Map of agricultural production changes in the nuclear winter following a minor nuclear exchange, posted for no particular reason.

(For a full-scale exchange...)

Also, for no particular reason, a map of Russia's population distribution, alongside a reminder of Russia's nuclear missile failure rate, particularly booster failures. And that nuclear warheads have been commonly lost disturbingly often even during peacetime, with at least seven weapons from four incidents lost in flight landing in a way that left them fully intact and easily reparable, just from the US alone. And that Ukraine is rich in nuclear engineers, including still some retirees who worked in the Soviet nuclear weapons programme.

There's also this myth that "if you just use a nuclear weapon, you automatically win the war". Nuclear weapons are immensely effective terror weapons, but their effectiveness on the front is a lot weaker than most people think. People on frontlines tend to be in trenches, bunkers, basements, armoured vehicles, etc, and can be surprisingly close to a tactical nuclear blast while still surviving. They're effective against hard points but struggle against a broad, diffuse front (aka, today's front, which is a sparsely populated, deep, amorphous zone, thanks to drones). Amortizing Russia's estimated budget for tactical nuclear weapons comes up with ~$15-25M per weapon (not counting the delivery system), so they're hardly a dime a dozen either.

IF, via terror bombing or threats of terror bombing, you can convince your enemy to surrender, then congratulations, you have won (enjoy your nuclear waste heap and restive population who wants nothing more than to kill you). If they do not, however, their only goal remaining will be to focus 100% on using their extensive nuclear waste supplies rich in plutonium, their extensive long-range strike weapon supplies, and their extensive metallurgical experience, to render your major cities to ash in the same way that you did theirs.

(I also just assume herein that Ukraine doesn't actually have a secret nuclear weapons programme already, which is certainly an assumption).

I look forward to the unplanned broadcast of Swan Lake.

On one hand, I fondly remember using those forums myself. And people are absolutely right; it was a place where users could share common issues with the hardware and get an idea of whether or not something had a defect. Meanwhile, Apple would try its best to keep those rumors silent and just quietly do warranty repairs as the broken hardware came back to them for service. So I feel like shutting them down is "the end of an era" in a way.

On the flip side? I'm not so sure any manufacturer is wise to create these "customer forums" that they don't officially support. It wastes a lot of people's time going to one with a problem, when the maker of the product never even sees their complaints or can be bothered to assist with them. If you're going to spend the money and time putting up a support forum, I think you should commit employee resources to reading it regularly and offering official support.

Fans of the products often create unofficial support forums themselves, anyway -- and those tend to be better in the long-run. People know the manufacturer isn't going to ban them for saying something negative, and the expectations are set from the start that it's not a place for official support.

as I do a lot of 3D printing and some designing, I've dabbled in Blender a few times. My wife knows it better than I do, since she spent a lot of time working with a friend to learn to use it to create 2D animations. Now, it's her "go to" tool to help edit our existing .STL files when we need to modify one. (Personally, I still get by with TinkerCAD for the basic things I need to do.)

The one downside I've observed with her trying to co-author/edit work with her friend online is the way Blender seems to require all of the project contents in a specific folder path? Maybe someone here with more knowledge can correct me if this is wrong/user error? But her laptop she used for the animation projects has a mess of folders on the Windows desktop that apparently can't easily be moved without breaking Blender's ability to open them properly?

It seems like her friend would send her a zip file of a project and then she was stuck putting it back in the same path he used. I remember that being the workflow of old desktop publishing packages like Quark Express on the Mac, many years ago. But I thought it was almost extinct in modern software.

To be clear: you can still totally argue about qualia, sentience, things of that nature. What is not up for debate is that they work through unimaginably-complex chains of logical reasoning on superpositions of conceptual states and engage in forward-planning and metacognition. These are just demonstrable facts.

There is no 'sentiment' in an LLM or internal state equivalent to 'thinking' anything.

Yes, there is.

I got involved in social media for politics starting in 2008. Things were "as bad as it gets" toxic in terms of 4chan cretins by 2010 and by 2012 there were obvious signs of nation state activity. Now, eighteen years after I started, I've got a precedent setting 1st Amendment case with my name on it, I live in this weird little protective program California offers, since one of my codefendants was murdered, and that case remains unsolved. If you Google "Rauhauser vs. McGibney" you'll find an endless rabbit hole excavated by clever hackers & lawyers vs. judicial corruption in Texas. I'm easily reached online if you'd like to see the affidavit from an FBI agent about McGibney being an informant. And this all flowed entirely from Twitter slap fights.

These days I've got a Twitter account again, briefly, because I want just one phone call with 420chan founder Aubrey Cottle, now that he's out of prison for the hit he did on the Texas GOP back in 2021. It's just NealR in hex, come on Kirt, gimme a ring :-)

And once that call is done I go back to the ONLY place I engage online - Reddit. I do get the occasional precocious windowlicker every now and then, but mostly it's got health related information, and a good supply of cat photos.

No, it's called "Evidencing The Fact That It's A Widespread Shorthand" (in specific, among Wikipedians, where it's in official terminology as well), a widespread usage that was falsely claimed to not exist.

(I'll also take this opportunity to note: rage about the use of shorthand on "copyvio", but not a word about "algos")

Shorthand should be something that other people actually use

Okay Felicia.

