Right, I think the problem with a lot of the economics-based analyses in this thread is that they rely on the assumption that Valve ought to, or wants to, sell the device at its market value.
Well, I suppose that's true strictly speaking. What I'm reacting to is your claim that this is a simple "choice" that everyone else is making:
> Embracing or shunning the society you live in is a choice.
When the reality is that it's more complicated. You're able to make this "choice" because you've spent years cultivating a quasi-religious attitude of equanimity toward things that are, from the perspective of most, annoying, troubling, or frightening. So what you're asking of most people is more than a choice (taking their AirPods out), it's more a matter of converting to a different way of life entirely.
Surely the solution to this social problem, however, can't be "everyone should simply convert to my religion / achieve a higher state of mind where they're not bothered by any form of inconvenience, irritation, or interruption." If it comes to that, most people will continue to wear their AirPods. It's a non-answer.
> about how Claude or even Codex have refused to perform some normal program development tasks
> a lot of reports that the US LLMs refuse to answer questions
I think the specific ask is for a case where the LLM is trained to lie about something. What you've come up with are cases where it refuses to do something, possibly for legal reasons but maybe not (you can come up with plausible non-legal reasons why a company training an LLM might want it to refuse to give you instructions on making a bomb, even if instructions on making a bomb are protected First Amendment speech).
An LLM that responds with "I'm sorry, due to legal requirements placed on my creators, I'm unable to answer questions about events at Tiananmen square in 1989." strikes me as much less problematic than one that pretends there is no relevant or reliable information that exists, or explicitly supports a regime narrative. But I'm also of the opinion that an LLM refusing to help you build a fertilizer bomb is much more reasonable than one that suppresses information of a political nature. I can't think of a case where information that reflects the broad consensus of experts is suppressed by US based LLMs for political reasons.
Looks like the SVG was converted from an EPS file, and the resulting SVG contains individual glyph positions (advances) for the characters in "Personality score", but it doesn't specify a valid font, probably because the font name was mangled in the original EPS file (which is pretty typical).
So whether the resulting file looks right depends on whether the rendering engine chooses the correct font. Looks like it's supposed to be Nimbus Sans or something metric compatible with that, but the serif font chosen by Typst looks obviously wrong.
> i reckon Meta would have found it challenging to download very large files without sharing. It's certainly much faster if you don't get throttled or banned by many peers.
You're not that likely to get throttled by seeds though, and most torrents that are downloadable at all have a few seeds. Seeds have no way of verifying whether you're contributing the network, they're just there because someone (implicitly) decided to make the file available to whomever drops by and asks for it.
I believe they changed the app since Trixie was released (Trixie has KDE 6.3, the changes were in 6.4) and buried a lot of the really common settings behind menus. E.g. you might want to take a screenshot on a delay, and that's now hidden behind a menu whereas they used to surface the most common features on a panel.
I don't think this is quite right. It's not that the question is inherently underspecified, it's that the context of being asked a question is itself information that we use to help answer the question. If someone asks "should I walk or drive" to do X, we assume that this is a question that a real human being would have about an actual situation, so even if all available information provided indicates that driving is the only reasonable answer, this only further confirms the hearer's mental model that something unexpected must hold.
I think it's useful to think about it through the lens of Gricean pragmatic semantics. [1] When we interpret something that someone says to us, we assume they're being cooperative conversation partners; their statements (or questions) are assumed to follow the maxim of manner and the maxim of relation for example, and this shapes how we as listeners interpret the question. So for example, we wouldn't normally expect someone to ask a question that is obviously moot given their actual needs.
So it's not that the question is really all that ambiguous, it's that we're forced (under normal circumstances where we assume the cooperative principle holds) to assume that the question is sincere and that there must be some plausible reason for walking. We only really escape that by realizing that the question is a trick question or a test of some kind. LLMs are generally not trained to make the assumption, but ~70% of humans would, which isn't particularly surprising I don't think.
