You don't even need a setup like that to feel that pain. That pretty accurately describes my experience with those websites - and many others - with just a 24" 1920x1200 monitor.
The weird silver lining is that most sites are also using fonts a bit too far on the small side for me, and don't respond too well if you jack them up much. But that unused 2/3s of the screen ends up allowing most websites to take a fair bit of zoom without any changes in layout.
That characterization of computational neural networks is particularly true in any meaningful way. And being able to "correctly" anthropomorphize them is absolutely not the goal.
Computational neural networks are not models of biological brains, nor are they even attempting to be.
The basic functioning of a computational "neuron" in a neural network is at most reflective of an extreme distillation of the most fundamental concept of how a biological neuron works. And it really is just their functioning - ie executing.
The most important parts of making a computational neural network actually give meaningful output - training - doesn't even rise to the level of being vaguely inspired by the deconstruction of the concepts behind biological functions.
So, no. They aren't models of biological brains any more than boids are models of actual birds.
As for the goals of reasonably anthropomorphizing them... you're talking pretty much full on artificial general intelligence there. I don't believe anybody is reasonably suggesting modern deep learning is even a particularly viable route there, never mind something that's an active goal.
Uh, yeah... The post opens with a mention of being inspired by OpenBSD and goes into some detail on differences between their approach and OpenBSD's throughout.
I assume this is collecting some downvotes because it's unclear if the second sentence is supposed to apply specifically to the long covid population or the general population.
Based on the submitted paper, if it is intended to apply specifically to the long covid population, then it seems to be a reasonable comment. It did mention post-long-covid vaccinations seemed to be more harmful than helpful - something like ~15% found their long covid symptoms improved afterwards while ~20% had their symptoms worsen.
If that second sentence was intended to apply to the general population, then it's neither supported nor contradicted by the submitted paper. I don't believe it addressed risks outside of those already suffering from long covid. While it did address protection against long covid, it didn't come to a particular conclusion on the matter. It mentioned that studies on this aren't in general agreement yet, and pointed out a number of potential reasons for this, such as varying and potentially incomplete standards for discriminating between both long covid and control groups, in addition to the basic difficulties involved in keeping up with new strains.
As for other research... well that's a whole other thing.
Only if you were actually going to be influenced to buy the thing in the first place. And it's not like the various bits of advertising from a sponsorship go entirely unnoticed in many circumstances, with various requirements to add text ads to video descriptions and pinned comments.
If you're looking to be actually informed - rather than manipulated - you're not missing out on much with SponsorBlock.
Not to mention I've never actually seen anything both potentially useful and novel-to-me show up in a YouTube sponsorship anyway. It mostly seems to be full of companies with established models looking for ways to boost their adspend even higher after they've tapped out other avenues.
Adblocking seems very distinct from theft to me, but thankfully even that is irrelevant with SponsorBlock. Those sponsorships don't pay via impression and only the channel themselves could really try to track impressions anyway.
You're free to use SponsorBlock and save so much time, brain space, and frustration, without worrying about altering the creator's pay at all. I don't see why you wouldn't do it.
At this point I've got actual emotional/stress responses to segues in videos. It's ridiculous. At least SponsorBlock saves me a good number of ads and gives me a way to do something when an ad spot isn't skipped.
I think they were talking about SponsorBlock, which was mentioned on another same-level comment. Probably just didn't realize this was a separate sub-chain (or whatever you call it) without that context.
While there are other options as you pointed out, I'm not sure it's realistic to say they're more likely an effective deterrent than prison.
People pay tons of money to avoid prison, even temporarily - see lawyers, bail, etc. Same goes for getting prison sentences reduced, even just in part, to house arrest and probation.
Just what amount of fines, house arrest, and probation is going to be more effective a deterrent than prison?
I think there's a reasonable discussion to be had about where the line is between 'enough' deterrence and excessive punishment, but it's a bit absurd to claim that things people happily accept in lieu of going to prison will be more of a deterrent than prison.
It depends a lot on what kind of crime you're dealing with.
This isn't a matter of teaching the executives of Hertz that no, they don't need to commit crimes to survive, and how to access alternative means of survival, and all that.
They did this because they were greedy, lazy, and they knew they wouldn't suffer much for it. When you're dealing with white-collar sorts of crimes like this, deterrence is a thing.
The current update fits pretty well exactly on my screen, so I saw no hints that it was a series. After seeing the usual corporate speak and signoff, I assumed that was it.
