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  • Legislation, paperwork, border checks and tariffs make it more expensive and difficult to transport stuff to the UK. Companies importing from the EU pass on the higher cost of transport to customers. Customers now pay more for the same thing because it costs more to import.

    EDIT: Should also mention that this applies to stuff made in the UK too. I doubt there's many industries that don't use anything from the EU for raw materials. If you make a widget with German steel, you still pay for that import even if your widget is made in the UK. That cost gets passed on to customers too.

  • Just think of all the trade agreements Britain has made now that it can independently negotiate! Why, the FTA with Australia alone increased GDP by checks notes 0.08%. Wait, that can't be right. Surely the British public weren't misled about any of this?

  • I hate the term intellectual property. It's a word used to describe vastly different concepts with vastly different legal backgrounds and problems.

    Copyright is theoretically a good thing, giving an artist or writer the time to profit from their work before the work becomes public domain, incentivizing the work. The current international agreements around it are absolutely bonkers thanks to Disney. The fact that the copyright persists after death, let alone for a century, is complete madness. The artist obviously can't profit from their work after they're dead. It's an absolute shameless cash grab that destroys culture.

    Patents are also theoretically a good thing, allowing companies to release specifications of machines that allow for 10 years of exclusive use. Without patents, companies would hide their designs as trade secrets. It guarantees that after a decade, the designs will be publicly available for anyone to see. They need to be much more heavily restricted in what you can put patents on though. Patenting a specific machine design is fine, patenting molecules or math breaks the entire system. Software patents are blatantly absurd and broken.

    EDIT: Should also mention that 3D printers are a patent success story of the system working as intended. Patented in 1986, the inventor made good money making expensive machines with his own company. In 1996, the patent expired and we had an explosion of competing machines, getting ever cheaper and more effective. Everybody won. The inventor made bank for his decade of exclusivity, and then everyone benefited from the design being public domain, free for everyone to use.

    Trade secrets, the protection of specific recipes, client lists and strategies, can be abused to protect companies against disclosing information that may be very pertinent to their customers and governments. The Coca-Cola recipe or lists of clients as a trade secret is fine imho, but they can also abuse trade secret law to hide systems that lie about your car's emissions.

    Trademarks help protect consumers against knockoff brands that pretend to be what they're not. This is the least abused type of "IP". This doesn't mean there aren't bad actors out there registering tons of different trademarks to squat on those designs & names, hoping to force a new company to pay up to use the name. Trademark squatting could theoretically be solved by annulling the trademark if the company isn't actively using it. Trademarks are currently much too easy to maintain.

    All of this to say, lumping all of these different laws into "IP" is not useful at all when talking about the goals of the different legislations, what they're trying to do, and how they fail.

  • The heroes are vastly different from one another, and are very different in terms of skill ceiling and floor. Meepo and Invoker are considered the two most mechanically demanding heroes, and should never be played by a new player.

    Contrast this with Bristleback, whose gameplay consists of right-clicking an enemy and spamming W, then turning around and running away if they fight back too hard. There's also Sven, whose gameplay consists of using a stun ability, right-clicking an enemy, and they're probably dead. Axe, whose gameplay consists of running in and hoping people are stupid enough to hit you, and using your taunt ability to force them to do it if they aren't.

    Finally, there's Sniper. You right-click enemies. That's about it. He has a slow and a long-range nuke spell, but if you've right-clicked an enemy you're at least helping.

    Of course, higher skilled matches change things drastically and more complex teamwork and ability use is needed at those levels, but for a new player, these heroes are all very simple and straightforward to use.

  • Still probably better than Romania's PSD (Partidul Social Democrat). The founding members were communist party members trying to grab power in a post-Ceacescu era, and have no real political ideology. Just corrupt bureaucrats trying to pilfer anything not bolted to the floor.

    It's very sad to me that in modern Romanian politics there isn't really a left-wing party. The most "sane" party is a center-right technocratic party (USR) that is at least better because they tend to mostly keep their hands off the bribe money.

  • Completely agree that there are a ton of ways around client-side anti-cheat. There have even been cases where pros have been caught with mice with in-built macros that spoofs themselves as a kb+mouse combo in in-person tournament settings where the computers are completely controlled and the players can't install anything.

    I was answering specifically the point about mechanical skill in MOBAs.

  • At least in Dota 2, macros can give huge advantages. For example, cycling through every meepo to start a poof and blinking takes ~10 inputs in a precise order with an extremely tight timing window. Very mechanically demanding. A macro can execute it perfectly with a single button press instantly. Similar with Invokers Invoke ability for sequenced combos of specific spells.

    I honestly have no idea if an equivalently demanding sequence of inputs exists in LoL.

  • I think the best counter to this is to consider the zero learning state. A language model or art model without any training data at all will output static, basically. Random noise.

    A group of humans socially isolated from the rest of the world will independently create art and music. It has happened an uncountable number of times. It seems to be a fairly automatic emergent property of human societies.

    With that being the case, we can safely say that however creativity works, it's not merely compositing things we've seen or heard before.

  • I really don't understand this whole "learning" thing that everybody claims these models are doing.

    A Markov chain algorithm with different inputs of text and the output of the next predicted word isn't colloquially called "learning", yet it's fundamentally the same process, just less sophisticated.

    They take input, apply a statistical model to it, generate output derived from the input. Humans have creativity, lateral thinking and the ability to understand context and meaning. Most importantly, with art and creative writing, they're trying to express something.

    "AI" has none of these things, just a probability for which token goes next considering which tokens are there already.

  • As horrible as the politics of the Republican party are, it's not comparable to living your entire life inside a refugee camp.

  • Poe's law is a real thing though. And /s is much older than Reddit.

    Maybe we could use the percontation mark instead⸮

  • It might as well be considering the history of cross-country support. Class above nation, after all.

  • Depends on the implementation of different login services and the number of possible permutations. An attacker will probably get locked out of trying to log in after making dozens of guesses.

  • What kind of public transport? And how is it implemented? The devil is in the details for this stuff.

    Free bus tickets do nothing if the buses are stuck in traffic with no bus lane so often that people go "fuck it" and take the car anyway, because it's more convenient.

    Free metro tickets do nothing if the routes don't go where people want to go.

    Free train tickets do nothing if the trains don't leave frequently enough to have options and/or are stuck waiting for freight trains to pass.

    There's any number of non-monetary reasons that public transport might suck, but there are solutions for them.

  • Computer-assisted board games are a growing subcategory. Typically they have a companion app that handles the background number crunch, RNG, and guides you through turns with what decisions are possible in each phase.

  • It's also breaking the joint calendar between the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches. So a symbolic breaking of unity.

  • It's only able to improve from here.

    That isn't actually true. With the rise in articles, posts and comments written by these algorithms, experts are warning about model collapse. Basically, the lack of decent human-written training data will destroy future generative AI before it can even start.

  • Yes and yes, imho. The only humane way forward is an end to the killing on both sides and a diplomatic solution. Whether that's a one, two or five state solution doesn't matter to me, that's up to the people negotiating.

    That diplomacy and negotiation feels a very long way away at the moment though.