lbeltrame

But the idea that giving your ID changes anything is a fiction

I'd say it's an expansion of the "attack surface". Not to mention: what happens with those IDs after the fact?

I don't think a theorical, overblown and mostly fictitious increase in risks

It already happened in my country (an European country) during the pandemic (and not in the first days). So it's not fictitious.

I think there's something a bit funny in worrying about giving a copy of your IDs to companies who already know everything about you from your full social graph to your political leanings and interests.

I believe it's because the governments (which are far more powerful than any "corporation", because they have the de facto monopoly of violence: Microsoft can sue you, but the government can just jail you) can then pressure said companies if there's something that is not liked, with all consequences that come from there.

There's no need to bring conspiracy theories in, FTR. The power of the government must be always limited and bound by strong chains, and this goes in the opposite direction.

Disty of SD.Next has made a version in diffusers format.

https://huggingface.co/Disty0/Index-anisora-5B-diffusers

For the record, the dev branch of SD.Next (https://github.com/vladmandic/sdnext) already supports it.

I have no interest in EM. I joined an anime themed Mastodon instance and left two months later as all I could read was EM hatred. I wasn't interested in EM to begin with! FTR the old Twitter was as bad as the new X for those who strayed just a bit from whatever was the trend, in my experience.

Also the most recent version is compromised (8.3.42). 8.3.40 is safe.

Question for those with more knowledge on these devices: how can they detonate? The batteries?

I don't get the fad with circos plots. At least in genomics, they offer a high density of information but unfortunately at the price of hard if not impossible interpretation. Like the systems biology papers of old, showing beautiful dense graphs, but with little room for biological interpretation. In addition, circos is quite... peculiar as an application, in particular its quirky configuration file format, which is half ini like and half XML or HTML like. Last I looked at it, about a decade ago, there weren't any APIs to create plots programmatically.

Does it still bundle an entire, old version of libclang?

Because it wasn't just the lockdown: it was a pretty complex affair at the job too (including very tense moments; it would've been bad even in the office, mind you) and there was no way to shut that away from me.

FTR, I did WFH in other times (2 years in the 2009-2011 period) and it wasn't like that.

Some say that "commute helps clear the mind / switch context", but a simple walk does the same IMO

No, it doesn't for everyone. Personal experience matters: after a 70-day lockdown including a very stressful work period (dedadlines etc), there's no way I'm going to WFH ever again.

But that's just me, of course. For others, priorities may be different.

Actual ovarian cancer researcher here. To be perfectly honest, it is the first time I've heard of talc or asbestos being linked to ovarian cancer.

Mesothelioma is one thing. One of the drivers of malignant mesothelioma (which is caused by inhalation of asbestos) is a chronic state of inflammation caused by the inability to remove or degrade the asbestos fibers.

But in ovarian cancer the major mechanisms are not inflammatory in nature. Depending on the type (there are a few), usually it's a mutation in a key gene that then causes other, larger alterations in the chromosomes and ultimately a malignant outcome.

Now, mutations can be caused by inflammation (in particular due to the release of reactive oxygen species or ROS), but as fa as I'm aware, mechanisms of asbestos-like chronic inflammation being a cause (not a link, a cause, I mean with a molecular explanation) are not widely reported in literature and I haven't heard anything like that from my peers (much more knowledgeable than me on the topic).

Then there are the computational biologists, such as myself. Many have a CS background but some (raises hand) actually come from biology itself (I was a wet lab scientist for a number of years).

At this point I'm thinking I got the worst of both worlds... (I jest! But on bad days I do feel like that)

I never had anything against WFH and actually did it for three years straight between 2008 and 2011. I actually think that anyone has different preference wrt in the office versus WFH.

I commute every day and I take 1h and 15 min one way due to bad public transportation. I could, technically, do everything I do via WFH. But I'm not doing it, and I get pretty annoyed when people tell me "why don't you do it?"

Well, it's my personal experience and in no way is meant to act as a judgment towards others. Simply put, WFH reminds me of when I was locked inside my house for 70 days. I was and still am an introvert but I found the experience down right horrible. On top of that I had a very stressful work period with often daily tense situations. And there was no real way to "escape" (I did, mentally, but I was close to a breakdown).

Ever since I was able to RTO I never did a single day WFH and I'm making sure that in no way work can get inside my house. If I ever had to remote work in the future I'm thinking of renting some co-working space.

