There are ISO country codes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-infrastructure/latest/regions/aws-regions.html

eu-west-1Europe (Ireland)

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/aws-restricts-data-center-access-in-ireland-amid-power-concerns-report/

AWS restricts data center access in Ireland amid power concerns - report

AWS is reportedly restricting the number of resources users can access in Ireland amid ongoing concerns about the amount of power consumed by the nation’s data centers.

Amazon’s cloud platform is periodically limiting access to its Ireland-based eu-west-1 region, according to a report in The Register. Energy-intensive instances, such as those where GPUs are deployed to run AI workloads, are said to be particularly impacted by the restrictions.

It does sound like more generation capacity is required, regardless.

Klein said there was huge pressure on energy prices in Europe, so building more datacenters was not a good solution.

Well, I assume that this would also involve building out more electrical generation capacity.

We’re going to need to be building capacity in the US.

https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-evaluating-increase-electricity-demand-data-centers

The report estimates that data center load growth has tripled over the past decade and is projected to double or triple by 2028. U.S. electricity demand is projected to account for data center expansion and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) applications, domestic manufacturing growth, and electrification of different industries.

The report finds that data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023 and are expected to consume approximately 6.7 to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028.

https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/ai-power-demand-and-u-s-energy-policy/

AI Power Demand and US Energy Policy

Recent analysis from the power-consultancy firm Grid Strategies shows that between 2024 and 2029, US electricity demand will grow at five times the rate predicted in 2022.

The last time I used a commercial VPS, I’m pretty sure it used VNC to provide console access.

The VNC software I linked to above appears to support TLS. If TLS isn’t sufficient transport security, then most Internet-using software is going to be in trouble.

I’m not sure what you mean by subjective.

I haven’t looked at the VNC protocol for a while, but I don’t think that it imposes any terrible inefficiencies. A couple of decades back, I needed to implement something quick-and-dirty similar to VNC, and went with rendering window contents and handling dragging of windows locally, which I don’t believe that VNC can do (or didn’t then) but IIRC VNC has a tile cache, which, if intelligently used, should avoid most traffic. Dunno if it can deal well with efficiently rendering visual effects.

Right. What I’m saying is that the benefit that VRR provides falls off as monitor refresh rate increases. From your link:

If a game on console doesn’t deliver new frame on time, two things can happen.

Console can wait for a new TV frame, delaying display time about 16.7 ms (VSYNC). Which leads to an effect called stuttering and uneven frame pacing…

If you have a 60 Hz display, the maximum amount of time that software can wait until a rendered frame goes to a static refresh rate screen is 1/60th of a second.

But if you have a 240 Hz display, the maximum amount of time that software can wait until a rendered frame is sent to a static refresh rate screen is 1/240th of a second.

OLED monitors have no meaningful framerate physical constraints from the LED elements on refresh rate; that traditionally comes from the LCD elements (well, I mean, you could have higher rates, but the LCD elements can only respond so quickly). If the controller and the display protocol can handle it, an OLED monitor can basically display at whatever rate you want. So OLED monitors out there tend to support pretty good refresh rates.

Looking at Amazon, my first page of OLED monitor results has all capable of 240Hz or 480Hz, except for one at 140 Hz.

That doesn’t mean that there is zero latency, but it’s getting pretty small.

Doesn’t mean that there isn’t value to VRR, just that it declines as the refresh rate rises.

Reason I bring it up is because I’d been looking at OLED monitors recently myself, and the VRR brightness issues with current OLED display controllers was one of the main concerns that I had (well, that and burn-in potential) and I’d decided that if I were going to get an OLED monitor before the display controller situation changes WRT VRR, I’d just run at a high static refresh rate.

It does sound like there’s a way to ask GNOME to use VRR only when fullscreen stuff is running:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1brlzqj/mouse_cursor_stuttering_on_gnome_with_vrr_enabled/

I prefer Gnome+Dash2Dock- there I have set it to do VRR only in fullscreen apps (aka games).

But the user doesn’t specify what he’s done to enable that setting, and I’m not familiar with GNOME’s (mutter’s?) Wayland settings. But if you are okay with VRR only with fullscreen apps, looking into that might address the issue.

Setting a high refresh rate is somewhat of a given, but won’t negate anything which VRR helps with - screen tearing.

