• 25 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • EU fines are working. Not in the sense that they would prevent companies from trying to do shit, but in the sense that they shape up once it has been levied: Understand that those 800m are a shot before the bow. If the behaviour continues, there’s going to be daily punitive fines that very quickly become very unaffordable.

    I mean, what is the money being used for?

    Goes towards the EU budget, reducing the amount the member states have to pay in. In other words Berlaymont doesn’t gain anything from levying fines, their budget stays the same.




  • Algorithmic patents amount to patenting maths which, by very longstanding precedence, is not a thing, for good reason. Same goes for business methods and other stuff.

    In the EU there’s only one way to patent software and that’s if you’re using it to achieve direct physical ends. E.g. you can patent washing machine firmware in so far as you patent a particular way to combine sensor data to achieve a particular washing result. Rule of thumb: If, 30 years ago, you’d have an electromechanical mechanism to do the task then you can patent the software that’s now replacing it.

    Oh: It’s also possible to patent silicon, that is, you can patent your hardware acceleration methods for video decoding. That doesn’t extend to decoders running on general-purpose hardware, though.

    If you want to monopolise your brand-new hash algorithm there’s a simple way: Don’t publish the source, use copyright to collect royalties… though that doesn’t mean that reverse engineering is outlawed, especially if necessary for interoperability. Practically speaking nope hash algorithms just can’t be protected which is fair and square because it’s academia who comes up with that kind of stuff and we paid for it with taxpayer money. Want to make money off it? Get tenure.



  • Set a temperature, have an exhaust, the temperature inside will be within a wibble of your set-point because the air stream will completely dominate over any other source of temperature raise/drop. You’re way overcomplicating things. Forego subtlety, consider the air as a bulldozer: If this was a closed system having feedback control would be a good idea but air frying is supposed to use fresh outside air so that the hot air is really dry and the intake air being a couple degrees hotter or colder won’t make a difference in practice. Just smash that shit.


  • Hmm. Diluting the air will be the hardest thing: A run off the mill heat gun will do 600C at 2000W in a concentrated stream, if you regulate it down to air frying temperature you’ll get very little total power so you’ll want to cool it down by pulling in additional ambient air instead. But with that out of the way… add a metal box and a timer? The heat gun already regulates the temperature. Probably not via PID though, just pre-set power levels for coils and fan they’re not exactly precision instruments.

    …and all that made me wonder and apparently there’s no culinary heat guns which would be a smart choice because they’d pay attention for all materials to be food-safe. But there are hobbyists reporting great results using standard heat guns instead of the usual torch. Not, to be honest, that you’d expect standard lighter gas to be food-grade, of course.


  • I’m not entirely against calling it frying, in both cases you have heat transfer by immersion in a dry liquid as contact medium, as opposed to heating with infrared radiation (e.g. toaster, many kinds of spits), direct contact with no or little contact medium (hot pan with no/minimum oil, waffle iron), using water (which is wet) as contact medium which invariably makes things soggy instead of crispy and thus very different, or directly moving the atoms in the food (microwave).

    That is: If you have a look at all the different ways to transfer heat into things then frying and baking are actually darn close to each other in the first place, compared to the rest. It’s the reason you can definitely make a passable calzone in a pan. And air frying in particular brigs baking into the frying range of crispiness so I’d say fair is fair, you can fry with air as long as you make you air mean enough.


  • The vast majority of sales are made to US based firms so they likely have a lot of sway.

    The sway is TSMC uses ASML EUV lithography machines and the US holds patents on those because they did foundational research regarding EUV lithography. Also, the EU hasn’t put China on the “it is illegal for EU companies to kowtow to US sanctions” list. Ironically ASML could sell to Cuba and Iran. If the EU were to tell ASML to sell to China the US would be free to not buy ASML machines any more and, doing that, kill off Intel’s fabs.

    None of this stuff has military relevance, you don’t need or even want to use small nodes (which require EUV) in military applications you want hardened chips instead. Run off the mill consumer chips go all frizzy if an EMP looks at them sideways. This is about the US protecting US fabs, foremost Intel. Not the chip design part but the manufacturing one.

