Trump says Palestinians have ‘no alternative’ but to leave Gaza
palordrolap @ palordrolap @fedia.io Posts 1Comments 733Joined 11 mo. ago
palordrolap @ palordrolap @fedia.io
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not sure what they're trying to do here
Maximise profits and minimise losses. My guess is that someone important at Microsoft thinks that this will do just that, and if not that, will make them, personally, a lot of money. That person has no-one who will dare challenge their authority and so we go down this road.
They (that individual or Microsoft as a whole) almost certainly have a stake in the companies that provide newer hardware, and if they didn't before this decision, they will have by now.
It theoretically makes Micosoft's job easier too. A huge chunk of backwards compatibility maintenance goes out of the window, if you'll pardon the pun.
"Oh you have 5 year old hardware? We don't support that."
Sounds fairly similar to Apple's business model if you think about it that way.
My house has a smell like that. I noticed it on the viewing when the previous occupants were still in, and I assumed that it was "their" smell and that it would go with them. Nope. Part and parcel of the house.
It's probably coming from under the ground floor floorboards because I've never been down there. It would require tearing far too much up in order to get down there.
My other theory is that something has soaked into the floorboards and has mostly but not quite been cleaned out.
Anyway, it hasn't killed me. I have rampant ADHD, but I'm pretty sure the two things are unrelated.
There's a reason the word "multifaceted" gets applied to people sometimes. There are different faces we present in different scenarios.
Sometimes people will be one way with family, another at work and another way again when with friends. There are funny stories (or webcomics) of people ending up in a group that comprises a family member and two people they know from respective second and third groups and the humour is that they have no idea how to act in a way that won't confuse at least one of the people they're with, including themselves.
As for relating to your situation, there was one online content creator who went by a name that sounded like it was based on a real, given name and not something made up. It was a bit of a surprise when I learned that wasn't anything to do with their actual name. They also posted things that were out of the mould I'd mentally put them in on another social media site.
(Being vague because I don't want to dox or disparage.)
Thankfully, those particular revelations affected no-one but me, which might be a way for you to look at the situation with the person you're talking about.
Current AIs often suffer from what's sometimes called "the strawberry problem" and can be easily confused into doing mathematics incorrectly. There's also the human element of "if it comes out of a computer it must be right", forgetting the "garbage in = garbage out" principle.
The strawberry problem is a colourful name for the fact that LLMs turn sentences into something else internally and can't then go back and re-examine the input to make checks and comparisons. Thus if you ask an LLM how many 'r's are in the word "strawberry", it often gives the wrong answer, unless it has been explicitly told what the right answer is. And now you have no idea what else it has and hasn't been told is right and wrong.
As for mathematics, they have to be explicitly programmed to be able to use a proper calculator if they're to do mathematics correctly. Otherwise you'll get something that looks good enough to fool someone who doesn't know any better.
LLMs are basically lossy compressions of knowledge. At a high level of abstraction, the creation of an LLM is fairly similar to how a raw image is turned into a JPEG. There's a necessary, deliberate bottleneck in the creation process that keeps the size down, and that's going to show up in the output if you look closely.
Using the output of an LLM is a bit like editing the JPEG rather than the raw image. Some of the things you do will invariably enhance those artefacts.
For a JPEG that'll do nothing worse than make an image "deep-fried" or otherwise ugly. Put an LLM in charge of people's lives and it'll do the same to them.
JPEG has a lossless encoding variant, but that's not the right analogy here.
That's a looong board.
But it's also the European food additive code for monosodium glutamate, which is a heck of a coincidence if that's not what they're intending to reference.
"No, see, the rule of the game is that I get to hit you with a big stick, it's not fair if you get your own stick and start hitting me with it."
With the right (or maybe that should be "wrong") people out of the way, many more people will be fed than would otherwise not be. Short term goals versus long term goals.
Also, stale baguettes, while technically food, are not the most nutritious of foods. Employing the baguettes in other ways may result in better nutrition.
I should make plain that "out of the way" does not necessarily mean the most extreme measure. It can, but it doesn't have to.
Somewhat like a stale baguette.
Web-rings were also a thing in the mid-to-late '90s before search engines really took off.
Basically you'd put a banner on your site that listed a site "before" yours in the ring, the one "after" and maybe a "random" link as well.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
There used to be an undocumented setting in early versions of MS-DOS that would allow the setting of the command option character to something other than the slash, and if you did that, the slash automatically became the path separator. All you needed was SWITCHAR=- in your CONFIG.SYS and DOS was suddenly very Unix-y.