I mean, I’d just turn on vsync; that’s what it’s for. VRR is to let you push out a frame at the instant that it finishes rendering. The benefit of that declines as the monitor refresh rate rises, since there’s less delay until the next frame goes to the monitor.

If you’re always playing with VSync on and getting constant frame rates, that’s not an issue

looks blank

Constant framerates? You’re saying that you get tearing with vsync on if whatever program you’re using can’t handle rendering at whatever the monitor’s refresh rate is? I mean, it shouldn’t.

Running a static refresh rate with vsync will add a tiny bit of latency until the image shows up on the screen relative to VRR, but that’s a function of the refresh rate; that falls off as the refresh rate rises.

VNC is dead.

How so?

There are a number of software packages in Debian that implement VNC. To grab one random example, the last commit to their git repo was last month.

What is not so great is the amount of flickering I get in Gnome now when I have the experimental VRR setting enabled.

The only way I get Windows to flicker as much on the desktop is if I turn on adaptive refresh rate, which kind of appears to be what Gnome is doing all the time.

I don’t totally get what you’re trying to accomplish. If you don’t want VRR in the desktop environment, are you wanting VRR only to be active when a fullscreen game or movie player is running or something?

EDIT: I’d also add that my understanding is that brightness fluctuation is kind of part and parcel with VRR on current OLED display controllers. I don’t think that it’s a fundamental limitation, that you could make a display controller that did a better job, but I’ve read articles matching up OLED monitors, and all of them that I’ve read about suffer from this. Like, if I got an OLED monitor today myself, I’d probably just set a high static refresh rate (which, fortunately, is something that OLED does do well).

Russia has a population of 146,028,325, of which this would be 6.8%. These are tremendously-disproportionate numbers; the 10 million here would be about a quarter Ukraine’s prewar population. My expectation—without trying to do a deeper analysis looking at what military hardware might wind up in the hands of the seceding oblasts—is that absent other changes in Russia, or political unwillingness to fight against seceding oblasts, or outside direct involvement, there would be a civil war and the resources of the other 93% would most-likely defeat them and re-extend control over them.

That might have a risk of nuclear civil war, depending upon how the military acts and what control of the arsenal looks like. The prospect of nuclear war amongst ex-member states of the Soviet Union was a principal concern of the US about the time that the Soviet Union broke up.

EDIT: Updated numbers to reflect the fact that Saint Petersburg isn’t part of Leningrad Oblast.

Define “know”.

• An LLM can have text describing how it works and be trained on that text and respond with an answer incorporating that.

• LLMs have no intrinsic ability to “sense” what’s going on inside them, nor even a sense of time. It’s just not an input to their state. You can build neural-net-based systems that do have such an input, but ChatGPT or whatever isn’t that.

• LLMs lack a lot of the mechanisms that I would call essential to be able to solve problems in a generalized way. While I think Dijkstra had a valid point:

  The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

  …and we shouldn’t let our prejudices about how a mind “should” function internally cloud how we treat artificial intelligence…it’s also true that we can look at an LLM and say that it just fundamentally doesn’t have the ability to do a lot of things that a human-like mind can. An LLM is, at best, something like a small part of our mind. While extracting it and playing with it in isolation can produce some interesting results, there’s a lot that it can’t do on its own: it won’t, say, engage in goal-oriented behavior. Asking a chatbot questions that require introspection and insight on its part won’t yield interesting result, because it can’t really engage in introspection or insight to any meaningful degree. It has very little mutable state, unlike your mind.

I enjoyed Bastion and Transistor.

I also preferred Hades to either.

Sure. I’ll add one guess that I’ve had for a long time as to one substantial factor in what helped start things get going in Europe relative to East Asia: moveable type. That drastically brought down the cost of written works, which acted as an enabler for subsequent social and technological changes, and happened towards the beginning of that “early divergence” period.

Why didn’t it take off in East Asia?

East Asia had had block printing, even moveable type, for a long time before Europe. However, it did not use alphabetic systems of writing, and if you have thousands of logograms, the kind of practical “I have a small number of bins of identical characters” thing doesn’t work nearly as well.

https://ca.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/moveable-type-story-of-china/moveable-type-story-of-china/

The Chinese first invented movable type during the Song Dynasty, but the complexity of the Chinese language made it cumbersome and not cost efficient.

