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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • We’re always going to have a system that optimises (aka is greedy), it’s just a practical necessity. The issue is what gets optimised. The utopian solution is not to eliminate greed but to make incentives that lets people be greedy for maximum overall happiness (ie make sure people get paid the most when everyone is happiest with the outcome and the environment is minimally affected, etc).





  • Rectangle is obviously the standard shape of phone and had been since before mobile phones basically.

    Rounding of corners is standard engineering practice, sharp edges are a weak point, rounding them off increases the overall strength.

    What is described is not aesthetics or ornamentation, it’s an engineering imperative obvious in airplane windows, car windows, diaries (many have their corners rounded anticipating wear and tear), pockets (many pockets are rounded off instead of sharply square to prevent the corner failing).

    Apple could perhaps argue nobody had rounded the corners as much as they did in earlier phones, without further altering the design beyond a rectangle. But that shouldn’t give them such a wide patent, a narrow patent on the specific shape would be sufficient.

    Another way to put this. If the shape you’re trying to patent has a css property dedicated to it (corner-radius) it may not be sufficiently specific.





  • scratchee@feddit.uktoTechnology@lemmy.worldVPN Comparison 2.0
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    6 months ago

    The age is useful when considering risk of enshitificarion. A well established and respected vpn has probably figured out how to run profitably, and will probably only go to shit after being sold out or a similar major internal upset, a 3 month old vpn may be offering below cost deals to undercut (or just catch up with) the market whilst the startup funding lasts, in which case they’ll have no choice but to start turning the screws once they have some customers


  • The difference between a fascist government and a democratic government can be distressingly thin, something we should all be aware of by now.

    In this case, the EU has just proven it is currently on the right side of that divide. When extremely unpopular and authoritarian ideas were considered, the public felt able to voice their disapproval and the government felt they had to listen. That is a crucial step. Good for you all.

    Sadly it likely will continue to require major work to keep the public on guard against future attempts like this one, but that’s life.








  • Because no matter how harmful he may have been in life, his death is probably more harmful.

    We had enough problems without tit-for-tat assassinations of anyone that anyone else dislikes.

    The Luigi assassination didn’t come out so bad since there wasn’t a strong political back and forth (there was some, but he wasn’t really a political/public figure, just an arsehole ceo, and didn’t make a great wedge issue), this one is much more dangerous, and yeah, probably it would have been better if he’d continued his harmful speeches from a limited platform than become an excuse for so many “justified” attacks on the left, and that’s assuming it stops here, and doesn’t escalate further.



  • scratchee@feddit.uktoTechnology@lemmy.worldWhat If There’s No AGI?
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    7 months ago

    Modern llms were a left field development.

    Most ai research has serious and obvious scaling problems. It did well at first, but scaling up the training didn’t significantly improve the results. LLMs went from more of the same to a gold rush the day it was revealed that they scaled “well” (relatively speaking). They then went through orders of magnitude improvements very quickly because they could (unlike previous ai training models which wouldn’t have benefited like this).

    We’ve had chatbots for decades, but with a the same low capability ceiling that most other old techniques had, they really were a different beast to modern LLMs with their stupidly excessive training regimes.