grumbel

Gemini3.5 Flash didn't have a problem OCR'ing and base64 decoding it, despite the OCR step having errors, it just fixed them in the base64 decoding step.

They all degrade and hold less charge over time and eventually fail completely, it will just take years or decades. But with today's forced obsolescence on the software side I tend to agree. The chance that a device becomes useless long before the battery causes issues are pretty high. The only device I ever had the battery fail first was the PSP (user replaceable), and that was after 20 years. Everything else had other hardware fail (buttons, sticks, flash memory) or run out of software updates ages ago.

That said, this will get more important going forward, phone and tablet hardware updates get ever smaller and incremental, and longer software update cycles are another thing the EU is starting to regulate. So devices reaching 10+ might not be that unusual in the future.

And as an aside, the one type of battery that very frequently fail isn't the built-in LiPo, it's the good old user replaceable Alkaline AA and AAA batteries, and they don't just run empty, they leak and destroy your hardware in the process, even long before the expiry date and with charge left. It's so common that I am surprised that that hasn't seen any regulation or consumer protection jump into action. Using NiMH instead helps, as they don't leak.

It's not about the console itself, but the accessories, anything that makes you buy more controllers means more money for them. And batteries aren't even the worst offender here.

Controllers have been using USB and an almost identical layout since the Xbox1 days 25 years ago, yet most game controller remain incompatible with each other, even within the same company. PS3 won't work on PS4 and PS4 won't work on PS5. Ironically, PS4 and PS5 controller will work on PS3, since that was the first and last console that supported plain old USB HID. Meanwhile Xbox360 had a lock-out chip to prevent third party controller and the Xbox360 controller don't work on XboxOne/Series either. XboxOne and XboxSeries at least are compatible. Meanwhile on PC pretty much everything works.

And then you have the whole stick drift problem, that has been solved since Dreamcast and PS3 SIXAXIS with Hall effect joysticks, but even decades later we still have controllers going in the bin due for easily avoidable reasons.

Rubber coating is another very common way to add an expiry date to devices that wouldn't have one otherwise.

If we wanted to get serious with the whole "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle", there are a lot more low hanging fruit than just the batteries.

Isn't non-web-based cryptography affected (as per this take) in the same way but with extra steps?

Yes, but it's a whole lot of extra steps spread across multiple independent parties, each of them adds large delays to the actions and increasing the chance that it is discovered long before it ends up on the users machine.

When you hack GPG it will take years before it trickles down into every Linux distribution, especially LTS releases. And ideally, you want an encryption protocol, not one app, thus you have some people running GPG, some running Sequoia PGP and some running OpenPGP.js. If somebody fiddles with the encryption, different clients won't be able to decode the messages anymore and it will be clear pretty quickly that something is wrong.

Meanwhile on the Web or smartphones, you remove or backdoor the encryption, everybody gets auto updated to the latest version and nobody will know that something went wrong.

Subreddit threads are sorted by time and ratings, old style forum threads are sorted by activity. You can't bump a thread on Reddit.

This leads to forums having threads that last years or decades, while on Reddit nothing lasts longer than a day or two. Points also didn't exist in old forums and even for those that have them now, they are more decorative than functional.

With a forum it's much easier to keep track of what you read, you can see the new threads easily and be done with them when you read them. With Reddit everything gets reshuffled all the time. Even sorting by "New" doesn't help, since that only takes the first post in a thread into account, and doesn't bump it when a new reply arrived.

All that said, I much prefer threaded discussion, a lot of forums become unreadable when they just put all posts into a linear feed.

The problem with that "look" is that it's a dead end. These things won't be having a real glasses form factor and high enough specs to be useful anytime soon. They'll remain comically oversized for years/decades to come. So why bother with glasses form factor? I'd rather have something like Hololens or VisionPro, that's big enough to fit in a larger battery, more sensors and more compute, and can be comfortable at the same time because it has room to include a top-strap. With a glasses form factor all the weight is resting on your nose and with anything over 60g that's going to get pretty uncomfortable.

