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marcus_holmes

16,590 karmajoined vor 13 Jahren
Travelling Gentleman Technologist.

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marcus_holmes
·vor 20 Stunden·discuss
We should propose a ban on parental social media accounts in Australia, since it's proven to do harm to children.
marcus_holmes
·vor 21 Stunden·discuss
Which is working so well against Iran, right?

Oh wait, no, the other thing.
marcus_holmes
·vor 21 Stunden·discuss
> Well the primary issue is that drones can’t hold or take land, only deny.

https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-russia-position-take...

That's changing
marcus_holmes
·gestern·discuss
> So far nobody has built a tank, plane, or ship that can run on batteries and while drone technology has continued to advance in many critical ways they don't bring the big bombs quite yet.

Ukraine is proving that the "big bombs" are useless - fpv drones can and do take out tanks, planes and ships. They don't survive long enough to deliver the "big bombs".

Russia is currently reduced to sending in unmechanised light infantry to try and take ground because everything larger doesn't survive (and the light infantry apparently survive for only 20 minutes on average). Russia's Black Sea fleet cowers in port under its anti-air defences and even then takes losses. Their long-range bombers are not being used in the long-range bombing of Ukraine's civilians, that's all down to cruise missiles, because they're too valuable to lose (and a lot of them have been destroyed on the runway by drones).

The age of WW2-era mechanised warfare is gone. It's as obsolete as the cavalry that came before it.
marcus_holmes
·gestern·discuss
"Race" as used in this sense is almost uniquely an USA thing, exported to right-wing movements elsewhere.

A white USA citizen will have more in common culturally, religiously and politically with a black USA citizen than any white European, Australian or New Zealander.
marcus_holmes
·gestern·discuss
I've travelled a lot, so no.
marcus_holmes
·vorgestern·discuss
> Copyleft and the whole software licensing ecosystem are only applicable when producing software that actually required human effort.

Fixed that for you. Code generated by an LLM is not copyrightable (because copyright only protects human effort), so the codebase is automatically public domain and cannot be licensed at all.

They could theoretically copyright the prompts that they used, but as that's not part of the output, and the output doesn't deterministically arise from those prompts, they'd struggle to use that to back a copyright claim.
marcus_holmes
·vorgestern·discuss
It's a clean-cut financial decision.

The existing system works. Yes, it costs a lot to maintain, and you could definitely reduce that if you moved to a more modern system. So now you're talking payback periods. Cost of development / maintenance cost savings per year = number of years before you pay back the project.

Problem is, that the cost of the development is often unclear, and the maintenance cost savings, while definitely above zero, and often unclear, and approximated the numbers usually come to a payback period in decades.

And that's without the usual tech caveats; We can't promise there won't be bugs. We can't promise deadlines will be met. We can't promise the project will succeed at all. We can't promise existing functionality will be faithfully reproduced in the new system. The normal risks around any software dev project.

All in all, it looks really expensive and really risky compared to just doing nothing and running the same old system for another five years.

Source: I helped do some of the maths on this for a Y2K project.
marcus_holmes
·vorgestern·discuss
This was my reaction!

OCR? oh my sweet summer child, you cannot know the days we spent typing in raw code from a magazine, and the joy when it finally ran.
marcus_holmes
·vorgestern·discuss
I think part of the issue is that the USA is more right than most of the rest of the world. So anything trained on what the world thinks will appear left-wing to the average USA resident, and anything trained on what the USA thinks will appear right-wing to the rest of the world.
marcus_holmes
·vorgestern·discuss
> Why do almost all countries that get rich also get more democratic and more liberal on social issues? I don't know, but I see it nearly universally in many different countries.

Agree.

Like I said, I've never been to Japan, can't comment on it, I'm only repeating what I've heard. I'm glad that's changing.

Thailand is a little different, yes. I wasn't there for as long, and was mainly only a tourist there, so no expert. But I never heard "Thailand is for the Thai people" while I was there. The cultural racism is similar, but they haven't had Cambodia's historical suffering as a background.
marcus_holmes
·vorgestern·discuss
That's just ridiculous. We have words for everything. Multiple words for everything. Having a word for "people who live in a country that isn't where they grew up" doesn't then mean that everyone else is inherently racist.
marcus_holmes
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
This. My workflow is a heavily-modified and personalised superpowers, and the docs that it produces are an asset. I tried Fable and it just ran off and did shit. Mostly that was good shit, but not all, and I would have liked to have had some input to those decisions.

I realise this is just me needing to structure my use of Fable better. But I got to a really nice place with my Opus workflow and I'm reluctant to go through that every time a new model releases.
marcus_holmes
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
I had to think about this.

I don't think it's wealth that's the differentiator. I think it's partly colonialism and partly culture.

> If Cambodia had a GDP per capita similar to Japan/Korea/Taiwan, they would "suddenly" become less racist

Japan is also, famously, extremely racist. Probably to the same extent that Cambodia is, but I haven't been there so I can't compare.

Colonialism has a lot to answer for in SE Asia. I suspect a lot of the defensive patriotism there is a product of being so badly treated for so long.

And culturally, there are a lot of differences between SE Asia mentality and Anglosphere/Western mentality. I suspect part of it is this, too.
marcus_holmes
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
> It's human nature to be "racist" since people generally prefer to be with others similar to themselves.

This is blatantly and obviously not true. Especially when discussing ex-pats, as you'd realise if you gave it 5 seconds' thought.
marcus_holmes
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
Words mean what people say they mean, in the context that they're said.
marcus_holmes
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
That's really good advice, but I found it hard to put into practice because my German was so bad. And German isn't a language you can just hammer out a badly-formed sentence in; word position is less important than conjugation, so if you get the conjugation wrong it makes no sense at all to the listener. I did try this a few times, but everyone lost patience with the painful butchering of their language when they realised their English was a lot better than my German.

I would have moved city, but a: COVID b: my wife also had a job there c: I really loved Berlin and really enjoyed living there
marcus_holmes
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
Berliners are renowned even in Germany for being blunt to the point of rudeness.

What we in the Anglosphere would consider rude, they consider efficient. It can be very off-putting at first, but you do get used to it.
marcus_holmes
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
The technology has certainly moved faster because of all the money thrown at it recently, but it existed before that, and was progressing before that. So no, I think OpenAI, Anthropic only exist because of the open-weight models (that came before them) rather than the other way around. Google is a special case; they invented the transformer and then published it instead of commercialising it, so they actually weren't evil (for once), or they didn't realise what they'd done until too late.

I think things will continue perfectly fine if those guys implode. They didn't invent the technology, they're not the people who are advancing it most (because everything they do is proprietary and undisclosed), and their efforts at commercialising it are just getting in the way of the real research.
marcus_holmes
·vor 3 Tagen·discuss
I agree with you, but some don't; I lived in Cambodia for a while, and there were/are "ex-pats" living there with Khmer wives and children, who speak perfect Khmer, work in Cambodian companies, have been there for 20+ years, and still refer to themselves as "ex-pats".

But I think this is might be cultural about the host country. Cambodia is blatantly racist, "Cambodia is for the Khmer people" is a thing there. Any non-Khmer immigrant will never be considered Cambodian, always a "barang"(foreigner) no matter how long they live there. This isn't true of NZ, who would happily consider you a Kiwi if you got the citizenship and lived there for a while, no matter your race or origin country.