TL/DR: "copyvio" is the Wikipedia-standard shorthand for copyright violation, used both in direct speech and in official templates. If a person says "copyvio", they've probably spent a lot of time hanging out at Wikipedia, where copyright violation is a frequent topic of discussion.

I'm sorry if shorthand offends your sensibilities. Should I spell out all shorthand for you? Maybe make sure I only use emdashes instead of "-" while I'm at it?

Oh, also, as pointed out further downthread, any LLM with a training cutoff before the license change date is pretty much assured to be okay for use in a cleanroom implementation. Copyright holders cannot make retroactive copyright changes, and open source licenses generally explicitly grant rights in perpetuity anyway. The threat would be new code. But since the cleanroom side has never seen that new code (it was released after the training date), it remains untainted. And training cutoffs generally lag model releases by many months, so not only should all current models be in the clear, but most next-gen models as well (subject to cutoff date verification, and various kinds of nuance such as avoiding RAG, potential post-training contamination, etc - but there's easy ways to guarantee these aren't problems that are present)

First off, you can always just use a LLM with an open training dataset (OLMo, Pythia, etc) to prove that the data isn't in it, and have that handle the "clean" side of the equation.

Secondly, you are under the mistaken impression that a LLM that has been exposed (which, BTW, does not mean "memorized", or even any rough understandings of the workings - ask the LLM (ideally an abliterated one to avoid refusals) to reproduce the original code verbatim, it'll almost certainly fail badly) automatically fails in such a suit. It does not. There is no such thing as "homeopathic copyright contamination". Copyvio requires substantial similarity. LLMs will tend to have common algos memorized, but those are the very things that tend to be simultaneously not copyrightable.

The cleanroom is an evidentiary shield, not a pillar of copyright law. If you can prove that the cleanroom team had no access to the original, then you can prove that they didn't copy it, and potentially get summary judgement. If you can't prove that, that doesn't mean that it's not copyvio, it just means that you instead have to focus on substantial-similarity defenses. Access without substantial similiarity is not copyvio. If you read an open-source codebase, close it, and then later write a new program purely on your own that looks nothing like the original, you had "access", but still did not infringe. The same applies to LLMs - but even moreso, because humans are much better at learning from brief, limited exposures to content than LLMs are. A court will usually apply an "Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison" test - they break the code down into layers (source code, parameters, architecture, algos, etc) (abstraction), remove everything that copyright law does not protect (ideas and common algos, things where there's only a limited number of ways to possibly do it, etc) (filtration), and then compare the creative expression that remains to see if there exists sufficient similarity to count as infringement. It is highly unlikely that a LLM-implemented version will fail that.

(That said, you're talking about a long, expensive legal battle if you get to that point, so you obviously prefer to be able to get summary judgement if you can)

What the GP described is known as a cleanroom implementation, and it's perfectly legal, and has been done many times in ways that have been upheld by the courts. The dividing line, by and large, is that the documentation has to be flexible enough that there's multiple potential ways it could be implemented, that you're not just transforming a code flow into "text pseudocode" and back. It doesn't matter if, by chance, it looks like the original - only that there were multiple means by which it could have been done under the specification produced.

There's also some various process-specific factors you need to manage - full separation of the teardown and cleanroom-implementation teams, a judge filtering all communications (with an audit trail) back and forth between the teams to make sure that they meet legal standards of separation, things of that nature. But a competent LLM can help set up the process and run each agent for each role in its own isolated context.

predicted that it would be the greatest embarrassment in the history of automobiles.

Said about every single Tesla model and non-vehicle product, and about the company as a whole, every time, by millions of people, for its entire history. That's hardly a badge to pin on yourself unless you were also saying that the Roadster, Model S, Model X, Model 3, and Model Y, and grid batteries would be massive successes.

Also, don't confuse "putting down a refundable $100 reservation" with "prognosticating about the future". Re: prognostication about the future, that's not "putting down a refundable reservation on a product you can choose to buy or not based on its stats when it comes out", that's making investments in the market. And back in the day, I made a TON of money long on $TSLA, predicting the overall company's success. How much, perchance, did you make shorting it, like millions of people did, talking doom and gloom about how every vehicle model was going to be the greatest embarrassment in the history of automobiles?

There was plenty of interest in the beginning**, and the electric truck market really doesn't have good competition for a given price point. The problems were:

1) The price shot up heavily
2) The stats and capabilities went down
3) Musk went hard-right, and rightly or wrongly the Cybertruck became seen as a symbol of being MAGA.

These things together pushed away ~90% of prospective buyers. Combined with the fact that the Cybertruck's production line was unique, as well as being a generation back, and it made it hard for Tesla to justify owning it.

** - Including from me. Beyond the stats-for-the-price point as introduced, I liked the engineering behind the design. If you want to make it rugged, that implies a thick skin. So make it an exoskeleton to bear the internal loads. Want to maximize strength while minimizing the mass? Resist torsional loads with a braced cantilever design (the triangular rear). Which, with a retracting tonneau, creates a very long, gradual rear taper, allowing detached air (from the angles necessitated by an exoskeleton) ample time to retract and minimizing the drawn wake. On and on - from an engineering perspective, there was a lot of great stuff that appealed to me. But little of that ended up staying. The final design hangs the (thinner) exterior metal onto a frame just as dead mass. The big raft of changes led to mass growth, cost growth, and range decline (despite advancing battery tech and pricing). And of course, I'm not super eager for Elon to end up with any of my money these days. Another family member had also been interested, and also cancelled.