Overzeetop @ Overzeetop @beehaw.org

Posts

0

Comments

233

Joined

2 yr. ago

Pandora's entire reason for being was essentially a ML (/AI) exercise to fingerprint and associate music. It's still pretty brilliant, really.

Good news: you now have access to streaming lossless audio

Bad news: Nearly every device people use now connects through Bluetooth, which doesn't support lossless audio.

Biden is a laws-and-procedures man; one for the status quo. It's why he's getting a lot done in the US. It's also why, short of agreeing that heads of state should be prosecuted in abstentia for crimes in foreign nations, he has no choice to admit that a foreign head of state is due immunity from prosecution. He's told MBS that he holds him personally accountable, according to the article. But Khashoggi is a (very) unfortunate pawn in this game, and the only other three options are to kidnap, try, and jail/execute a foreign leader, place sanctions on or cut off all ties with one of the richest and most economically powerful [and nominally one of our few middle eastern allied] countries, or go to war and nuke the entire palace from orbit just to be sure. None of those three are viable - practically or politically - and so he's fucking stuck with what he has.

There are, of course, inadequate solutions like not allowing him personally to arrive or transit the US, but that's a bullshit limitation for someone worth half a trillion dollars and does nothing to stop him from killing again or bring peace to the Khashoggi family.

So Khashoggi gets murdered on Trump's watch and Trump's response about MBS is - and I quote from Woodward's book - "I saved his a**,” “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop." And then, after Trump leaves office MBS gives his son, who has no hedge fund management experience, a $2B investment for his new hedge fund. But Biden is blamed for betrayal based in his desire to engage the country and not "walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia, or Iran."

Did Putin ghost write this story for the Guardian himself, or is it run of the mill, mid-level Russian propaganda?

a perfectly legal collection, not give anyone else access

I would love to meet this unicorn.

McCarthy was doomed from the start as a leader and not only has gotten nothing accomplished but has negotiated in bad faith with the administration and has undertaken unproductive and unwarranted "investigations" which his own witnesses admit do not merit review.

The Democrats are ready for a power sharing structure and will gladly reach across the aisle to form a coalition which excludes the freedom caucus. They voted for the continuing resolution because it was right for the country. Ultimately, if the Republicans choose not to govern because they are beholden to the clown show that is their right flank, they need to be held accountable for any damage they do. And history says they will.

It's worth noting that the Democrats have a similar problem in the Senate, but/also from their right flank. The only difference is that the clown show only has two members - from WV and AZ - and they are moderates (and I use that term loosely) rather than extremes so that business gets done but without useful progress, politically.

While unpopular for American oil producers, if the US declared oil and refined petroleum products a national resource that could not be shipped overseas until the American needs were met, we (the US) would never worry about petroleum. We are not only the largest producer of oil in the world - by a margin of something like 20% over either SA or Russia - we are the largest refiner in the world, besting China by more than 10% and with almost triple the capacity of Russia. The US could fill the SPR by commandeering just three weeks of US production "in the national interest". If the Defense Production Act can make manufacturers produce medical supplies for a pandemic, I suspect it could limit overseas sales to refill the nation's *strategic *reserve. Now, tbf, our refinery capacity isn't exactly aligned with our native production, but the fact remains that the US is hardly in a tight spot.

The global market really just means the West, because China, India, and the rest of the BRICS will find ways to ignore the (lets face it - voluntary) Russian limits on exports. In fact, they already have, with Russian oil prices trailing a miniscule fraction behind world markets rather than the $60/bbl international sanctions require. The tightness in the market is a product of the West allowing Russia to drag this war in Ukraine out - effectively our own damned fault. Economic crisis, my ass. - all of this is manageable. It merely requires the axle to squeak enough to get greased. And it will, far before we get to any sort of "crisis".

That's probably the most uplifting part about the award - such amazing persistence.

Ripley: You never said anything about an android being on board, why not?

Burke: It never uhm, never occurred to me. It's common practice, we always have a synthetic on board.

Bishop: I prefer the term "Artificial Person" myself.

Trivially, from an administrative standpoint. You rent/buy a new place out of state, fill out the local forms to get a new driver's license and change your residence address. Registering to vote in your new location is often handled by just getting your new driver's license, and all states offer comity - if you have a license in an US state they'll give you a new one without a test, just a small fee. Even for professional workers who have to be licensed it's rarely more than a day or two of hassle and a week to a month of administrative waiting. I'm an engineer and have licenses in 6 states; most allow you to simply fill out forms and pay a fee (and have no judgements on your current license) and they'll review and issue you a license. Doctors, nurses, teachers, hairdressers, accountants, lawyers are usually similar, though some states have slightly different requirements so you may need to take a test or add some continuing education.

Practically, you need to have some savings - a rarity for Americans. Moving expenses from state to state is similar to moving from one city to another within a state. There is the issue of children in school (mainly the emotional cost of re-making friend groups), and your own social life (mainly the emotional cost of re-making friend groups). And, of course, you will need a job - something harder to find when you are remote, and difficult if you work in a rarefied industry.

