If the information never leaves the device then it doesn’t need a policy - privacy is not about what an app does in the device which never leaves the device hence never gets shared, it’s about what it shares with a 3rd party.

A clock doesn’t need to send system time settings information to a server since that serves no purpose for it - managing that is all done at the OS level and the app just uses what’s there - and that’s even more so for location data since things like determining the timezone are done by the user at the OS level, which will handle stuff like prompting the user to update the timezone if, for example, it detects the device is now in a different timezone (for example, after a long trip).

That’s because it’s not a clock, it’s a private information stealing app disguised as a clock.

How else would the twisted sense of humour character trait be passed to the next generation?

I’m pretty sure somebody who died because they didn’t made sure to check freely available information beforehand given the very loud and widespread advanced notices that “serious shit might be coming your way” counts as Natural Selection.

One of the first things they teach you in Experimental Physics is that you can’t derive a curve from just 2 data points.

You can just as easilly fit an exponential growth curve to 2 points like that one 20% above the other, as you can a a sinusoidal curve, a linear one, an inverse square curve (that actually grows to a peak and then eventually goes down again) and any of the many curves were growth has ever diminishing returns and can’t go beyond a certain point (literally “with a limit”)

I think the point that many are making is that LLM growth in precision is the latter kind of curve: growing but ever slower and tending to a limit which is much less than 100%. It might even be like more like the inverse square one (in that it might actually go down) if the output of LLM models ends up poluting the training sets of the models, which is a real risk.

You showing that there was some growth between two versions of GPT (so, 2 data points, a before and an after) doesn’t disprove this hypotesis. I doesn’t prove it either: as I said, 2 data points aren’t enough to derive a curve.

If you do look at the past growth of precision for LLMs, whilst improvement is still happening, the rate of improvement has been going down, which does support the idea that there is a limit to how good they can get.

It’s wonderful how the expression “humble Arch Linux user” manages to pack a contradiction in a mere 4 words.

How much would that be in Libraries Of Congress if written down?

I disagree: as a Bachus of Programming I have successfully managed to at the same time both be a God of Programming AND having no clue what’s going on.

(The real joke behind the joke is that today I’m doing Shader programming so that’s quite close to reality and I could definitelly do with large amounts of wine or at least beer).

Here too the Schrödinger’s equations apply: a programmer’s state during coding is a superposition of both of these states until actually trying to run the code, at which point it collapses into one of the two states.

Death by being SWATed after a Github commit.

Above a certain level of seniority (in the sense of real breadth and depth of experience rather than merely high count of work years) one’s increased productivity is mainly in making others more productive.

You can only be so productive at making code, but you can certainly make others more productive with better design of the software, better software architecture, properly designed (for productivity, bug reduction and future extensibility) libraries, adequate and suitably adjusted software development processes for the specifics of the business for which the software is being made, proper technical and requirements analysis well before time has been wasted in coding, mentorship, use of experience to foresee future needs and potential pitfalls at all levels (from requirements all the way through systems design and down to code making), and so on.

Don’t pay for that and then be surprised of just how much work turns out to have been wasted in doing the wrong things, how much trouble people have with integration, how many “unexpected” things delay the deliveries, how fast your code base ages and how brittle it seems, how often whole applications and systems have to be rewritten, how much the software made mismatches the needs of the users, how mistrusting and even adversarial the developer-user relationship ends up being and so on.

From the outside it’s actually pretty easy to deduce (and also from having known people on the inside) how plenty of Tech companies (Google being a prime example) haven’t learned the lesson that there are more forms of value in the software development process than merely “works 14h/day, is young and intelligent (but clearly not wise)”

This kind of thing just confirms how it’s really all about the Power elites keeping an eye out on the plebes trying to organise and change things so that they can kill any such things in the early stages.

Democracy was supposed to slowly bring Autocracies around to its way of doing things but instead what we’re seing is the very opposite of that.

The amount of effort I do to try and avoid using double parentesis is trully herculean.