I like this article a lot, but if I can put forward one mild criticism, it seems to depend entirely on having exactly the same measure of semantic distance for word pairs as the original generator. In that case, as the post shows, you only need several guesses to eliminate all possibilities other than the correct one, just like you only need a few GPS satellite locks to pin down your location.
It would be interesting to see a solver that works more like a human player, where it requires the "warmer" "colder" information from different guesses to hone in, rather than being able to simply look up which words have the exact semantic distance (+/- some fudge factor) from the guess.
This is totally hypothetical, but I wonder if a system whereby your dollars went to the publications you actually read, but you could immediately, at any time read anything else you wanted for free would work. There would be an obvious reason to subscribe (you get past the paywall for any publication that is part of the bundle) but you would have the feeling that you're not "wasting" money because your money only goes to the publications you actually support.
(In reality, of course, cable providers were mostly doing this under the hood along with pocketing a big cut for themselves; television is just expensive to produce. But it didn't help the feeling of unfairness when you didn't watch any sports but ESPN was probably the most expensive channel in your "package".)
I think a lot of file transfer issues that occur outside of the corporate intranet world involve hardware that you don't fully control on (at least) one hand. In science, for example, transferring huge amounts of data over long distances is pretty common, and I've had to do this on boxes that had poor TCP buffer configurations. Being able to multiplex your streams in situations like this is invaluable and I'd love to see more open source software that does this effectively, especially if it can punch through a firewall.
It is relevant, though. I have 1.2 Gbps down with a 2 TB monthly cap. I've never hit the monthly cap even once, but by your standard I have "1.2 Gbps down for 3 hours, 42 minutes".
But that doesn't change the reality that it matters to me that a 20 GB video that a friend took at my wedding downloads in just 2 minutes rather than the ~30 minutes it would take if I had a 100 Mbps connection.
I do think it's vastly superior to preferential treatment for some traffic, which seems to be the most popular alternative. The one caveat is that ISPs need to be forced to be transparent about this. Often, with cell providers, it's "Unlimited 5G" advertised, with a tiny asterisk pointing to even tinier disclaimer text at the bottom explaining that they throttle your rates once you hit a (fairly low) cutoff. That type of misleading marketing undercuts the fairness of the offer.
I endorse the view that everyone should use an ad blocker, but for what it's worth I keep seeing this techcrunch article and the original advice offered by the FBI [1] is actually much more limited.
> Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. Most internet browsers allow a user to add extensions, including extensions that block advertisements. These ad blockers can be turned on and off within a browser to permit advertisements on certain websites while blocking advertisements on others.
So the specific recommendation is that you turn on an ad blocker while performing searches. Why are they so concerned about searches? It's because of a specific form of fraud, where someone purchases an ad pretending to be the business you're searching for, but actually takes you "to a webpage that looks identical to the impersonated business’s official webpage" - that is, a phishing scam.
That's way more limited than the "FBI recommends ad blocker" statement would lead you to believe. From the FBI's point of view, pitching a bullshit supplement in an ad (what you're talking about) is an entirely legitimate business practice, and selling supplements is legal in the US so long as you don't make certain medical claims or imply FDA approval.
The promise is especially dangerous when a huge fraction of traffic doesn't use Encrypted Client Hello, [1] so the domain name is sent in the clear with the initial request to the server.
A while back I wrote a quick proof-of-concept that parses packet data from sniffglue [2] and ran it on my very low powered router to log all source IP address + hostname headers. It didn't even use a measurable amount of CPU, and I didn't bother to implement it efficiently, either.
I think it's safe to assume that anyone in a position to MITM you, including your ISP, could easily be logging this traffic if they want to.
I would prefer web developers not track me at all without a good reason and consent. Yes, I also block JS on a per-site basis, use an ad / tracking blocker, and block all third party cookies entirely.
I'm not naive - I know that it is possible to track me using other server-side tools even with all this effort, but on the other hand I'm easily in the 0.1% most difficult users to track, which means a lot of web devs are going to use the easy approaches that work for 99% of users and leave me alone. That's a worthwhile trade to make, for me.