The American government and their supporters hate modern day Europe, and yet they’re so obsessed with gaudy replication of old European stuff. You see it also with all the kitchy Roman-like pillars and replicas of the statue of David randomly plonked in some room. It’s just so… weird. I guess they like the idea of “old” Europe, the good old days when they still spent half their time killing each other, and the other half killing people in far-away places. They probably see it as their own origin story, so they resent that the modern versions of these countries, after all the devastating wars, have evolved into modern, peaceful countries. Maybe they see themselves as defenders against modern debauchery like freedom, peace and happiness?

From my perspective it just seems kind of hollow and desperate, can’t think of your own stuff to do so you decide to copy the megalomania of dysfunctional old empires that got crushed by their own ego and inability to peacefully coexist in prosperity. There’s a reason they’re not around anymore, and copying them, aside from being vaguely pitiful, just means you’re headed to the same end. Let’s hope it won’t take two world wars for America to catch on.

Kind of niche but Guitar Pro. Not sure what the newer versions are like but the one I have is great for composing and arrangement.

I know you meant it as a critique, but the changing part is actually completely right! I guess my distaste for it stems from my distaste for tribalism. I follow topics I care about, and despite largely comprising opinions I agree with through selection bias, I dislike how there’s a set of agreed upon opinions that people are expected to follow, with intense backlash to attempts at nuance or compromise. Naturally everyone from other tribes is considered a horrible evil being who just wants to see your own tribe suffer, and so anything but the most vicious “anti-them” perspective is considered traitorous.

As far as I can tell, it doesn’t matter much which part of the community it is, most seem to have a relatively large proportion of users who seem to delight in the opportunity to tear others to shreds if they perceive some justification. I sometimes wish we could enjoy things together without turning everything into a hateful fight (that somehow always seems to be considered justified because other tribes are supposedly even worse). Maybe I’m just in the wrong place…

I don’t use Lemmy much anymore nowadays because of this. While it’s important an alternative to Reddit exists, so I try to support it, it ironically feels more like a hivemind than Reddit does (ironic because you’d expect the opposite for federated services). I think it’s because switching to Lemmy from Reddit requires either idealism or a Reddit ban, both of which disproportionately attract people who feel good when they verbally attack internet strangers for disagreeing with them on 1% of the implicitly agreed upon joint viewpoints. It also strangely reminds me of the feeling I got being part of an old gaming community that was slowly dying out, where eventually only the unpleasant ones who defined their identity based on it were left.

I’m always happy to see there are also people here who dislike this attitude, though, or even to see neutral posts. There is still hope!

I like HERE WeGo lately, haven’t really noticed differences for public transportation with Google Maps. I only have experience using it in my country, though.

Your interactions will generally be stored and used for further training, so using their services gives them an advantage compared to European companies. I would suspect, although I have not read about this in detail, that the plan for eventual monetisation, once they have a monopoly and people are dependent and unable to switch back, will be to generate a profile and use this for targeted advertising/influencing, similar to how social network services operate. IMO it’s much better not to use their services, they want the data more than they care about electricity bills.

My experience in the NL: bicycles and functioning public transportation is what gives teenagers mobility, without requiring a lot of money (especially bicycles). Forcing them to share infrastructure with much faster, much more expensive electric mopeds claiming to be e-bikes to avoid safety and licensing requirements makes this much worse. The hard-earned mobility from the infrastructure already in place gets worse, not better, from fatbikes being treated as bicycles.

It depends on what your goal is. I used to share your opinion, but find myself increasingly of the opinion that these ideals must be kept separate. Much as I like the idea of open source, not all open source applications or crowd-sourced data can keep up with companies with hundreds or thousands of people actually responsible for it. Similarly, when it comes to innovation, large resources and private investments are needed. If we focus too much on requiring every single thing related to software being open source, we risk the entire effort failing before taking off.

Open source is great, and if you care especially much about this topic that’s also great, but it’s still quite niche (the general public won’t care), while geopolitical sovereignty is a big topic many are rapidly coming to appreciate. Let’s start with this part where there’s already substantial agreement within the population instead of necessarily packaging them together. Switching over from sending our money to the US for the privilege of dependence to investing our money into our own companies seems a relatively easy and well supported first step, over European and open source and non-addictive and no obnoxious ads and low energy consumption and and and. All all worthwhile causes, but insisting on all at once is doomed to fail. IMO it’s better to move in steps, and start with the low-hanging fruit.

