The guy who wrote Winamp Sold it decades ago. So you should clarify who is defensive about their code :-) The original coder is really good - he also wrote the awesome AVS visualization plugin for Winamp which among other things utilizes a special programming language called “eel”. After selling Winamp he went on to create Reaper which also uses eel I think.
Ahh the event in 1054… Yeah that event was a banger!
It cannot “analyze” it. It’s fundamentally not how LLM’s work. The LLM has a finite set of “tokens”: words and word-pieces like “dog”, “house”, but also like “berry” and “straw” or “rasp”. When it reads the input it splits the words into the recognized tokens. It’s like a lookup table. The input becomes “token15, token20043, token1923, token984, token1234, …” and so on. The LLM “thinks” of these tokens as coordinates in a very high dimensional space. But it cannot go back and examine the actual contents (letters) in each token. It has to get the information about the number or “r” from somewhere else. So it has likely ingested some texts where the number of "r"s in strawberry is discussed. But it can never actually “test” it.
A completely new architecture or paradigm is needed to make these LLM’s capable of reading letter by letter and keep some kind of count-memory.
Honestly, do yourself a favor and watch the OG Alien from start to finish with no distractions. Then do the same with Aliens as well. Those two are masterpieces with Aliens being much different in tone. Every sequel or prequel made afterward tried to rekindle the fire/brilliance of those two. Unfortunately Alien was made worse by the later films where the Xenomorphs origin is basically explained as human in origin (caused by humans). So pretend that you didn’t see any movie from the franchise and try to be “fresh”.
I’m using none of these. But what i use almost all the time : possibly = evtl (eventuell) maybe = vllt (vielleicht) kindest regards = LG (Liebe Grüße) e.g. /for example = zB (z.B.: / zum Beispiel) (i omit the dots and colons)
IIRC most successful VCs invest very early and get out often early-ish too. The real enshittification that dangers the actual position of the company often happen much later. At that point the company is traded publicly and there’s a large anonymous body of shareholders - they only care about profits. VCs are actually a little smarter and care about longer time frames as in that early stage often much larger (relative) growth rates are possible.
At a late stage (think Google, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc today) growth is much more difficult. How could Google grow today? They’ve saturated the search market years ago. So the only way of making more money is by sucking more money out of their existing user base. And they absolutely need to do it, as there’s huge pressure on the managerial class to do it, because the shareholders demand it. If the managerial class doesn’t do this (because often some older idealistic people know it would compromise the quality of the product), or they aren’t capable of doing it - they will get replaced by people who are more willing or capable - even if it’s detrimental for the company when viewed longer-term. VCs i would argue care all about profits, “but”. (they are smart enough to see the big picture. They are also small enough or “few enough” that they can communicate among themselves in order to agree on a more wise plan. That’s why they often get out once most of the possible (easy) growth has been achieved. They either know that now growth is much more difficult, or that the company’s value is much more stagnant - ow might decrease even. They can get out and invest their money in other more promising endeavours.
The shareholders of large publicly traded companies are not that coordinated as they cannot really agree on anything other than just “growth”. More sophisticated strategies would have to be negotiated (and communicated) among thousands. The only unifying bond among shareholders is that they want profits. Think about it: many shareholders often don’t even know what companies they own as they are often part of other investment packages. Maybe you’re retirement plan has invested in stocks of 50 different companies, or 10 different fonds that have invested in others still. That is a form of dilution (?). It’s very difficult to communicate any strategy more sophisticated than “profits”. (a side effect is also that many people have invested indirectly or wothout knowing in endeavours that make their life more shitty/expensive when they retire - without knowing it.) There isn’t enough nuance in the wants of the masses as to want any more sophisticated strategy than simply “growth”. That’s why only short term growth can be thought.
Of course sometimes also large companies can grow 2.5x or something like that. But it’s rare and takes more time. The exception makes the rule here. Early stage growth that VCs bank on is much more explosive i think. More like 10x or 100x.
EDIT: sorry i typed this on mobile and it shows.
Glad that isn’t Rust code or the pass by value function wouldn’t be very nice.
Where would you have to touch internals in zed? In reality would you have to come into contact with rust when using Zed? If it works it wouldn’t be apparent what it was build with, wouldn’t it?
present… yet until i can toy around with zed in Linux
only if you don’t have to clean it up later. Nobody can pee standing up without making a mess. if you think you can you’ve never cleaned your toilet yourself.