I think that stuff is the product of a completionist/perfectionist mindset - as one is writting, important details/context related to the main train of thought pop-up in one’s mind and as one is writting those, important details/context related to the other details/context pop-up in one’s mind (and the tendency is to keep going down the rabbit hole of details/context on details/context).

You get this very noticeably with people who during a conversation go out on a tangent and often even end up losing the train of thought of the main conversation (a tendecy I definitelly have) since one doesn’t get a chance to go back and re-read, reorganise and correct during a spoken conversation.

Personally I don’t think it’s an actual quality (sorry to all upvoters) as it indicates a disorganised mind. It is however the kind of thing one overcomes with experience and I bet Mr Torvalds himself is mostly beyond it by now.

It was about as prescient as “640k is enough for everybody”, but in a good way.

In a highly simplified way:

• Think of Windows as an electricity provider with their own specially shaped wall socket.
• Linux is also an electricity provider with a differently shaped wall socket.
• In this metaphor Wine is just some guys providing an adaptor that makes the electricity of the Linux electricity provider available in a wall socket that has the same shape as the Windows provider’s.

Wine isn’t breaking Windows copyright because it doesn’t copy any of the Windows internals: instead it provides the contact points with the right “shape” for programs which were made to work in Windows to connect to to get their needs fullfilled, and then internally Wine does its own thing which is mainly using the Linux under it to do the heavy lifting.

Mind you, this simplification seriously understates just how complicate it is to implement what was implemented in Wine because the Windows interface is a lot more that just the shape of a wall socket.

I got an Orange Pi 5 Plus to play with smallish AIs (because it has an NPU) and I normally access it remotely, so I have to know its IP address to do it.

In order to easilly know the IP address of it, I’ve wired a little 128x64 monochrome OLED screen to it (Orange PIs, like Raspberry PIs have a pin connector giving access to GPIO and interfaces like I2C, Serial and SPI) which talks via I2C.

Turns out those interfactes aren’t active in Linux by default (I.e. no /dev/i2c-x), so I figured out that I had to add a kernel overlay to activate that specific interface (unlike with the Raspberry PI whose Linux version has a neat program for doing it, in the Orange Pi you have to know how the low level details of activating those things), which I did.

To actually render characters on that screen I went with an ARM Linux port of a graphics library for those screens I used before with Arduino, called u8g2)

Then I made a program in C that just scans all network interfaces and prints their names and IP addresses on that screen, and installed it as a Cron job running once a minute.

Now, as it turns out when you shutdown your Linux on that board, if you don’t disconnect it from power there is actually still power flowing through the pin connector to any devices you wire there, so after shutdown my screen would remain ON and showing the last thing I had put there, but because the OS was down it would naturally not get updated.

So the last thing I did was another small C program which just sends to that screen the command for it to go into power saving mode, shutting it down. This program was then installed as a Systemd Service to run when Linux is shutting down.

The result is now that there is a little screen hanging from the box were I put this board with Linux which lists its IP addresses and the info is updated if it connects other interfaces or reconnects and gets a new IP address. Curiously I’ve actually been using that feature because it’s genuinely useful, not just a funny little project.

It’s a new frontier in sourcing material for AI training…

“Will horrors never cease?!”

Wine and Proton manage to be better at both forward and backward compatibility with Windows than actual Windows.

I’ve switched for over a month now and did had problems with 2 games out of the 6 I tried so far (all of which were both games installed via Lutris and I found solutions to fix them both).

Funnily enough one of the games I got via Steam which did not work before in Windows now works in Linux. Further, I was running Windows 7 (yeah, I know it was a bad idea security wise), so there are AAA games whose minimum Windows version is 10 which I now can play in Linux that I couldn’t before in the Windows I was using.

All in all it has been great and I have no intention whatsoever to go back to Windows.

Even if there are games that won’t work in Linux, there are so many good games out there that can entertain me for hundreds of hours that I won’t miss the handful I cannot get to run in Linux.