config.sys generation represent.

I’m perfectly comfortable with C, it’s a neat, small, language. I actually understand the whole of the semantics (at least the POSIX ones). I also happen to speak x86 assembly quite fluently (as long as it’s not SIMD noone speaks that fluently, last time I actually wrote assembly in earnest x87 was still relevant). The thing is though I’m more comfortable with Rust, even if I don’t understand absolutely everything: Because it’s less mental load. I don’t need to worry about so many things at once, don’t have to keep a thousand assumptions in mind that that pieces of code I’m not currently working on are making.

No, driving a unicycle instead of the metro doesn’t make you a better commuter. It makes you a better unicycle driver.

Greybeards can be found in lots of places, but definitely not on discord.

Yes. I just described how.

Yes. You can observe the whole vote, keeping an eye on the ballot box all the time until it is emptied on a big table, where it is sorted, and once sorted things get counted, there’s a whole procedure to minimise confusion and with that errors, double counts etc. Unless a magician comes along and teleports your ballot out of the box you can then be sure that it has been counted.

What you can’t do is prove to anyone that you voted a certain way and that’s a good thing.

It’s incredibly intentional in an entirely distinct but fundamentally related way, since you lack control over so many aspects of it- the things you can choose become all the more significant, personal and meaningful. I remember people comparing generative art and photography and it’s really… Aggravating, honestly.

And that’s not precisely the same for AI… why? Why are the limited choices in photography significant, personal, and meaningful, but not the limited choices people make when generating pictures?

A lot of generative art has very similar lighting and positioning because it’s drawing on stock photographs which have a very standardized format.

Yes. Because the majority of stuff that’s generated by people without much intentionality, by amateurs, or both – but so are most photographs, they just don’t ever even get analysed in the context of being art or not because their purpose is to be external memory, not art. And arguably most AI generated stuff should not get analysed in the context of being art.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t control lightning, or that someone who does have a sufficiently deep understanding both of the medium of pictures in general, as well as the tool that is AI, would not, at some point, look at what’s on the screen and ask themselves “Do I want different lightning”. Maybe you do, Maybe you don’t. Like, there’s a reason there’s standard lightning setups, not every work has to be intentional about that particular aspect.

And maybe you want different lighting but the model you use doesn’t provide that kind of flexibility – when you say “still life” it insists on three-point lighting because it thinks one implies the other just as “mug” implies “handle”. You can then go ahead and teach it about different lighting setups, “this is an example of backlight, this of frontlight, this is three-point”, and, with some skill and effort, voila, now “still life with backlighting” works. There absolutely is intent in that. Speaking of models that can do that, here’s usage instructions for one that does.

In principle all samplers are deterministic because they use PRNGs, any and all actual non-determinism you see is due to GPUs, underlying acceleration libraries playing fast+loose with numerical accuracy. Which they do because the models are generally robust against noise which is exactly what lacking numerical accuracy (or quantisation) is, but you can get into situations where, on direct comparison, it does make a difference.

Why not “AI readymades”?

A LLM prompt can’t convey that level of intentionality, because if it did, you would just be writing it directly.

Photography, as opposed to painting, can’t either. Part of the art of photography is dealing with the fact that you cannot control certain things. And yes a complete noob can get absolutely lucky and generate something absolutely stunning and meaningful by accident.

Personally I vibe much more with definitions of art that revolve around author intentionality on the one side, and impact on the human mind on the other and AIs, so far, don’t have intentionality neither can they appreciate human psychology or perception so there’s really no such thing as “AI art” it’s “Humans employing AI as a tool, just as they employ brushes and cameras”, and the question of whether a piece created with help of AI is art or craft or slop or any combination of those is up to the human factor, no different than if you used some other tool.

So in my mind that auction is just as valid as one that focuses on photography. There’s a gazillion photographs made daily that aren’t art, and those don’t get auctions, just as deluges of stuff that AI generated doesn’t make it to that point. It’s still about that “special something” and being a materialist doesn’t mean you need to reject it: It is recognised by a very material computer right there in your head. It’s hard to pin down, yes, if it was easy to pin down it wouldn’t be art but craft.

With numbers out of Kiel:

132bn Euro divided by 450m Europeans == 296 Euro per capita. Not including already decided on money which has yet to be paid out, that’d nearly be double. Also not including refugee costs.

114bn Euro divided by 335m USians == 340 Euro per capita. Vastly exaggerated as they’re valuing ancient Bradleys they would have to pay to decommission at the price of buying a new, modern one, same with old ammunition. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the US are saving money by giving Ukraine weapons, there’s also shipping and refurbishment costs, but it’s definitely exaggerated.

Why would you think Ukraine is banking on Trump?

I don’t. You implied they do:

Zelenskyy’s demand for Russia to retreat to pre-invasion borders is less a roadmap than a plea wrapped in geopolitical theater—knowing full well Putin’s playbook doesn’t include rewinding clocks. Banking on Trump to broker peace reeks of tactical nihilism, betting on a man whose transactional whims could pivot faster than a TikTok trend.

