Linux was not muscled like that in 1991 - it’s first, barebones kernel was released in September of that year.

I remember installing Linux on a 90MHz 486 in the mid 90s and it barely ran X server with a simple window manager. And if the machine was turned off while Linux was running, you might not be able to boot again.

Linux now, however, is unrecognizeably better.

Can’t be C, C is the true path.

I’m guessing that exactly the same LLM model is used (somehow) on both sides - using different models or different weights would not work at all.

An LLM is (at core) an algorithm that takes a bunch of text as input and produces an output of a list of word/probabilities such that the sum of all probabilities adds to 1.0. You could place a wrapper on this that creates a list of words by probability. A specific word can be identified by the index in the list, i.e. first word, tenth word etc.

(Technically the system uses ‘tokens’ which represent either whole words or parts of words, but that’s not important here).

A document can be compressed by feeding in each word in turn, creating the list in the LLM, and searching for the new word in the list. If the LLM is good, the output will be a stream of small integers. If the LLM is a perfect predictor, the next word will always be the top of the list, i.e. a 1. A bad prediction will be a relatively large number in the thousands or millions.

Streams of small numbers are very well (even optimally) compressed using extant technology.

It seems you misunderstand the goal of goverment.

This is your opinion of what you want governments to be, not what they actually are.

What is the point of not researching and having bigger budget, if it can’t buy thing that did not get created?

What a lot of negatives and hypotheticals. All solved by getting a return on investment and having that money to do more things with, including research.

And then on goverment level there is no such thing as copyright or patent.

I’d like to introduce you to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) which is an intergovernmental organisation that does precisely what you say doesn’t exist.

They STILL need to put in money to create their own product.

Sure, but the cost to duplicate the product is tiny compared to researching, developing then creating a production run for it. And this fake normally severely impacts the profits for the inventor.

But now we’re just repeating the same arguments.

You appear to want to completely burn down a system you don’t understand because of some examples of misuse. For example, as there are slumlords, should we make all property free? Or should we solve the underlying problem (of massive capital flows to the rich?)

You also have no idea how to read and understand a patent. The way they are written is horrendously verbose and highly confusing, but so are medical research papers or legal case summaries, and for the similar reasons: these are highly technical documents that have to follow common law (i.e. a long history of legal decisions taken in IP disputes).

The real problem in the US IMHO has been the constant defunding of the patent office that has allowed a large number of very poor patents to be filed. The problems you are screaming about largely go to that root cause.

But don’t throw the baby out with the bath water - you have no idea how bad that would be for everybody but the mega corporations.

Manufacturing lines are built all that time for unpatented products,

And cheaply, because the research and productisation has been done by somebody else - this is an argument for patents

plus a competitor can’t just “take all of that work and investment”, they will need to put in money to create their own product,

Not true. One major issue is that many competitors literally copy the product exactly. Fake products wreck the original company

even if it’s a copy they still need to make it work,

That is 100x easier when you have a working product to clone

They’ll be second to market, and presumably need to undercut price to get market share… This is a very risky endeavour, unless the profit margins are huge, and in which case, good thing that there’s no patents…

The point is exactly that the fake product undercuts the original by a huge amount (they had no investment to pay off).

If the research is so costly and complex (pharmaceutical, aeronautical,…), then it should be at least partly funded by the government, through partnerships between universities and companies.

I agree that the government model makes sense for a lot of areas and products. But note that a government won’t invest millions or billions in developing a product if another country immediately fakes the product and prevents the government from collecting back the taxes it spent on the research.

As I discuss above there are lots of criticisms to the current IP laws - adjustment is 1000x better than abolishing a system that has driven research and development for several hundred years

All evidence points to the opposite of your conclusion.

In places where IP laws are weak or non-existent, very little fundamental or expensive research is done by companies - because the result is immediately cloned by 100 competitors. In medicine, companies will not research and develop new drugs to market unless they can get a return on the investment. Even in places with strong IP laws, development of drugs that can’t produce a return in the limited monopoly window is simply not done (eg with a small number of patients or when 1 course of a drug will permanently cure the patient), so many diseases do not have treatments.

In countries where there is strong IP laws, innovation jumps because innovating creates new things that people/companies can sell for profit. A personal area of interest is development of small-arms - every single advance from muskets to modern weapons is documented in patents in the US and Europe; the rate of innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries was incredible - and that is via patents and profit in the free market.

Now, we can have a productive argument about state sponsored research - but unless the state undertakes all research in an economy (which would be staggering overreach), we need IP laws.

We can also discuss patents on software (which IMHO are not needed because companies do fundamental research without patent laws like in the UK).

We can also discuss what is the appropriate time that copyright should remain - the Disney law in the US is a ridiculous overreach. It was 25 years or until the death of the author/artist - that worked very well for centuries.

