sushibowl @ sushibowl @feddit.nl

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2 yr. ago

I don't know how long you're out in Kyoto, but my personal hidden gem is sanjusangen-do. It wasn't on our itinerary at all, but we just happened to stumble upon it and it's definitely worth a visit. Highly recommend checking it out if you can spare the time.

There's not really any definite border. FAA controlled airspace generally ends at flight level 600 (around 60,000 feet, although flight levels are defined by air pressure not distance from the ground, so the actual altitude can vary). Above that will be uncontrolled airspace, though that doesn't necessarily mean the US won't claim sovereignty there.

The Outer Space treaty, generally considered the first step in establishing space law, stipulates that "outer space" is for the benefit of all mankind and not subject to sovereignty claims by any country. However there isn't a legal definition of where outer space begins. The Karman line (100km) is a common practical definition. However the US has flown spacecraft (notably the shuttle) below 80km above Canada, without asking for permission first.

Practically speaking, there are as yet not enough craft flying at these kinds of altitudes for real legislation to be necessary. The spacefaring countries mostly work it out between them on a case by case basis.

The difficult thing with this type of tax is that products will become more expensive. In most cases, manufacturers choose plastic because it is the cheapest option. If plastic becomes more expensive they may choose an alternative, but this will still result in a price increase.

This type of policy also tends to be regressive, i.e. it hurts people with lower income much more than wealthier people. This makes it unpopular.

The main problem is that most countries don't have their economic system set up for it. The retirement system also in many cases is not sustainable with a shrinking population. This is going to cause a lot of pain and probably countries will start out with policies aiming to increase birth rates to attempt to maintain the status quo.

You're going to face a lot of resistance trying to actually adapt economic policies to a shrinking population. Especially from older people.

Russia isn't communist anymore.

Strictly speaking, was it ever really communist? Did any Marxist-Leninist state even come close to a communist society? Where's all those Lemmy people who read Marx when you need them?

They are a white ethno state with strong laws against the gays.

Kinda always have been.

I see where you're coming from, but I don't think that excuses anything. If you bought a hard copy with the understanding that a digital copy came with the purchase and now they're taking away the digital copy, that's still a Darth Vader "I'm altering the deal" type move.

If you tried this with Chinese LLMs they would probably come to the conclusion that dropping bombs on the US would result in peace.

I think even something as simple as asking GPT the same question but in Chinese could get you this response.

I agree but also disagree. It's true that machines are capable of fine motor control much more quickly and accurately than humans. But this by itself is often not enough.

This achievement should be somewhat surprising because of Moravec's paradox: the observation that, opposite to what early AI researchers expected, intelligence and reasoning skills are comparatively easy for a computer to simulate, while sensorimotor skills are in fact incredibly hard. Notice how, for example, chess engines started beating human players in the 90s or so, but we still don't have a robot that can do something as simple as pick raspberries (because surprise, for a machine picking a raspberry is actually hard as shit).

Good to know, thanks. I'm not too familiar with the American news media, although I know there's a lot of it around. I checked them briefly and they didn't seem all too different from e.g. Huffington Post or other similar sites, which is why I called them unremarkable. It's interesting to see they have a long history.

I don't think this materially affects any of my conclusions on the article itself though.

I was curious because of how unashamedly propagandist this article is. So I clicked on the author link. It seems this is the only article he's ever written for this website (I hesitate to call it a news outlet). Also, it says he's a former republican political consultant now working for the Lincoln Project. That's apparently the name of a moderate republican PAC that is trying to fight Trumpism.

So why would a political news website outright publish propaganda from a PAC without any commentary? I've never heard of the new republic before, but they seem to be an otherwise unremarkable progressive political magazine. I couldn't say whether the new republic is getting paid by the PAC to publish this, or whether they just took it because it generally aligns with their own stated political views. I will say that, although it is mentioned at the bottom that the author currently works for the Lincoln Project, I had to really look for that. it also wasn't clear to me at first this was a PAC. So in my opinion, proper journalistic ethical standards are not being upheld here.

Given the article's origins, it's pretty safe to say none of this is genuine. These are moderate republicans who hate Trump, trying desperately to destroy Trumpism. If they truly believed their own article they'd be democrats. And if you're here wondering if the article is worth reading, I'd say it is practically fully content-free. It's all just hopium.

The image depicts the cover of a Russian translation of the book "how to manage your slaves" by Marcus Sidonius Falx, a fictitious Roman slave owner, and classicist Jerry Toner.