Well, long winding post to say that yes, some tightening of WFH rules may be not justified, but IMO it's one person's experience and attitude that makes WFH worthwhile or not.

Perhaps OT but I see often these comments on HN. How do these devices (I don't own one) lose functionality over time? Features removed through updates?

I got lectured by Bard when I asked about help to improve the description of an action scene, which involves people getting hurt (at least the losing side) even if marginally. I suppose you can still jailbreak ChatGPT? I didn't know it was still a thing.

One of the reasons I entered an apparently very focused Mastodon instance and left after two months. I was absolutely not interested in discussing politics, let alone culture wars that are absolutely incomprehensible to me.

It doesn't surprise me that BlueSky goes in the same direction, to be honest.

While I currently use SD.Next[1], I have tested ComfyUI locally with my AMD card. The UI can be daunting, but you learn quite a great deal about how a Stable Diffusion pipeline works. In addition some innovations and advances find their way into ComfyUI first.

[1] https://github.com/vladmandic/automatic

Agreed, but you haven't demonstrated that these checks and balances have been violated.

I mentioned specifically Italy, because that's where I live and where our freedoms where completely thrown out of the window by, as I said, an administrative act (not even the equivalent of an executive order, nor a law), from one day to another. An act that shouldn't have had that force, but well... rules were bent.

(A year later, people were also deprived of their ability to go to school or to work, which regardless of the reason, was equally bad)

What volumes does it speak?

That while the event wasn't predicted, it sparked ideas on how to "revolutionize" society in a "different" way (the actual passage was about taking the pandemic as an opportunity to bring forth "a new cultural hegemony of the left"), not caring about consequences.

And we see the same with other aspect of society (misinformation, climate policies...). Some EU commissioners (Timmermanns to name one, until he was in office) are hell-bent in that direction (although this time there's significant pushback).

those governments did what they felt they were elected to do

Outside my country, in many others (e.g. Spain), courts actually said that well, governments weren't allowed to do what they did.

It is my impression that checks and balances, constitutions etc need to work exactly in times of crisis. If they only work when everything is all right, they are useless. Especially when it comes to freedom.

The fact that a government minister even wrote in a book (hastily taken off the market) that he hoped the situation would be used for "a new cultural hegemony" speaks volumes.

Didn't dictatorships always use justifications for threats or emergencies to be instated?

An emergency doesn't justify taking away fundamental freedoms. Hence, anything the EU does in this space, justified or not, must be scrutinized.

“Unilaterally” outlawed by elected governments who can be peacefully deposed, that is to say, not unilaterally at all.

Well... It took one signature on an administrative act and almost everyone in Italy, not in China, was under house arrest for 70 days with armed soldiers on the streets. No oversight, no checks and balances, no constitution, nothing. This warrants being very careful of any government activity.

And at some point someone even suggested to postpone elections.

But more on topic, the only reason the Commission is going gung-ho is because of the elections next year. They are very afraid.

While I won't ever call myself an artist, there are people who do not just click and get an image. My workflow involves getting the right prompt out, then manual touch up of the images (sometimes drastically so) using Krita and a Wacom tablet, or composing scenes with 3D mannequins from CLIP STUDIO PAINT and then feeding them to ControlNet (up to several CNs at once), generating and touching up again. I would argue there's a definite creative process here.

Which is kind of funny in a way. I am no artist but I'm using Krita with a smallish Wacom tablet to manually refine illustrations generated by Stable Diffusion.

But again, some of the Krita team have had strong ideological positions on many themes. Luckily you can keep using the software whether you agree or not (and you can contribute, too).

50% for overheads? Is that university serious? Where I live grants that have more than 30% raise many, many eyebrows...

It's a bit more complicated than this (disclaimer: I followed the trials and vaccinated earlier than most).

The current wave of anti SARS-CoV-2 vaccines skepticism has multiple facets and is also country dependent.

First, the risk profile of the disease meant that the best solution would be vaccinating those at risk immediately and leave the rest for judgement of the individual. However, people took the infamous Israeli study about 94% reduction of risk of asymptomatic infection (hence transmission affecting) at face value (the 5MM people from that study weren't swabbed regularly; it was an extrapolation), which meant that some tried to follow the dream of impossible elimination (impossible since March 2020) so they thought everyone needed to be vaccinated. Previous evidence on other CoVs was largely ignored.