And all that aside, the real killer-feature with AR/VR is the software and so far it doesn't fell like anybody has figure out what people are even supposed to do with these things.

That explanation still seems overly complicated. Iroh isn't a VPN. Iroh just lets apps connect to each other, just like plain old TCP, but without the shackles of NAT, DNS and dynamic IP addresses that made that impossible. It's restoring simple P2P connectivity to the Internet.

It is important, if I destroy your brain and grow a new one and start running the same program on the new brain your consciousness is still dead and its a new person living.

If I copy a text document from one computer to another, is that the same document or a different one? It's all just information. If you copy it, you have two, it's still the same until the documents start changing and go different directions.

Computer AI models don't run on a single machine

It doesn't matter on how many machines it runs on. It's information processing, as long as it gives the same results, it doesn't matter how you accomplish it.

Consciousness isn't some magic thing that sits on top, it's the result of that information processing. You take random sensory data, the brain transforms that into "cats, dogs, you, me", it uses uses those percepts to execute actions, gets more data back and checks how the actions changed the world state.

Keeping track of what changes in the world were causes by actions of the brain vs things that happened due to other causes is the conscious experience.

The image capture was done with a robotic camera rig from what I understand, they photographed 360° images of the room from all possible position. They restricted the camera movement to a plane, which is why the player height is fixed. I don't know what they did on the software side with all the image.

Many years ago there was a game called Casebook[1], a small little detective game where you investigated rooms for clues. But unlike similar FMV games where you jumped from point to point, it had photorealistic environments that could be smoothly walk around in, much like later lightfield or gaussian splatting experiments.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-VAaC5BgVE

The point is that the brain operates on information, not things. The thing you think is the external world, that's just electricity flowing through your neurons. When you see a dog, that isn't a thing in the world, but a signal in your brain. In principle we can take a knife and cut that connection at any point and replace the real signal with an electronic box that gives the same signal.

You don't need a body, you need electrical signals your brain interprets as body. And in principle you don't even need a brain, you could replace that with some matrix multiplication or transistors that do the same stuff.

The important part of consciousness is being able to figure out what of the sensory input is correlated to your own action and which was caused by the rest of the world.

If a hundred people see the same event, will they all respond the same?

If you have hundred different people, they will of course do something different. Just like hundred different AI model will do something different. The question you have to ask is if the same person under the same circumstances would do the same.

Luckily, we have an answer to that: They would. Transient Global Amnesia is a condition where people temporarily lose the ability to form memories and in turn they keep repeating the same conversation again and again[1]. Their brain keeps asking the same question again and again, as it doesn't remember the answers it already got.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3fA5uzWDU8

The "you" isn't your physical body, it's the pattern recognition in your brain that that classifies some parts of its sensory input as "you" (see Mirror Hand illusion). That it happens to be running on meat instead of silicon is an implementation detail and not important.

If we want to know if AI is conscious or not, we have to ask if the AI can recognize itself in the input it gets.

Some aspects like limited content length and lack of ability for the model weights to update will certainly limit what the AI can do. But that's ultimately a matter of degree, not kind, when it comes to consciousness.

How can you have a subjective experience without a body?

Easy, you don't have subjective experiences because you have body in the first place. You have them because some signals come in from your nerves, which your brain turns into a world model. You are effectively a "brain in a vat", the vat just happens to be placed on top of your body.

An AI system constructs the world model a little different, by all the text that gets feed into it, but that doesn't mean that there is anything fundamentally different in the world model it builds. Consciousness operates on world model, not on the world or even the body itself.

The AI's world model might be missing some information, because they weren't described in enough detail in text, but that shouldn't matter for consciousness. A blind or deaf person isn't less conscious than one that can see or hear just because some information is missing from their world model.

I am a little worried that this is still a problem after 20 years. Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? And flooded roads aren't exactly an unusual event to begin with.

