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They're trying to dissuade European NATO members from continuing their support for Ukraine.

Things are going badly for Russia. The war has lasted longer than the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany and Ukraine is actually taking back territory. Over half a million Russians are dead and probably a million wounded. The economy is imploding due to the enormous expenditures (30% or more of GDP is spent on the war). Just like in WWI Russia is running out of men to continue the fight. It either has to give up or escalate.

I believe Zelensky made a big mistake insulting Putin when things were going stellar at the front a couple months ago. By making it personal Putin is doubling down until he defeats Ukraine or Russia is destroyed in a war with NATO.


I thought the Russians were supplying them with HiRes imagery. I've not heard of any Russian optical or radar satellite breaking up.

In the great power struggle there can be no safe havens. All the world's a stage. And the sky too.

>All the world is a stage

Not really. Most of the cold war nuclear war scenarios only consider nuclear exchange in the northern hemisphere. Until this day there's little strategic value in south America or south Africa. Maybe Australia and new Zealand but still low compared to the north. The Argentinian Patagonia must be the safest place to be in a nuclear winter.


Linux is rising from the ground up. Many users are fed up with Redmond's nefarious schemes to pump up their share price like using its user base as A.I. guinea pigs.

Amazingly it's U.S. users who are taking the lead in installing Linux Mint and other Linux distros. I assume it's because there are few consumer privacy and protection laws and tech companies can abuse their users as they see fit. Many have had enough and are jumping ship towards Linux.


Everyone loves to bag on Microsoft, but they are generally quite good at keeping their software patched, they do get it wrong from time to time and everyone jumps on them. I've jumped to Linux as my main OS a while back (though still use windows for work), it's definitely not as seamless as windows is. It's great, I generally love working in linux, and with AI now it's WAY easier to sort out linux issues, but it does not seem anywhere near as polished as windows and I've had to deal with all kinds of niggly little issues with various things (all solvable ish... wayland seems a big source of issues).

It's not perfect (Linux Mint) but neither is Windows. I mean, there are three or four different UIs in there from different eras.

I find Linux far easier to use because you never have to install device drivers. It either works with your hardware or it doesn't.


I'm surprised recent MS Office isn't fully supported under Wine yet, given the advantages that LLMs give in reverse engineering stuff.

EDIT: Well, should have searched first before posting: https://itsfoss.com/news/bottles-microsoft-365-early-look/


I generally assume Wine cannot use LLMs considering developers that have been in contact with Windows code cannot contribute and LLMs almost certainly were.

Edit: for reference: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Developer-FAQ

No such reference to LLMs possibly being trained on Windows code however. Well maybe AI companies were careful to remove problematic data from the training set.


That would be a stupid application of the rule, it would mean no developer could use an LLM for anything that already has a proprietary alternative with heavily documented internals or leaked source code.

Not so sure, if the LLM has been overfitted and can just throw back something equivalent to the original code, then it's no different from a human having seen the code and writing something similar afterwards.

On another hand, I'd be curious about Microsoft's reaction if somebody let an agent write a "perfect" Windows emulator/compatibility layer eating away at Windows's market share (assuming that's possible; since it does not exist it's probably not currently). Would not do much for kernel anti-cheats but would help for productivity software. Microsoft could either choose to say this is not a white box implementation and take down the project but it would hurt anything LLM-related since all LLM-based projects could be targeted, or let it live and eat away at Windows (I suspect they'd choose the latter because it's the shiny new thing and would probably not hurt Windows that much).


I agree that the choice for JPEG XL is mostly politically motivated: it isn't Google. And its name is derived from JPEG, which is an IETF standard which gives it more clout.

JPEG isn’t from IETF.

>it isn't Google.

It is Google. The JPEG XL standard evolved from a codec Google made, Google was involved in the standardization process, and Google heavily contributed to the reference implementation of JPEG XL.

https://ds.jpeg.org/whitepapers/jpeg-xl-whitepaper.pdf

  Editors:
  Jyrki Alakuijala – Google, Switzerland
  Jon Sneyers – Cloudinary, Belgium
  Luca Versari – Google, Switzerland
  Jan Wassenberg – Google, Switzerland

Yes, but unlike WebP it wasn't exclusively designed and developed by Google. That's a big difference.

AV1 wasn't also exclusively designed and developed by Google.

Chrome's team should be blamed for favoring AVIF over JPEG-XL, not Google entirely.


And Google also removed jxl support in Chrome in '22 (only to put it back in recently)

It was only ever supported behind a flag. Stuff behind a flag isn't 'supported', it's experimental. The experiment ended.

Like I've said here before: we need to push for legislation that bans the sale of consumer data collected by websites and manufacturers to third-parties.

We need a solution, not a Band-Aid like the "Freedom Car Act." I believe that legislators are deliberately coming up with legislation that mildly hinders, but in no way resolves the issue in order to keep their sugar-daddies freewheeling.


These days almost all Google search results return nothing but links to stuff that you can buy instead of useful information you were looking for. They do this because they think they can get away with it, they're the only game in town.

To me this signals a huge opportunity for other companies to dive into. If a new internet search company appeared that returned actual useful search results and clearly delineated ads (like Google used to) I would switch to it almost immediately.

The only way these companies are ever going to change their game is when people vote with their feet!


Kagi is better. You might want to try it.

Kagi is such an amazing team, building a truly next-level product. It's hard to realize what you're missing until you experience a real search engine for the first time in decades. It's wonderful.

Kagi will never make it. Asking people money for search is a non-starter.

Also, I type in something in the search bar and...nothing happens. There's a pop-up below the search bar which tells me nothing is saved with a "Dismiss" button. When I press it I'm being directed to the homepage telling me to pay-up.


Async/await is a poor abstraction since I find it difficult to reason how an application using it will behave. It's certainly not intuitive or easier to understand than threading.

If, in addition, there are many possible design choices (as described in the article) that lead to inconsistent behavior between languages it has failed for its reason to exist in the first place.

I believe we should make threading easier and safer to use by, for example, two-way message queues.


I believe that it's time, a quarter century after 9/11, to abolish the DHS, the department which was created pure out of spite towards the FBI and NSA.

It's a service looking for a purpose and in doing so is trampling the rights of Americans and foreigners alike and coming up with crazier and crazier schemes to spend its huge budget. It's creation has also lead to an enormous duplication of work and infighting between the intelligence services.


I believe one of the feasibilities we have with electric locomotion is the standardization of components: electric motors, motor controllers, batteries and battery chargers. These being interchangeable will lead to lower costs through competition and more innovation.

It's disappointing that manufacturers are moving the other way to enable vendor lock-in. But only one manufacturer has to jump the fence and the others will be left behind.


I’m suspicious of this vision because for example, with battery packs, cells with compatible voltage and size have vastly different characteristics.

Those characteristics, like safe discharge rate, capacity, projected cycle count, are all things that manufactures exaggerate or get wrong.

I don’t think there’s any way that consumers can ever be informed enough to have an efficient market in products such as those


I can imagine a future where batteries and chargers communicate using an open-source protocol just as they are doing now over USB.

If the batteries are a full pack which contain their own internal charge controller, etc. Raw cells can't communicate anything.

The problem is the consumer can't tell the difference between a well engineered pack and one that will explode in their apartment overnight.


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