It was taken out after a while because, with the feature being undocumented, too many people didn't know about it and bits of software - especially batch files, would have been reliant on things being "wrong". The modern support for regular slash in API calls probably doesn't use any of the old SWITCHAR code, but it is, in some way, the spiritual descendant of that secret feature.
Here's an old blog that talks about it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/larryosterman/why-is-the-dos-path-character
If the API price-gouging scandal didn't bring them all over already, then you might be surprised just how many continue to hang on there, even after this one. And the next one. And the next.
It's just how people are. We don't want to change.
It will bring some people over. But I doubt there will be a flood.
Being dangerously close to the truth is a hallmark of certain kinds of humour. I appreciate it's not everyone's cup of tea. Most days it isn't mine either.
He died of drugs. Priscilla was 14 when she met Elvis. Lots of bands do unspeakable things with groupies. I am deliberately not connecting any dots there.
The dog thing, I have no idea where I got that. Probably one too many cartoons as a kid or exposure to horror tropes because I'd be horrified if someone did that for real.
The vote happened in 2016 and the election promise that lead to it was made at some point in early 2015 or late 2014 (that election was May 2015), so yeah, Brexit has been a concept for roughly a decade at this point, and that's why it feels so long in time.
Then there's that Euroscepticism has literally always been a thing here in some form or another on the one hand, and on the other, the prolonged agony after that very same thing bit us in the rear end once we decided to act on it.
That's the smile of a man who did something incredibly illegal and all the other guys are trying to get him out of there ASAP while worrying about the consequences if anyone finds out.
As for what that illegal thing was, well, this is just me putting a concept to a picture that might have had no illegal acts preceding it whatsoever, but you know. Drugs maybe. Full on making out with an underage groupie who was loving the experience, but then their dad entered the next room looking for them, necessitating a rapid getaway and a st-eating grin. Grabbing a dog's tail from the inside and, roink, turning it inside out or making an audacious internet comment with a sound effect like "roink". Those sorts of things.
Yes. It is theoretically possible for a dictator to rule with the actual best interests of the people in mind, rather than a misguided belief about what those are, or else a complete lack of concern for anyone but themselves.
Since political beliefs tend to align along party lines, the party of such a dictator does matter somewhat, however little that might be.
Unfortunately, any benevolent dictatorship would be at constant risk of turning, and almost certainly be doomed to turn, into one of the other two options.
Even less fortunately, most dictatorships skip the benevolent step entirely.
About 30 hours.
I had to go nil-by-mouth for 12 hours before an operation to repair a fairly serious injury and they kept pushing the surgery back and back and back. Higher priority cases were keeping the surgeon. It wasn't like I was low priority either, but my injury was stable and not immediately life threatening.
Did I mention I'd also lost blood? That made for a force multiplier.
In the end, they admitted defeat - the surgeon had worked too long anyway - let me eat something and rescheduled my surgery for the following day.
Let me tell you, that was the best chicken I ever ate.
I can imagine that works well. Once.
Given the engineer's amendment to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." is usually "If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.", I can only surmise that COBOL must be one of those languages that are so terrible that they deter their programmers from wanting to do that.
I'm not sure Douglas Adams could have written that today. Most of the people who would have been digital watch people are generally more obsessed with their personal portable computing and communication devices instead. And I like to think that's what he would have called them, repeatedly and often in a handful of paragraphs dedicated to them for no other reason than how well "personal portable computing and communication device" rolls off the tongue.
The sort of phrase that Ford would use when talking to Arthur who would instead be expecting "mobile phone" at most. And then there'd be a little pointless argument about how "mobile phone" wasn't anywhere near descriptive enough.
"What? You mean like 'Mostly harmless'?" asked Arthur pointedly.
"Exactly!" said Ford, cheerily. "Now you're getting it!"
Arthur wasn't getting it. In fact he wasn't sure if that if he had it that he wouldn't want to get rid of it as soon as possible.
Typing in a box on a website provided by someone else can be done by practically anyone, even the boss themselves at a pinch. Heck, some of them love doing that.
Maintaining a server (or a service on a server) requires someone with more skills, which generally costs more money.
It's simple: He can't tell the difference between Palestinians, Jordanians and Egyptians, and therefore neither can they.