makomk · HackerTrans

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All available evidence suggests there's nothing "classified" or "wartime ready" about these - they were your basic, cheap, totally unencrypted POCSAG/Flex pager. The same as any other pager carried by doctors and all the other people who use them - aside from the hidden explosives, of course.

makomk

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Apparently most stuff that relies on the weights being resonably similar to SDXL don't work - control nets, LORAs, commonly-used inpainting patches, the lot. It seems to go well beyond fine tuning and be substantially retrained to the point it's a good chunk of the way to being a different model entirely, and the amount of training time is on the order of what went into SDXL originally too from what I can tell.

makomk

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Wealth is indeed power rather than simply a collection of material goods, and most of all the wealth this article talks about is the power to run specific large businesses in the way those specific wealthy people want. That is, the way capitalism works in this case is that control over businesses and the ability to dictate how they allocate resources is given to individuals who are in some sense "successful" at running those businesses in that they manage to make lots of revenue and convince investors they'll do a good job of continuing to do so going forward.

The reasons why this system might be attractive may become more obvious if we consider some alternatives. For example, in Russia currently the power to control big businesses is given to politically well connected "oligarchs", and anyone whose business success exceeds their political influence tends to find that business is taken off them and given to someone much less capable but better connected. This does not lead to a functining economy. (There's a popular idea on the left that capitalism has oligarchs too which we just don't call that, which misses this important difference.) We could also imagine a system where this power is distributed democratically, and everyone in the country gets a say in how all the businesses are run. The problem with this is that in order to make decisions that are as well informed as even just some dude who happened to be in the right place at the right time, every member of the public would have to dedicate as much time to informing themselves as all of those random dudes collectively do already. That is, it's structurally impossible to just distribute this power out to everyone.

Also, most of the things that populist campaigners claim that wealth redistribution will achieve are about more material goods for everyone which relies on those material goods or at least the capacity to produce them being there already and just horded by the super-rich - just handing out power will not satisfy people's expectations for wealth redistribution and wealth taxes.

makomk

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Yeah, Oxfam have been pushing a bunch of similar misleading claims using the same trick, such as arguing that people across the world lost vast amounts of pay during the pandemic even as the rich got richer by a vast amount and insinuating this was money that was somehow redistributed from one group to the other. Of course, this is just using the fact that share prices anticipate future changes in the economy to measure from close to the bottom of the pandemic-induced drop, which happened right around when the pandemic was first declared and it was just starting to affect people, and there is no actual mechanism by which money could be transferred in such a fashion. The money lost in pay was essentially destroyed; people didn't work, didn't produce things, and the real global economy of stuff available to purchase shrunk by if anything much more than that (due to furlough, unemployment, inputs other than labour, etc). The increase in wealth of the super-rich similarly was not transferred from anywhere, it was just the valuation of things they already owned going up due to the price shares were trading at increasing. This didn't mean an equal sum of money was somehow transferred into the stock market to do this.

makomk

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Yeah, the big headline claim of Forbes' billionaires list from 2023 at https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ is that half the billionaires on the list lost wealth over the previous year and that in total they were worth less than a year ago. I don't think that's adjusted for inflation either, unlike claims about workers' pay getting worse. There was also a drop off in billionaires' wealth in 2020, which coincidentally is where a lot of claims about the rich getting richer from organisations like Oxfam and publications like the Guardian start measuring from.

makomk

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This article does not provide any actual evidence for that idea though. In particular, the richest person in the world - and I think possibly also the one whose wealth grew the most - wasn't even a billionaire until fairly recently, and the basic investment thesis that's made his companies so valuable is that they'll take a big share of the global car market, wrecking the income of existing car companies and destroying the wealth invested in them. Actually, I think all five of the people this article is about became billionaires in the last 30 years or so, displacing the previous richest people in the world as they did so.

You've also got to remember that by focusing on the richest people in the world right now the article is effectively cherry-picking the people who've done the best in terms of wealth whilst ignoring those whose wealth has failed to grow so well.

makomk

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2.5x the pixels is more like 1.5x the resolution in terms of the smallest features that can be seen - remmber that displays are two-dimensional and in order to halve the width of the smallest discernable detail like say a line you need to double the pixels in both directions for a total of four times as many pixels. On the other hand, it is going to be close to 2.5x the rendering cost.

makomk

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It's not exactly true that Truss "rejected any windfall taxes on energy companies" even though the opposition Labour party keep on claiming that: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-labour-kee...

Basically, the Tories had already placed a windfall tax on UK oil and gas before Truss even became PM that's almost identical to the one that Labour have called for, and no-one has proposed removing it. (To some extent, it looks like Labour copied the existing Tory tax.) The main reason why Truss' original proposal required so much more taxpayer funding was that her price cap lasted for two years rather than six months - Labour were relying on windfall tax revenue from well before the start of the price subsidy to make their numbers add up and still couldn't quite do it, so there's no way to extend it for longer without massive government borrowing.

