Quarrel

They took the slavery / serf distinction seriously in the Slavic world. While the distinctions might have mattered in the 1800s, by any modern-slavery standard the serfs were slaves, as you rightly say.

Whatever we might now think with hindsight of the communist revolution in Russia, if ever there was a country primed for the peasants to rise up against the ruling class, it was Russia.

Russia might have been a land of art, music, dance and literature, but you were pretty fucked if you weren't in the 20%.

FWIW I think Acemoglu writes very well & I loved his book "Why Nations Fail" for introducing lots of interesting ideas to me, while also helping me understand my own (non-failed) society better.

conductor.build is Mac only ..

and, as the articles points out, it is literally out of copyright.

For profit journals need to die.

The earliest Roman records of Slavs are of the Veneti, who lived in roughly western Ukraine, Belarus, south-east Poland.

Very much in Europe.

Then, like now, they were the people east of the German speakers.

TFA:

    npx pagecast publish "/absolute/path/report.html" --password "your-password" --json
    npx pagecast publish "/absolute/path/report.html" --no-password --json   # remove it

Ah, thanks, yeah, I just looked it up.

I had no idea.

Mistral have moved to actually trying to make money, and been relatively successful; at least if we lived in a normal world.

They've got a heap of contractors working to help industry adopt LLMs. It is just classic consulting work, and they'd look like a really great company if we weren't comparing them to literal $2T+ companies losing money hand-over-fist...

Everytime I see people talking about the length of their coastlines ...

Look at how long this edge of my fractal is, Ma!

err?

afaik Bellard never had any beef with Burger Becky. Both are legendary programmers, but somewhat different eras.

I have no idea what you're suggesting.

I basically was ready to come on and make a snarky comment like this. "I wrote one in the '90s!".

and then I saw the examples, and the feature set. I particularly like the blender-to-Luz export.

It seems great. Good luck to OP.

how are you sourcing your proxies?

the vast majority seems to be pretty unethical, and many of those that aren't overtly so, seem to not always be nice.

There are decent reasons people want to KYC residential proxy users ...

Of course it can. They can license the code for use under almost any terms they like, including restricting how you use the code.

The GPL imposes conditions on your use of the code / program, as does the MIT License. If you don't follow the conditions then you do not have a license to use the program / code & are open to claims of copyright infringement.

You might choose to ignore the licenses on the code you use, but it certainly isn't a great idea in a commercial context (and in your personal projects probably just a moral dilemma). Although, sadly, I'm not sure any of the many public GPL violations have really "cost" the companies that did them all that much.

Edit: I guess you're saying, yes, you can just go ahead and use it. Which I guess is the position large LLM training corpuses have taken ..

The Chinese models are censored (too?).

This is MUCH less of an issue if they're providing the weights though.

They can still be fine-tuned & ablated.

Which is quite the contrast to Mercedes new axial flux electric motor, which goes all in on rare earths- the design relies on the highest end high-grade permanent magnets.

Still, presumably Mercedes ambitions are for few motors than BMW or Renault.

I'm a Terence Tao fan, but yes, OpenAI should at the very least just be telling him to go crazy with the latest models on our dime.

I liked this article because it helped me understand the javacript engine flow better than I had.

The rust flow is so much more natural to me.

I moved to the UK in 2016.

The public sector, simple, no frills, accessible, no flashy graphics, websites were a massive eye-opener.

They just worked. They had a job. They did it. I wasn't going to buy more from them because of it, and they didn't care. It was great.

I've heard that recently they've dismantled the centralised team that wrote all the rules, enforced it, and started moving to decentralised hosting, but so far the whole still seems to hold to together really well. I think, I hope, they have embedded the expectation that the local council, the tax office, your visa status, etc, should just be utilitarian in nature, and work for everyone.

I worry how long it will last...

Damnit. No WFH option.

3. AI Companies will be profitable

but many of the current crop will never return money to investors.

I largely agree with you, but the huge investments currently being made will be very hard to get a return on. Token costs will come down, performance will go up, and you want to be in the business of selling the picks & shovels, not doing the mining.

Which is of course why nvidia, google & TSMC are in pretty good positions, but even their valuations have some bubble in them.