Second, many vaccinated to go back to a normal life. Imagine the reaction when those people were faced with more lockdowns, masks, restrictions... Some thought they were made fun of.

Third, the government officials absolutely hated good news as they thought fear was good to achieve compliance, at least in UK and Italy. In Italy, not the nutjobs, but respected members of medical society unwillingly questioned the efficacy of vaccines ("half-work", someone said). This confused the general public even more

Fourth, adverse reactions are to be expected and with loads of inoculations, some are bound to appear even if very rare. Even more with these vaccines which are highly reactogenic. The confused reactions on the AZ vaccines when there were cases of thrombosis were eloquent. Also, risk vs benefit ratio was not considered. Children have very low risks but have a higher incidence of (rare) adverse events. Given this, the ratio isn't favorable, but it was pushed anyway without solid data (the confidence intervals on FDA documents for pediatric versions of these vaccines are horrid).

Fifth, some countries went out of their way to make the lives of those not vaccinating very miserable. In Italy you could not even work without three doses. Children without three doses > 12yo could not take the bus legally. And the whole Canadian truckers matter.

While antivaxxers are a very loud but small minority with no real power (they're extremists) the whole matter was a massive failure at scientific communication. Also because governments wanted to treat citizens like stupid peasants that needed guidance by the enlightened. Well, not all of them, but in Europe there were many.

To be fair, some scientists made fools of themselves and their (and mine!) profession when speaking to the media. And most of the time journalists treated them as infallible priests handing down absolute truths (like when someone mistook relative risk reduction for proportion of patients responding to a drug... in an EU national newspaper). I even saw falsehoods (yes, falsehoods) on immunity appearing on mainstream papers ("Omicron bypasses vaccines" - totally false): at some point I thought my immunology textbooks would self-combust.

More on topic, even though I tend towards the natural origin hypothesis, there's not enough evidence to show that it is the only possible idea, and that at least a leak (I think bioengineering is far less likely) is possible.

And personally I think (of course, that's just my opinion) the whole debate is there due to the Fauci controversy about GoF research, not necessarily about the actual virus.

Shutting down debate like this was never a good idea and in fact reinforced the conspiracy theory supporters. Because people are people, and despite the uncertainty, they started treating lack of evidence as "facts".

At which point do you think humanity will start seriously thinking about radical solutions?

Given the push politically for solutions that are going to impact negatively the lives of millions of people "for their own good", I think some are already pushing for "radical solutions".

Luckily, there's pushback this time.

I use Stabile Diffusion with Paperspace's Pro tier ($9/mo) which gives you up to 6 hours of non per-usage GPU (meaning you don't have to worry about having a mortgage to pay for the cost) since I have an aging Vega at home and I worry about the electricity bill (EU). My worry is that plan will go away replaced by strict per usage costs.

I was told the same: that if I weren't able to give up everything "I would not be successful". 8 months later and with a breakdown, I was fired from that lab. Better, because people were forced to work (literally forced: even if you had nothing to do you needed to stay until 8pm) at least 12 hours per day, no weekends, no days off, nothing. And my scientific productivity tanked.

I managed to somehow continue to a PhD and then I even got a permanent position, but for that mindset I am "failed scientist": I'm over 40, I don't lead anyone, I don't have grants (only two failed ones that caused me so much stress that I didn't want to do them again), nor I have a teaching position (I would gladly get one if it were just teaching, and not the hell of grant seeking). I do the same stuff I was doing during my postdoc years, with a little more job security, of course.

FTR, I made sure that my connections outside work were nowhere near labs, and nowhere around science. Much better for work-life balance.

Academia seems so obsessed with "excellence" it's not even funny. And that excellence needs to be obtained at absolutely any cost. Probably I wouldn't have chosen this career had I known beforehand what I was getting into.

Apparently it's been reinstated?

https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/ - At least I could access it now.

Personally it would've been better to take down the offending repos and at least give a warning to the author before doing this.

Now all knowledge is lost. Not the code, but there were discussions, tutorials, and what not.

I don't know who Auto is or what he did in practice that led to the violation (yes, I read about those mods): my qualms with the repo were due to its questionable licensing, which is, however, allowed by GH. After all, I can use something without agreeing with the author's moral views.

And yes, this again, even if one agrees with the suspension, shows the danger of centralized platforms when they become so large (although they are convenient).