• 9 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • EU fines are working. Not in the sense that they would prevent companies from trying to do shit, but in the sense that they shape up once it has been levied: Understand that those 800m are a shot before the bow. If the behaviour continues, there’s going to be daily punitive fines that very quickly become very unaffordable.

    I mean, what is the money being used for?

    Goes towards the EU budget, reducing the amount the member states have to pay in. In other words Berlaymont doesn’t gain anything from levying fines, their budget stays the same.




  • The problem is: Data is code, and code is data. An algorithm to compute prime numbers is equivalent to a list of prime numbers, (also, not relevant to this discussion, homoiconicity and interpretation). Yet we still want to make a distinction.

    Is a PAQ-compressed copy of the Hitchhiker’s guide code? Technically, yes, practically, no, because the code is just a fancy representation of data (PAQ is basically an exercise in finding algorithms that produce particular data to save space). Is a sorting algorithm code? Most definitely, it can’t even spit out data without being given an equally-sized amount of data. On that scale, from code to code representing data, AI models are at least 3/4th towards code representing data.

    As such I’d say that AI models are data in the same sense that holograms (these ones) are photographs. Do they represent a particular image? No, but they represent a related, indexable, set of images. What they definitely aren’t is rendering pipelines. Or, and that’s a whole another possible line of argument: Requiring Turing-complete interpretation.




  • Not to mention ARM chips which by and large were/are more efficient on the same node than x86 because of their design: ARM chip designers have been doing that efficiency thing since forever, owing to the mobile platform, while desktop designers only got into the game quite late. There’s also some wibbles like ARM insn decoding being inherently simpler but big picture that’s negligible.

    Intel just really, really has a talent for not seeing the writing on the wall while AMD made a habit out of it out of sheer necessity to even survive. Bulldozer nearly killed them (and the idea itself wasn’t even bad, it just didn’t work out) while Intel is tanking hit after hit after hit.


  • Lore books eh you’re giving me ideas. Hard to justify spending budget on that kind of stuff even if you have money to work with… how would one even get one’s hands on a woodprint artist? You know, the chisel and printing press kind? Imitating it is going to be hard indeed and figuring out how to do it not worth for a couple of one-off images you could just as well do without so either generating from prompt or telling the model to re-paint an input image in that style seems like the obvious solution.

    I think a similar rule applies as when it comes to code, and NIH syndrome syndrome: Whatever it is that is your primary focus you should write yourself, use libraries for the rest. If you write a shooter, you’re going to write the gunplay, but can take the renderer off the shelf. I you’re writing a walking simulator that happens to have a gun somewhere but is generally focussed on graphical atmosphere, go grab the gunplay off the shelf but write the renderer yourself.

    So unless the focus of your game is rummaging through books in an ancient library, go use that model.



  • ICANN isn’t really a massive organisation, it’s a technocratic non-profit with a buttload of advisory committees, including one for end users. The rules surrounding ccTLDs were tightened after Russia didn’t sunset .su, so they tried to take politics out of it, make it a wholly rules-based thing, but now it figures that the rule everyone wants to have is “decide on a case-by-case basis”.

    There’s also been various initiatives regarding reform of internet governance over the decades but in the end noone can agree on what would be better so ICANN keeps on chugging on.

    You know what would bring a quick end to this? If Mauritius doesn’t incorporate those islands into itself, letting them stay an autonomous territory. From British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritian Indian Ocean Territory.





  • In Germany any EU resident has a right to a basic account, in case you’re homeless you should have an address because you’re in a shelter, if you insist on sleeping rough (or the municipality is just too fucked up, happens in places) you can give the address of a social work organisation (those are all over also doing debtor counselling and a lot of other stuff).

    Only valid reason for a bank to refuse basic business is if you tried to defraud them. They don’t have to give you a credit line, but they do have to accept your money, store it, and let you wire it (incl. POS payments etc).

    Identity fraud is not an issue because they’ll want to see a proper ID which, if you’re legally in the country, you have.

    It’s less about paying, though, you can always pay with cash in Germany, it’s about the welfare authorities not wanting to handle cash and cheques only if actually necessary.



  • barsoap@lemm.eetoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    17 days ago

    the training data is not stored in the model in its original form,

    It is not stored in the model, period. Same as you do not store the shape of the letters you’re reading right now, not even the words, but their overall meaning. Remembering the meaning of what I write here, you can then produce words and letters again and you might be close but even with this short paragraph you’ll find it very hard to make an exact replica. That’s because you did not store it in its original form, not even compressed, you re-encoded it using your own understanding of language, of the world, of everything.




  • barsoap@lemm.eetoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    17 days ago

    “Oh, they didn’t. Nobody leaned the technique to paint this, there may not be any feeling behind it, or any point at all, other than ‘it looks good

    “May” being the important word, here.

    I suggest that if you cannot tell the difference between “someone who knows art did this piece” and “someone just hit generate” then you have no business critiquing art.

    And I’m pretty sure that most people could learn how to prompt successfully in a matter of days or weeks.

    …that won’t give you art skills. It’s practically impossible to develop an artistic eye, much less mind, by hitting generate, the feedback isn’t sufficient, you can’t train like that. No model prompts the same, btw, frankly speaking prompting is about the worst way to condition a model when you’re out to create something specific.

    The art is not in the fucking medium. Never was. Never will be. Come at me for this and I’ll be referencing urinals on pedestals.


  • Cuba doesn’t really pay much of a premium on their imports they’re just cut off from the US. Did you know it’s illegal for EU companies to bow to US sanctions on Cuba?

    Cuba’s main issue is that they never really industrialised. Like, they’re importing light switches from the EU and are paying in rum, honey, nickel, and tourism. Which actually wouldn’t be an issue if they weren’t dependent on energy imports.