Tim

New Tier 1 actually; Shanghai is very much China for amateurs, of course - but that’s irrelevant; you might not realise this but the vast majority of Chinese also don’t live in Shanghai.

I mean, I’m not particularly bothered about convincing anyone else, but personally I am absolutely 100% sure that no technology that is cogniscant of absolutely nothing but tokens of language (entirely arbitrary human language at that, far from any fundamental ground truth in itself), that is entirely incapable of discerning any actual meaning from that language other than which tokens appear likely to follow another, is absolutely never, under any circumstances, going to lead to AGI.

Yann LeCun is probably heading down a more realistic path to AGI with his world models - but for as long as my cat has a few orders of magnitude more synapses than Anthropic’s most world beating model has parameters, I’m not going to get to stressed about that either.

The thing is, all this can be true (and I don’t really understand why you’re being downvoted,) but it’s also true that LLMs are no more evidence that we are close to AGI than Eliza was.

AGI is inevitable, but it won’t come from an LLM, and all the hype in that direction from Anthropic, OpenAI et al is just so much bullshit.

The problem is, we don’t need AGI to experience the catastrophic consequences; as bad or worse will be idiotic human intelligences putting very-much-not-AGI in charge of things it has no right to be in charge of because they drunk their own koolaid (or rather, the investors did.) That, unfortunately, is the future we are speedrunning - SkyNet never needed AGI, it just needs fucking idiots to put an LLM in charge of a weapons system.

(As for AGI, my gut feeling is that it will come from the intersection of neural networks and quantum computing at scale - I’ll be filling my bunker with canned goods when the latter appears to be close on the horizon…)

Of course; that’s why PPP is the only sensible way to compare economies when you’re discussing individual experience.

There are much more interesting reasons than “ugh, me big rich western man, proud overpay not europoor” why Romanian internet is cheaper than western though; after all, GDP PP PPP in Romania is 60% of Denmark or half of Switzerland (and only a shade off the EU average these days), but fibre internet is between one fifth and one eighth of the price apparently. Particularly surprising when you consider that Denmark must be the easiest country to wire up in the world (very small and geographically unremarkable.) I would think a curious mind would want to know why…

1Gb/s symmetrical fibre 9eur/month here in Romania… And happy to say it’s rock solid/advertised speed.

Alas, Digi’s 10Gb/s product seems to be mostly vapourware (the installer asked if I wanted it - for an extra eur/month IIRC - but any mention has disappeared from the website.) That said, I said no anyway because the thought of upgrading all my equipment to actually do anything with it doesn’t make me at all happy…

This is apparently a different China than the one I’ve worked in for the last decade.

You may have a theoretically fast connection - but even then it’s not particularly cheap (I pay less in Romania and Thailand for FTTH,) and the actual qualify of Internet bandwidth is beyond atrocious for any non domestic traffic (i.e. anything crossing the great firewall.)

Which is not to be negative about China, it’s got a hell of a lot going for it - I’d live in China before I’d live anywhere in the US - but great Internet is not one of those things.

They’re labelled “oxygen removers”, so I rather assume that’s what they’re for. Dessicant is something else entirely.

I own a property & live part of the year in Thailand, and have worked in China for a decade - I don’t need grandma to teach me to suck ants. Amazingly, in all that time I’ve discovered that a single layer of plastic and a bag clip is, in fact, entirely adequate to keep both humidity and ants out of food.

If this helps Asia get off its addiction to wrapping absolutely everything in about 5 layers of plastic, there may be an upside here.

(For the uninitiated: if you buy a packet of biscuits in Europe, you’ll get a cardboard box, maybe one interior wrap of plastic, and the biscuits. The same packet of biscuits in China will see every two biscuits wrapped in its own sealed plastic bag. Each of those will have a small plastic bag of “oxygen remover” for God knows what reason. The bags will all then be carefully nestled into a thick plastic tray. The whole lot will then get another layer of plastic wrapped around it. Everything is like this there (and most of South East Asia in my experience) - it’s genuinely nuts.)

This gets repeated a lot - but for avoidance of doubt, practically no normal people use VPNs in China, and the government is very successful at blocking them.

You can set up a brand new, never seen before VPN on entirely new IPs and random ports today, and at 1am tomorrow it’ll be blocked. Commercial VPNs are basically unusable. (For a while, Cloudflare Warp was a very nice way around - but they put a stop to that too.)

IF you have a competent government willing to put the work in, blocking VPNs is entitely doable. That “if” is probably our best hope in the west, though.

