And so the prosecution heaps on threats of years and years of prison time, or "take this little plea bargain". They still get their "conviction."

Super intelligence. Aha. :)

One of the reasons I went with Android over an iPhone. If F-Droid stops working I am done with Android.

It's unbearable that most LLM inference happens on closed H/W, closed drivers, and closed SDKs.

The technology, compression, etc, for models are getting better and better requiring less and less H/W and power to run the same inference power.

Perhaps our hunger for ever more powerful models will be enough to offset this, but I am not sure.

I would expect a government to be professional and just stick to the (proven) facts and avoiding labels; that would also be more convincing. Oh well.

Why? Your job is to transfer pieces of mail from one place to another. Just continue that. Everything else is manufacturing a problem where there was none.

Edit: Spelling.

What would you have them do? Somehow they have to make some money somehow.

Alternatively they have to live purely from donations, which means that people like you and I have to part with of our money. Or they could be purely open source, in which case people like and I donate our time.

IMHO, that Firefox can only really stay free if it is supported by donations (i.e. people like us who use it). Anything else will lead to various things that either push people away or make less free - probably both.

A company with a good culture is like a good football or soccer team. They work with each other to win, they know each other (enough for the job at least).

I am working at a bigger place now and the AI mandates handed down have been quite unproductive... As if we wouldn't have been able ourselves to figure out how to use the new tools - like we have since the beginning of software.

If management trusts you do to your job and has your back, then you trust the management and will naturally do a better job. Now there are always a few people who are exceptions to this, and part of good culture to identify those and remove them.

It's rather interesting that Apple (and Arm) are blazing the trail while Intel is seemingly left in the dust. Maybe not entirely on raw performance, but definitely on performance per watt.

Yet, we continue to burn more and fossil fuels; solar, wind, EVs, etc, non-withstanding. And right now some governments are actively spending money to work against renewable energy.

At this point I am afraid that we humans will only act when the alternative is unaffordable, when the forest is already on fire. I hope by that time it won't be too late.

Those of us who have been saying this all along won't even get the hollow satisfaction of an "I told you so!", because we'll be too busy surviving.

Vote, drive less (combustion engines), fly less, use public transportation, check your utility mix (and demand a larger renewable fraction), install solar, lobby, buy more local (where possible), consume less, support those with jobs displaced by renewables, accept some loss on your fossil stocks, ...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI

Exploration: Hey there's some cool new tech, let's see what it can do for me, for us.

Anxiety: What will happen to my craft? Will my skills still be important? Will I have a job in a year? How will I keep up? If we stop or slow hiring junior engineers, what happens when the experienced folks retire?

Frustration: This could be a time of fun and exploration with these new tools at hand. Instead we are measured by weird metrics (tokens, PR times, etc, etc), some of us are laid off, etc. There are $100bns spent on AI data centers.

The last one is the closest to anger, but it's not really the same.

The "Rule of Law" applies to everybody, including the President (recent decisions of the supreme court not withstanding - though they are very unfortunate). You have provisions for the freedom of press, freedom of speech, to be free from unreasonable searches, a reliable court system, etc, etc.

Searches at the border are murky legal territory, and I think that there is a problem here. You may also argue that the president and senate have too much power, or that gerrymandering is a serious problem (which it is). But from these you cannot conclude a general lawlessness.

(I'm from North-Western Europe, living in the US for a few decades now, so I feel that I have at least some data to compare.)

For example, take quantum decoherence (which, IMHO, is the most logical explanation for the collapse of the wave-function - by saying it does not actually collapse). Quantum decoherence is almost like a giant constraint resolution system - once a particle randomly interacts with another they become entangled and both now have fewer degrees of freedom. When it interacts with many particles, like any macro-effect it has essentially no degrees of freedom anymore. It's all about who knew about what and when. The experiments around this fascinating. (Note that there are other theories, like the many-worlds interpretation, that also explain the collapse of the wave function)

This seems to be another example of this. Anyway, as I said, just a layman.

I can't believe a weight-loss fad is going to take "my" sardines from the shelves.

Also, why only sardines? Any fatty fish will serve the same purpose. I guess a fad is a fad.

I do not like it one bit, but that does seem to be state of the software world right now.

If that idea had cost (say) a billion dollars (like in some medical research or physical research), there absolutely is value in granting a temporary monopoly in order to encourage such research in the future.