Self-Perfection

JPEG photos stored as progressive usually take ~5% less space so there is value.

And it is possible to losslessly transcode JPEG to progressive.

Lossless transcoding to JPEG XL gives even more space savings though.

What if government websites were distributed & archived as a default, from the beginning? Think IPFS as a first target for publication, "normal web" only as a mirror.

Is it feasible?

Should we push for this default?

First obvious objection is that lots of government services need backend and dynamic content, but let's say this requirement only goes for static content.

$ curl -I https://drop-e7e6d363-601.important-seat.workers.dev/ curl: (7) Failed to connect to drop-e7e6d363-601.important-seat.workers.dev port 443 after 47 ms: Couldn't connect to server

Tried from two hosts, different countries.

That gives some probabilistic info to scraper. Like person might have genes that are: - susceptible to drugs abuse - or game addiction Bam - you get target ads

- Indicate that any common substance is especially dangerous/harmful for him (think of allergies). So attacker might plan assassination or severe inconvenience by exposure to the substance and then claim he did not know

I am mulling the idea that we need a day of fast software software to spread the [culture?] of loving fast low-latency software.

Like a programmers day or sysadmin day.

That is a special celebration of fast software. To celebrate one should find faster alternative to some of his usual tools, try to switch and spread the word. Or maybe avoid opening Jira for a day at $job.

From the article:

The Nothing Phone button gives you a tap confirmation via both haptics and sound, and then ignores the tap if a previous rotation is still animating.

This is the issue. Number of performed actions has to be equal to number of times the app identified that button press was registered. Debouncing is a good practice, but if it is used then debounced taps must not produce feedback.

I'm sure that everyone out there is trying to make their weights, when ingested during training, survive over competing weights; "Buy AAA products" vs "Buy BBB products".

Just like for humans we have propaganda.

You can get away from supply/demand laws. By pretending that something is not giverned by them and putting fixed price lower than real price (i.e. that price at which suppl equals demand) one leaves space for scalpers to exist and collect money that people are willing to spend over set price.

Given that people are going to spend money anyway it seems more honest and reasonable to direct this money to the party that makes the thing by letting it to run auction.

In lossless mode WebP is superior to AVIF.

Why "was"? I still read books in fb2.

Looks like you missed that MapComplete is an alternative interface to view OSM data and contribute to it.

Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization https://www.lesswrong.com/s/MH2b8NfWv22dBtrs8/p/Jq73Gozjsuhd...

I remember this LW essay most often

My current understand that "subjective experience" is a post effect of memory forming in the process. "I experience X" ≈ "I remember that I just recently received [external stimulus / interpreted my current state as] X".

And I am as well baffled why people make such a big deal out of "subjective experience" and "consciousness".

I was joking that maybe I miss this properties, but now starting to really wonder if it might be the case. What if these phenomenons are present in humans to various extent? Check aphantasia. Only in XIX we discovered, that ability to visualize mental images is not universal, available to different people to various degree and some people completely miss it. My ability to visualize is weak. What if "consciousness" and "subjective experience" are similar?

And I am slightly worried when I am writing this that it might turn to be truth and in ~20 years I will be treated as "inferior human" without complete set of human rights.

Well yes, LLM need rich and favorable substrate to grow and learn (or we might say bootstrap)

As well as DNA needs specific substrate (cell with ribosomes and other machinery). As well as humans (one need oxygen atmosphere, food, parents).

But in the world we live in existence of favorable substrate for humans or LLMs is a given thing. It is _already_ bootstrapped. Can we infer something about LLM limits or possibility of it achieving AGI from its bootstrapping requirements?

People are not. Humans have an inner world and subjective experience. Humans learn through their experiences, not just backprop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

But this is complicated and takes us sideways. Let's say somehow we can determine if LLM has inner world or/and subjective experience. Will this new gathered piece of information affect your estimate of upper bounds of LLM capabilities? It does not affect my estimate.

I am getting tired of hearing "next token predictor" from carbon-based facial expression predictors. You are saying this like an argument which allows somehow estimate upper bound of possible influence of these entities. And I do not see how this help to make predictions. It sounds to me like saying "but air is just molecules bobbing around". OK, that's true, but does it help calculate wing aerodynamic profile?

Yup, it makes sequence of symbols. We already have seen that producing specific sequences of symbols is mindbogglingly powerful: merely DNA producers somehow has flown to the Moon!

And yes I am quite aware of Chinese room analogy. Perfectly fine applies to humans as well: single neurons in my head do not understand language, yet I as a whole I would say do understand. Just like applying Chinese room to humans does not help to estimate what humans can do I do not see how it helps to estimate what LLM can do.

Hopefully this database is integrated with OpenStreetMap.

OSM has extensive tagging scheme for phone booths: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dtelephone

I suppose we do not even know exact reasons of decline of wildlife population. Quite definitely it is due massive intervention of human activity, but which aspects exactly? Light pollution might play big role in insect population decline.

kudos to guys who already started to work in that direction! They track blockings:

https://hayahora.futbol

This is a push for privacy and it is fundamentally pushes in the opposite direction from let's say "forming accurate knowledge about the world".

