Anything that makes companies lose the slightest bit of control they want to make illegal. If they can’t endlessly milk you for money it’s a problem.

If Minecraft came out today it would be a subscription service or at the very least would have season packs and cosmetics.

That’s true, but spaghetti code was always faster to write than good code before as well. I will agree that the speed gap probably has grown though. That’s why tools like AI need discipline.

If managers and engineers don’t understand that their code will turn into garbage and the business will get reputational harm and lose customers / get sued / have more tech debt to fix and they’ll eventually learn their lesson. In the meantime it’s going to be a painful process where upper management see extra speed, expand their scope or downsize their staff, then learn that they have crumbling foundations and need to adjust. This has publically happened a few times already. Things will stabilize in time.

Maybe you’ve misunderstood something.

No matter what framework or language you are using, AI can make the development process faster. It can help you debug a problem, write tests and refactor code. In some situations, it will be faster than writing code yourself, in others not.

In some parts of Europe, we have many ways of mitigating heat that don’t cost as much and work well enough to a point.

Shutters will reflect heat before it gets into the home, which can keep the temperature as low as 10 degrees cooler than outside, cieling standing and desk fans can help cool you down in 20-30 degree weather. Dehumidifiers can help in humid heat.

Beyond a certain point, you do have to use air conditioning to lower the temperature, but that’s when you get to 35deg and above, and that typically been pretty rare until now, and most of the above still help.

I think if I did have the money I would probably install a heat pump + air conditioner combo and I believe there should be grants available for those.

If you’re a renter it sucks though because you have very few options. “Portable” air conditioning is ok but not very effective and very expensive to run.

They like to ignore that there is no evidence that it works, and in fact significant evidence that it does not.

Insane stuff.

Hopefully, those are the sorts of companies that should fail or get sued, so they learn their lesson. Not holding my breath though.

Companies have been doing insane shit for the sake of saving a buck or getting to market fast for decades, it’s nothing new. AI may or may not just make it worse.

In my experience, AI is an amplifier.

Good engineers will produce more good code, because they ask the right questions, know what good looks like and check the output.

Bad engineers will produce reams more bad code. The mistakes they make will be amplified. They will give wrong and incomplete instructions, won’t see what the problems are with the result and will ship it anyway.

This amplification also means people will spend a larger proportion of time reviewing than coding, which I think is less interesting.

All of this is stuff that can, to some extent, be addressed with policy. You help and instruct juniors, encourage people to better understand and own their code, or at worst reprimand them if they don’t.

You can adjust expectations of product managers and explain to them that more is not better, as it always has been. Faster development can often come with bugs and tech debt and this is more of the same.

All I’ve said above is puts aside the ethical arguments of using or not using AI of course. That’s a separate can of worms entirely.

Funny… but please don’t do this.

It’s pretty obvious they are asking if the UK is next to block VPNs.

That said, I will agree that there is a second layer meaning. “These are the sorts of governments you will be aligning with following this policy”.

The UK is/was a colonial power. Usually those oppress people outside the country, but keep the people within relatively happy. Rights for the internal group but not external ones. A form of profiteering and oppression.

By comparison, most of the countries listed here crack down regularly on the rights of people within their country, and this is the direction the UK goes in when they ban protests and privacy.

Oppression is oppression, and oppression is bad.

It’s pretty complex for someone who knows no Arabic but I learnt a few things about Arabic script. Very cool!

Which episode is this? I’ve only gotten to Season 3 so I’ve not seen this scene yet (assuming it’s real)

I mean, there’s nothing stopping you, but it’s a bad idea. You can also call your website aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com. Good luck trying to type that out as an end user.

Still, I like that going to the website mentioned by the article, http://a-------------------------------------------------------------a.com/ , gives you a page trying to sell it to you in the most ironic way.

I’m guessing it’s not intentionally silly.

I think Labour were left wing before, but they were compromised by right-wingers and now they are about as right wing as our right wing mainstream party, the conservatives.

Pro-Israel, arresting activists, cutting welfare and disability benefits. I like to call them Forced Labour.

Google actually already has a system to automatically detect and filter incoming nude pictures. It allows apps to blur then and you can then opt to view them. It’s a separate application and uses locally running machine learning.

I can’t remember the name of it and if it’s just on Pixels, nor what applications it works with. Might just be for their own messaging apps or it might be more deeply integrated. If anyone is curious I’ll try to look it up after work.

The point is they already have something similar to this they could maybe leverage.

To avoid you all a trip to reddit:

You’re right to raise this, and we want to address it directly and provide you important context on how this happened.

Vincent Lapierre’s channel should never have been part of our affiliate and sponsorship program, because we intentionally avoid association with channels whose content could distract from our message and divide our community.

Proton operates globally, and while our services are available to everyone regardless of political views and our mission is consistent everywhere, our knowledge of every local media landscape is not. In this case, our team didn’t have enough context about the French space to make a well-informed decision, and that’s on us.

We also want to be straight about what a placement like this is and isn’t. An affiliate or sponsorship arrangement is a transactional placement for awareness, not an endorsement of a creator’s views. In the case of Vincent Lapierre, this was a single video sponsorship, not a partnership.

But that distinction doesn’t excuse what happened here. The responsibility to vet who we put our name next to is ours, and we didn’t meet it this time. We’re now reviewing our vetting process and our guidelines for our marketing agencies to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

If you see something like this again, tell us. We rely on your feedback and vigilance.

24 MHz Arm Cortex M0+ processor. The chip also carried 24KB of flash storage and 3KB of static RAM.

… a 10y old phone can barely load Google, and this is about 100x slower.

Wild that you can serve anything with that hardware. Granted, static websites are basically just sending files over the wire.

I’ve just discovered another use for grain synthesis:

Adding grain using to DVD movies with badly compressed grain.

I just bought Breakfast at Tiffany’s on DVD and despite it being a 60s movie that should have had clean grain, it has very little and what is there looks bad because of mediocre DVD compression. You end up with some minor but distracting compression artifacts and static grain. By adding a little grain synthesis, you end up with an appearance that strangely seems more authentic and hides compression artifacts.

Here are the results. I’ve added clips wit 0-36 strength grain synthesis strength, and I personally think 24 looks pretty good.

That’s reasonable. I know a lot of people don’t like it. In my case it’s as much about loosing quality when trying to denoise as it is a case of preserving the visual style.