of calculating GDP growth and trade, it’s probably true that if the money isn’t being spent on software licenses and so on, it means there’s less economic activity going on.

The whole point of open source / free software is that you’re not locked into someone’s proprietary software ecosystem. You don’t have to continue paying license fees. So, if the governments simply stop paying for software licenses, it’s probably true that their GDP will technically shrink. But, that assumes the money won’t be spent on something more useful.

You could even phrase it so the “customer is right about what a machiato is”, like “I’m sorry, this is what we call a machiato here, can you tell me what you’re looking for?”

Hiding behind the bar trying to guess someone’s order isn’t good customer service. Asking the customer to clarify what they want so you can make it exactly how they like it is good customer service.

This is why I much prefer restaurants in places where tipping doesn’t happen.

There’s no BS about the waiter/waitress pretending to be your friend. There’s no organizing the restaurants by sections with one waiter/waitress covering only their section, whoever’s available when someone needs something deals with it. When your food is ready, any waiter/waitress around will grab it and bring it to the table. Also, because the places don’t depend on tips, they don’t care as much about how the waiter or waitress looks. That means people tend to stick around for longer, they know the food, they’re good at the job, and because they don’t need to keep flattering you, they can be honest.

Not FOSS, just public domain.

I’m fine with going fast on a sled being a sport. That’s cool. But, it seems like something where it’s only valid if everybody involved is actively doing something on the way down, not just being ballast.

One person sledding makes sense. But, in this sport, the guy on the bottom can’t possibly be anything but ballast, can he? He can’t see anything, so he can’t be steering or braking, right?

Same with bobsled, the guy at the front is steering. Maybe the people in the back help with something, but they can’t be too actively involved because they can’t see.

Why are you so angry? I’m trying to determine if there’s actually a use for these text generators, and you first say “Sorry but if you can’t make LLMs useful there is something wrong with how you are using them.”, and then you refuse to actually explain what you’re using it for, instead making vague hand-wavey statements.

What do you mean by “medical help”?

What is it that you find useful?

It works by predicting the most likely words to follow the sequence you already have, with a bit of noise added. The result is that if you ask it a question, it is effectively designed to sound as much like an answer as possible. Whether or not that answer is true is out of scope, and not something that technology could ever consider.

I like to talk about it as if it’s the world’s best prop master. You ask for a prop, and you’ll be given one of the most realistic props imaginable. You want a medical chart, it will give you a chart that might fool a doctor. You ask for a legal brief, it has one that might just fool a judge in court. If you ask it for a computer program, what it spits out might actually compile and/or run. But, of course, these are props. They’re only designed to look good on camera. At most, someone will stream it in 4k, pause it, and try to read the prop while it’s on screen.

As someone who has been annoyed with props for decades, I love that. No more “computer code” scenes where it’s just random gobbledygook. But, someone trying to use the output as if it’s real is just as clever as someone who tries to spend prop money from a movie.

Note, this is happening for the same reason Reddit started enshittifying much harder all of a sudden. Discord wants to do an IPO and so they’re going to suddenly start squeezing their users to make the numbers look good just in time for that IPO. Their bet is that they have enough momentum that enough people will stick with them long enough for the IPO to succeed, and after that happens, it’s someone else’s problem.

The battery is the first thing that tends to fail for me.

My phone is a few years old now and recently I wet it down on the inductive charger overnight and missed, so when I woke up it was at 20% battery. I decided that I’d let the battery drain to 0 before charging it, because AFAIK it’s still true that it’s good to do that occasionally so the battery management software can recalibrate things. So I used it for a few minutes and it very quickly dropped to 9% battery, and then it hung out there for like 10 minutes without moving. I gave up on actively using it to drain the battery and just put on a YouTube live stream and put the phone down. Eventually it moved past 9% battery and slowly drained down to 1%. And at 1% it lasted at least another half an hour just sitting there playing full screen video.

From my experience with previous phones, there’s a chance that the battery management software might be able to tune things so that it is more predictable. But, if I’m unlucky it’s already in its death spiral. It’s a shame because it’s still a fairly decent phone. I might want to upgrade anyhow, but it sucks that once the battery goes bad the phone is almost e-Waste. I’ve used a local guy who does repairs to change the battery in a tablet a few years ago, and it went from having horrible battery life to having good-as-new battery life. But, while the battery is still decent on it, the model is so old it’s no longer getting any software updates, which means a lot of apps simply won’t run on it. So, even if I replace the battery in this phone, it’s getting more and more useless by the day.

If I could load another OS on it, I could find a use for it. I have headless computers and it would be great if this could be a temporary screen / keyboard for those. It could be a dedicated bike computer. I could use its camera and monitor 3d prints. But, none of that is possible if the manufacturer says that it’s too old for them to bother with and their app store no longer has apps for it.

You’re indirectly helping Google though. If the second hand market is better for Pixels than other devices because of Graphene, then people are more willing to buy Pixels, so Google sells more of them.

Epstein’s “day job” was being a socialite. He was the guy who knew everybody. If you wanted an introduction, he could do it. He was the guy who made sure that the riff raff stayed out, even if they were rich.

I’m pretty sure that everybody knew he was always around “young women”, but I strongly suspect that most of the people he interacted with didn’t know about the child sex abuse. They were there for his “rolodex”.

But, the end result is that because he was the guy who knew everybody in a position of power, his network shows who has the power. My guess is that at least half the people he had in his network were not into child sex abuse, and didn’t know that he was involved in that. But, I have only the world’s tiniest violin to play for those people. I think they’re guillotine-worthy because of their abuses of power, and how they hoarded obscene amounts of wealth. For far too long, the ultra rich have had a good public image in the US. People should have been furious with them just for hoarding all that wealth. And, the Epstein folks are the ones who not only hoarded the wealth, but spent it to gain power, which they used to warp society to benefit themselves. So, now everybody’s disgusted with them and hates them, it’s for the wrong reasons, but at least they’re hated.

Cool, just be careful on the rules. Switzerland is technically not part of the EEA. They’re part of the EFTA, and have a bunch of bilateral agreements with the rest of the EU, but there are still quirks to the deals. Even if you’re charged only minimal fees or duties, that could add up if you’re buying a car. At a minimum, you’ll probably have to do paperwork to export the car from Switzerland to another country. And the Swiss love their paperwork.

Have you ever crossed the Swiss border? That was an interesting one. Switzerland isn’t in the EU but they’re in a lot of bilateral agreements which means they mostly have an open border. But, that agreement is a lot less solid than the rest of the EU agreements.

It seems like the France / Belgium border could be turned back into a proper border control post within a few months. But, the Swiss / France border seems like it could be back in full force within a few days. Currently you can drive past it at nearly full highway speeds, but all the border control buildings are there, and the roads leading up to them are just ready for them to start diverting traffic again. I also seem to remember that it offered a last second chance to turn around and not cross the border, something you didn’t get at say France / Germany. Probably because there actually is a meaningful difference in laws between the two sides, so there’s a chance someone might decide not to do it.