You don’t need government promises of monopoly rights to create innovation in the marketplace, competition drives innovation.

I agree that the end is not unguessable, but it’s pure wish fulfillment, and it’s not earned by the characters involved.

I agree, completely unearned. My headcanon has the movie end quite differently and more satisfactorily (but I won’t give spoilers).

It was a surprisingly good drama, but I felt the ending was a bit formulaic.

The Catholic/Papal setting is technically central to the film, and provides amazing visuals, but, like many good films, the movie is centred on interesting characters and their personal struggles. The movie could be rewritten to place it in any organisation and it would still be great. I say this not to downplay the religious angle, but to highlight that you don’t have to be Catholic to enjoy it.

Having said that, the lead actors’ performances are amazing and work wonderfully together.

It’s a corollary of the other famous expression that science advances one funeral at a time. This came from Max Planck and predates Clarke:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it …

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.

Max Planck, Scientific autobiography, 1950, p. 33, 97

TSMC and Intel both use ASML lithography, but there are many many more steps than just lithography - Intel, TSMC, Samsung and other chipmakers use different processes to make the components on their chips (many of which are patented and so owned by specific parties).

These things include the physical structure of the components and wiring on the chip, how the silicon is doped and with what ions, what coatings are put on to be etched in the lithography and what coatings are applied to the etched layers, how the chips are packaged and also how multiple chips can be combined into one package.

Basically there are similarities but also hige differences between the different manufacturers, and a lot of trade secrets.

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, I’d recommend the youtube channel Asianometry - the content creator is amazing.

Better: Above 60°C pasteurizes the contents so killing all bacteria.

Technically pasteurization is met by holding the food over a specific temperature for a specific time, so over 63-65°C for 30 minutes, or 100°C for 12 seconds.

Normal pasteurization is very similar to cooking in times and temperature, and so pasteurization cooks both the food, altering texture, appearance and taste, and the bacteria.

UHT means ultra high temperature pasteurisation, which heats, eg, milk well over 100°C for only a couple of seconds and immediately cools it, minimizing the alteration of the milk.

So, by keeping the stew over 70°C, the stew is completely food safe.

All junior devs should read OCs comment and really think about this.

The issue is whether is_number() is performing a semantic language matter or checking whether the text input can be converted by the program to a number type.

The former case - the semantic language test - is useful for chat based interactions, analysis of text (and ancient text - I love the cuneiform btw) and similar. In this mode, some applications don’t even have to be able to convert the text into eg binary (a ‘gazillion’ of something is quantifying it, but vaguely)

The latter case (validating input) is useful where the input is controlled and users are supposed to enter numbers using a limited part of a standard keyboard. Clay tablets and triangular sticks are strictly excluded from this interface.

Another example might be is_address(). Which of these are addresses? ‘10 Downing Street, London’, ‘193.168.1.1’, ‘Gettysberg’, ‘Sir/Madam’.

To me this highlights that code is a lot less reusable between different projects/apps than it at first appears.

Typically you need about 1GB graphics RAM for each billion parameters (i.e. one byte per parameter). This is a 405B parameter model. Ouch.

Edit: you can try quantizing it. This reduces the amount of memory required per parameter to 4 bits, 2 bits or even 1 bit. As you reduce the size, the performance of the model can suffer. So in the extreme case you might be able to run this in under 64GB of graphics RAM.

I think that’s a better plan than physically printing keys. I’d also want to save the keys in another format somewhere - perhaps using a small script to export them into a safe store in the cloud or a box I control somewhere

You need at least two copies in two different places - places that will not burn down/explode/flood/collapse/be locked down by the police at the same time.

An enterprise is going to be commissioning new computers or reformatting existing ones at least once per day. This means the bitlocker key list would need printouts at least every day in two places.

Given the above, it’s easy to see that this process will fail from time to time, in ways like accicentally leaking a document with all these keys.

I agree, so much legislation is broken, the legislators aren’t doing shit, so we citizens need to fix it!

But we could start with the right to repair.

What about the people who lived in the Americas or the Pacific 1800 years ago? These people could not have heard of Jesus as missionaries could not have spread any word to them at this time.

(And while I’m about it, Christianity was a whole different thing back then - the Trinity hadn’t been invented, there were multiple sects with very different ideas, what books would be in the New Testament had not been decided, etc etc. People with beliefs of that time would seem highly unorthodox today, and the Christianity of today would be seen as heretical by those in the 3rd century, so who’s going to heaven again?)

Purgatory was invented for the purpose of not sending good people who had not heard of Jesus to hell. But still, these people were denied their chance to get to heaven which seems mighty unfair.

If you’re pushing everyone’s buttons it’ll end badly.