The only reason the regulation happened is because Apple ignored the “industry, agree on a standard or we’ll set one for you” memo: By the time the EU passed the act all other manufacturers had already shaped up.

That is: For other companies, the looming threat sufficed. Apple needed to be forced.

The DSA contains provisions for combatting disinformation and as a very large online platform google is required to implement suitable practices. The DSA is a regulation, that is, immediately applicable law in all of the EU. As is usual for laws it’s written pretty generically and abstract, though, so the commission is also publishing more detailed documents that companies can use as check-lists.

In essence, the difference between the tax code and the finance ministry publishing a paper on accounting best practices. You’re free to ignore the latter but that will likely make your life harder than it needs to be.

Well, define “long after”. The earliest surviving non-Christian source is Tacitus who is generally considered to be a reliable histographer and had access to records that are now lost, he wrote, in about 116 CE, in the context of Nero’s burning of Rome (64 CE):

Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.

116 CE should be about 80 years after crucifixion, not that long. If the Romans had not done it they would have considered themselves slandered and mentioned it in their justifications as to why Christianity should be persecuted, it would have been part of the contemporary political consciousness.

It’s pretty well-established within the field of history that there was a Jewish mendicant preacher named Jesus of Nazareth who got baptised by John and nailed to a cross by order of Pilates. That’s just as well (or badly) attested as anything else about notable people in Galilee at the time.

It’s the rest that ranges from unattested to either allegorical or certainly made up.

Intel and overheating.

And if it’s going to be full-blown AGI then we’ll become AI psychologists.

they used opposite genders

Not necessarily. For IBM PCs that was true, but my UltraSPARC had a differently-gendered serial port which was very annoying because neither standard straight nor null-modem cables worked. It was a DB-25, carrying two ports.

Those connectors were used for a lot of different things, with no autonegotiation no nothing. At least the pinout for port A was compatible with the standard DB-25 one-port pinout, just with different gender.

Or do these limits only kick in for platforms above a certain size?

That’s how it’s in the EU, the DSA only applies to large providers. It’s kinda like the fairness doctrine in broadcasting but in the digital domain, e.g. TikTok is currently in hot waters over the Romania elections because they did not take sufficient precautions to make sure that everything’s fair and square.

And in that case, why would the same principle not apply?

Because size obliges. If I want to smelt some cans in my backyard I can just do that provided I have a “fireplace” – which is just an area set up to be suitable to have a fire. If I want to build an industrial-scale aluminium smelter I have to get permits and everything. The public interest in the latter is much larger, that’s why I have to jump through hoops and follow regulations.

(I can’t burn garden waste though, gotta give it to the municipality to compost. A matter of waste of perfectly fine organic material and unnecessary emissions).

It’s not even about humanity, it’s also the right thing to do from a business perspective: You want your workers to be productive again ASAP, that’s worth not just continuing to pay them, but also focussing the collective buzz-bee energy of middle management on finding out what everyone needs and finding ways of providing it so they can actually do work instead of dealing with personal shit. Suddenly have 1000 homeless employees? Get them hotel rooms, find them homes, if need be build apartments. Have the legal department pro-bono the management of their insurance claims. Whatever is necessary, the next useless presentation and the next grand lawsuit you planned can wait. Don’t paint your nails while your feet are on fire.

I wouldn’t say primary type, they just happen to be the primary example that theory (complexity analysis etc) is taught with. Hence also the veritable zoo of very very bad sorting algorithms that still have proper names. There’s no quantum bogosort for string search.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorting_algorithm

Which is just stochastic optimisation.

Which yes is exactly what evolution does, big picture. Small picture the genome evolves a bit more intelligently, using not random generation and filtering but an algorithm employing randomness to generate, and then the usual survival filter because doing it that way is, well, fitter. Also what you can see under a microscope.