If you did not want to be interpreted that way, may I suggest not using language such as “reeks of tactical nihilism” right after criticising Zelensky’s approach.

What he’s actually doing here is framing what “success” and “failure” means for Trump’s initiative, “If Trump can’t get this then it was a failure”. The point itself (pre-Feb-2022 lines) is rather unlikely in practical terms, it’s chosen so that a) Putin will not accept it, he wants way more and b) It is not Ukraine’s maximum position, either, so that afterwards it cannot be said “Ukraine could have had peace if they were only reasonable and realistic”.

There’s also a reason Zelensky only talked about “Russia must withdraw to”, not “Russia can keep”. Sounds more like “If Russia withdraws there, we can start talking about exchanging the rest for Kursk”. They’re establishing the desired framing of the Trump negotiations without giving up anything, even if Trump should succeed in pressuring Putin.

Now I don’t want to imply that Zelensky is running circles around both Trump and Putin when it comes to 4D chess. It’s not the man, it’s his whole administration. They’ve gobsmacked me more than once.

This is good for RISC-V.

Commas. “object of act of aggression” and “object of threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used” are two different, independent, conditions.

And btw China seems to be enforcing the latter. They independently gave Ukraine nuclear guarantees, just shy of calling it a nuclear umbrella, and there has been a suspicious absence of nuclear threats against Ukraine while there’s no shortage of Russian threats against NATO.

Ukraine doesn’t have the luxury of stopping Trump or anyone else

So why would they try? Why are you characterising them not attempting the impossible as “banking on Trump”?

Noone but MAGA has Trump as Plan A, B, and C.

Ukraine’s Plan A here is dictated by happenstance: Gotta wait for Trump because he’s gotta have his try. Plan B is going it alone with Europe. Plan C is their own military production. Plan D is partisan warfare. Ukraine is prepared for all of them.

How, in your mind, would Ukraine go about stopping Trump from doing whatever he’s going to do in Saudi Arabia, and what would be the costs?

Banking on Trump to broker peace reeks of tactical nihilism

Trump brokering a deal is not negotiable, he’s going to do it for the simple reason that he sees himself as the best deal-maker, the best negotiator, the best. It would be futile to try to stop him, and it doesn’t hurt Ukraine’s position that he try, so why the hell would they attempt to stop him.

There’s basically two outcomes, here: Trump thinks Putin is nuts when it comes to demands, Trump still wants to look good domestically, so he’s doubling down on Ukraine support. Then, Trump thinks Putin is in a strong position, he tries to dictate terms to Ukraine, but will fail. US support may or may not stop after that, depending on how he can spin it domestically, in any case Europe is there to have Ukraine’s back.

This decision point – is Trump going to squeeze a deal that’s acceptable for Ukraine out of Putin – has to be awaited before Ukraine can move, because otherwise you’re pissing Trump off and making the US pull out instead of double down more likely.

tl;dr: It’s strategically opportune to hold Trump’s beer right now, you might not believe he can get anything out of Putin but you got to let him try, and fail, on his own.

So what you’re saying is that no German reactor would ever be online for years while its backup power supply, critical for safety, was offline? Because yes that happened. Or that this is a proper way to store nuclear waste? Because that happened, too. Just as the water incursions into that salt mine.

Long story short humans can’t be trusted with this shit. If you think we can, you’re naive.

Don’t worry on that angle we’re using paper ballots, always have, always will, as the constitutional court decided that it must be possible for a voter with basic education and no specialised knowledge to ascertain for themselves that the vote is kosher. The constitutional court recently got reinforced, too. Not to mention that the federal level has preciously little power if the states really decided to tell it to fuck off. Also, as a Nazi you shouldn’t trust a military that names bases after Stauffenberg.

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Something something Emmanuel Todd and endogamous communal family structures, the tight internal clan bonds competing with and thus preventing the creation of a strong overarching identities vs. almost exclusively non-communal structures in Europe (and where there’s communalism it’s not as strong as in the Arab world, and definitely not endogamous), leading to strong overarching civil societies and identities. Very different assumptions about how society should be organised on a very fundamental, structural, level.

In those terms Europe is culturally way closer to e.g. Japan (just as much stem family structures as e.g. Ireland and lots of Scandinavian and German regions, some in France) than we are to the Arab world. Arabs actually integrating here means, for them, to flip an internal switch, saying something like “oh now my clan is my region, and my profession a secondary one”, and that is hard to do because a) you don’t actually know most of those people, while you know at least about everyone in your original clan, and b) you’re in a foreign land, not understanding what binds people together even though they might not know each other directly, also c) your family clan is still expecting you to be part of it, and not just in the “come to your cousin’s marriage” way. Lots of non-prejudicial cultural friction that especially people from absurdly individualist societies like the US don’t understand because they don’t have an overarching society in the first place. Both sides think the other is weird AF.