Farmers right now are fighting a legal battle for the ability to repair their own tractors.
It's not good for farm equipment to be locked down and sealed off just like it's not good for operating systems to be locked down and sealed off.
Nah, the cost of labor + materials + distribution is the minimum price of an item. The actual price in practice will be that price + whatever the manufacturer can get away with charging.
What determines the premium they can get away with is whether or not alternative goods exist and whether or not the consumers are informed of them, motivated to seek them out, and capable of making the switch.
Did they add the sand worms to this game yet?
Copyrights (rights to media content) do not lapse because of failure to enforce them.
Trademarks (the right to call your product a specific name) can lapse if members of the general public start associating it with a type of product rather than your specific brand. This happened with "zipper", "jet ski", and "popsicle". But you can't sue Grandma Smith because she mistakingly referred to an Xbox as "a Nintendo".
Pretty good track record with videogames too.
Some ARM CPUs that are advertised as microcontrollers have 32 bit address spaces and roughly the same power as an i486.
This model isn’t “learning” anything in any way that is even remotely like how humans learn. You are deliberately simplifying the complexity of the human brain to make that comparison.
I do think the complexity of artificial neural networks is overstated. A real neuron is a lot more complex than an artificial one, and real neurons are not simply feed forward like ANNs (which have to be because they are trained using back-propagation), but instead have their own spontaneous activity (which kinda implies that real neural networks don't learn using stochastic gradient descent with back-propagation). But to say that there's nothing at all comparable between the way humans learn and the way ANNs learn is wrong IMO.
If you read books such as V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee's Phantoms in the Brain or Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat you will see lots of descriptions of patients with anosognosia brought on by brain injury. These are people who, for example, are unable to see but also incapable of recognizing this inability. If you ask them to describe what they see in front of them they will make something up on the spot (in a process called confabulation) and not realize they've done it. They'll tell you what they've made up while believing that they're telling the truth. (Vision is just one example, anosognosia can manifest in many different cognitive domains).
It is V.S Ramachandran's belief that there are two processes that occur in the Brain, a confabulator (or "yes man" so to speak) and an anomaly detector (or "critic"). The yes-man's job is to offer up explanations for sensory input that fit within the existing mental model of the world, whereas the critic's job is to advocate for changing the world-model to fit the sensory input. In patients with anosognosia something has gone wrong in the connection between the critic and the yes man in a particular cognitive domain, and as a result the yes-man is the only one doing any work. Even in a healthy brain you can see the effects of the interplay between these two processes, such as with the placebo effect and in hallucinations brought on by sensory deprivation.
I think ANNs in general and LLMs in particular are similar to the yes-man process, but lack a critic to go along with it.
What implications does that have on copyright law? I don't know. Real neurons in a petri dish have already been trained to play games like DOOM and control the yoke of a simulated airplane. If they were trained instead to somehow draw pictures what would the legal implications of that be?
There's a belief that laws and political systems are derived from some sort of deep philosophical insight, but I think most of the time they're really just whatever works in practice. So, what I'm trying to say is that we can just agree that what OpenAI does is bad and should be illegal without having to come up with a moral imperative that forces us to ban it.
If you want something truly ancient and out-of-touch, you can easily just set it 15,000 years ago instead of 1,500 and no player will bat an eye or even notice
I am currently doing world building for a ttrpg campaign, and recently I did try to set an ancient empire 15,000 years in the past.
The basic idea was that empire A existed 15,000 years ago (them existing while the world was still covered in ice was important to the aesthetic), then they would be wiped out by empire B some time later, only for empire B to be destroyed by a great calamity. I wanted for there to be remnants of empire B still hanging around in the form of people who still worship a few of its god-kings and groups of people who still try to preserve its knowledge and maintain its infrastructure without fully understanding most of it.
The latter group was based partially on the Catholic Church preserving records after the fall of the Roman empire and partially on how the core of the Jewish religion was able to maintain a continuity of information and tradition over vast stretches of time even in the face of mass migration and social upheavals.
The problem was that I underestimated just what a vast gulf of time 15,000 years is. For one I was struggling to fill in all that time with events, and for two I realized that this knowledge preserving group would have had to existed for way longer than I was originally envisioning. Not only would they be older than the Jewish religion, they would be older than ancient Sumer. In fact you could take the entire history of the beginning of the Sumerian empire to the present day and fit it into that span of time twice over.
In the end I had to invent empire C, which refurbished some of empire B's infrastructure before collapsing themselves, as the actual origin for the knowledge keepers. And even with that I still had to move the timeline up by thousands of years.
It’s also not any less awe-inspiring to have people who lived in an important time period. We still have living veterans of WW2, and WW2 is no less important or intriguing
The problem with that is that it would really change the dynamic of how non-elf civilizations would develop. Unless the elves are extremely insular, and even then. How do you have a plotline involving the player characters needing to delve into an ancient tomb in order to discover whether or not the current ruling family are the legitimate heirs of the kingdom when you can just ask an elf? How does the world get into that situation in the first place when you can just ask an elf?
I have two friends who take turns running DnD 5e campaigns in a shared setting who have made elves entirely extinct for that reason.
The US has lower rates of food contamination from e.g. Salmonella or E coli, which I think is what that study is measuring. However, I think food in the EU generally has superior, better tasting, ingredients. There are two reasons I believe this to be the case. The first one probably has a smaller impact than the second.
The first reason that in the US an ingredient must be proven to be harmful before the FDA is allowed to ban it. In the EU an ingredient must be proven to be safe before it is allowed in commercial products.
The second reason is that while both the US and EU have farming subsidies, the way these subsidies are structured means that in the US they tend to incentivize the use of high fructose corn syrup and the production of highly processed foods while in the EU highly processed foods tend to be more expensive and "whole foods" tend to be cheaper.
As a result people in the EU tend to eat less processed food as a percentage of their caloric intake:
The problem with that style of blocking is that it goes both ways.
Someone can post ignorant shite and block anyone who would give them pushback, then when other people look at the comments they think "wow I guess everyone here just agrees with this".
I guess I've always viewed making a post as standing on a street corner and shouting, not meeting on the side of a street with a group of your friends.
I guess it depends on if you view "subreddits" as communities, that is groups of people that you choose to associate with if you post there, or if you view them as topics that you want your post tagged as. A lot of social media sites take the latter approach, but reddit used to take the former, as did old style forums. It might just be from me spending more time on those kinds of platforms, but I do think the "community" approach is better.
No, you're still right.
The US has had two major parties for the entirety of its existence. Occasionally one of those two parties collapses and is replaced by another one, but even during these upsets it is always one of the old major parties (the one that didn't collapse) that has their candidate elected.
Furthermore, if you take every third party + every independent and combine all their congressional seats the most they've ever held was 36, and that was in 1833-1835.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election#Popular_vote_results
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_States_Congresses
drosophila
joined 5 months ago
Solar panels aren't worth it for a normal EV, but supposedly the Aptera is so small, lightweight, and aerodynamic (with that teardrop shape) that they actually add a significant amount of range.