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

A potential solution to the linguistic and cultural bottleneck that held back movable type in Korea for 200 years appeared in the early 15th century—a generation before Gutenberg would begin working on his own movable-type invention in Europe—when Sejong the Great devised a simplified alphabet of 24 characters (hangul) for use by the common people, which could have made the typecasting and compositing process more feasible. But Korea’s cultural elite, “appalled at the idea of losing hanja, the badge of their elitism”, stifled the adoption of the new alphabet.[20]

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

A particular difficulty posed the logistical problems of handling the several thousand logographs whose command is required for full literacy in the Chinese language. It was faster to carve one woodblock per page than to composite a page from so many different types.[citation needed] However, if one was to use movable type for multitudes of the same document, the speed of printing would be relatively quicker.[20][better source needed]

Despite the appeal of moveable type, however, craftsmen soon decided that the semi-cursive and cursive script style of Japanese writings was better reproduced using woodblocks. By 1640 woodblocks were once again used for nearly all purposes.[67] After the 1640s, movable type printing declined, and books were mass-produced by conventional woodblock printing during most of the Edo period. It was after the 1870s, during the Meiji period, when Japan opened the country to the West and began to modernize, that this technique was used again

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press#Gutenberg.27s_press

The invention of mechanical movable type printing led to a huge increase of printing activities across Europe within only a few decades. From a single print shop in Mainz, Germany, printing had spread to no less than around 270 cities in Central, Western and Eastern Europe by the end of the 15th century.[52] As early as 1480, there were printers active in 110 different places in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, England, Bohemia and Poland.[5] From that time on, it is assumed that “the printed book was in universal use in Europe”.[5]

https://www.taiwan-panorama.com/Articles/Details?Guid=09433229-1971-44c8-a7fe-0193be415fbc&langId=3&CatId=11

In the 1970s, major newspapers in Europe and North America steadily entered the era of computer set printing, which was a great blow to traditional moveable type. Computer printing makes for faster entry, convenient editing and amending, and cleanliness, and saves manpower to boot.

So that would have been a technological window running from in the 1400s to something like the 1970s where it was cheaper to do production of written works in (alphabet-based) European languages than in (logogram-based) major East Asian languages.

EDIT: On another interesting note, the Soviets tried to promote an alphabet-based writing system for Chinese some time back.

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

Work towards designing Latinxua Sin Wenz began in Moscow as early as 1928, when the Soviet Scientific Research Institute on China sought to create a means through which the large Chinese population living in the Far East of the Soviet Union could be made literate, facilitating their further education.

From the very outset, it was intended that the Latinxua Sin Wenz system, once established, would supersede the Chinese characters.[16] The Latin alphabet was chosen over the Cyrillic alphabet because the former was thought to better serve their purposes

For a time, the system was very important in spreading literacy in northern China, and more than 300 publications, totaling 500,000 issues, were printed in Latinxua Sin Wenz.[16] Ultimately, promotion of the system ceased, because of its proposed target of superseding logographic Chinese characters altogether, which was deemed too radical:

In 1944 the latinization movement was officially curtailed in the communist-controlled areas [of China] on the pretext that there were insufficient trained cadres capable of teaching the system. It is more likely that, as the communists prepared to take power in a much wider territory, they had second thoughts about the rhetoric that surrounded the latinization movement; in order to obtain the maximum popular support, they withdrew support from a movement that deeply offended many supporters of the traditional writing system.[21]

The Great Divergence. China was also up there alongside India for many centuries. Europe was a backwater.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/2000-years-economic-history-one-chart/

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/e89435dd-fa66-4eaa-bc9a-fb97c5053d77.jpeg

Note that the time axis on the chart above is not linear.

