Author here. My hosts file was written to without notice. The Adobe Creative Cloud app runs as admin, and does automated updates (when it's working as intended) without further requiring a password. Most of the things that I listed as deleting in my post required me to enter an admin password to delete. However, the Adobe updater happily updated them without requiring a password. One of them was a background helper in `/Library/PrivilegedHelperTools`, which is granted root access on installation. It runs as root on boot, and can do basically whatever it wants. I don't know how this works on Windows, but I assume it's something similar.
The only reason I knew that it was happening was because of a Hacker News post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664205). I linked to the same OSNews article linked to in the HN post in my piece. It seems like Adobe has reverted this change since then because of the pushback (and insanity) of this sort of change. But there's nothing surprising about the mechanism here. The only unbelievable bit is that they'd choose to do this.
Scorched Earth taught me the concept of software versions. It was the first program that I ever knowingly interacted with more than one point-release of. I had version 1.0, but a friend had version 1.2. My very young mind was boggled by the concept of software being updated.
I'll state it plainly, then: Python is more widely used and supported. It has more examples, and more people understand it and can debug it. I hope that helps you.
It's strange to me that this blog post was written in English. If AI is available, why aren't we all communicating in Lojban? [0] It's an obviously superior language. What does it matter that many people already communicate in English and much of computing depends on that language? AI doesn't care about that. Plus, if you ever need to edit Lojban without AI, you should be able to pick it up in a few weeks, right?
I’ve been hit by this when posting links. If you edit the post, you can re-add the stripped word and it will stay. “Why” is another that is often stripped.
Author here. I'm not complaining or trying to talk smack. I'm just pointing out something that seems to be coming: LLM price increases or the products being degraded to make more revenue. If I knew how to solve that, I'd be insanely wealthy.
Author here. The reason I wrote that local hardware is "sipping power most of the time" is because most of the time it's not doing LLM-related work. If you're just using your local machine (or eventually maybe even your phone) to do local LLM tasks, you're not doing that all day.
I agree that data centres will be set up to be more efficient, but we're also going to need fewer of them if local LLMs take off. If that's true, overbuilding data centres is more revenue pressure for AI companies.
Is this something you're seeing personally? If so, how do you know it's because of the Online Safety Act? This is a personal blog and it doesn't seem to have any adult content that I can find. The homepage of the site isn't blocked when I check it here: https://www.blocked.org.uk/check
The book starts with generating fairly standard mazes, but transitions to making more interesting ones in later chapters. There are 12 algorithms explained in the book (listed in the link above), and the author does care about making pleasant mazes.
This is a great list! A while back I also enjoyed reading “Mazes for Programers” and playing around with different maze generation algorithms from that book over a holiday break. The book isn’t super deep, but it has a fun set of projects and further ideas/reading as well. https://pragprog.com/titles/jbmaze/mazes-for-programmers/
> AI is getting better/faster/cheaper at incredible rates, but regardless of when, unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence. We call that point AGI.
I still don’t think this is certain. It’s telling that code generation is one of the few things these systems do extremely well. Translating between English and French isn’t that much different than translating between English and Python. These are both tasks where the most likely next token has a good shot of being correct. I’m still not sold that we should assume that LLM-based tech will be well-generalized beyond that. Maybe some new tech will come along to augment or replace LLMs and that will get us there, who knows. Just because the line is going up quickly at the moment doesn’t mean it always will.
What is Office EU?
Office EU is a European productivity suite for files, email, calendars, documents and calls, built on Nextcloud Hub. It brings Files, Talk, Groupware and Office together in one platform.
Looking through the Office EU screenshots, they do look like Nextcloud Groupware/Files/Office with the logo changed.
Mostly adding this because I wasn't sure if it was a new product or not based on a first glance over the Office EU site. Nextcloud offers recommendations for providers on their site, most of which are in the EU [0]. The Office EU website seems to be new since around January of this year [1]. More managed hosts for Nextcloud is a good thing in my book, but I'd be a bit wary to host my stuff with a brand new provider.
This is a fully local version of WordPress running in the browser. It's based on the WordPress Playground project (https://wordpress.org/playground/), and allows for editing the WordPress files, administrating the SQLite database, and doing things like installing plugins. A really handy way to play around with the platform.
I loved Christmas Lemmings so much back in the day! The snowfall visualization and the little Santa lemming clearing it. I made a much less impressive snowfall demo a while back based on that (minus the clearing lemming, because I always wanted to watch the snow pile up). https://anderegg.ca/projects/flake/
I'm not annoyed by it when people are trying to make XML compatible documents, but effectively no one is. Platforms like WordPress use self-closing image tags everywhere, but almost no one using WordPress cares about document validation. This ends up meaning that the `<img ... />` is just an empty gesture.
In the early 2000s I was 100% sold on the idea of strict XHTML documents and the semantic web. I loved the idea that all web pages could be XML documents which easily provided their data for other sources. If you marked your document with, an XHTML 1.0 Strict or XHTML 1.1 doctype, a web browser was supposed to show an error if the page contained an XML error. Problem was, it was a bit of a pain to get this right, so effectively no one cared about making compliant XHTML. It was a nice idea, but it didn't interact well with the real world.
Decades later, I'm still mildly annoyed when I see self-closing tags in HTML. When you're not trying to build a strict XML document, they're no longer required. Now I read them as a vestigial reminder of the strict XHTML dream.