Is this feedback for devs?

My 144hz monitor randomly runs at 60hz with no way of changing it apart from restarting several times.

I have a TV connected in addition to my monitor (for lazy gaming or watching series), but this causes various small but annoying problems. I can’t unlock my PC without moving the mouse over to my monitor, which invariably spawns on the TV, and I have to guess how to move it over (left/right alignment is also inconsistent). It also turns the mouse pointer massive on the monitor, presumably because the TV has a higher resolution. Despite marking the monitor as the main display, more than half of my applications launch on the TV. Except the ones I actually want there, of course. If my tv is off before booting is complete, and I turn it on later, my background disappears, and sound is routed to the terrible built-in monitor speakers instead of either the tv audio I use while it’s on, or the actually good headphones I use when it’s not.

At some point my kernel randomly broke because the driver of my WiFi adapter was somehow incompatible. It was a massive pain to figure out the problem and fix it.

As a causal user these are definitely points that came out worse than the competition functionality-wise, and since most of the general public will not opt for a lesser experience for the sake of idealism, this type of issue probably prevents other people who just want to use their PCs from switching.

Edit: it was also a massive pain to set up a Korean keyboard layout, in Windows you just select it and you’re done. In Ubuntu, you do the same and nothing changes. I don’t even remember what it was that actually fixed it, but I tried a lot of guides that didn’t work.

It differs per community. Some of the more hype-y conferences I’ve submitted to require at least one co-author to review other papers as a condition to submission. I’ve not seen this at less hyped conferences or journals yet, though. But different communities tend to do things very differently, so many people will have different experiences.

I don’t think this is appeasing a bully, this is actually giving him very little. Appeasement would have involved actually giving him something. The increase to 3.5% is back to around cold war levels, which seems very appropriate for the current geopolitical situation. The final 1.5% is essentially an accounting trick to make whatever expenses you like count towards the 5%, like road maintenance or technological R&D, it would be hard not to reach this target. Plus this money can now be increasingly spent on Europe’s own companies instead of sending 1-2% of yearly GDP straight to the US economy, especially once economies of scale start picking up.

This is just what Europe was planning to do on its own, but framing it in a way that strokes Trump’s ego and lets him claim it as his victory. Especially after a few years this will not be a positive change for the US. I’ll happily sacrifice Rutte’s pride if it means Europe gets exactly what it wanted.

Agreed with the points about intelligence definition, but on a pragmatic note, I’ll list some concrete examples of fields in AI that are not LLMs (I’ll leave it up to your judgement if they’re “more intelligent” or not):

• Machine learning, most of the concrete examples other people gave here were deep learning models. They’re used a lot, but certainly don’t represent all of AI. ML is essentially fitting a function by tuning the function’s parameters using data. Many sub-fields like uncertainty quantification, time-series forecasting, meta-learning, representation learning, surrogate modelling and emulation, etc.
• Optimisation, containing both gradient-based and black-box methods. These methods are about finding parameter values that maximise or minimise a function. Machine learning is also an optimisation problem, and is usually performed using gradient-based methods.
• Reinforcement learning, which often involves a deep neural network to estimate state values, but is itself a framework for assigning values to states, and learning the optimal policy to maximise reward. When you hear about agents, often they will be using RL.
• Formal methods for solving NP-hard problems, popular examples include TSP and SAT. Basically trying to solve these problems efficiently and with theoretical guarantees of accuracy. All of the hardware you use will have had its validity checked through this type of method at some point.
• Causal inference and discovery. Trying to identify causal relationships from observational data when random controlled trials are not feasible, using theoretical proofs to establish when we can and cannot interpret a statistical association as a causal relationship.
• Bayesian inference and learning theory methods, not quite ML but highly related. Using Bayesian statistical methods and often MCMC methods to perform statistical inference of the posterior with normally intractable marginal likelihoods. It’s mostly statistics with AI helping out to enable us to actually compute things.
• Robotics, not a field I know much about, but it’s about physical agents interacting with the real world, which comes with many additional challenges.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and there is often overlap between fields as they use each other’s solutions to advance their own state of the art, but I hope this helped for people who always hear that “AI is much more than LLMs” but don’t know what else is there. A common theme is that we use computational methods to answer questions, particularly those we couldn’t easily answer ourselves.