Merkur 23C, btw, in case anyone is looking for a safety razor that’s both inexpensive and very good. Unchanged for literally a century now, no fancy materials (“aerospace-grade aluminium”) but good ole chromed zinc and brass. On the blade side, Russians being out of the picture, BIC is probably the right choice unlike other western brands they didn’t slouch on quality. Feather is always an option but many consider them too sharp. Also, more expensive. BICs should be somewhere around 15ct a piece. Don’t buy anything of that stuff from Wilkinson or such their offerings in that area seem to only exist to make safety razors look bad.

because Zuckerberg did Jujitsu

LMFAO that coordination failure of a leek I have to see that.

I can’t believe this exists. Watch carefully how Lex Fridman (yes that one) goes to great lengths to not kill Zuckerberg in training.

As to martial arts in general and assholery, I’ll just leave this here.

Higher refresh rates for movies are meh at best, VRR OTOH is a godsend as 24Hz just won’t fit into 60Hz. Gaming, too, is much nicer when you have VRR, figures that delayed frames are quite a bit less noticeable than dropped frames.

Depends on whether you grow crops specifically to turn into fuel or ferment waste that would otherwise ferment in the open.

The main point on the European level revolved around whether construction of gas plants should get access to some green fund or the other, to which the answer is yes because they’ll always carry some on-demand load, and seasonal storage is bound to include syngas because we’ll need that stuff anyway as chemical feedstock.

US/Canadian border from roughly Vancouver to Winnipeg. Berlin is further north than Saskatoon, Karlsruhe is on the 49th parallel. The lot of mainland Europe is north of Albuquerque. In fact much of Tunesia is north of Albuquerque. Miami is on about the same parallel as Bahrain, Orlando on the same as New Delhi.

They introduced some kind of caps (don’t remember the details) on negative pricing quite early on, from what I understand it would have been very lucrative in the last decade or two to get into grid-scale battery storage without those caps.

One thing I remember is Flensburg building, pretty much on a whim, a water storage tank with immersion heater, an investment that amortised within a month or two as they were literally getting paid to fuel their district heating.

There’s got to be some rules as to what you can do with electricity you by at negative prices, e.g. not just put an immersion heater in the ocean, maybe some prioritisation as to who gets the energy first just as there is on the production side (fossils have to shut down and pay if they don’t do that fast enough while renewables get to produce energy), but overall I don’t see why there should be a limit on negative prices.

Is there a particular narrative floating around “women can’t do movies”? In the present, I mean? There have been plenty of “women can’t be soldiers” narratives in Uhura’s time, also (in the US) “black women can if anything only be maids in movies”, of course that opens a door.

To me, “women can’t do movies” makes about as much sense as “women can’t write books”. Ask even a paleoconservative and I doubt either would make sense to them. There has to be a narrative that needs to be broken for a narrative-breaking role model to have an effect, especially as “you can do anything, girl” is also a narrative.

Also, rant: Why is it that female role models got a downgrade. I’m talking about the original Mulan “be smart about things and play to your strengths and you can achieve the barely imaginable” vs. remake Mulan “you have literal magic powers that’s why you’re better than everyone at everything” type of thing.

…just looked at who wrote/directed either and let me just say that according to this limited sample, it is infinitely better to have men write and direct inspirational movies for girls than let women do it. Just for the record I don’t doubt that women can make good movies, those just clearly can’t, and I hated the remake before I just looked up who made it.

What’s more important: That the movie inspires a billion young girls or that the behind the scenes inspires the 10k who bother to watch it?

they might not make the mental leap to “I want to be a director, and I think it’s possible”.

You have an awfully low opinion of women’s agency.

Regarding STEM: Countries with higher gender equality have lower rates of women in STEM. One factor there is that STEM pays well so in less equal societies getting into it gets you independence and security that is not necessary in more equal ones.

Regarding CS in particular, it was found that the type of examples in intro courses has a lot of influence, e.g. you can explain Dijkstra’s algorithm by talking about finding the shortest path a message might take between two people who know each other only via chains of acquaintances, or by having a robot find a path through a maze. Once people are into the field it doesn’t matter any more as they recognise examples as that, mere examples of a more general thing, but the intro classes should address preferences of different populations equally and we don’t have to get into why those preferences exist that’s contextually irrelevant. Just do it. Much more fruitful than adulating Ada Lovelace or Grace Hopper. At least the latter would probably have punched you for it.