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Comment Re:Europe has itself to blame for this (Score 1) 199

EU has around 1 billion people, ruzzia jas maybe 100 million, EU has 10 times the population. The only issue is that if Ukraine falls, putin will use force to make sure his army now includes Ukrainians conquered in Ukraine, just like he did with the residents of Donbass region. He will then take on the rest of Europe and given what ruzzians and Ukrainians have learned in thia war, the Europeans will find themselves in a really tough place Will the Europeans even fight at all? Polish, Lytovian, Finnish, they will fight, what about the rest? Given the experience and the size of the militaries, Europe stands no chance. Its best deffense is to help Ukraine with everything, instead European countries are busy with their internal problems.

Comment Re:Google? wtf (Score 1) 86

It's easy to have unique keys in your spreadsheet so that you can easily relate information on different sheets to one another. The problem is, actually doing the processing that a SQL server would do trivially is irritating, and then it will be processed slowly every time. Whatever Excel does or doesn't cache, it isn't enough. You can do big complicated things, but they work slowly, and maintaining it is irritating at best. When you do complicated things either your formulas get long, or you wind up having to write code, or in fact often it's both. At that point you're way better off IMO doing it in something else so that at least performance is good when you're done, and you never have to screw with editing a long formula.

Comment Re:Google? wtf (Score 1) 86

But, is 2e7 cells really that many? If I spent 5 minutes brainstorming I could probably think of 20 pieces of metadata you'd want in columns of a spreadsheet tracking financial transactions

That's exactly why it should be in a database and not a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are best when you have a reasonably limited number of columns. It's also a horrible PITA to use them as a relational database (it's more or less possible, but you don't want to do it) so hiding pieces of that complexity in other sheets in order to limit the data the user interfaces with on the main sheet is just a lot of extra work you wouldn't have to do if you used another solution.

I'm mostly surprised that Google Sheets chokes on what feels like a fairly small amount of data. My best guess is that it's some insane formulas that it struggles with more than the number of cells.

It doesn't really matter where it fails, if Excel can do it and Sheets can't then Google has to admit inferiority to Microsoft which is never a good look.

Comment Re:Australia never cared about reducing emmisions (Score 1) 29

Seems more like political problems. They have been trying to build large wind farms and export cables for years. If they can't even manage that, they have no hope of building nuclear.

It's a tragedy really. They have massive amounts of space for this stuff. A lot of sun, and good on and off shore wind resources. The domestic solar market is actually doing okay, because it gets less political interference and there isn't all that much that can be done to stop people putting panels on their homes.

Comment Re:Those who cannot remember history (Score 1) 199

When in the last two centuries have the French, or the British, or the Germans, or the Belgians, or the Italians moved in a way to unify that continent to stand up to this kind of genocide?

Biden went around congress to fund a different genocide. Pretty words, but living up to them is another matter.

Comment Re:An old familiar story (Score 1) 73

Are you saying you didn't see this coming? It is a democratic system, ain't it? So this means politicians just do what is expedient, that's why they are elected. Leaders have stopped being elected long long time ago. Not that I am for any government intervention into any of this at all, I am against it. I believe we must do what we do as a species without any collective action enforced by government, I am against all government intervention. I am totally against anyone trying to architect our survival as a species, I am all for real natural selection.

Comment Re:Really? (Score 5, Insightful) 107

automated image pattern matching has been around for decades

The problem is that the LLM only does one trick. When you start integrating other software with it, the other software's input has to be fed in the same way as your other tokens. As the last paragraph of TFS says, "every clock check consumes space in the model's context window" and that's because it's just more data being fed in. But the model doesn't actually ever know what time it is, even for a second; the current time is just mixed into the stew and cooked with everything else. It doesn't have a concept of the current time because it doesn't have a concept of anything.

You could have a traditional system interpreting the time, and checking the LLM's output to determine whether what it said made sense. But now that system has to be complicated enough to determine that, and since the LLM is capable of so much complexity of output it can never really be reliable either. You can check the LLM with another LLM, and that's better than not checking its output at all, but the output checking is subject to the same kinds of failures as the initial processing.

So yeah, we can do that, but it won't eliminate the [class of] problem.

Comment Re:tells me the time fine (Score 1) 107

Asked the thing to tell me:

I have heard that you sometimes give wrong time and sometimes even answer that you cannot tell the time, why does this happen to some people?
ChatGPT said:

You see different behavior because the system reads time from the userâ(TM)s environment. Some users block this data. Some browsers hide it. Some devices send inconsistent region info. This leads to gaps.

You see steady answers because your browser shares stable time data.

Other users trigger fallback behavior. In those cases I answer that I cannot read the time.

is this it?

Submission + - Conde Nast fined €750,000 for placing cookies without consent (noyb.eu)

AmiMoJo writes: In December 2019, noyb had filed complaints against three providers of French websites, because they had implemented cookie banners that turned a clear “NO” into “fake consent”. Even if a user went through the trouble of rejecting countless cookies on the eCommerce page CDiscount, the movie guide Allocine.fr and the fashion magazine Vanity Fair, these websites sent digital signals to tracking companies claiming that users had agreed to being tracked online. CDiscount sent “fake consent” signals to 431 tracking companies per user, Allocine to 565, and Vanity Fair to 375, an analysis of the data flows had shown.

Today, almost six (!) years after these complaints had originally been filed, the French data protection authority CNIL has finally reached a decision in the case against Vanity Fair: Conde Nast, the publisher behind Vanity Fair, has failed to obtain user consent before placing cookies. In addition, the company failed to sufficiently inform its users about the purpose of supposedly “necessary” cookies. Thirdly, the implemented mechanisms for refusing and withdrawing consent was ineffective. Conde Nast must therefore pay a fine of €750.000.

Conde Nast also owns Ars Technica.

Comment Re:Big, BIG companies should know better (Score 1) 86

(Shuffles off and mutters something about how does a greybeard get Vulture Capitalist funding to setup cross continental niche cloud for people that value stability over shiny, with Open Source ... Open Stack ... Cloudified LibreOffice, Ceph, my lawn)

Every tech company needs at least three things to start with: The business guy, the brain, and the lawyer. Ideally there should also be a marketing guy, but you can add them in later. Also, none of them have to be male, I just like saying "guy", buddy.

Comment Re:Excel is a platform. (Score 1) 86

Untrained? Excel is a spreadsheet tool within the MS Office suite with 27,000 features. It requires a tad more training than handing a moron a hammer

Yes and no, depending. If you are building an application in Excel, yes, all you said is true. If you are using one, no, none of it is. Spreadsheets can be set up such that the user just stuffs data into them where they are supposed to, then clicks a button to get results. Or maybe they don't even have to hit a button.

For the simplest useful example I can think of, I put together a spreadsheet which produces a table we use for asset valuation. This spreadsheet changes every year. If you load my spreadsheet, it will be correct for the current year. No user has to think about that at all, they just load it and get a correct table. You can extrapolate this to basically any level of complexity because Excel has VBA and you can script everything. The user just follows instructions, and they aren't even allowed to edit any cells which could break anything.

Comment Re:Google? wtf (Score 2) 86

LibreOffice doesn't have cloud sharing features that allow multiple users to access a shared file with different permissions.

LibreOffice Calc does allow multiple users to edit a spreadsheet on a network drive, but doesn't have a user permission system or integration with a single login somewhere. The other apps like Writer don't support collaboration at all.

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