Most of the media coverage didn't explain this at all, they just repeated Labour's claims that all that government borrowing was because the Tories were in the pockets of energy companies and rejected a windfall tax. Nor did they explain the practical consequences of the price cap ending in April. All of the numbers thrown around for the cost of Truss' longer price cap assumed energy prices would still be unaffordably high by then, but no-one pointed this out and what it would mean for households. Of course, the moment the government annouced their energy support would end in April there were headlines everywhere about the huge bills this could cause for households.

makomk

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Now that the rise in corporation tax to 25% is back, the UK press are of course pushing claims by economists that it will make the oncoming recession deeper and longer. That narrative was nowhere to be found prior to the u-turn though, with the media consensus being that of course lower corporation tax wouldn't help grow the economy and only ideologically-driven right wingers who ignored the evidence believed otherwise. It's another one of those scenarios where whatever the government is doing at the time is the wrong choice.

makomk

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More than half the population, probably. Also, for the last few years the UK media have been doing something obnoxious where they take decisions where all options have some downside and present only the downsides of whatever the government has chosen, making it sound like the obvious wrong choice and something only a complete incompetent would pick - which is particularly obvious when the government does a u-turn and suddenly everyone discovers the problems with whatever they'd been presenting as the obvious right choice. The BBC is a particularly consistent offender. This of course makes it seem to everyone who follows the news like they could easily do better than the idiots in power.

One example HN might be familiar with is the smartphone-based Covid contact tracing app in this country. When the government was going with an app that didn't use Google and Apple's contact tracing framework, the BBC focused hard on the inherent problems with not using it and made it sound like no-one other than the government thought that decision had any advantages at all. Then the government U-turned and literally they day the new app launched, all of that was forgotten and the BBC suddenly discovered the fundamental, well-documented disadvantages of that framework they'd ignored before and found some experts who made it sound like that was worse than the original app. They've been doing it with almost everything though.

makomk

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Not necessarily. Small websites have to pay for their bandwidth, but bigger companies like Netflix have been pushing ISPs into various schemes that give them that bandwidth for free, either through peering arrangements where ISPs take traffic to and from Netflix systems for free or through installing caching boxes in ISP facilities with the power, data and space paid for by the ISP.

makomk

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Most people aren't going to think about their internet usage in terms of total data used, because working out how much data a particular site or service will cost them is a lot of work and requires knowing technical details that most people don't pay attention to. That results in a market for internet products that offer unlimited access to particular sites, sometimes with restrictions like only standard-definition video in the unlimited video plan. In addition, there's not really such a thing as single-price bandwidth to the entire internet at the scale most large ISPs are operating at - they're setting up peering with particular networks, some of which like to try and push more of the costs of peering onto the ISP side than others.

makomk

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Most developed countries have net zero goals that are not consistent with continuing to pump out 20% of current electricity-related CO2 production forevermore. Also, keeping those coal and gas plants operational isn't exactly cheap either, though it is probably still cheaper than storage.

makomk

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In this case, the bug fixing is probably the lion's share of the work though - there's a huge amount of subtle edge cases involved in rendering text, and the Microsoft employees almost certainly know this. And the example that broke it isn't even something particularly obscure. We're literally talking about the output of the dir command, one of the first things someone is likely to do with a terminal window, not displaying correctly. He basically did the easy part of the work and lambasted some Microsoft employees as idiots because they thought it was more complex than that.

makomk

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Whether the font is monospace or not isn't really the problem - that causes some aesthetically ugly spacing, but that's to be expected and it's still readable. The big issue is that the code has completely failed to find a glyph for one of the characters used in something as commonplace as a directory listing from the dir command and people expect better than this from font rendering in modern applications.

makomk

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The fact that Casey Muratori's proposed approach requires the terminal to reimplement the process of correctly mapping characters to glyphs - including stuff like fallbacks to other fonts - is a huge part of the argument for why it's much harder to implement and more complicated than he claims. If it really doesn't do that right for something as simple as a decimal seperator for the font some random HN commenter happened to use, that does tend to suggest the Microsoft employees are in the right here.

makomk

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It's more subtle than that. What the Microsoft engineers are saying is that the console's current approach to drawing text is inherently slow in this particular case, due to the way the text drawing library it's based on uses the GPU. The proposed solution requires the terminal to have its own text drawing code specific to the task of rendering a terminal, including handling all the nasty subtlties and edge-cases of Unicode, which must be maintained forever. This is not trivial at all; every piece of code ever written to handle this seems to end up having endless subtle bugs involving weird edge-cases (remember all those stories about character strings that crash iPhones and other devices - and the open source equivalents are no better). It's relatively easy to write one that seems to work for the cases that happen to be tested by the developer, but that's only a tiny part of the work.

makomk

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Big tech companies like Google and Facebook have encountered problems where running the same crypto operation twice on the same processor deterministically or semi-deterministically gives the same incorrect result... so the check needs to be on done on separate hardware as well.

makomk

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You can access the current posts from any good NNTP server, but Usenet isn't used that much these days anyway. What's more interesting is the historic posts from its heyday and I think Google might own the only good archive of them by virtue of purchasing it.

makomk

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The WHO seemed to be relying on Chinese flu surveillance data, which is basically useless - even the figures it produces for flu infections are implausible and probably wrong. Between this and their other comments it might be best to treat anything the WHO says as just Chinese propaganda at this point.