Why is some software SuperMarioBros and other Microsoft Word? 'cause that's what the specific software is written to produce and the other is written to do produce else. Consciousness is not some magically thing on top of a information processing, it's what that specific bit of information processing produces. It's functional, it does stuff.

It should be kind of obvious due to the fact that we are conscious about our human self, not neurons, not brains, not microtubules or any other random implementation detail. We have zero clue what is going on in our brains, but we do have a high level description. Just as our brain can take some random electrical impulses from our eyes and decide that that's a "cat", it can take all the other input that goes around and conclude that that's a "self". It's perception, the brain trying to figure out what parts of the world it has direct control over.

the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.

The problem with that common definition is that it doesn't make much sense. Every philosopher that ever talked or wrote about the hard problem and qualia did so with plain old physics, by moving their mouth or using their hands to move a pen or keyboard. You can, in theory, trace how those physical interactions happen, all the way down to the neurons. Meaning the reason why they talked about qualia boils down to plain old physics.

There is no scenario where the easy problems are solved and the hard problem remain. For there to be a hard problem, the easy problems must be unsolvable, but then you don't need a hard problem, since the easy problems are already hard.

Why some kinds of information processing and not others?

Consciousness isn't something the information processing has, it is something the information processing does. It's a function, not some magic property that happens on top.

Consciousness is simply your brains ability to figure out what part of all the sensory input it gets can be attributed to the "self", just like other parts might be labeled as cats, dogs, table and chairs, some will be labeled as self.

And I am sure one day somebody will boil that down to some nice math, since fundamentally it's about networks. If the brain wants to move a hand from one spot to another, that's easy if it is its own hand, a couple of nerve impulses and it will happen. If that hand belongs to somebody else, moving it is a whole different ballgame. That fundamental different in connectedness should be expressible.

Pain isn't just saying the word, it's a signal that changes your behavior generation in a way that conflicts with your self model.

Alternative suggestion: Force them to open up the service and allow third party clients. Take Art. 20 GDPR "Right to data portability" and extend it to public content.

There's nothing preventing you from setting up a web server

Carrier-grade NAT stops you pretty good. And if you make past that hurdle, HTTPS might stop you. And without Google's help, nobody will find you anyway.

That's where this whole thing went wrong. The modern Internet is quite terrible at actually connecting computer and people. Everything is segregated into clients and servers, and to get anything done you need a middle man.

Most of them I would assume. Everything from 2006 forward started to use Xinput. DirectInput support only shows up in racing sims, flight simulators, fighting games and emulation. But all the big AAA games have been built around Xbox360 style control schemes for two decades.

But it's all a bit theoretical, since most modern gamepads have Xinput support, and the generic HID devices are mostly flightsticks or SNES-style gamepads that wouldn't have enough buttons and axis for modern games in the first place. Another issue is that most games don't offer input remapping for gamepads.

But with SteamInput and homebrew tools like x360ce there are many ways to make generic USB devices compatible Xinput, so it's not like you can't use them. It's just not something that works out of the box.

If that hadn't happened who's to say where we would have ended up.

We went through numerous years of that before Steam became a thing, almost a whole decade passed between the Internet getting popular and Steam really taking off. DRM filled DVDs and online installs with activation limits were the results.

but let's not pretend that it was simply impossible to play Windows games before Gaben graced us with his attention.

Let's also not pretend that fiddling for hours with Wine configs is somehow similar to pressing "Play" and having stuff Just Work™. That extra level of polish that Valve provided is critical for making it actually useful for the masses.

Do you have evidence that courts would see this differently with a digital download?

Can you show me a place were I can buy used digital games? Itch.io doesn't disallow reselling games as far as I can tell, but yet we don't have a used digital games market. Buying a random .zip file, with no proof of ownership, is just not something people are interesting in.

It's a bit more tricky, a Generic HID just gives you a DirectInput device, while reasonably modern games use Xinput. Microsoft never provided a way to map DirectInput devices to Xinput. For Xinput to work a Microsoft specific USB protocol is needed, not a Generic HID device. Many third party controllers have a switch or button combination to switch between XInput and DirectInput modes for this reason.