“Wir wollen keine Parallelgesellschaft”
hopefully circumstances worsen quickly enough that it’ll be noticable for everybody so that the general public can clearly identify it as a direct consequence of this maniac being elected. If its deteriorating too slowly people might just not notice it as much and might go along with all the coming explanations ( probably immigrants, leftists, blahblah). If there’s a quick look into the abyss people might wake up and get into action.
If you want to have some fun again, maybe program a little with artsy-fartsy shaders.
Make a little blog that showcases them and write a little animation everyday - or twice a week.
I’ve seen also “shadplay” which lets you easily write and run shaders using rust. There was also this other tool where people could live-code shaders, but I forgot the name
I honestly gotta say that I really liked JJ Abrams Star Trek from 2009. I say that as a huge Star Trek fan. It was like a reimagined of the good 'ol fable of captain Kirk and his brave little crew of adventurers. It had all the things that I normally hate (first and foremost: perpetually moving camera, too many lense flares), but in this movie it worked.
His Ep7 would work if it could exist in isolation to the rest of the franchise.
To be honest star wars has been shit for decades. the only exceptional Star Wars after the OG Trilogy was “Rogue One” and the exceptional “Andor”. The rest is for little children.
I’m sorry but, I always find it strange when people talk about nuclear energy as the simplest solution.
Nuclear energy is extremely expensive compared to wind and solar once you also account for the cost of processing the uranium and then dealing with the radioactive waste afterwards.
Also take France for example. The EDF has (after being privatized) ran on substance without reinvesting in repairs and renovation so much that last year more than half of its 56(54?) reactors stood still because of problems relevant for their save operation. This was before the last record-breaking summer in 2022 when even more of them didn’t have enough cool water to operate. As a consequence the EDF made mountains of dept because they had to buy so much energy from Germany last summer (from all the solar and wind) that Macron (the famously socialist and anti-market-driven-everything-president of France had to re-nationalize EDF last year. If a neoliberal government like France’s nationalizes the EDF (famous for its highest percentage of nuclear energy in the mix) you can really see how great of a solution it really is.
Also: where does most of the world’s uranium come from? Russia. So not really much of a difference to the gas. France takes a lot of it from Mali as well (which explains their involvement there. So uranium isn’t that great in this regard as well).
Also: Nuclear reactors create the most important resource for nuclear weapons automatically.
In north-east Germany there’s the Wendelstein 7X an experimental stelarator-type fusion generator that since its operation blew all the best estimates for experimentation out of the water. But it can never create more energy than it takes because it’s too small. But it took decades to ensure the funding to even build a small one like this. For a fraction of the subsidies tat nuclear power plants, or gas or coal gets ever year we could’ve build many larger ones that would be much closer to be net positive in power production.
I’m not against nuclear energy per se. But it’s really annoying to hear all these voices from outside that from thousands of miles away know everything about Germany turning off its power plants.
The main advantage of nuclear in capitalism is that its central. Everybody having solar power and large fields of wind farms distributed evenly across the country make it less controllable by singular entities.
I might warm up more to nuclear energy it would be run in a more socialist society where there’s no profit-driven operation that drives companies to skip repairs. The corrosion crisis in France is a direct result of “market forces”.
If something like Chernobyl happened in France… holy shit. That country has the most tourists in the world and exporting their food into the whole wide world. And -yes - I know that the chernobyl-type reactor (Graphite-mediated and so on) isn’t used in France anymore. As someone who lived half of his life worth in 30km to “Fessenheim” - France’s oldest and now shut down Graphite-Based reactor - I can yell you that you examine the possible impact more closely from time to time and think about it more.
Solar and Wind are better. But they naturally don’t create market monopolies and dilute power over energy. That’s why they’re not pushed that hard. If a resource is spread out evenly you cannot make money from it. There’s no market. Capitalism doesn’t like this.
Yeah it was not specifically only about Deutsche Bahn, but also an observation about one of the multiple problems that drives the enshittification.
One Point that Deutsche Bahn definitely did was to find out which connections are mostly used by people ( tickets for these connections thereby contribute mostly to DBs revenue) and kind of abandon the less profitable connections. That’s accounting in my book.
What they did (counting passangers by rail-connections) wasn’t possible before, as DB-tickets were sold not electronically and couldn’t easily (cheaply / with little work-hours) be turned into data sets and analyzed.
