LocalSend. It’s exactly like Apple Airdrop

This may be super-nitpicky (and I lose LocalSend and use it a lot), but there is one difference between LocalSend and Airdrop. LocalSend requires network connectivity (and requires the devices to be on the same network), whereas Airdrop can work without any network connection (using Bluetooth).

I recently discovered that he believes it’s theft if you watch one of his videos with an adblocker. Just out of spite, sometimes I put one of his videos on in the background (muted) with an adblocker.

I feel like this should be required reading for a lot of Linux users. That article is a couple years old now, but I think is even more true now than it was when it was written. Having a middleman (package maintainer) between the user and the software developer is a tremendous benefit. Maintainers enforce quality, and if you bypass them, you’re going to end up with Linux as the Google Play Store (doubly so if you try and fool yourself into thinking it won’t happen because “Linux is different”)

Linux is the only platform to get native WebGL, too!

It’s in Proverbs 11:20

The C++ developers are an abomination to the Lord,
But the Rustaceans in their Rust-based OSes are His delight.

Totally agreed. I never used Twitter. I tried in earnest to use Mastodon for a couple years, because I wanted it to to succeed, just kind of ideologically.

Eventually I realized that the whole concept of “microblogging” is just fundamentally awful. (At least for me)

It’s true. And people try to jump on to similar things. “It’s just like how email works!”, or “It’s just like how international phone calls work!”

Yeah, nobody has any clue how those two things work, either.

The search term is censored by DuckDuckGo in Korea. Even robots apparently think it’s going to be an IoT buttplug.

That’s Saturday night in North American time zones. Just a heads up in case you’re planning a boys’ night out a couple hundred billion years in advance, maybe move it to Friday night in case the world ends Saturday night.

Scraping is legal

Have you been following any of the court battles involving LLMs lately?

The New York Times suing OpenAI. Getty Images suing Stability AI. Sarah Silverman and George R.R. Martin suing OpenAI.

All of those cases involve data that has been scraped. (In the latter two cases, the memoir/novels were scraped from excerpts and archives found online).

It’s too late to say with complete certainty that it’s all legal (the appeal processes haven’t all been finished yet), but at this point it looks like using scraped and copyrighted data in training LLMs is legal. Even if it’s going to turn out not to be legal, it’s very clear that nobody’s shying away from doing it, because we have the courts showing as a statement of fact that it’s been happening for years.

Everything you’ve written is just fantasy. We have a lot of reality which contradicts it. Every LLM company has been primarily relying upon scraping data (which we know to completely legal) and has been incorporated copyrighted and scraped data in its data sets (which is still legally a grey area, but is happening anyway).

Has reddit not already been scraped? With all of that information exposed bare on the public Internet for decades, and apparently so valuable, I find it hard to believe that everybody’s just been sitting there twiddling their thumbs, saying “boy I sure hope they decide to sell us that data one day so that we don’t have to force an intern to scrape it for us”.

Let’s not rule out Æ

I firmly believe US Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our education, like such as in South Africa and uh, the Iraq, and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should. Our education over here in the US should help the US, uh, or should help South Africa and help the Iraq, and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our children.

It’s not. He was very explicitly not talking about his murder there.

In a certain light, you could argue that Linus doesn’t really have any control at all. He doesn’t write any code for Linux (hasn’t in many years), doesn’t do any real planning or commanding or managing. “All” he does is coordinate merges and maintain his own personal git branch. (And he’s not alone in that: a lot of people maintain their own Linux branches). He has literally no formal authority at all in Linux development.

It just so happens that, by a very large margin, his own personal git branch is the most popular and trusted in the world. People trust his judgment for what goes in and doesn’t go in.

It’s not like Linux development is stopped because Linus goes offline (or goes on vacation or whatever). People keep writing code and discussing and testing and whatnot. It’s just that without Linus’s discerning eye casting judgment on their work, it doesn’t enter the mainstream.

Nothing will really get slowed down. Whether something officially gets labelled by Linus as “6.8” or “6.whatever” doesn’t really matter in the big picture of Linux development.

I used to run a TFTP server on my router that held the decryption keys. As soon as a machine got far enough in the boot sequence to get network access, it would pull the decryption keys from the router. That way a thief would have to steal the router along with the computer, and have the router running when booting up the computer. It works wirelessly, too!

I’m going to reframe the question as “Are computers good for someone tech illiterate?”

I think the answer is “yes, if you have someone that can help you”.

The problem with proprietary systems like Windows or OS X is that that “someone” is a large corporation. And, in fairness, they generally do a good job of looking after tech illiterate people. They ensure that their users don’t have to worry about how to do updates, or figure out what browser they should be using, or what have you.

But (and it’s a big but) they don’t actually care about you. Their interest making sure you have a good experience ends at a dollar sign. If they think what’s best for you is to show you ads and spy on you, that’s what they’ll do. And you’re in a tricky position with them because you kind of have to trust them.

So with Linux you don’t have a corporation looking after you. You do have a community (like this one) to some degree, but there’s a limit to how much we can help you. We’re not there on your computer with you (thankfully, for your privacy’s sake), so to a large degree, you are kind of on your own.

But Linux actually works very well if you have a trusted friend/partner/child/sibling/whoever who can help you out now and then. If you’ve got someone to help you out with it, Linux can actually work very very well for tech illiterate people. The general experience of browsing around, editing documents, editing photos, etc., works very much the same way as it does on Windows or OS X. You will probably be able to do all that without help.

But you might not know which software is best for editing photos. Or you might need help with a specific task (like getting a printer set up) and having someone to fall back on will give you much better experience.

I’m curious about auto-regressive token prediction vs planning. The article just very briefly mentions “planning” and then never explains what it is. As someone who’s not in this area, what’s the definition/mechanism of “planning” here?

Yes, it is. ed25519 depends upon discrete log for its security, which Shor’s algorithm can (theoretically, of course, not like it’s ever been done) efficiently solve.

The post-quantum algorithms are in active research right now. I don’t blame anyone for avoiding those at least until we’ve quantum computers big enough to solve baby toy elliptic curves.

I mean…yeah. Just because something is provably the best possible thing, doesn’t mean it’s good. Sorting should be avoided if at all possible. (And in many cases, such as with numbers, you can do better than comparison-based sorts)