Maken

These examples mention explicitely ambient light, which is the point of the article. SSAO makes no sense for direct ligth.

AO is an approximation of how indirect light behaves. If you have an actual global illumination solution you don't need these tricks.

It is not a good idea to build a bridge that last 500 years.

Why not? A well-build bridge from 500 years ago is perfectly functional today [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puente_de_Segovia,_Madrid

Maybe they intend for Gemini to be the only chatbot with built-in access to internet search.

Because the NSA has such a great record of getting punished from their transgressions, right?

For foreign countries, handling your data to either the Chinese surveillance apparatus or the USA one makes no difference. In fact, any company with such deep ties with a foreign intelligence agency as Palantir should be automatically considered a security thread in other nations.

Anyway, the deal with Huawei was about buying hardware, not handling over data.

You are mixing apples and oranges. The infamous Huawei deal was buying tons of HDD servers. Any deal with Palantir is handling all your data to the NSA.

You are probably thinking about ketamine.

Most homes and public spaces have AC installed, but it doesn't help as soon as you set your foot on the street.

The contract with Huawei was about buying storage servers [1], which would then be managed by the Interior Ministry. They were not outsourcing anything.

[1] Concretely these: https://support.huawei.com/enterprise/en/flash-storage/ocean...

If scrapping content is legal, model distillation should be legal too.

To be fair, the UI randomly changing in every update is a pain point for people of any age.

The bar is just too low.

Just in time for fusion energy?

Whatsapp used to be a paid app.

It's not like they had much of an option, when everybody was hoarding every GPU they could. For the second Colossus they could book future production, but the first one had to be built ASAP so xAI looked as a serious competitor in the AI space.

The problem is that only works at the advanced courses. However people need to learn the basics before they reach that level, specially when they are starting and are in many regards below the LLM's baseline.

The real genius was whoever decided to add fake typing sounds to virtual keyboards on touch screens.

Was open source any more secure before LLMs became so cheap? For those same 100$ you could have a North Korean hacking your code for a whole month.

The digital Yellow Pages were replaced by streaming teleshopping.

Now that's a bleak picture of the future.

Let's just be glad somebody talked him out of using nukes. For now.

That documentary is a must-watch for any Miyazaki fan. They recorded the entire creation of Ponyo, from Miyazaki's watercolors to the final released movie.

It also shows why the movie ends as abruptly as it does and why Ghibli was eventually disbanded. With Takahata gone everything was bottlenecked by Miyazaki's himself, and he was simultaneously crumbling under the pressure and refusing to let anyone else have creative input in the studio.

The only countries going to war with Iran are Israel and USA. The other countries are negotiating with Iran and reportedly paying the toll. Also, the strait has been open to Spanish tankers since two weeks ago.

Steam offers an distro-independent runtime for native Linux games' distribution, which is based on Flatpak [1]

[1] https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/b...

eIDAS is about making the electronic IDs emitted by the different EU governments intercompatible, so you can use a Slovenian certificate to authenticate into the German tax system, if you want to.

I specially like the graph-looking picture with no axis, no data and no context.

No matter how consumer friendly they were, nobody trusted them in the long term. Buying games on EA Origin meant giving them control over games' sales, and a EA monopoly in digital distribution was a nightmare scenario. Their bad PR at the time simply killed the platform, no matter how good or bad the product itself was at the time.

What is "financially viable"? Just hoarding copyrighted materials and not distributing them in order to create artificial scarcity could meet that criteria.

Copyright is an artificial monopoly set in place to guarantee that artists get a piece of the cake from distributors. The duration of this monopoly is completely arbitrary, and ideally it should be "long enough to make art creation a viable trade".

The main problem with EA Origin was EA itself. They have burnt every single bit of costumer trust EA as a company could have.