IIRC tickets were priced much differently - they weren’t fixed to specific trains but to connections (no “Zugbindung”). So There wasn’t even (easily available) data to when most travellers were using the trains.
Today with all the data being generates automatically the accountains know much better what costs and what earns DB money and they prioritize based on that. Once you get into the habit of that even things that are obviously always costs (like fixing rails or bridges) will be outsourced or avoided. (like the supermarket example - it’s obvious that someone has to restuff the shelves, but once you have all the data and see only red numbers you try to separate it away and not do it (so it gets turned into a subcontract with probably unrealistic conditions that some other companies are underbidding each other in order to gain the contract - even if this means that their employees will not earn a living wage from it. It’s a perfect system that also pushes responsibility and blame away from the outsourcing company. they can always blame the sub contracting company for underpaying or not follow safety regulations (even if they can only fulfill the sub contract by operating this way)).
I’m German and have been in France quite often in recent years. It’s fascinating to hear their opinions on Germany. Outside our country is still imaged as having great engineering, efficiency - that Trains run on time. It’s quite puzzling to me.
I came to the conclusion that the only real innovation in the last 30 years has been accounting. largely driven by neoliberalism. So every neo liberal country has kind of become more similar. Germany is not special, but has the advantage of having a lot of old successful companies that only slowly get sold of to international conglomerates. (Like Kuka etc). We behave as shitty as the rest, but our downward trajectory started higher up.
Modern computers and software made it possible to account for basically every item in a company with little cost. Before you’d have needed so many people and hours of work to judge profitability of small things that it wouldn’t have been sensible to do so. CAD-Software also enables a special kind of accounting - simulating hardware components enables engineers to judge which parts are necessary and how much thickness is really needed. This is a huge and complicated process of optimization.
Accounting made it possible to turn a mostly opaque company structure that ran inefficient (but mostly on par with the competition) and judge every employee, every item. That’s why supermarkets have outsourced the job of restuffing the shelves to a different company (that has to somehow make it work with the shitty pay that get). But it’s also the reason why appliances seem to hold just slightly over the warranty period. CAD-simulations made it possible for the accountants to change the products (make them shittier) so that people would need to buy new ones often.
The Deutsche Bahn is the same. Has made it possible to invest the smallest amount possible, because they realized they can just work with the deterioration infrastructure as well - most people don’t have a choice and have to take the late train anyways.
It’s the same with telecommunications here btw. With only few companys owning most Internet services they realized they don’t have to invest a lot into fiber. People need Internet and will have to pay anyways. It’s more profit to just raise prices.
Lol?
I’m German and travel regularily in France as well. Travelling in France by train is a JOY compared to Germany. Please ask around as many French living in Germany as you can find. Hear their opinions.
Yes. But travel to other countries and hear their thoughts about Germany and you’ll discover this image is very much alive still. It’s important to spread the word outside of Germany, too.
Thank you! Nicely put. The problem isn’t people like your aunt, its massive shareholder-controlled investemet machines that own thousands or even millions of homes. Your aunt probably knows eafh renter by name - there can exist a personal relationship. There’s two things limiting your aunt becoming a money-hungry antisocial ghoul:
So increasing rent is a lot of hassle and her renters might like her less after that - which might be a factor.
Now lets think of the hugr real estate company. They have thousands of renters and maybe hundreds of employees. They have lawyers employed. If they raise rent by 2% they have to send thousands of letters. But these letters are sent by people whose job it is to do so. Tyey can calculate in advance that from their renters X% will just accept the nrew rent, Y% will require some manouvering, Z% might move out and so on. They can estimate the cost of raising rent pretty well based on experience and compare to the profits they make. And with thousands of apartmants 2% is a lot of profit. The employees have no relationship to the thousands of renters. Renters are just numbers anyway. Everything is much more efficient. Also: Shareholders. They demand profits and dont’t care how. They care even less aboht the renters. They demand more profit and will just say “make it happen”. If thr ceo doesn’t raise profits - with whatever means necessary - the shareholders will replace the ceo.
The soltion IMHO would be some progressive tax That makes it basically unprofitable to have more than 10 apartments. And to prevent legal entities owning other legal entities owning apartments in order to circumvent this. If there exists (and can reasonable exist) a personal relationship between landlord and renter everything is alright in my opinion. People usually are not animals to eaxh other if they know eaxh other personal.