Yes and now. It was also the Age of Discoveries. That means that basically each ship crossing the oceans at the time also had a part time or full time scientist on board, who was measuring everything he could put his instruments on. The Royal Navy and its requirements for logs also demanded a lot of data to be taken daily, including air and water temperature.

Depending on the region you live in, it goes back until 1736 (e.g. Schoenbrunn, Vienna and Mannheim, Germany). In this year, several observatories in Central Europe agreed to take regularly measurements of weather data and keep a log of them.

And yes, that's the time when Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686 - 1736), Anders Celsius (1701 - 1744) and René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1686 - 1757) lived, each constructing his own type of thermometer, and defining his own temperature scale.

It was Attachmate, which swallowed Novell and spun of for instance SuSE Linux before being itself acquired by Micro Focus. SuSE S.A. is now a separate company in Luxembourg, and maybe, they are holding the original UNIX licenses, as it would fit into their portfolio.

Social media is like if someone took all the problems of usenet and amplified them to the point of unusability...

Writing music (or any other creative endeavor) is not just about mimicking learned patterns, but about experimenting until you create something actually new. Models are recombining patterns using deep learning, which can give the appearance of novelty without actually being genuine creations, unless there's adequate guidance and shaping by a human. The problem is that there is a way that real inspiration and innovation *feel* which becomes delocalized when the cognitive labor is mostly offloaded to a model and thus hard to recognize, especially if you don't actually have experience doing the creative act yourself. So people who don't know how to write music will make slop, and even experienced artists could end up with stuff that is mostly slop if they're not paying very careful attention.

Plus the social value of creativity is based on recognition of the effort involved in creating novel things; many people appreciate art because it reflects human experience and human effort, which can get muddled or lost with generative AI.

I have been writing music and studying computing since childhood and studying some machine learning since I was a teen, three decades ago. I don't think all generative AI is useless or offensive (though the resource overconsumption with the LLMs-in-everything fad is a serious problem, and I do believe there is a type of expected-usage violation / consent problem with many AI vendor training sets and products). The disagreements about deep learning and generative AI (exaggerated by a bubble-driven profit motive, unfortunately) will take work to solve because new social contract concepts will have to gradually be explored and tested over the coming years by billions of humans until a general consensus is reached on what fair use now means and how intellectual "property" ethics are navigated.

I think people are asserting a lot of things which amount to gazing into a crystal ball around these topics, but there are at least two things which I feel pretty sure of based on my experience: the human creative process is much more complicated than LLM/GAN training+prompting, and actual human creativity has value which a machine is unlikely to replicate effectively at least anytime soon â" though simulacra of creativity pass enough of a capitalist sniff test to make money, detracting from the livelihoods of artists already dealing with the nightmarish economic calculus of trying to make creative things while paying the bills in the contemporary era.

Of course, litigative copyright scalping companies don't add any value to society either and are effectively just another type of nuisance; Round Hill looks to be a hedge fund manager's project to make money off others' labor without actually facilitating human creativity. Cue the infamous "I believe everyone involved in this story should die" Norm Macdonald line... (which is much more applicable here than the original transphobic "joke"!)

I never sold any power to the grid. I just offset some grid usage with my own power.

As I have paid 300 Euros for a pair of solar panels and a rectifier back in March, and despite the panels not being optimally mounted (straight upright, facing Southwest, and partly in the shadow from nearby trees), I harvested already 200 kWh as of today, I am pretty sure, "green energy" is not about twice as expensive as it should be. Even a badly mounted setup will return the investment in less than five years.

This is plain bullshit. Itâs that until recently, air condition was not necessary at all. Europe is very far to the north. Great Britain for instance lies between the latitudes of Vancouver Island and Juneau, Alaska. On the other side, Montreal, Canada is on the same latitude than Milan, Italy, and Toronto is as far to the north as Florence. Most of the continuous U.S. is somewhere between the Mediterran and the Sahara Desert. No one in southern Italy doubted the necessity of air condition in the Summer. For Germans or Scandinavians on the other hand, air condition was just a waste of space and energy, because it never was hot enough for A/C to make a difference, except in large office complexes with their large windows and basically no shadow. And they all have air condition. This year, nearly all European places have posted new local temperature highs. Europe today is hotter than it ever was in recorded history.

Are Austrians famous for following the regulations?

That's why back in the late 1970ies already, Germany developed FE-Schrift especially for license plates. It gives each letter a shape so unique, it does not even match in part another letter, making automatic recognition easier, and forging a license plate by covering up parts or adding color a lot more complicated.

We should also note that humans don't only rely on vision to drive cars. They also rely on noise heard by the ear, and on vibration felt with their body.