Thanks very much for this- I had not seen it.

It does not paint a pretty picture, and I did not know this context.

Perhap the tridge I knew is also of the past, but I hope not.

But DID anything change?

Of course I know that some people can just becoming psychotic out of nowhere. But why would I assume it?

wtf is this comment section?

The author of these commits were tridge & claude.

What does tridge have to do to convince the open source community that he might be a legit programmer & have a clue?

Samba? Whats that? Rsync? Never heard of it. Tivo? No clue (maybe more Australian context here than others, but still).

Even the comments on the github issue, are totally devoid of the context that this is a very senior open source contributer who has maintained this project since he came up with the diff algorithm during his Phd, started the project and now chooses to acknowledge that he's using claude.

Is there any evidence that the bug rate on rsync is any worse than it used to be? or just a screenshot from mastadon?

It is just so bizarre to me.

I have quite an early memory of being on the somewhat remote property in Australia that my mother grew up on (Central NSW, near Condobolin).

My Uncle, who then ran the property, walked over to a rock, whacks it with a hammer or similar, shows me a bit of a trilobite (which are totally different to our sort of bytes). He did this a bunch of times. I still have the rocks. No amazing full horizontal cross-sections, but it certainly got my very young mind excited.

There were fossils RIGHT THERE from before there were dinosaurs!

Oh, and that central Australia used to be an Ocean!

These clear demos to young kids, or adults, are great, and the many other examples here in the comments are a testament to that (Vienna? wtf!).

and in the meantime, just a sweep of the committed code (or the to-be-committed code for lots of us) and the code it interacts with, is increasingly catching lots of problems.

It's just such an old old business school idea. Metrics matter.

The classic example is the Second Fleet of convicts that were sent to Australia - they were paid per convict that boarded the ships. 40% of them died. Unsurprisingly perhaps, slave traders won that contract.

They started paying per live convict landed in Australia after that.

A COO at a ~$150B firm like Uber certainly should know what the outcome will be before the leaderboard goes up. Really makes you wonder if the board was incentivising him to increase AI usage; job done, bonus unlocked.

Stop payment resulted in the US pulling from the pre payment for the F35s...

Which Switzerland then reluctantly agreed was allowed under the terms.

As you say, totally being taken to the cleaners, and it is unclear how they escape in the short term.

The more this happens though, the more deals like Italy's make senese, irrespective of the performance comparison of the two planes.

If the US is going to be an unreliable partner, that will filter through in many many ways, and the US can hardly blame anyone but themselves (well, I'm sure some fingers will get pointed internally).

They really don't.

If your goal is to say, write science fiction, their reversion to classic LLM-isms, is really distracting and is what makes people say from a glance that it was written by an LLM. You basically can't use them at the moment in any real "natural" long-form writing. Everyone will call "slop" pretty quickly on the current frontier models.

Rosmin's DFT paper is worth a read.

If nothing else, rosmine's DFT [1], which is what they were working on with this setup, seems like a worthwhile investigation.

While I'm skeptical that there is much of a moat, at least for the large players, it should at least hopefully set rosmine up with for the next job :)

It does seem to fix the current biggest issues with using LLMs for writing at various publishers. If you're The Economist, you have a very specific house style and you have a decent corpus of articles written in that style. At least on my reading of it, rosmine can use DFT to get a model to closely match its outputs, in terms of the language quirks that are generated, to that of the corpus it is fine tuned on. ie it will very much match the house style, particularly as it is used in writing, vs giving a system prompt to an LLM that has some Economist articles in its vast training set, and telling it to write in that style- it will do an ok job, but still exhibit LLM language quirks despite itself. Even if you feed it the specific "style guide" that they give their authors, I dare say the reality of their writing is the best place to learn, and it sounds like DFT can ground the writing of a model in a specific corpus like that.

[1] https://rosmine.ai/2026/05/18/fixing-llm-writing-with-distri...

These are reasons why it might not be the largest provider of funds per capita, not why it would be by orders of magnitude the biggest recipient.

I have been to Luxembourg and to Hungary, Bulgaria & Greece - the otherwise obvious contenders for "poorest" in the EU and Luxembourg should not be in the picture.