Exactly. Like Larry Wall's three "virtues" of programming: laziness, impatience and hubris. Thing is, those are actually the vices, and the true virtues of programming are actually diligence, patience and humility, though vices have their uses.

That's what the "The STOP CSAM Act" would do. Not sure if it did any good, but I've written to my rep in congress about it already.

I hope you're wrong, but I fear you're right.

Forgetting for a minute that GPT-x is not anything like "AGI" at this point, and may never be, though that may be beside the point, practically speaking.

Our minds are unarguably "NGI" -- when we read books (copyrighted or not) our minds/brains compile that information down into memories, such that we (given the aptitude/inclination) could write another book in the same style, same characters, etc., which GPT-x+n presumably at some point could also do, even while still not being anything like an "AGI".

Does a copyright holder have the right to demand a brain-wipe (again, forgetting that isn't yet possible) so that a person who reads a book would then lack the capability to create derivative works? Of course not.

Is that not what we're talking about here? Also forgetting about how stupid current (virtually perpetual) copyright law is for a minute, it shouldn't be possible to violate copyright by reading a book and then having information from that book stored in our minds. Actually publishing derivative works is a different story, but the *capability* of creating derivative works isn't (I'd say can't) be a copyright violation. So how does one legislate that? I guess you could say that the LLM is allowed to "read" the books but should be prevented somehow (on the front end) from creating full-blown derivative works, but how does one define that? Are summaries allowed? Use of fictitious names and places? Parodies are protected under current law, so there's that. If I ask ChatGPT "Who is Frodo?" and it says "A a hobbit that goes on a quest to destroy the One Ring." is that infringement? Is it infringement if someone asks me that question and I give that same answer? Of course not. Should the owner of an LLM be liable for works created thereby? Or is the person who asks for it to "Write me a fourth Lord of the Rings novel, picking up where The Return of the King leaves off." and then publishes it the one that is liable? My first instinct would be to say that it's the latter, since that amounts to computer-assisted plagiarism. What if they never "publish" it, but only read it for their own pleasure? Is that a violation of some kind? No? Is the fact that the LLM "distributed" that work to a single person actionable? Yes? No?

These are the murky waters we are now dipping our toes into. FWIW I'd say that if we have the "right" to read a book that we purchase or otherwise legally acquire, we have the right to compile statistics (by hand or with computer-assistance) and create summaries of that book, and share that data with others, whether in our heads and in speech, on paper or in electronic form. That's almost certainly fair-use. I guess what's at issue is if someone is doing that for-profit. Where is the fair-use line drawn? I don't see any easy place to draw it, since wherever we draw it, there will always be edge-cases, which will end up in court, just like all the past cases where someone sued someone else for copyright infringement.

Since we now have competing vested-interests beyond "The People vs. Copyright Holders", maybe this is a watershed moment for copyright law to get things back to something reasonable, like 7-year terms (with a limited number of extensions for living authors: maybe three or four) for copyright. I know, I know, cold day in hell and all that, but we can hope?

Good to know, thanks! I might could check those out, though the WU 10-day forecast page works great on my phone and desktop.

As with most "apps" the various weather apps are either unusably slow, broken or just plain worse than the corresponding web page that provides the same information.

The NWS recently switched their radar maps to use some kind of a "web app" that is almost unusable on mobile devices and older computers, and even on a fast connection and beefy hardware, leaves a lot to be desired: slow, clunky, shifting content, bandwidth hogging, poorly-designed interface. Thankfully, they actually listened to the voluminous outcry and made their animated gif maps available again:

https://radar.weather.gov/ridg...

wunderground.com went downhill after TWC bought them, but they seem (to me) to have the least-sucky website and best local forecast data. Their "app" (at least on android) is almost completely useless, so I just use their website. The same URL works on my desktop browser and my android browser.

But addicted? People are addicted to looking at the weather forecast? I mean, I look at it almost every morning and evening, but it's hardly like I need a fix. I just want to know what clothes I should wear if I'm leaving the house, or (in the winter) whether I need to make sure I have snowblower gas. Maybe people who are "addicted" to their weather app (or any app for that matter) need to spend more time outside. And maybe journalists might want to think about doing some actual journalism if this is what passes these days.

No they don't. Those two things (The Standard Model and General Relativity) are *fundamentally* incompatible. They both work, and really well at that, in their individual domains, but there is currently no way to reconcile them with each other: any way we try, contradictions appear. The math literally doesn't work out.

It could literally be that the universe has inherent contradictions (go figure) but we don't actually know that for sure; maybe someday we will (I doubt very much that it will be a fancy computer program that makes the discovery). It could also be that there's a "bridge" between them (quantum gravity) or that one or both are missing something important.

Lastly, the SM/GR problem is only one of many unsolved problems in physics. There are literally hundreds of them, and some of them are doozies.

Of course, then we could get all philosophical (since we're talking about the "true nature" of things) and say that it's also possible that everything we think we know is wrong, and that it's merely a coincidence that SM & GR (mostly) describe how the universe works, and the *actual* way the universe is put together is something else entirely.

I switched my primary machine to Linux in May of 2023.