    Europe hasn’t played the high-end end-consumer chip market for ages and I doubt we’ll do it any time soon. Having ASML, Zeiss etc. means that whoever actually produces that stuff wants to be friendly with us and strategically, both military and economy, our own production facilities are perfectly sufficient. Hence also why ESMC will only go as small as 12nm, it’s the most cost-effective node size and performance is perfectly adequate for a missile, a CNC mill, or a car infotainment system. Or the gyroscope chip in your phone (it’s almost certainly a Bosch), EUV doesn’t make a lick of sense when you’re doing MEMS. Where we have to catch up is chip design lets see how that RISC-V supercomputer chip turns out.



  • that meme makes is that it’s clear the gal doesn’t want to participate in the conversation due to body language.

    Not trying to argue against the meme, how it’s used and understood etc, but: You can’t interpret body language from a still image, you need at least like two or three movements, you need to see how someone reacts to their own movements so to speak. She might just as well be going “woah, cool”, slight backward surprise movement, and the two are the most wholesome couple you’ve ever met. Or she actually really wants to get out of there. That’s the point: The still image itself is too little information to make the distinction.


  • The problem is: Data is code, and code is data. An algorithm to compute prime numbers is equivalent to a list of prime numbers, (also, not relevant to this discussion, homoiconicity and interpretation). Yet we still want to make a distinction.

    Is a PAQ-compressed copy of the Hitchhiker’s guide code? Technically, yes, practically, no, because the code is just a fancy representation of data (PAQ is basically an exercise in finding algorithms that produce particular data to save space). Is a sorting algorithm code? Most definitely, it can’t even spit out data without being given an equally-sized amount of data. On that scale, from code to code representing data, AI models are at least 3/4th towards code representing data.

    As such I’d say that AI models are data in the same sense that holograms (these ones) are photographs. Do they represent a particular image? No, but they represent a related, indexable, set of images. What they definitely aren’t is rendering pipelines. Or, and that’s a whole another possible line of argument: Requiring Turing-complete interpretation.




  • Not to mention ARM chips which by and large were/are more efficient on the same node than x86 because of their design: ARM chip designers have been doing that efficiency thing since forever, owing to the mobile platform, while desktop designers only got into the game quite late. There’s also some wibbles like ARM insn decoding being inherently simpler but big picture that’s negligible.

    Intel just really, really has a talent for not seeing the writing on the wall while AMD made a habit out of it out of sheer necessity to even survive. Bulldozer nearly killed them (and the idea itself wasn’t even bad, it just didn’t work out) while Intel is tanking hit after hit after hit.


  • Lore books eh you’re giving me ideas. Hard to justify spending budget on that kind of stuff even if you have money to work with… how would one even get one’s hands on a woodprint artist? You know, the chisel and printing press kind? Imitating it is going to be hard indeed and figuring out how to do it not worth for a couple of one-off images you could just as well do without so either generating from prompt or telling the model to re-paint an input image in that style seems like the obvious solution.

    I think a similar rule applies as when it comes to code, and NIH syndrome syndrome: Whatever it is that is your primary focus you should write yourself, use libraries for the rest. If you write a shooter, you’re going to write the gunplay, but can take the renderer off the shelf. I you’re writing a walking simulator that happens to have a gun somewhere but is generally focussed on graphical atmosphere, go grab the gunplay off the shelf but write the renderer yourself.

    So unless the focus of your game is rummaging through books in an ancient library, go use that model.




  • ICANN isn’t really a massive organisation, it’s a technocratic non-profit with a buttload of advisory committees, including one for end users. The rules surrounding ccTLDs were tightened after Russia didn’t sunset .su, so they tried to take politics out of it, make it a wholly rules-based thing, but now it figures that the rule everyone wants to have is “decide on a case-by-case basis”.

    There’s also been various initiatives regarding reform of internet governance over the decades but in the end noone can agree on what would be better so ICANN keeps on chugging on.

    You know what would bring a quick end to this? If Mauritius doesn’t incorporate those islands into itself, letting them stay an autonomous territory. From British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritian Indian Ocean Territory.