The squabbling process moves the law toward meeting the needs of more people. If a dictator just gets to decide what the law is, they’ll likely be self-serving to the dictator, or even outright harmful to entire categories of people.

For the rest, well, there isn’t even actually a question, I suspect you’d open a door and pick a box and hope that you’ve got a gold ball to pick, and it’s not clear that he’s following Monty Hall rules and always opening a bad door, but I think knowing which ball got thrown would make the rest of the odds fall into place.

It’s very good for navigating and editing text quickly, and fantastic for situations like “I need to do the same thing 100 times” with things like macros. Coders are frequently opening a big, complex file, jumping around it a lot, changing big and small parts of it, and doing repetitive tasks. For something more like writing out thoughts for an email, editing them slightly, then being done with that text forever, there aren’t as many advantages, you’re spending most of your time in “insert” mode which is effectively “normal text editor that people are used to” mode. That said, it’s one of those things where when you do get used to it and start to enjoy it instead of being frustrated by how different it is, you start wanting it wherever you have to type anything.

They also took away the ability to specify your answer separately from the answer you were looking for from others, so now it’s just “did you say the same thing.” Which doesn’t make any sense for some questions, like “do you prefer a partner that is a) taller than you, b) shorter than you, c) doesn’t matter”, if you both picked A or B, you aren’t a match for this question!

I think you’re thinking of SerenityOS (although it isn’t actually a Linux):

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/not-a-linux-distro-review-serenityos-is-a-unix-y-love-letter-to-the-90s/

Fellow former popes, you mean, by reading this message you hereby excommunicate yourself.

The only objection to that is that first episodes are usually pilots where they haven’t sorted out everything and have to spend the whole episode setting up the premise of the show, not actually doing the show. Episode 2 is a lot more likely to be representative of everything that comes after it. But other than that, yeah, of course, just walk away, hit da bricks, real winners quit.

I’m bitterly clinging to my iPhone 13 mini, because I suspect it’s the last phone I’ll ever actively enjoy. I went along with bigger phones when that became the trend and decided I didn’t like them, and the mini line was such a relief to go back to. Once it’s no longer tenable, I’ll probably just buy a series of “the least bad used phone I can find” because I know I’ll be mildly frustrated every time I use it.

It’s the last one, the “wait a day” option and the “pay $20” options aren’t equivalent. If it’s still a day away from viability, it isn’t viable yet, but if it’s $20 away, it is. You may be of the opinion that waiting a day isn’t a big deal, or is only $20 worth of hardship, but that’s not your choice to make for others.

You’d think ending a doomed pregnancy would be a simple matter even for pro-lifers, yes. They often don’t consider the issue, or assume that it’ll always be clear-cut and obvious in every circumstance, or worry that any exception will be used as a loophole.

I can’t believe this word doesn’t seem to have made it into any part of this thread, but I think you’re looking for viability: the point where a fetus can live outside of the womb. This isn’t a hard line, of course, and technology can and has changed where that line can be drawn. Before that point, the fetus is entirely dependent on one specific person’s body, and after that point, there are other options for caring for it. That is typically where pro-choice folks will draw the line for abortion as well; before that point, an abortion ban is forced pregnancy and unacceptable, after that point there can be some negotiation and debate (though that late into a pregnancy, if an abortion is being discussed it’s almost certainly a health crisis, not a change of heart, so imposing restrictions just means more complications for an already difficult and dangerous situation).

“Life without risk of poverty”?! That desperation and fear is the only way I can staff my sweatshops!

Back in the olden days, if you wrote a program, you were punching machine codes into a punch card and they were being fed into the computer and sent directly to the CPU. The machine was effectively yours while your program ran, then you (or more likely, someone who worked for your company or university) noted your final results, things would be reset, and the next stack of cards would go in.

Once computers got fast enough, though, it was possible to have a program replace the computer operator, an “operating system”, and it could even interleave execution of programs to basically run more than one at the same time. However, now the programs had to share resources, they couldn’t just have the whole computer to themselves. The OS helped manage that, a program now had to ask for memory and the OS would track what was free and what was in use, as well as interleaving programs to take turns running on the CPU. But if a program messed up and wrote to memory that didn’t belong to it, it could screw up someone else’s execution and bring the whole thing crashing down. And in some systems, programs were given a turn to run and then were supposed to return control to the OS after a bit, but it was basically an honor system, and the problem with that is likely clear.

