Agreed: The first one is a policy based on real economic reality. The second one is an unsupported conspiracy theory which ignores the reality that US companies that do the exact same thing.

You are 100% correct.

For human interactions, the LLM seems random not only because most interfaces set the temperature to a nonzero value, but also because seemingly irrelevant changes such as spacing or punctuation will change the LLM output.

allo literally defined it in the post:

This one in fact, saying that survey response rates for official UK data had collapsed from 35% to 5%.

Survey fatigue is one, but I think people are also more wary about having their opinions attached to data these days. At least for formal, official data anyway, obviously social media is still going strong. I think a factor is that people aren't sure how it's going to be used and if it could come back to them in some way.

Lean on your keyboard for long enough and you'll have a valid Perl program. You won't know what it does of course, but then how does that differ from any other Perl program?

Hmm, well your comment made me go and read the paper. It is interesting because they focused on an important part of the DNA storage process, which is deposition and recovery. And yes, there are a few neat innovations, like the tape system, the partitions, and the zeolite encapsulation.

However, the limitation remains DNA reading and writing, which is A) much longer than the deposition process, making gains in the deposition process almost insignificant, and B) requires careful temperature control such that any hopes to do this at room temperature are pretty much moot. It wasn’t the focus of the paper, so it’s not fair to say they glossed over it, but they did bury it in the methods. A few key limitations:
    - They used DNA Fountain to encode the data, which offers a high storage potential, but they also limited it to 100 bp oligos so that the DNA strands would be accessible with current oligo synthesis technology. So for their test, a 50 KB file required 5000 100 bp oligos. The maximum that has been reached using this approach is around 2 MB with 72,000 200 bp oligos. The data densities that they talk about in these papers is a theoretical bits per nucleotide that is extrapolated out to number of nucleotides in a gram of DNA and therefore a theoretical maximum bits per gram of DNA. It is nowhere near a practical reality, though.
    - To synthesize these oligo arrays of 3000 - 5000 oligos per array, they contracted them through Twist. It has been a while since I have worked with Twist, but these oligo pools cost on the order of $1500-$2000 per pool to synthesize, it takes weeks to months, and the failure rate is fairly significant.
    - To read back the oligos they used Illumina sequencing. This is a multiple day process that also costs thousands of dollars in consumables. And for this application the error rate is significant. So instead of taking the raw sequence reads as the data, they mapped the reads to a known reference. Which means they weren’t actually reading the data, just confirming it.

Bottom line: while it is interesting to see people thinking about some of the physical aspects of a DNA storage device, and I like a lot of the ideas they have proposed here, this technology isn’t going anywhere until we have major breakthroughs in DNA synthesis and sequencing capability. And when we do it will have impacts far and wide, beyond just DNA storage.

Because for music, we're in a post-scarcity future. The world is not short of new music, and the tools for producing it get better and better and better. There's no shortage of people wanting to write, you can reasonably easily self-publish (and on a completely unrelated note...check out my two albums and my singles...)...there's no scarcity here.

The problem isn't availability. The problem is gaining an audience.

Here comes a data-point of one, which makes this simply an anecdote...

When I work out hard (resistance training to beyond failure) I find that consuming protein at around 1.6-1.8g per kilo of body weight significantly improves my recovery time -- perhaps because of the effect on muscle-protein synthesis which seems to be optimal at this level.

Working out hard with lower levels of protein intake adds at least a day to my recovery so it's easy to see why, given the fixation on strength and fitness that abounds right now, many people are consuming more protein than they might actually need if their goal is simply to remain healthy.

One consideration for many is that when you bias towards a high-protein low fat/carb diet it becomes easier to lose weight or prevent weight gain. Protein is generally more satiating than carbs and leaves you feeling fuller for longer, reducing hunger pangs. A diet higher in protein is also less likely to produce insulin resistance (type 2 diabetes) than one higher in carbs. However, protein is usually also far more expensive (per calorie) than protein which can be a factor in many people's decision-making.

Increasing protein intake (as a percentage of total calories) is also important as you age because it plays a role in reducing the effects of sarcopenia, a condition that affects most over-50s and predisposes people to becoming frail and increasing their likelihood of death from many causes.

Debit cards are available to under 18s - you can have one from the age of 12. Credit cards aren't - that's why they're picking credit cards.

This is the UK - debit cards are the norm, credit cards are not universal. Most people have one of course, but most - certainly not all particularly at the 18-24 type age range.

It didn't seem to be - two examples of its 'useless' jargon were 'intranet' and 'EFT', both very specific terms. Without getting access to the source study I can't tell if that's a bad article or a bad study of course, but certainly the linked article didn't provide the point it thought it was making.

I wish they'd fix the issue that under Linux Mint, my mory use grows to over 50% and VM use gradually climbs to 95% over several weeks when doing nothing but web-browsing and this is only released when I exit FF and re-enter. Memory leaks anyone?

Please fix the bugs before you start adding more "fluff".

Wait a few months and you'll hear:

"Has anyone seen my shirt? I'm an investor in this eVTOL air-taxi thing and I seem to have lost mine. What is 'due diligence' anyway?"

Don't be so generous.

I would not be surprised if this move was designed to deliberately blur the line and visual difference between creator-generated and AI-generated content.

"Why?" you might ask?

Well right now Youtube has to hand over more than 50% of its ad revenues to the pesky creators that make the videos people watch on the platform. If they can replace those creators with AI then they get to keep *all* the money -- and that is a very, very large chunk of change -- more than enough to incentivize such a move.

YouTube (and its parent Google) long ago lost any interest in not being evil and now *everything* they do is all about hiking revenues and boosting that bottom line. If you think otherwise then you're sadly deluded.

Always interesting to see the fascist take. Oh wait... no it's not.