I'm not a libertarian, but that sounds like a lot of overhead to do for all cars, since it's primarily heavy trucks that cause road wear, fourth power of the axle weight and all that, so really all we'd need to do is do all of that for just freight vehicles, and actually make them pay accordingly, passenger cars then become almost a rounding error in terms of total road costs, though London seems to be doing well with charging people to drive in the city during peak hours, so there's probably something to be said for doing that for all vehicles in metro traffic, and requiring a transponder in heavy traffic probably isn't bad idea. It could enable automatic lane speed control on highways, so I guess maybe I agree more with the idea than I did when I started writing this comment, but heavy trucks should still pay for most road costs. FWIW, I think it's more important to have reliable, available and affordable public transportation than "free" public transportation, though I do think public transit as a public service is a great idea, but here, in the US, we need the former more than the latter, but for the most part we don't have either now, so sure, free busses, why not.

If they had spent 10 minutes on this site:

https://www.darksky.org/

Before replacing their streetlights, they wouldn't have that problem. LEDs aren't the problem. Nearly every one of the DSI approved lighting products are LEDs. Outdoor lighting simply needs to illuminate the ground, not the sky. It's not a particularly difficult problem to solve.

Sure, also technically true, but with my current phone, a Moto g5+, which has an ifixit score of "moderate(!?)", one has to remove the digitizer, the screen, fingerprint sensor, along with each of their connectors (the display has 2), three layers of adhesive, a bunch of stickers and clips, and 19 screws, just to replace the battery, which can take "45 min - 2 hours" and carries significant risk of damaging components at each of the 42(!) steps required for complete disassembly/reassembly. To top it off, apparently a common problem after disassembly/reassembly is that the digitizer no longer functions, requiring a factory reset to fix, so it's *necessary* to backup the phone before replacing the battery. That's completely ridiculous. Now *I* might try and replace the battery when it finally goes because I'm obstinate, (even though it's nearly 5 years old and still holds about 75% of it's original charge) but will probably want a backup phone (a new(er) phone) before I do it, just in case I brick it, but many people (even skilled technicians) might say: fuck it, just get a new phone.

Now, if it were a case of just needing to weaken some adhesive and pry the back off the phone, and maybe a few screws to get to the battery (as is the case for many other phones) I'd do it without a second thought.

I didn't say user-swappable batteries are stupid. I said *mandating* them is, since apparently some people like devices so thin you can use them to pick your teeth. I'm not one of those people, and would personally rather have a phone with a battery compartment and be 1 or 2mm thicker, but as I stated, I'm also fine with having to do 5 minutes of work to replace a battery, I just don't want to risk breaking the damn thing when I do it.

That's all true, any yet, there's no (technical) reason why thinner phones without a *user-swappable* battery have to have the battery literally *buried* inside. I've replaced batteries in *lots* of devices over the years that weren't designed with a user-swappable battery, and up until the last few years, it's been relatively straightforward: melt some adhesive, pry apart, maybe remove a screw or two, replace, reverse, done. Not easy for *everyone* but at least easy with a modicum of tech know-how and about 5 minutes; and I'm totally OK with that. However *lots* of devices have started making a battery swap take more like an hour with substantial risk of breaking delicate components (display connectors and other fiddly bits) that are in the way of replacing the battery. Maybe there's some design considerations tor doing that that make the phone .5mm thinner, but looking at some of these designs, it smacks of programmed obsolescence.

So, IMO, mandating *user-swappable* batteries would be stupid, but incentivizing device makers to make them *not impossible* to work on by third-party technicians or skilled amateurs (i.e. "Right to Repair") is appropriate regulation. So I guess it depends on how they define "easily".

I just bought one of these boards. Figures. I agonized about what board to buy for months. I wanted an Asus board, but couldn't find one with what I wanted that was obtainable in my price range. (I refuse to pay $400 for a board when a $100 board will do just fine, I'm not a gamer.) It's in the process of becoming my primary system. I guess if it tries to inject crap into the system32 folder, it won't find it, since the only windows OS on it is in a VM. I'd imagine there's a way to turn it off, and if not I'd bet gigabyte will release a FW update to at least allow it to be disabled, and hopefully fix the sloppiness.

Sure, it's gotta restore RAM, CPU busses, etc., to the state they were in, but I'm sure there's unnecessary delays in there somewhere. It doesn't need to take 30 seconds to copy a few gigs of data from the SSD into RAM. The system really is usable and 100% responsive from a cold boot in under 5 seconds. I realize it's still "doing stuff" even after the system is fully interactive. I'm not really complaining, since unless there's an extended power outage, the machine is either on or suspended to ram. I just think it's funny that this machine boots in 4 seconds, resumes in 30s, but my last build (2014ish, which ran windows) resumes from hibernation in about 5 seconds, and booting took more like 15-20sec: so, almost exactly reversed. Resuming from suspend-to-ram is nearly instantaneous on both systems, which is a refreshing change from my last experience attempting to switch from windows to linux, when I couldn't get it to work at all, at least on the hardware I had. I've used linux every day for the last 20+ years, but only as a server OS, but 2023 is finally "year of the linux desktop" for me, especially since I now have a clone of my old running windows system in QEMU just in case I need it and for safe keeping. I only have a few fiddly bits left to resolve before I can fully switch over.