Hardware and OS software added features to enforce more order. OSes got more power, and help from the hardware to wield it. Now instead of asking politely to give back control, the hardware would enforce limits, forcing control back to the OS periodically. And when it came to memory, the OS no longer handed out addresses matching the RAM for the program to use directly, instead it could hand out virtual addresses, with the OS tracking every relationship between the virtual address and the real location of the data, and the hardware providing Memory Management Units that can do things like store tables and do the translation from virtual to physical on its own, and return control to the OS if it doesn’t know.

This allows things like swapping, where a part of memory that isn’t being used can be taken out of RAM and written to disk instead. If the program tries to read an address that was swapped out, the hardware catches that it’s a virtual address that it doesn’t have a mapping for, wrenches control from the program, and instead runs the code that the OS registered for handling memory. The OS can see that this address has been swapped out, swap it back in to real RAM, tell the hardware where it now is, and then control returns to the program. The program’s none the wiser that its data wasn’t there a moment ago, and it all works. If a program messes up and tries to write to an address it doesn’t have, it doesn’t go through because there’s no mapping to a physical address, and the OS can instead tell the program “you have done very bad and unless you were prepared for this, you should probably end yourself” without any harm to others.

Memory is handed out to programs in chunks called “pages”, and the hardware has support for certain page size(s). How big they should be is a matter of tradeoffs; since pages are indivisible, pages that are too big will result in a lot of wasted space (if a program needs 1025 bytes on a 1024-byte page size system, it’ll need 2 pages even though that second page is going to be almost entirely empty), but lots of small pages mean the translation tables have to be bigger to track where everything is, resulting in more overhead.

This is starting to reach the edges of my knowledge, but I believe what this is describing is that RISC-V chips and ARM chips have the ability for the OS to say to the hardware “let’s use bigger pages than normal, up to 64k”, and the Linux kernel is getting enhancements to actually use this functionality, which can come with performance improvements. The MMU can store fewer entries and rely on the OS less, doing more work directly, for example.

A VPN is just a way to say “wrap up my normal internet packets and ship them somewhere specific before they continue the normal way.” The normal way is you want to get a message to some other server, and as a part of setting up the network you’re on, your machine should already have a list of other devices it’s physically connected to (“physically” could be “via radio waves” so not just wired) and they should have already advertised “hey, I’ve got access to these places too” for your information. Your router is likely the only one in your home network advertising anything that is on the larger internet, so all your outgoing messages will have to go that way to get to their destination. For example, I’ve got a phone, a wifi access point, a router, and my ISP’s box; my phone knows the WiFi access point is two hops away from internet because the access point said so, that’s the best one it can see, so it sends it that way and hopes it makes it. Each machine in between does the same thing until hopefully it gets where it is supposed to.

With a VPN, the same messages are wrapped in a second message that is addressed to the other end of the VPN. When it gets to the VPN provider, it’s unwrapped, then the inside message is sent off to wherever it’s supposed to go. If a message comes back to the VPN provider addressed to you (ish, this is simplifying a bit), it’s wrapped up the same way and sent back to you.

Big companies often put resources “behind” the VPN, so you can’t send messages from the outside addresses to the office printer, they’ll get blocked, but you can request a connection to the VPN, and messages that come in through that path do get allowed. The VPN can be one central place where you make sure everything coming in is allowed, then on the other side the security can be a little less tight.

VPNs also encrypt the internal message as a part of wrapping them up, which means that if you’re torrenting via a VPN, all anyone else can see is a message addressed to your VPN provider and then an encrypted message inside. And anyone you were exchanging messages with only ever saw traffic to and from the VPN provider, they never saw where it was going after your VPN provider got it. Only you and the VPN provider know what was happening on both ends, and hopefully they don’t look too closely or keep records.

Hopefully now it’s clear that Mullvad and similar won’t help you access your own things from outside, they’re only good for routing your stuff through them and then out into the rest of the internet. However, this isn’t secret magic tech: you can run your own VPN that goes in the other direction, allowing you into your own home network and then able to connect to things as if you were physically there. Tailscale is probably the easiest thing for things like that nowadays, it’ll set up a whole system where your devices can find each other and set up a mesh of secure, direct connections no matter where they are physically located. By default, just the direct device-to-device connections are re-routed, but you can also make a device an “exit node” that can route all your traffic like a traditional VPN.

Of course, that will be the exact opposite of what you want for privacy while torrenting, as it’s all devices that you clearly own and not hiding their identities whatsoever. But it’s very cool for home networking and self-hosting stuff.