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

The Great Divergence or European miracle is the socioeconomic shift in which the Western world (i.e. Western Europe along with its settler offshoots in Northern America and Oceania[2]) overcame pre-modern growth constraints and emerged during the 19th century as the most powerful and wealthy world civilizations, eclipsing previously dominant or comparable civilizations from Asia such as Qing China, Mughal India, the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, and Tokugawa Japan, among others.[3]

Scholars have proposed a wide variety of theories to explain why the Great Divergence happened, including geography, culture, institutions, and luck.[4] There is disagreement over the nomenclature of the “great” divergence, as a clear point of beginning of a divergence is traditionally held to be the 16th or even the 15th century, with the Commercial Revolution and the origins of mercantilism and capitalism during the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery, the rise of the European colonial empires, proto-globalization, the Scientific Revolution, or the Age of Enlightenment.[5][6][7][8] Yet the largest jump in the divergence happened in the late 18th and 19th centuries with the Industrial Revolution and Technological Revolution. For this reason, the “California school” considers only this to be the great divergence.[9][10][11][12]

Technological advances, in areas such as transportation, mining, and agriculture, were embraced to a higher degree in western Eurasia than the east during the Great Divergence. Technology led to increased industrialization and economic complexity in the areas of agriculture, trade, fuel, and resources, further separating east and west. Western Europe’s use of coal as an energy substitute for wood in the mid-19th century gave it a major head start in modern energy production. In the twentieth century, the Great Divergence peaked before the First World War and continued until the early 1970s; then, after two decades of indeterminate fluctuations, in the late 1980s it was replaced by the Great Convergence as the majority of developing countries reached economic growth rates significantly higher than those in most developed countries.[13]

I mean, at least tell them what the correct usage is.

OP, you probably want “software package” or “a piece of software”.

“Software” is a mass noun, like “butter”. You can’t have “a butter”. You can have “a pound of butter”.

In English, mass nouns are characterized by the impossibility of being directly modified by a numeral without specifying a unit of measurement and by the impossibility of being combined with an indefinite article (a or an). Thus, the mass noun “water” is quantified as “20 litres of water” while the count noun “chair” is quantified as “20 chairs”. However, both mass and count nouns can be quantified in relative terms without unit specification (e.g., “so much water”, “so many chairs”, though note the different quantifiers “much” and “many”).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/software

Usage notes

Software is a mass noun (some software, a piece of software). By non-native speakers it is sometimes erroneously treated as a countable noun (a software, some softwares).

“A something” is only correct if the noun is a countable noun.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitter-rolls-out-encryption-for-direct-messages-but-with-key-limitations/

Twitter rolls out encryption for direct messages but with key limitations

Both the sender and recipient must be verified, while group conversations and attached media aren’t supported by the encryption.

For an existing chat, tap the Info icon. If the option is available, you’ll see a button for Start an encrypted message that you can just click. For a new chat, turn on the switch to enable encrypted mode. Write your message, and then send it.

So what is the difference between what they’re rolling out and what they added in 2023? Support for more users, maybe? Support for non-verified users?

EDIT: Apparently it had been disabled earlier this week?

https://www.theverge.com/news/676171/xs-encrypted-dms-are-being-put-on-pause

This article implies that it was to address some of the limitations, though isn’t explicit about what if anything here is being addressed:

According to the document, encrypted DMs are only available if you are a verified user (somebody who pays for Twitter Blue), a verified organization (an organization that pays $1,000 per month), or an affiliate of a verified organization (which costs $50 per month per person). Both the sender and recipient must be on the latest version of the Twitter app (on mobile and web). And an encrypted DM recipient must follow the sender, have sent a message to the sender in the past, or accept a DM request from the sender at some point.

tried

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/eu.mirkodi.swatchbeatclock/

Can still do it!

“No one,” sourly thought a reader in Longyearbyen, Norway. “No one, dammit.”

Longyearbyen experiences midnight sun from between 18 April and 24 August (128 days), polar night from 27 October to 15 February (111 days), and civil polar night from 13 November to 29 January. However, due to shading from mountains, the sun is not visible in Longyearbyen until around 8 March.

and the (almost) adoption in the US.

For example:

• 1 bushel is exactly 64 dry pints.

• 1 dry pint is exactly 107521/92400 liquid pints.

• 1 liquid pint is exactly 231/8 cubic inches.

• We formally defined the inch in terms of the metric system in the 1950s as being precisely 2.54 centimeters.

Thus making the bushel exactly 220244188543/6250000 cubic centimeters.¹

¹ Unless you’re talking about an oat bushel, a barley bushel, a wheat bushel, or a few other exceptions.

I’m now imagining that playing out.

“France, we’re thinking about adopting British time as the global standard. Do you have any thoughts or input on the matter?”