Microsoft has a new API with GameInput that addresses this situation and allows mapping Generic HID devices onto game controller via config file, but it doesn't work retroactively, it only works for games that use the new GameInput API.

Valve could of course provide a way to switch and emulate other protocols too, just like other third party vendors do, but there is no USB standard that makes things "just work" in Windows when it comes to gamepads, you always need extra drivers, USB modes or other hacks.

On consoles the situation is even worse, modern consoles deliberately lock out any unlicensed third party controller. Playstation3 was the first and last console that supported standard USB controller, while PS5 doesn't even support PS4 controller.

I'm not convinced that's guaranteed to be less of an issue going forward.

I am sure it's going to be an issue at some point in the future, it already is an issue when it comes to sharing games or keeping older versions around, but what's the alternative? The alternative isn't no DRM, it's whatever DRM Apple, Google, Microsoft, Epic, EA and friends come up with, and of all of those, I take Steam any day.

Even GOG kind of loses to Steam here, as while GOG gave us DRM-free downloads, Steam gave us Linux support and Windows-emulation and I'd rather have Steam DRM on Linux than being stuck on Windows with DRM-free GOG games. And unless I am missing something, GOG's DRM-free games didn't lead to a used digital games market either, they explicitly forbid selling or sharing in their user agreement[1]:

> 3.3 Your GOG account and GOG content [games] are personal to you and cannot be shared with, sold, gifted or transferred to anyone else.

Digital goods ownership is just not a thing that exists at the moment. There was an attempt based on blockchain with Robot Cache[1], but that just shutdown.

[1] https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212632089-GOG-User...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Cache

Prior to Steam there was StarForce and other copy protection messing up your OS and DVD drives, and plenty of stuff needed online activation as well. Of the last few physical games I bought, none work anymore, Bioshock couldn't be installed due to lack of patch servers last time I tried and Arkham Asylum failed due to GFWL being dead. Even when everything worked, you often had to manually go hunt for patches, sometimes multiple that needed to be installed in the right order, and that might not even be compatible with the localized version of the game you had.

Still sucks that used games died and the forced game upgrades that come with Steam have their issues too, but PC gaming was a horrible mess before Steam cleaned that up. Heck, I'd rather rebuy a game on Steam than find out what those vintage DVD copy protection does to a modern Windows. Most PCs don't even have a DVD drive anymore anyway.

Would the model even need that breath of knowledge? Humans just look things up in books or on Wikipedia, which you can store on a plain old HDD, not VRAM. All books ever written fit into about 60TB if you OCR them, and the useful information in them probably in a lot less, that's well within the range of consumer technology.

As long as the application is made aware of the permissions and can prevent functioning when they get denied, that doesn't really help much. It's the choice between getting mugged or never leaving the house.

The ability to deny permissions without the app noticing or filling it with fake data doesn't exist on either system.

One big thing I still miss with org-mode are explicit section endings. Just as with markdown you only have headings, the end of a section is implicit. This often leads to text getting swallowed up by the last chapter and makes any kind of restructuring fragile. HTML's <section> makes things much easier.

Having explicit header levels (similar to HTML's <h[0-6]>) is another annoyance, as that makes inclusion of one org document into another problematic and requires restructuring (somewhat workaroundable with "#+begin_src org").

Problem with that is that the default browser styling is extremely ugly and the ability for custom style sheets was removed from the browser GUI many years ago. ReaderMode and Addons can help, but as long as the default is essentially broken and unsupported that whole approach remains a dead end.

On top of that come issues like the lack of pagination support in browsers, which make long document impossible to read and practically require to add custom UI inside the website itself.

ePub works much better, with readers giving control over line spacing, font size, pagination and proper markup for TOC and other metadata, but despite ePub being based on xHTML, browsers have ignored it (only old Edge supported it for a little while).