No one is actually pulling out. The U.S. has made it harder for foreign companies to import them. But there are still domestic manufacturers of EVs, like Tesla, Ford and Stellantis. This is something very else: For the last decade, one big argument against EVs was "bad resale value", because EVs were seen as a novelty, and fear for dead batteries, fueled by the problems with first gen Nissan Leafs, made buyers wary of used EVs. Additionally, there were not many used EVs on the market to begin with, fleet operators did not have many young EVs to sell, and prices did not really average out yet.

Now, demand for EVs is rising due to high fuel prices, and a good public charging network making EVs a viable alternative for many people. And also people looking for bargains are hitting the market, and with used batteries not being the problem they were thought to be, used EVs have its own value proposition. We have here the normal effect of demand rising more than the available supply.

Hi, I came across this thread and it's something which has raised a lot of concerns for me since Google's announcement. There's a discussion of how it hurts the open-source ecosystem at https://www.reddit.com/r/selfh... and Google's announcement is at https://android-developers.goo...

I like the idea of writing free, open source utilities for others to use. Users having to jump through even more hoops to sideload, or me having to pay money and reveal my identity to Google, get in the way of this --- especially if one of the things I've thought about is e.g. writing a tool to help LGBTQ+ people find locations where they can be reasonably safe in the current US geopolitical climate. That is exactly the sort of utility where the DoJ would make claims I'm some sort of subversive "antifa threat" and demand Google release my identity to them for harassment. Plus, the time where that utility would be most useful -- if someone suddenly has to go someplace unfamiliar on short notice (e.g. getting a call that a relative who lives a few hundred miles away in MAGA territory is getting emergency surgery), having to wait 24 hours to sideload the app if you don't have sideloading currently unlocked, just to find out which rest stops are safe to stop at or not on your drive, would be incredibly unfortunate!

I'm not saying improving app security is a bad thing, and at least Google didn't pull a "We Own Everything And There Is No Way Out Of Our Grip" like they could have, but the options they provide are not nearly good enough. It seems like they only thought about (1) average uninformed users who install things randomly, (2) big commercial developers [who still can get compromised and end up pushing malware, or might even include malware intentionally: just look at LG's McAfee situation, the infamous Sony BMG CD rootkits, etc etc], (3) independent developers who have identity documents Google is willing to recognize [what about the identity document fiascos going on right now with Ukrainian towns Russia is occupying? what about areas occupied in the Middle East by various regimes? what about the way cops confiscate homeless peoples' belongings including ID cards, but you need an ID card to get your belongings back?] plus extra cash [and $25 USD is a lot in some impoverished places, limiting the ability of people in such places to help themselves by becoming app developers], (4) students and hobbyists who only need to share their app with a small group of testers [limiting your ability to test scalability!], and (5) power users who are patient. If you don't fit into the scenarios they planned for, you might be out of luck. And I recognize that the vast majority of legitimate use cases do fall into those above categories, but there are legitimate use cases which don't. They could have at least had a series of open community fora to get feedback on other use cases and plan additional options, but they did not.

It's great that they thought about a few different use cases, at least. But that's not nearly enough!

Could I find an ally to register as the "developer" and publish such an app? Sure, but is that how it *should* be? I would now be dependent on someone else to manage the Play Store listing, which limits my ability to build. Could I spread the word to people who might need such an app that they should unlock sideloading indefinitely just in case? Sure, but maybe that creates new risks for them (and -- what if the option to unlock sideloading indefinitely gets taken away at some future point? Google gets to dictate all the changes here, and users have little recourse if they disagree with the specifics of the implementation)

I just want the guaranteed ability to say "hey, what about XYZ situation, which I or a friend have personal experience with? can you provide a way to handle that?" but I don't. There's no form to fill out to request some sort of special accommodation for an unusual situation, and there probably should be. When you have billions of users, planning for the needs of 99.99% of them still hangs hundreds of thousands of users out to dry. I know trying to accommodate more edge cases isn't as profitable, and having a large enough support team to hear people out when they have an unusual need requires a ton of extra staffing, but smartphone usage has become a critical utility rather than a luxury in much of the world. Google has an immense amount of power over numerous aspects of the lives of all sorts of different people, and if they want to continue to make money from that situation, they need to be prepared to deal with the complexities of it all.

Yep. Open weights is closer to having precompiled binaries only (though you can do a little bit more with open weights). All training data with labeling, plus a detailed build log including any special fine-tuning logs, is needed, especially to help show how the final weights were arrived at (since there can be randomness involved). Unless someone else can both replicate your final output plus make their own changes to it, it's not fully open source.

We're entering the exciting age of AI-powered cybersecurity attacks. I imagine it won't be too long before something like a malware worm which polymorphs to evade detection and adapts itself as new CVEs get published, able to utilize tuned edge models, shows up. Wireless IoT could mean we end up with physical "e-quarantine" zones, wherein devices keep attacking anything in radio range...