Blood, Gore, Violence and Nudity? For free? Sign. Me. Up.

I kid of course. Nowadays I just get all of them (except that PC builder and 911 operator stuff...). I only have about 30-40 years left in my life, and I doubt I'll ever clear my Epic freebie backlog.

If on the ballot she would win, too.

One of the biggest barriers to a functioning democracy is inertia (name recognition), which is why we need term limits so badly. Ask any democrat, for example, and they'll tell you they want younger, more diverse candidates. But when asked to check a box in the spring of 2020 for president, the majority (plurality?) bypassed the female candidates, candidates of color, and the non-CIS candidate(s) to choose an old white man as their champion - and not even the liberal old white man at that. We need these old-ass MFers out of the way, for our own damned good.

The more specific the prompt, the more uniform the output; the less specific the prompt, the less uniform the output. The models are large enough that it's little different than offering the same prompt to human artists. The idea was to mimic the input--output flow of human interpretation using massive back catalogs of interpretations made by humans. Humans are, essentially, stable diffusion engines which take everything they've read, seen, and learned, and apply it to the task at hand. Some are better than others. Some - rather few - have the abiliy to create exceptionally refined and nuanced versions - we get the classics. Even fewer can extrapolate from the existing human data set, or set it aside to produce results in unexpected ways, and we get the avante-garde...which then gets folded into the "data-set" for future humans.

To quote Mel Brooks (or his writing team):

Dole Office Clerk : Occupation?

Comicus : Stand-up philosopher.

Dole Office Clerk : What?

Comicus : Stand-up philosopher. I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and meaningful comprehension.

Dole Office Clerk : Oh, a bullshit artist!

That's a single line needed that clarifies that derivative works originally created by AI are not copyrightable, to make it explicit and distinct from the ability to claim copyright on non-transformative works made from public domain content. AI created works cannot be copyrighted (and that should include things like software) and derivative works should now be considered non-copyrightable as well. The onus should be shifted to the creator to prove that their work is transformative in order to claim copyright over the work.

Skip smoking and vape limits. Outlaw nicotine and other addictive synthetic nicotine-like compounds. For gods sake - you’re not allowed to buy acetaminophen or pseudoephedrine in bulk in the UK.

Stop allowing the sale of the addictive drug and a good deal of the problem will correct itself.

Can’t be any worse than season 8.

It sounds shitty for Biden (and the dems), too. The percentage supporting impeachment from August to September went up. Granted, those were different polls, and even with the same poll would likely be within the margin of error, but tit means that the unfounded smear campaign from the Republicans is at least holding steady, and possibly gaining ground. That sucks.

As the father of a college student, I see a lot of kids going to college for a "college degree" like it's a token that provides a job. If you ask them what they want to do as a profession when they get out, they don't have an answer. That's a fundamental disconnect in the purpose of college. It's technically the student's responsibility to determine what they need to become employable, but these young adults simply don't have the world experience to know what is necessary. Corporations are looking for relatively specific skill sets when hiring, and the average swath of humanities and science degrees doesn't fulfill those needs. For the price of tuition colleges should be guiding them, but they mostly wash their hands of any post-graduate needs. The system devolves into a gamification of the experience where "success" is navigating the various and sundry graduation requirements and the end result is a degree rather than a person with intellectual skills they can market directly.

That's not to say college is useless, just misguided. It's like getting the best tailor in the world for your next public engagement. You and your college/tailor may have produced the finest 17th century Russian ball gown ever seen but now you need to find a 17th century Russian ball; you can't wear that as an intern to an accounting audit. Not to pick on 17th century Russian gowns, you can't wear a fabulous business suit (which might be okay for an accounting audit) as crew on a civil engineering/surveying team or at an archeological dig.

All that said, I'm going to go as far as to say a pretty large helping of value should have come from parents or mentors. We, as parents, have spent most of our children's formative years either entirely ignoring the need to have a focus, or hyperfocusing to the exclusion of a bigger picture. It's always been this way, of course, but screwing up in college didn't used to result in life-burdening debt, and parents need to step up a lot earlier.

(apologies for not reading the article, I was determined to be a robot at the capcha)

The point is that the designer gets paid once, at the time if design, and the car companies make as many copies as they want without paying an additional penny. Anyone who buys a car never pays an extra penny to the designers no matter hire many times they use the car (analogous to watching a movie or show multiple times).

But let’s take you’re argument- that it costs money to make a copy. All modern cars are filled with software - entertainment, operations, video processing, communications, autopilot. Afaik, no programmers at Ford are getting residuals for the number of times their startup menu plays, or the fuel injectors modulate for a different mix of fuel.

The crux is how these creators get paid - as a fee, or with a speculative, contractually-agreed rate. We’re somehow appalled when one field doesn’t get residuals they want, but other fields never get them at all.