Bluesky’s more like an aspirationally decentralized platform, you can keep your own data on your own server and use your own domain name as a user name, but most of the rest of it is “centralized, but we’re designing it in such a way that we can open it up later.” Even then, though, it’s heavily influenced by the original idea of “let’s make something decentralized that Twitter can switch to once it’s worked out” which means that even when they do open things up, it’s likely that a lot of Bluesky will only be practical at “big tech company scale” to run yourself, whereas Mastodon or Lemmy you can just spin up on a server and it’ll be fine until you get a lot of users.

I as a human being have grown up and learned from experience and the experiences of previous humans that were documented or directly communicated to me. I can see no inherent difference with an artificial intelligence learning on the same data.

It’s a massive difference in scale. For one, before you even leave the womb you have millions of years of evolution shaping the initial structure of your brain. Then your “training” begins, but it’s infinitely richer than anything we’re giving to these LLMs. Sights, sounds, smells, feelings, so many that part of what your brain is learning is what it must ignore. You’re also benefitting from the interactivity of your environment, you can experiment with things and get feedback for what happens. As you get older and develop more skills, you can start integrating them together to do even more complex things, and the people around you will use their own incredible intelligence to specifically tailor your training to what you need as you learn and grow.

Meanwhile, an LLM is getting fed words, and learning how to predict the next word. It’s a pale shadow of the complex lives humans live. Words are one of the more powerful things we have for thinking and reasoning, so if you’re going to go all in on one skill, it’s a rich environment for learning and in theory the contents of all of humanity’s writing probably contains all the information necessary to recreate human intelligence, but our current technology doesn’t even come close to wringing every ounce of knowledge from the training sets.

The UN is supposed to be a toothless, executively dysfunctional institution, that’s a feature, not a bug. Its members are nations, whose entire purpose is to govern their regions of the planet. If the UN itself had the power to make nations do things, it wouldn’t be the United Nations, it’d be the One World Government, and its most powerful members absolutely do not want it to be that, so it isn’t.

It’s supposed to be an idealized, nonviolent representation of geopolitics that is always available to nations as a venue for civilized diplomacy. That’s why nuclear powers were given veto power: they effectively have veto power over the question of “should the human race continue existing” and the veto is basically a reflection of that. We want issues to get hashed out with words in the UN if possible, rather than in real life with weapons, and that means it must concede to the power dynamics that exist in real life. The good nations and the bad nations alike have to feel like they get as much control as they deserve, otherwise they take their balls and go home.

It’s frustrating to see the US or Russia or China vetoing perfectly good resolutions and everyone else just kind of going “eh, what can you do, they have vetoes,” but think through the alternative: everyone has enough and decides “no more veto powers.” The UN starts passing all the good resolutions. But the UN only has the power that member nations give it, so enforcement would have to mean some nations trying to impose their will on the ones that would’ve vetoed. Now we’ve traded bad vetoes in the UN for real-world conflict instead.

What that “get rid of the vetoes so the UN can get things done” impulse is actually driving at is “we should have a one world government that does good things,” which, yeah, that’d be great, but it’s obviously not happening any time soon. Both articles mention issues and reforms that are worthy of consideration, but the fundamental structure of the UN is always going to reflect the flaws of the world because it’s supposed to do that.

It’s all a stupid game. Israel killed some people, so Iran “had to” respond to save face, and then Israel had to do the same. Once everyone is satisfied that everyone knows both countries have very big and girthy missiles, they can finally back down from a war no one wants (hopefully).

Archive Team looked at this about 10 years ago and found it basically impossible. It was around 14 petabytes of information to fetch, organize, and distribute at the time.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK

Do you think electing Trump will be read as “wow, the US is taking a principled stance on Palestinian rights” by the world?

“Lossless” has a specific meaning, that you haven’t lost any data, perceptible or not. The original can be recreated down to the exact 1s and 0s. “Lossy” compression generally means “data is lost but it’s worth it and still does the job” which is what it sounds like you’re looking for.

With images, sometimes if technology has advanced, you can find ways to apply even more compression without any more data loss, but that’s less common in video. People can choose to keep raw photos with all the information that the sensor got when the photo was taken, but a “raw” uncompressed video would be preposterously huge, so video codecs have to throw out a lot more data than photo formats do. It’s fine because videos keep moving, you don’t stare at a single frame for more than a fraction of a second anyway. But that doesn’t leave much room for improvement without throwing out even more, and going from one lossy algorithm to another has the downside of the new algorithm not knowing what’s “good” visual data from the original and what’s just compression noise from the first lossy algorithm, so it will attempt to preserve junk while also adding its own. You can always give it a try and see what happens, of course, but there are limits before it starts looking glitchy and bad.