I went looking in their history of posts for more information on the August incident but couldn't find anything, as the older installments do not show up individually.
The VPN is a funny one. Aside from appearances and legal realities, it's a great fit for them. It doesn't require a bunch of risky investment, and the whole VPN thing relies on trust anyway. I can't think of an organization offhand that would be well situated to run a VPN service and that I'd trust more as a VPN provider.
Of course they're not such a great fit if you're hoping for a slightly shady company in a country with favorable laws to conveniently 'lose' various legal requests. But other than that, if you had to guess if $slightly-shady-company or Mozilla was actually upholding their promises...
I don't like the situation either, but I find it hard to blame Mozilla for not pushing monetization hard enough. I can't think of anything more I'd like Mozilla to actually do.
I'm rather against being sold out, and suspect most Firefox users feel similarly.
Offering services essentially entirely separate from Firefox could work, but comes with substantial risk. Mozilla will be more trusted than some fly-by-night startup, at least among the techie crowd, but also can't just burn investor money and start over until something sticks. (Ironically, the only thing that comes to mind here for me would be a privacy-oriented email provider.)
The only maybe, theoretically, kind-of, plausible route I see working would be more of an open-core-esque model, where their paid offerings essentially implemented extension-like capabilities that would benefit substantially from deep integration with the browser. Think things that would otherwise be impossible with the extension API, or have substantial performance improvements if only Firefox internals could be messed with.
But. So many buts.
I'm not even sure their organization is setup to allow this kind of thing. I'm sure their codebase isn't, especially if it might require special considerations to comply with their charter.
Mozilla would also gain a bunch of perverse incentives to restrict or cripple base Firefox, which would bite them every time they added a new paid offering. For example, just how much more flack would they have caught for the new extension API if their own offerings wouldn't have to abide by any of those new limitations?
And it seems inevitable that they'll have to spend some serious effort to minimize the amount of browser fragmentation issues that would now occur within Firefox itself.
After all of that, the extensions most likely to get me to buy in - literally and otherwise - to the whole concept, would be ones that would seriously strain Mozilla's relationship with Google and many other companies. Things like deeply integrated ad-blocking and other privacy-focused features would be most likely to get me to not only accept the practice but even spend my money. But step one of weening themselves off Google's money probably shouldn't be "Burn bridges with Google."
So... yeah.
What else is Mozilla supposed to do? I'm not overly enamored with Mozilla these days. Increasingly I feel I'm sticking with them less because of anything they've done, and more because of what Google's done. But still, I find it hard to blame them too much for treading water.
My current thought on this is that the git model (or at least the interface for it) is probably a touch too simple to accommodate all the things people want to use it for. As a result, you get this whole 'clean history' vs 'what really happened' split. And often you can find a few more splits if you dig in a bit deeper into the actual mechanics people prefer.
Generally, bigger picture stuff works best with cleaner histories as they mop up a bunch of unnecessary and distracting details, and neatly package things together. But doing so also means you're getting rid of, well, the details. If you need them later - and some poor bastard always will - you're just screwed.
Unfortunately all we've got are commits, so you're constantly fighting different groups and even different people who value the benefits of different approaches due to their positions, histories, or preferences.
This isn't even a half-baked idea at this point, but at first glance something like a meta-commit which just contains more commits and a message seems like it might be better. The top-level commits could just be the 'clean history' while deeper levels could record more of the as-happened details.
Just because it hasn't seen activity in awhile doesn't mean it can't be used at all.
Sure, you're not going to want to start up a major project with a long-abandoned language experiment, but frankly it's not much of a step down from even an active language experiment.
I suppose it's got a greater chance of being harder to get going, but so much of that depends on how it was built in the first place that simply being older isn't enough information make much of a guess on that either.
> When a company has cash that it can't invest as profitably as its shareholders could do on their own, it's obligated to pay it to them as a dividend.
Aside from, as far as I know, not being any kind of legal obligation... I don't see how that situation would ever even come into effect if it was.
What kind of investment opportunity is going to turn down cash from a company (especially one the size of Facebook/Meta) but welcome it from most/all of their investors?
The weird silver lining is that most sites are also using fonts a bit too far on the small side for me, and don't respond too well if you jack them up much. But that unused 2/3s of the screen ends up allowing most websites to take a fair bit of zoom without any changes in layout.
I really don't get modern website design.