> What does "every character" mean? Did it really need to include emojis, for example?
You may be too young to remember, but there was a time when a lot of software had their own way to encode emoji if they supported them. This sucked for interoperability - especially when using common protocols like SMS.
Some of these implementations were essentially find/replace and would turn various strings of characters commonly occurring in code into emoji. Someone reading your mail containing code on their portable device or other weird client would see parts of that code replaced by emoji. Maybe you had to format your code a certain way, inserting spaces tactically, to avoid accidentally ending up with an emoji. I'm glad we put that behind us for the most part.
Living in a world where you can just copy-paste some text containing emoji (or not) from one software into another is honestly great. Same for all these other symbols that may be embedded into text.
If a software has to come up with their own text-embeddable encodings to represent symbols (to allow for copy-paste or sharing) things often end up less than optimal.
> Having ideas is difficult and expensive. Let's lobby instead!
> [..] spends around €10 million a year on lobbying – which sounds like a lot, but amounts to just 0.05% of VW's €21 billion R&D budget.
> The logic is clear: innovation is expensive and uncertain, whereas lobbying to keep current products on the road is cheap and reliable.
Complete non sequitur. This could more easily be read as "they don't care much about lobbying and are hard at work doing R&D instead", but then that would go very much against narrative the author is trying to spin for us here.
Also I distinctly remember industry voices being very much pro-electric, while it was dinosaur politicians fetishizing ICE cars and fighting to keep production going, long past the point VW even wanted to focus on them.
I don't think this one was a lobbying problem for once.
This. VW actually invested a lot into EVs and now they’re outselling every other EV maker in the European market. Mercedes and BMW also invested a lot. All of them have brand new and pretty competitive EV platforms. Heck, even Peugeot make decent EVs. The only manufacturers lagging behind at this point are the Americans. Tesla basically stopped investing into EVs and their tech is outdated, in Europe they get absolutely butchered by VW and in China they‘re only able to keep sales level because the market is growing so fast. But soon Tesla will get annihilated in China too. Other US car makers that build EVs on scale are nowhere to be seen, besides maybe Rivian.
> They find the probability of every word that could come next.
If we're being pedantic, they find a* probability for every token (which are sometimes words) that could come next.
What actually ends up being chosen depends on what the rest of the system does, but generally it will just choose the most probable token before continuing.
* Saying the probability would be giving a bit too much credit. And really calling it a probability at all when most systems would be choosing the same word every time is a bit of a misnomer as well. During inference the number generally is priority, not probability.
Content aside, that website is very nice. It goes a bit crazy with animations in places (header, switching articles), but that does not taint the experience of reading something on it in the slightest.
It's feels like a modern twist on a bygone time of the web.
Given that pressure from natural selection has lessened a lot, chances are that we are less special now.
Our intellect evolved for survival, but now it's very much optional - has been for many generations. It and may now even be inversely correlated with having offspring.
I would be unsurprised if we're noticably dumber now than we used to be.
More chances than not that you live in a country that benefitted from the American propensity to do the right thing, even at a huge cost to itself. Yes we have a different and more selfish America now, but all said, America still protects the world order that allows this conversation to exist.
Everyone is the hero in their own story - that's why nationalism can be so dangerous - yet seeing how it plays out in individuals is endlessly fascinating to me.
we don't need good boys, we need good laws where everyone is equal and punished equally for violating the common moral principles, e.g. for being a pedophile
I've done similar shenanigans before. That main loop is probably simplified? It won't work well with anything that uses timing primitives for debouncing (massively slowing such code down, only progressing with each frame). Also a setInterval with, say 5ms may not "look" the same when it's always 1000/fps milliseconds later instead (if you're capturing at 24fps/30fps, that would be a huge difference).
What you should do is put everything that was scheduled on a timeline (every setTimeout, setInterval, requestAnimationFrame), then "play" through it until you arrive at the next frame, rather than calling each setTimeout/setInterval callback only for each frame.
Also their main loop will let async code "escape" their control. You want to make sure the microtask queue is drained before actually capturing anything. If you don't care about performance, you can use something like await new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, 0)) for this (using the real setTimeout) before you capture your frame. Use the MessageChannel trick if you want to avoid the delay this causes.
For correctness you should also make sure to drain the queue before calling each of the setTimeout/setInterval callbacks.
I'm leaning towards that code being simplified, since they'd probably have noticed the breakage this causes. Or maybe, given that this is their business, their whole solution is vibe-coded and they have no idea why it's sometimes acting strange. Anyone taking bets?
No, they do not. They just value their silicon valley paycheck over personal integrity.
And really, this isn't a big deal. It's a bold lie everyone can see through, but it's not nearly as consequential as other bold lies society tolerates or is complicit in. Many of these lies make modern society function in the first place - they're necessary fictions everyone participates in.
This lie is... laughably irrelevant, which is why calling it out won't make you a pariah. People are jumping at the chance to point and laugh when doing so carries no consequence.
Other examples of inconsequential bullshit: "Your call is very important to us", "We value your privacy", "We're like family here", and "It's not about the money".
There's servers where they just hang out, but which themselves are legitimate. Cybersecurity related ones etc. You can ban them and they'll just switch to another account within a minute. Occasionally discord or a server owner does, but everyone knows its pointless. There's probably other servers that are mostly used by cybercriminals, maybe command-and-control backups, and security researchers may stumble upon these when taking some malware apart, join them, and end up getting in contact with the owner.
In general I don't think law enforcement wants discord to take these down or ban them. These guys would have no problem to just make some IRC servers or whatever to hang out on instead, which would be much harder to surveil for law enforcement - compared to discord just forwarding them everything said by those accounts and on those servers.
Because you now have more infrastructure than people to pay for and maintain it. As population density decreases, the people that remain are using oversized infrastructure. The relationship between required maintenance and amount of usage is far from linear. For a lot of infrastructure being underused means additional maintenance procedures become necessary.
A way to combat this is to move people and condense the population again, abandoning areas in the process and pretty much writing them off. Not optimal, but it'll help.
I've assumed that moving people in order to consolidate infrastructure use was already modus operandi in countries that need to worry about these things in the short term, but it makes sense that it doesn't work that way.
You may be too young to remember, but there was a time when a lot of software had their own way to encode emoji if they supported them. This sucked for interoperability - especially when using common protocols like SMS.
Some of these implementations were essentially find/replace and would turn various strings of characters commonly occurring in code into emoji. Someone reading your mail containing code on their portable device or other weird client would see parts of that code replaced by emoji. Maybe you had to format your code a certain way, inserting spaces tactically, to avoid accidentally ending up with an emoji. I'm glad we put that behind us for the most part.
Living in a world where you can just copy-paste some text containing emoji (or not) from one software into another is honestly great. Same for all these other symbols that may be embedded into text.
If a software has to come up with their own text-embeddable encodings to represent symbols (to allow for copy-paste or sharing) things often end up less than optimal.
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