I got a sitewide warning a couple of months ago for suggesting that Trump’s inaugural “board of peace” meeting was the apotheosis of the “you have one bullet…” thought experiment. “After reviewing, we found that you broke Rule 1 because you threatened violence or physical harm.” I’ll wager Trump’s secret service guys were absolutely shitting themselves when they read it, so it’s probably for the best they took it down tbf.

On the bright side, it was the kick up the backside that was needed to get me to try Lemmy, and I hardly use Reddit at all now.

When I’m on a plane I still idly think about the possibility of there being a gremlin out there on the wing eating an engine…

(I fly a lot and even learned to fly gliders/sailplanes back in the day, so definitely not afraid of flying, but if I’m ever sat next to William Shatner I’m deplaning. No point taking chances. ;-).)

You seem to be under the impression that booking.com provides property management services. I’m not aware of them doing any such thing, but if they do them she should absolutely raise a dispute under her contract for those services. A quick scan of their information page for property owners is pretty clear, though, that it’s the property owners’ responsibility to get insurance if they need it (they even have some partner links for insurance providers.)

Using booking.com to advertise and resell her business does not change the fact that managing that business is entirely on her. If she doesn’t want to put in the minimum effort, or expense (e.g. insurance) required, she should get out of the business of property letting.

You can hate booking.com for many reasons, but “not running my spare property as a hotel for me so I can just sit back and count the cash” isn’t really one of them.

I hate not to join a pileon, but if the landlady didn’t want to deal with the consequences of letting random strangers into her property unsupervised for money, she shouldn’t advertise her property for random strangers to occupy for money.

Short term rentals are a business, not a free money machine. Even rent extraction requires slightly more effort than just depositing the cheques - dealing with customers’ behaviour is a cost of doing business. If, like most short-term let grifters, she is not capable of handing that responsibly she should get out of it (and good riddance - short term rentals do no good and plenty of harm to society.)

They know the user’s identity - they have the name and home address on the credit card used to pay.

If you mean “it doesn’t have the user’s ID card”, well that’s true. But that’s mainly because the UK doesn’t actually have an ID card or national ID database/reference number, so NO operator in the UK has “the user’s ID” in that sense.

You think they don’t already? Can you even use an iPhone without an Apple ID? I’m fairly sure you couldn’t install any apps without one, and if you’ve ever paid for anything they definitely already have your real data.

I’ve always preferred Gitlab to Github anyway, but I recently migrated all my repos to a self-hosted Gitlab and it wasn’t too painful. Despite the woeful documentation of the Helm chart configuration.

I know there are other options (Forgejo et al,) but the thought of migrating all my CI/CD pipelines to a new platform was too much to bear - moving from .com to self-hosted though is much more manageable.

Why the ever loving fuck does an init system even need a user database?

Honest to God, if FIFA were giving out a World “Understanding UNIX” Prize, Poettering would be the inaugural, and only, winner. Never in the field of operating systems has one man driven so much enshittification through sheer force of cluelessness coupled with supreme arrogance. And in a world that Steve Ballmer still occupies, that’s one hell of an accolade.

If you’ve seen how badly specified, documented and behaved OpenAI’s APIs are, you’d guess this was already the case.

Actually it was Sequoia that was the last straw for me to get rid of most of my Macs (replaced them with Linux machines in the main - I was just so sick of Apple trying to turn the OS into a phone while not fixing basic known bugs that have been around for years - like forgetting external display layouts one in ten boots, not restarting external drives properly after sleep, and the finder being, well, everything about the finder…) And constantly having to fight with crappy “oh, today all your builds are going to fail because I’ve decided ld.so isn’t trusted any more” locked down platform nonsense. And creeping “you don’t need to know where your files are stored, they’re In The Cloud, stop asking for a file dialog (and that’s why we’ll never fix the finder btw)” type crap from the ever increasing number of un-uninstallable crapware applications wasting disk space with every update…

But yeah, you’re right - the visual horrorshow that is Tahoe was the trigger to finally give Asahi a try on my last remaining Mac.

Shame really; until a couple of years ago I’d had exclusively Macs for desktops & laptops since the late 90s (from the lovely Powerbook G3 Lombard on.)

It would be quite nice if they added some MacOS features back to MacOS instead of trying desperately to turn it into a mobile phone OS.

That said, Sequoia is so objectively awful it finally gave me the kick I needed to nuke my MacBook Air and install Asahi, and I’m genuinely really impressed. The only shame is having to waste 80gb of disk for a MacOS partition that I’ll never use, but otherwise it’s actually good enough to be a daily driver.