FYI I’ve had this issue on my old XFCE laptop for a while, and I’m still using X there. I thought it was a sign of failing hardware, given that it happens at the very last point of shutdown (and also, if the system was going into hibernation, it wakes up from it successfully even though I had to force poweroff the machine).

I thought we switched to libre

Maybe some people did. Thing is there’s a whole rest-of-the-world out there, and they didn’t necessarily get the memo or are happy with the existing way.

Gardiner Bryant is great. So great, you don’t have to suffer YouTube to keep up with his videos, he also publishes to PeerTube:

https://peertube.wtf/w/omBg7MPgFSZAB7YkWEYGdu

A collective can be a great way to run a company, for some cases. I lived with a girl who worked at a cafe that was run as a collective - it meant that people had a fair say in decisions that affected them. They could vote on their own wages, working conditions, and no one was barking out orders bossing them around. The owner was an old-school left-winger who was doing this out of pure idealism. He was still the one with the financial risk, he dealt with banks, ensured taxes were dealt with, and all the other tasks involved in running a business such as that.

Nothing stopping you trying!

Great. Yes. Under some kind of egalitarian free-energy tech utopia such as you’re describing, websites like Nexus mods would be even better. Sadly there are no such systems already operating for us to move to, and we do not yet have the technology to try creating a new one.

So any other political systems that are more real-world?

How would this specific problem be better under another system?

I guess you still have the issue of someone needing to pay for the huge number of downloads, most of which are going to come from users who make no other contributions to the site. Maybe you could combine a fedi site with torrents or something?

I commend this guy for sticking by his principles. I remember feeling shocked and let down when walking into my uni’s computer department for the first time and finding out that the main lab was the Windows lab, with the Linux lab being smaller and hidden away.

He must have tried the patience of his professors though, with his refusal to even use non-free JavaScript - for instance he wouldn’t use the Zoom video conferencing web client. Given that you don’t have to install anything on your machine and JS is heavily sandboxed, that does seem a bit too idealistic!

But hopefully he made his professors think a little and maybe they’ll even opt for true FOSS solutions in future. Like this Jitsi Meet that I’d never heard of before - I’m looking forward to trying it instead of Google Meet next chance I get.

In case you haven’t seen it, the paper is here - https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinking (PDF linked on the left).

The puzzles the researchers have chosen are spatial and logical reasoning puzzles - so certainly not the natural domain of LLMs. The paper doesn’t unfortunately give a clear definition of reasoning, I think I might surmise it as “analysing a scenario and extracting rules that allow you to achieve a desired outcome”.

They also don’t provide the prompts they use - not even for the cases where they say they provide the algorithm in the prompt, which makes that aspect less convincing to me.

What I did find noteworthy was how the models were able to provide around 100 steps correctly for larger Tower of Hanoi problems, but only 4 or 5 correct steps for larger River Crossing problems. I think the River Crossing problem is like the one where you have a boatman who wants to get a fox, a chicken and a bag of rice across a river, but can only take two in his boat at one time? In any case, the researchers suggest that this could be because there will be plenty of examples of Towers of Hanoi with larger numbers of disks, while not so many examples of the River Crossing with a lot more than the typical number of items being ferried across. This being more evidence that the LLMs (and LRMs) are merely recalling examples they’ve seen, rather than genuinely working them out.

I think it’s an easy mistake to confuse sentience and intelligence. It happens in Hollywood all the time - “Skynet began learning at a geometric rate, on July 23 2004 it became self-aware” yadda yadda

But that’s not how sentience works. We don’t have to be as intelligent as Skynet supposedly was in order to be sentient. We don’t start our lives as unthinking robots, and then one day - once we’ve finally got a handle on calculus or a deep enough understanding of the causes of the fall of the Roman empire - we suddenly blink into consciousness. On the contrary, even the stupidest humans are accepted as being sentient. Even a young child, not yet able to walk or do anything more than vomit on their parents’ new sofa, is considered as a conscious individual.

So there is no reason to think that AI - whenever it should be achieved, if ever - will be conscious any more than the dumb computers that precede it.

“We demand you voluntarily side with progress”

They have an interesting concept of voluntary to be sure

Your downvotes make me wonder if I misunderstood your post, but you seem to be saying that Spain’s Airbnb regulations make it harder for people to buy flats with the intention of using them as short-term holiday lets, while not really stopping people who just want to rent a room in their own house for short periods. Which does sound good to me, given that those empty rooms in grandma’s house wouldn’t otherwise be on the market.

So is your point that this is “anti-tourist” in the sense that it does make things more difficult for tourists, but that should be expected given that tourists are generally indifferent to the long term negative effects of tourism on a city?

While true, why are you linking this comment in almost all the other comments?

I’ve been stuck repeatedly asking myself this question ever since reading your comment 😩 Please be careful about throwing infinite while true loops around! Now I need someone to Ctrl-C me.

That’s interesting. I’ve always thought the name a little weak, so you prompted me to find its origins. According to wiki:

Taler is short for the “Taxable Anonymous Libre Economic Reserves”[7][8] and alludes to the Taler coins in Germany during the Early Modern period.

That definitely looks like a backronym! Anyway, the wiki for the Taler coins says this:

The word is shortened from Joachimsthaler, the original thaler coin minted in Joachimsthal, Bohemia, from 1520.

So the original root appears to be Thal or Tal i.e. valley (just like Neanderthal/Neandertal). The Taler wiki page goes on:

[The Holy Roman Empire’s] longest-lived coin was the Reichsthaler, which contained 1⁄9 Cologne Mark of fine silver (or 25.984 g), and which was issued in various versions from 1566 to 1875.

Was Denmark part of the Holy Roman Empire? Either way, your ancestors would’ve presumably often traded with Germans using these early Thaler/Taler coins.

I’m probably misunderstanding as I rarely use word processing software, so I apologise if you talking about something more than the system’s own handling of touchpad scrolling! here’s the settings applet for XFCE, I think every DE will have similar options (it does even offer circular scrolling, but I know you aren’t looking for that):

Gesture scrolling? You mean like making clockwise or anticlockwise circles to scroll up or down? I’d have thought that kind of functionality would be handled by the touchpad driver, not individual programs.

You live in a fantasy world if you think “Don’t go” is a feasible alternative. If I don’t go, someone else will, and all I’ve done is deprive myself of something that I want to make a point

Come on mate, you could say this about any kind of protest or boycott.

all I’ve done is deprive myself of something that I want to make a point

Yes that is exactly how boycotts work. You make a personal sacrifice as a protest against something that’s unfair or immoral.

If you’re not prepared to make a sacrifice, that’s OK, but at least have the honesty to admit you just don’t care enough about this particular issue.

Such a cop-out. Every boycott is a personal sacrifice, and every individual participating in a boycott knows that their one purchase isn’t by itself going to make a difference.

that’s interesting that you mention that - never been there myself or anything, but I did come across reports that the city authorities had relaxed rules on large murals to make up for the lack of advertising, and there’s certainly a lot of pictures of some pretty impressive artworks!