How can we combat being mislead by false AI generated images? I'd say keeping track of provenance is what we should adopt, at least as an option. I hope we will find solutions to propagate images over the net reliably keeping how, when and where they were taken.

This is far from the first time that I see on HN indignation on LaLiga blockings. Sadly all this rage does not seem to lead to any change.

I'd like to suggest some steps that might/should be followed, which I will not pursue personally but in my defense - I do not live in Spain and not affected.

1) (first! low-effort) Somebody should create any space on the internet, where such anecdotes might shared and probably people with common goals of fixing internet access in Spain will meet. E.g. telegram group, discord channel, subreddit...

2) probably create wiki with related research: legal framework and possible actions etc

3) Raise public awareness. Create a resource/website with schedule of past and future "semi-blackouts", simple explanation of possible effects a layman may notice etc

4) Explore legal actions that might be taken. How this issue might be forced to be discussed by politicians? For instance I know that Portugal has official mechanism to put forward petitions, that will be discussed in parliament if get enough votes [1]

Space of possible demands in such petitions is vast. For instance:

- Make LaLiga compensate partly price of internet access

- Force LaLiga to include education notice in the beginning and the of translation with title like "Start of reduced internet connectivity" / "End of reduced internet connectivity"

[1] https://participacao.parlamento.pt/initiatives/

[Meta comment]

Humankind is not doing well with implementing new policies. We should really strive for each new policy (like in this case - blocking access to some parts of internet during soccer games):

- Consider running policy in small scale scenario (e.g. testing blocking in small parts of Spain before whole country rollout)

- Implement channels to gather info from those who are faced with results of policy implementation (in this case: the op got webpage with description why the page is blocked - a bit of sanity! It would be better if it was served with HTTP code 451)

- Policy instructions

- When deciding on policy put a date at which policy should be reconsidered and revised using data collected during the time when it was in effect

- ... and some more I have not thought about.

Let's strive to cultivate this principles in all life areas where we can affect how new policies are implemented.

(edit: linebreaks)

I think that in most cases jq is launched to extract value from relatively small JSON document, for which raw parsing speed is not affect much. jq is just really slow to start. Version 1.6 was especially abysmally slow to start, 10x times slower than 1.5:

https://github.com/jqlang/jq/issues/1826

So any replacement candidate should also benchmark like hyperfine "jq .a <<< '{"a": 10 }'" . This oneliner does not work but should illustrate the idea.

Also please just use jshon if you need to just extract specific value from some small JSON. jshon uses way less resources by any conceivable metric.

HWisnu wrote cgrep that he asserts is even faster, especially on loaded system. He posted interesting benchmarks

https://hwisnu.bearblog.dev/building-cgrep-using-safe_ch-cus...

It seems this was possible because ripgrep is inefficient in CPU usage when runs multithreaded and uses about 2x times more CPU time in comparison to GNU grep.

https://hwisnu.bearblog.dev/levelized-cost-of-resources-in-b...

like "TRY /fast" when Opus is overkill for the task

In fact using /fast in this case would only increase spending. /fast mode uses the same opus but consumes $$$$ faster to produce tokens faster )

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode

I use simpler solution (measuring by number of taps on the screen): share place from google maps to https://f-droid.org/packages/page.ooooo.geoshare which can convert it to actual latitude/longitude which in turn can be shared to any app working with locations: OsmAnd, Organic Maps, Uber, ...

Feels really laggy on desktop. Tried both Firefox and Brave. Like 3-4 FPS

It has really got unreliable in my experience.

Often desktop client just cannot connect to mobile. At first I noticed that this happens when desktop client starts to output in logs these (reported [1]):

  kdeconnect.core: Too many remembered identities, ignoring "<id of KDE Connect on my android device>" received via UDP

  #!/bin/dash -x
  
  
  while sleep 1m; do
      nmcli connection show --active | grep wifi || continue
  
      kdeconnect-cli -l | grep reachable && continue
  
  
  #   notify-send 'No reachable devices via kdeconnect. Restarting'
      systemctl --no-pager --user status app-org.kde.kdeconnect.daemon@autostart.service
      systemctl --no-pager --user stop app-org.kde.kdeconnect.daemon@autostart.service
      killall kdeconnectd
      systemctl --no-pager --user start app-org.kde.kdeconnect.daemon@autostart.service
  
  done

Uhm is it possible to mitigate second point by publishing encrypted article in social network along with is sending it to the agency to assign it timestamp? Or maybe in any blockchain if one does not like social networks.

Then if journalist does not like how mangled was his piece on publishing he can disclose encryption password to show everyone what he actually wrote in the article?

Using text? How old school! This is not how current generation interacts with computers.

My colleagues frequently send me cli output as screenshots instead of text. They are too accustomed to macOS embedded OCR I presume.

Or how would they share event details on social media. Rarely there is text description, mostly date and time is imprinted on image in Instagram.