The book itself seems to be a historical work about slavery in the Roman Empire, written in a humorous tone from the perspective of a slave owner giving advice to other slave owners.

Often, licence agreements stipulate that they are not transferable and thus you have contractually agreed not to resell them. To what extent this is enforceable is... contentious. Different courts have struggled with the topic and have ruled both directions on the issue.

Copyright law as written was not designed for immaterial goods in any way, and the DMCA has done little to improve that. So effectively the judicial branch is in limbo. Corporate America is content to leave the confusion as is. They can just adopt an interpretation of the law that is maximally beneficial to them, and consumers generally don't have the resources to challenge that interpretation.

at some point some proto-chicken ancestor laid an egg that was different enough genetically that it counts as a chicken. In other words, a non-chicken laid a chicken egg

This is incorrect. If I take an ostrich egg, empty it out through a small hole, then put a chicken fetus inside, it does not suddenly become a chicken egg. We must therefore conclude that "chicken egg" can only reasonably be defined as an egg laid by a chicken.

The proto-chicken ancestor can never lay a chicken egg, it can at most lay a proto-chicken egg which by some mutation contains a chicken. Therefore the chicken came first.

Is there a modern (i.e. post 2000s game) that matches the definition of a roguelike as given in the article?

I think Caves Of Qud qualifies. But "real" roguelikes are few and far between these days, so it's no surprise to me that the term has expanded to cover more. Otherwise it would've become essentially obsolete.

It's nice that you can turn off overdraft protection but some US banks will then charge you a Non Sufficient Funds (NSF) fee when a transaction is refused because it would overdraw your account. So you get fucked either way.

Ctrl-a and Ctrl-e are much faster to type than home/end and do the same thing (assuming a standard readline-enabled command line).

All the keys in the cluster above the arrow keys are really too hard to reach to be of real practical use, IMO. Actually that includes arrow keys as well. Just too far from home row.

I don't get this article, it's clearly got a bone to pick with self-checkout and seems to be contradicting itself in the process:

Consumers want this technology to work, and welcomed it with open arms. [...] In a 2021 survey of 1,000 American shoppers, 60% of consumers said they prefer to use self-checkout over a staffed checkout aisle when given the choice

Okay, so even given the myriad of poor implementations out there, a majority of people prefer it. But then at the end:

Simply, "customers hate it".

Oh really? Because your quoted survey seems to say the opposite. And then there's stuff like this:

In addition to shrink concerns, experts say another failure of self-checkout technology is that, in many cases, it simply doesn't lead to the cost savings businesses hoped for. Just as Dollar General appears poised to add more employees to its check-out areas, presumably increasing staffing costs, other companies have done the same.

This is too light on data. Even a luxurious 1 cashier per 2 self-checkout stations will result in large cost savings for a business where employee costs are a significant fraction of total expenses. Especially in low margin businesses like grocery stores, removing even small amounts of overhead makes a big difference. Just because stores are adding a few employees back, doesn't mean cost-savings are completely negated.

Despite self-checkout kiosks becoming ubiquitous throughout the past decade or so, the US still has more than 3.3 million cashiers working around the nation, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Surprise, a large nation did not completely get rid of cashiers! The number is meaningless without more context: did the number of cashiers go down? What about average cashiers per store? Where is the data?

My point is, maybe companies just went too hard on the cost-cutting and are trying to find the right balance. What is the best ratio of self-checkout to classic cashier checkout? What is the right amount of self-checkout assistants? How do we make checking out yourself a good user experience? All of these things are still being experimented with. What does seem to be clear is that self-checkout has become near ubiquitous, and therefore it is most certainly not a "spectacular failure" by any definition.

Tesla shares constitute something like 70% of Elon's total fortune. Twitter is overall not that relevant for his big picture wealth, and weird behavior even less so.

At the moment Tesla's stock price is in decline because of competition from China and the overall EV market not growing as fast, so Bezos or somebody else could indeed overtake Musk in the near term. But this could easily change again next month, the stock market is fickle.

LFP batteries are both nickel and cobalt free, and are being used in production cars right now (e.g. Tesla model 3/Y standard range options). That technology has long arrived.

No, there are no updated keys that need to be downloaded. It's kind of like, they just stop including the key matching the revoked device on future Blu-ray releases. All other devices are completely unaffected by this, because their key is still on the discs. So they don't need to change or update anything.