I meant it as a joke but I could imagine them getting one email from Germany about GDPR and then deciding to geoblock the whole country instead of complying (and ignoring the fact it applies elsewhere in Europe too).

Maybe they really couldn’t be bothered with writing an Impressum!

I imagine it feels quite righteous to drop maxims like this. I too am reminded everyday how glad I am not to have to live in a fascist state.

That said I think this sort of superficial dismissal is really unhelpful.

I think the vast majority of Linux users will agree we don’t want to have to work with these laws but the reality is that we do. Far better we focus our efforts on minimising harm and promoting alternative mechanisms (e.g. zero-knowledge proofs).

Further I fear this righteousness actually serves to foster a toxic culture in the free software movement. And do you know what we call belligerent people who want to stifle dissent? Fascists!

No he doesn’t. We need to focus our anger on the legislators/ lobbiers (Meta in this case).

I’m inclined to agree that OS-level age verification declaration is pointless and invasive but I’m sympathetic with distros looking to comply with the law. I can also see why governments want to pursue identity verification to enforce laws online even if this is obviously not the right way to achieve that.

I want to see Linux become the mainstream choice and accept that it will need to be compatible with laws like this to do so. Were Linux more widely used then organisations like the KDE e.V. might even be consulted by lawmakers which might help avoid this sort of legislation being passed in the first place!

I’m also hoping that this can be solved for those in California with some sort of optional service rather than something that gets too closely integrated with the distros or desktop environments.

Yeah I learned this fermenting lemons. With the sugar gone it tastes like kitchen cleaner!

So kind of like a personalised learning assistant? I realise it’s different but this inverted instruct approach puts me in mind of Doctorow’s reverse centaur!

Don’t you find that the links you get are hallucinated though? Even if they’re not now you can imagine this collapsing into slop echoes…

I’ve tended to ask for examples to help me bootstrap new projects. A bit like getting customised docs. I certainly haven’t had enough success with generated code to think about automatically adopting it.

This is interesting and sounds like how I’ve been using it - basically like customised stack overflow answers.

Would you mind elaborating a little on your approach? Are you saying you provide it with guidance and links or are you asking it for those?

Get a Steuerberater. IIUC they charge based upon your revenue and it’s certainly easier than doing it yourself. They’ll generally deal with all the bureaucracy.

Don’t use platforms like ODesk/ Fivvver to find work as you’ll be competing on price for commodified work. You’ll have more interesting and better paid work if you have a hand in developing the role with your clients.

You need to do some sales and marketing work - e.g. create a portfolio and go to events to meet people in the industries you’re interested in. Finding work is largely luck but you don’t invest the time then you’ve got no chance.

The fees will really depend on experience and the value you’re adding. Check out e.g. Glassdoor for equivalent employed roles to get a ballpark. Estimate 200 days per being available at full utilisation.

Hi. The game doesn’t work for me on mobile sadly so I can’t offer any specific suggestions but in general I suggest you have two options…

The basic approach is to write some rules/ heuristics for your AI player (e.g. start with move X, if player does X then do Y, if condition X then do Y). You can probably distil some basics from your own strategy.

An advanced approach is to train a model using e.g. reinforcement learning to figure out it’s own policy of which actions to take given the game state. You can use a library like stable baselines for this. You may be lucky though to train your agents by pitching them against one another or you might have to teach them e.g. with the rules-based agent or by having them learn from human-vs-human games.

I quite like this one of the baby pulling the pensioners up hill.

This seems to be an advertorial.

What’s a technical mod?

Haha yeah it’s great. It’s fast, portable, and has keyboard shortcuts from this century!

I have to say when I saw this headline I was bracing myself for AI “features”…

230B parameters is “reasonably small” now?!

Yeah I’d really like the idea of talking to a smart home but can’t justify the power consumption of leaving such a big box running 24/7.

I also don’t think we need models this large for that purpose. It just needs to understand the semantics of home automation. Being able to compose limericks is a parlour trick that’s not worth the overhead.

Reinforcement learning involves a reward signal (e.g. a score in a game) which I don’t think is present here.

Diffusion models, as you’ve also mentioned, seem a better metaphor. These try to generate a structured image (e.g. matching a prompt) from noise. Perhaps your visual cortex is just trying to make sense of random sensory input while your eyes are closed.

It’s also interesting to think about dreaming in terms of the more general set of representation learning techniques. As I understand it you’re trying to process the day’s experiences and reflect on past memories - sifting through and deciding what to retain and what to forget - essentially mental filing.

You may be interested in Deep dream. This is a program that runs an e.g. convolutional neural network in reverse. Instead of adjusting it’s belief about whether an image should be classified as a dog or not it adjusts a given input image so that it looks more and more like a dog. The results are pretty psychedelic!

This is basically lucid dreaming.

If you make notes of what you remember of your dreams when you first wake up then after a few days you’ll become conscious while dreaming. Then you can basically decide what to dream.

It’s kind of fun flying around but I stopped doing it as I didn’t find it particularly restful.

This reminds me of the book “Only you can save mankind” by Terry Pratchett. The aliens surrender once they realise the player is apparently immortal!

When you use the KDE Desktop Environment it will also show notifications from your phone and sync media controls (e.g. stop playback when you get a phone call). It’s great!