My personal issue with Foundation was, that at its core in the books, it was about ordinary humans solving problems. There of course were people with special abilities, but that was, well, special, and so special that e.g. in the case of the Mule, it completely trashed all plans everyone had due to its extraordinariness.
In the TV series, everybody seems to have superpowers. A rather pacifist politician from the book is suddenly, in the series, a gunslinging person with mental superpowers.
I liked that the original was about more or less competent people making decisions, and seeing those decisions play out. I admit, I like competence porn. Almost everyone having superpowers feels like a betrayal of the values of the books.
Best part about the TV series are the three emperors. It's the one addition which really added something to the story... and which did not betray the values of the original book series, but was just a nice addition.
Seems there's no way to disable the <= ligature without disabling whitespace ligatures? I'm not all too crazy for real ligatures but whitespace adjustments otherwise seem nice.
Also, as it's so finely adjustable, would love if they'd offer some variants for dot and comma, to increase their size, because that's my number one problem with fonts since age 45.
It's just someone you don't know who actually runs it due to no proper imprint promoting their business over someone else who you also don't know who actually runs it. So you send all your valuable business data to unknown guy A instead of unknown guy B. Oh, and also, in both cases you couldn't even sign a proper data subprocessing agreement with both guys. You can't sign it with guy A, who doesn't care, and you also can't sign it with guy B who says he's from Europe, does not even bother to provide an address to prove that, and obviously does not understand the GDPR.
Net souvereignty gain is zero by switching the middle man. In fact I'd say using such a "European" router service is actually worse than making business directly with, let's say, AWS, OpenAI or Anthropic where you'd at least know where you're buying from.
Wanted to try a demo, but instead of downloading it time-limited or something, there's some kind of Web demo. But it's buggy in that it at least does not scroll the list at all when using the cursor keys instead of the mouse.
Bugs like these in the very thing which is supposed to convince me of buying do not exactly increase my trust :-)
I especially like that it's a single executable according to the docs.
Recently evaluated other testing tools/frameworks and if you're not already running the npm-dependencyhell-shitshow for your projects, most tools will pull in at least 100 dependencies.
I might be old fashioned but that's just too much for my taste. I love single-use tools with limited scope like e.g. esbuild or now this.
Then why does their list of subprocessors list Google and Microsoft "for cloud infrastructure", specifically for "Le Chat, La Plateforme, Mistral Code"? Sounds to me as if they're mainly running on Azure.
Also, they're listing CoreWeave as inference provider in "EEA" area, but CoreWeave is of course also an US company. Even if they have their data center physically in the EU, it must be considered open access for the USA due to the CLOUD act.
If what you say is true, they have a communications problem and they need to fix that urgently. Right now, this is why they don't get my business. Others will have made the same decision based on their own subprocessor list.
Or did you mean, they're like, right now building it and plan to move there, but it's not up yet?
The problem with the European independence story is, that it seems Mistral runs its own stuff also on US cloud act affected infrastructure. This makes them a very weird value proposition: If I accept a level of "independence" whereby I run on AWS or Azure, I could as well pay for Anthropic or GPT to have SOTA performance.
If I do not accept that level of independence but want more, I need to buy what's on OVH, Scaleway, Ionos etc. or host my own, but that usually means even smaller, worse models or a lot of investment.
Nevertheless, the "band" that Mistral occupies for economic success is very narrow. Basically just people who need independence "on paper" but not really. Because if I'm searching for actual independence, there's no way I could give them money at the moment for one of their products and it making sense, cause none of their plans are an actual independence-improvement over, let's say, Amazon Bedrock.
I really really want to support them, but it must make economic sense for my company, too, and it doesn't.
Socials:
- github.com/warpspin
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