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.

There are still phones that have it. Sometimes even pretty good ones. It’s just that they are not advertised so heavily. I recently learned about HTC U23 or 24 or something. Now I feel dumb because I never bothered to check because I always thought all good phones don’t offer headphone jacks anymore.

It depends.

It’s the reason I stopped making so much fun of people that recreate the “MAMIL” trope - “Middle Aged Men In Lycra”. Meaning men who start their midlife crisis buying an expensive bicycle with neon-colored bicycle clothes and bicycle glasses and all the other stuff.

Why don’t they just start riding their bicycle they already got? They can use their sunglasses and normal sport shorts. What’s the problem?

But I some cases or age-ranges people want to make a change and get out of their usual habits. A real phase shift. People think they want to work out more regularly. Or really start a new hobby. Buying a bunch of expensive stuff can increase the need to go through with this phase shift - at least in the minds of the people buying it.

As an adult picking up a new hobby often means that other things in their life have to make room. It’s usually not that adults in their (let’s say) mid 30s until early 50s have problems filling their day. So whatever new hobby or task they want to do has to push away other habits and stay there until these new habits can take root.

So starting with some expensive shit can be something I can understand - if one has the money.

If I would start making music again, I’d probably start by buying an expensive synth like the super-6 from UDO (that I always wanted to buy) instead of a bunch of bleep-bloop-machines that need a lot of initial time for understanding them and then only fulfill one specific function in my music.

True.

I’m very much opposed to and sad about an international pop star and apparent progressive taking a private jet all the time.

But there’s two things at play that should be differentiated.

1. The role model aspect. She has millions of fans that look up to her. She could lead by example and use different means of transportation.
2. She’s obviously a unique figure. She’s not replaceable or generic in the position she’s at. Her “position” cannot be replaced by someone else as would be possible with the Starbucks CEO. She’s not “some CEO” taking a Jet to work and thereby normalizing this as a habit for CEOs". Right now there are few if any other celebrities with her status l, so she stands for herself.

The precedent of Starbucks CEO commuting by jet is much more of a blueprint that might be applied to other CEOs. Or already is. I don’t even know his name FFS. So he’s making a precedent that a lot of other people could readily adapt.

I don’t want to excuse anything. I just think that it would be more beneficial to attack CEOs for taking private jets. There’s a lot more of them. They areuch more susceptible to the pressure if the companies is seen as a polluter than Taylor Swift might be. She’s much more independent than any CEO. She doesn’t have to worry if the board of directors or the shareholders are going to replace her if her if her habits are becoming a PR problem. So our energy might be more productively applied elsewhere.

I’m still sad about a seemingly progressive and apparently Intelligent pop star like her flying that much.

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.

How dare you! 😅

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.

I’m all for it, but with plants of this size - or rather such an mount of relatively dense photovoltaic surfaces - i am thinking about the heat that these panels are generating. i am guessing it would be similar to such an area out of asphalt. if these panels were cooled the heat could also be used to warm massive heat storage tanks.

In this case it’s a giant housing shortage though. The city (and large surrounding area) is Freiburg in the south. Rents are so expensive and available flats are so rare that companies don’t find workers who could actually live there. Also: the comparably good loans don’t mean much when it’s only channeled into a greedy landlord’s pockets.

Edit: oh no i was wrong it’s Nuremberg - their public transport organization is also “VAG”. But Freiburg has a huge labor shortage due to unaffordable housing and housing shortage.

In my experience there are quite a few tenured professors that are brilliant in their respective fields (so i heard), but we’re absolutely terrible in teaching their it. In my case this was physics (and also mathematics where i met some of these specimens). I suspect if you understand a certain field so naturally and really excel at that it becomes a second nature it it is more and more difficult to put yourself in an outsider’s perspective. It is so foreign and unimaginable for you that someone might not understand this and that aspect naturally that you cease to be a good teacher in this.

Have you been to Europe? Have you walked the streets of Paris? The US was built with enough space being everywhere. American roads are wider, cities are mostly built like square-grids of roads built in a time when cats existed whereas European cities emerged in the middle ages. They’re tightly packed with little extra space. Sometimes (very rarely) here there are old Cadillacs that can be rented for weddings. Seeing one of these cars on the street is an unreal experience. They’re just so huge. They don’t fit on the streets here - and those are cars from the 60s or 70s. Everything seems tiny compared to them. From a European perspective it’s really stupid to build such large vehicles as driving and parking it is much more complicated when everything is build for small cars. Now that SUVs are becoming popular here too it’s just a really annoying. Less parking space per vehicle etc. On cities like Paris - one of the tightest city on Europe this is just annoying. And i haven’t even written about fuel consumption. Paris has had huge problems with smog in recent years.

SUVs are not super rare in the EU (unfortunately). They are pretty common in cities and cause a lot of accidents.

if you have a wheelchair you get dedicated parking spaces anyway. what’s your problem? what are you talking about?

I’d like to add that Paris is one of the tightest cities there is in Europe. there’s just so little space already. with thousands of badly parked scooters cluttering up sidewalks people got fed up very quickly. the vote was pretty one sided IIRC.

a Chromecast is one of those inputs. And it has been a nice product. The reason people are mad is that they Google changed the product after they bought it significantly.

and yes. Today the only reasonable good TV is a computer monitor connected to a device I have control over.

“Wir wollen keine Parallelgesellschaft”

it is possible now to copy your data to another account on another instance.

in the future lemmy might even support something like having your account automatically backed up to another instance. Similar to a backup email address at your main email address.

Would it be possible for the mastodon software to detect if users are connecting via threads and replace all images in posts with a different image - one that says e.g. telling people that Zuckerberg doesn’t care about raising tennage suicide rates through Instagram or something similar.