To me, what sets AI apart from the rest of computer science is that we don’t do “P” problems: if there is a method available to directly or analytically compute the solution, I usually wouldn’t call it AI. As a basic example, I don’t consider computing y = ax+b coefficients analytically as AI, but do consider general approximations of linear models using ML AI.

The central command is there, but it’s led by America. This means that, if we rely on NATO mechanisms, America effectively controls collective responses by Europe, which is undesirable now that they are not on Europe’s side in the conflict with Russia, and they state over and over again that they intend to annex Greenland.

A European central command and standardisation between countries makes a lot of sense to me. If member states don’t want to give up autonomy, maybe with some kind of opt-out clause. That way the countries that are willing won’t need to coordinate poorly through dozens of bilateral communication channels, but can jointly operate with a common strategy, and at worst, not all member states would contribute to every action. Plenty of possibilities for problems still, but a step up from the current situation.

I would personally still prefer to see a more integrated European military, though. While we will have a bunch of low-population countries all doing all possible tasks poorly, instead of having some specialise to specific strengths and sourcing collectively, the EU will always be weaker militarily than a comparable force that is not split in such a manner.

Very good post, I agree completely! It’s easy to let perfect become the enemy of good.

One thing I’d add is that many social media companies sneakily get their trackers added to random web pages or other services you might use, so doing random things on the internet could be included as extra engagement (and it also doesn’t require you to be signed up to their service in the first place, though it helps them). In this case their business is the data they collect on your behaviour, even outside of their own services, and the ads they can target to you using this on behalf of other entities who outsource their advertisements. It’s quite scary how ubiquitous this is.

I think what OP suggested here is a very good mindset to live by, and it will help a lot. If you wanted to go one step further, you could consider combining this with steps to try and prevent these companies from still harvesting your data when you’re not even aware that you’re using them, e.g., by blocking such trackers as much as possible.

Probably many greedy reasons, but my personal favourite speculation: annexing Greenland surrounds Canada and stops any potential aid by its NATO allies in case of an invasion, since annexing Canada is one of the stated objectives of the US now.

In terms of strategy for actual national security, they already got all the access they wanted, if they wanted more all they had to do was ask. If they’re the ones doing the attacking of a common ally, though, they wouldn’t get that access. So it’s only of added strategic value to annex instead of maintaining the alliance if the goal is to attack members of the alliance.

Ukraine has one of the strongest militaries in Europe. This whole “they couldn’t even beat puny Ukraine” line I keep seeing is entirely too haughty for my liking. Their gear is less state-of-the-art, sure, but many European countries lack vital components of a functional military altogether. Including logistics and coordination of joint efforts which the Americans have until recently been doing.

Sure, no need to panic yet, but certainly a need to get a move on and actually respond proactively to make up for gaps, and respond jointly, to ensure that it’s not going to be a matter of small countries getting steamrolled one by one.

Korean democracy is not dead yet!

Me, checking what the damage is: oh good, my European defence stocks went up 2 to 4 percent today while the American stocks are tanking, happy days!

Me, after thinking on it a bit longer: oh God, my European defence stocks went up while the world economy is taking a hit, better get ready for whatever’s coming

While you are staying, your productivity is fueling the economy, and the taxes you pay go to the government you dislike. If you flee, that’s a big economic difference you’re making over the years. I guess if you fight symbolically but non-pragmatically and get arrested, they have to feed you and house you in a prison which will cost a little extra, but compared to your non-productivity that’s just a small bonus. Fleeing also means you get to proactively contribute to competitors and reward them for being a better place to live, which in a way doubles your economic impact. There’s a reason the Berlin wall was built and North Korea executes 3 generations of the families of defectors. People are valuable, and they can’t afford to lose too many of them.

On the other hand, if your threshold for fleeing is too low, there are no competitors to support, because every country has their issues, and some may be at a risk of the same developments as the country you’re fleeing from, making it a pointless exercise. And your loved ones could be essentially hostages that can be used to make you stay.

So it kind of depends, but at least the cowardice argument seems pointless to me. Pragmatic small-scale effectiveness tends to beat symbolic perfectionism at making an impact.

Slightly off-topic from the intended point, but I’ve heard this more often, that there’s no such thing as a fish, but it’s a useful constructed concept to have.

So why is it so important that we all remember that animals like whales are not fish, they’re mammals? Didn’t stop us from calling animals from other groups fish, why should mammals get a special treatment?