There’s at least one company that does tweak (iirc used) airliner turbofans by taking the fan part off so they just have the turbojet (which is already tuned to mostly generate rotational energy to drive the fan turbine rather than produce thrust itself) and use that to spin a generator. Obviously, it’s a bit more complicated than that in reality, but there are quite a lot of old engines no longer certified for flight out of an abundance of caution but that still work fine, and a market for high-power generators that don’t need to be the pinnacle of efficiency (originally as backups just for occasional use, and now because of AI companies caring only about speed and not about cost).

Whether or not that’s true at the moment (obviously, the status quo has changed because in 2020 UPlay changed to Ubisoft Connect, so the alleged incident happened years ago, and it’s alleged that Ubisoft were forced to stop selling something, so they wouldn’t still be selling it), the article specifically says:

Uplay featured a $15 USD Rainbow Six Siege Starter Pack, but this version was not available on Steam, making the cheapest option on Valve’s platform much more expensive.

The obvious way of parsing that is that it was the UPlay version of the game, but even if not, it’s generally not viable to sell Steam keys for things not available on Steam. The only time you can is when a game’s delisted but you’ve already generated keys for it, and then Valve can just wait for Ubisoft to run out rather than making the alleged threat.

If we’re going to pull up other people’s pithy phrases that aren’t intended to be taken entirely literally, then the relevant one here is machine learning is the second best solution to any problem. In the (approximately, depending on how you define it) century people have been thinking about computers, we’ve already found better solutions to lots of problems. If a transformer-based neural network can get 99% accuracy in sixty seconds on 92 billion transistors of GPU and billions more for its VRAM, that’s pretty useless if we can also do it with 100% accuracy in sixty microseconds on a $1 microcontroller, or even faster on a less constrained device.

The attention is all you need phrase is specifically in the context of sequence transduction models, and specifically referring to the discovery that they don’t need a combination of attention, recurrence and convolution, but actually only need attention if it’s used in the novel way introduced by the paper. If you don’t need to transduce any sequences, then this isn’t necessarily relevant, and it’s critically not a claim that you can do everything by transducing sequences. It was a surprise that applying it to generating new text instead of just converting it worked as well as it did, and a surprise that it kept getting better with larger models instead of plateauing around the GPT-1 and GPT-2 era, and a surprise that the text generation could be used to do other things, even ones as basic as addition. These things weren’t predicted by the Attention Is All You Need paper.

That’s not what the article says. It’s about UPlay keys sold by Ubisoft through UPlay that have nothing to do with Steam, and Valve threatening to remove a game from Steam unless the UPlay keys sold through UPlay became the same price as the Steam keys sold through Steam.

He was murdered by a second, much larger, knife, which wasn’t covered by the allowance for ceremonial knives for religious reasons, so the killer was already breaking existing knife laws. It’s not like Steven Yaxley ‘Tommy Robinson’ Lenon and his supporters will ever care about this, though.

It’s not damn near anything. There’s loads of stuff that computers can do much more quickly and more accurately without it just by virtue of computers already being fast and effective at maths and obeying logic. With or without the transformer architecture, a neural network is never going to be as fast or reliable at, for example, summing a collection of numbers as just adding them would be, and loads of real-world tasks are like this, hence why we’ve built billions of computers even before the transformer architecture was invented.

Also, in particular, I didn’t say that the transformer architecture wasn’t useful for things that aren’t LLMs, I said that most of the work done specifically to improve LLMs has no applications outside LLMs, so the next big leap towards making computers intelligent isn’t helped more by working on LLMs than it would be by working on any other kind of AI.

It’s actually just a lot of pretty simple maths from decades ago, but it’s a lot of it. The big changes in those decades have been the feasibility of doing enough of that simple maths to achieve anything useful, and domain-specific network architecture stuff that’s rarely transferable, e.g. LLMs are possible because of the invention of the transformer architecture in 2017, and that’s also turned out to be useful for a few things like image generation and protein folding simulation, but not for all neural network based techniques, and then most of the things that have made successive LLMs better haven’t also been useful for the few other transformer-architecture-based neural networks. Most not-LLM AI isn’t going to be meaningfully easier to create than it would have been had the world got bored after GPT-2 and we’d only focussed on doing image and video generation.

It’s a fairly common sentiment that ‘good billionaires’ like Newell will demonstrate that seeking profit by making things people want to buy is more profitable than ruining things people were already buying so margins are higher, thereby making the bad billionaires want to copy them, and then capitalism will start working for the common people, and that therefore seizing the means of production is unnecessary as long as they praise gaben. Pointing out that he’s still accumulating the value of other people’s labour as quickly as he can and he’s just less short-sighted about it, rather than aiming to do good, can be helpful.

The attorney general has referred the case to the court of appeals for resentencing, so the politicians seem to think that there’s been some kind of fuckup applying the sentencing guidelines that politicians set. It’s news because this isn’t normal, and the mechanisms to resolve it are in motion. They’ll probably take years to sort it out, as the justice system is incredibly slow and wildly overwhelmed after over a decade of funding cuts and policy decisions that force people to resort to crime, but in 2040 or whenever they get around to it, the decision is almost certainly going to be that the judge made a mistake.

Fun fact: if you’re self employed in the UK, you’ve been able to do your taxes online via a simple (ish) form on the HMRC website, but they’re in the process of phasing it out in favour of third-party proprietary software, so some people aren’t allowed to use the free web form anymore, and within two or three years, it’ll become totally unavailable. Everyone always loves it when the government finds things that Americans complain about and copies it here so we get to complain about it, too.

Lots of shops have gone out of business because, by having a premises, their operating expenses were more than an online retailer, so places like Amazon could undercut them, and their customers were willing to wait for delivery to save some money. It doesn’t take that many customers leaving before you’ve got to put up prices to cover your overheads, and that just makes more customers leave, and after a couple of decades of online retail being common, you’re left with far fewer physical shops.

In lots of the world, that’s how all pills that do anything always are. It’s only ones where it’s safe to accidentally eat the whole bottle at once that are allowed to be in bottles.

https://xkcd.com/979/

A laptop that’s been driven over or smashed with a hammer or otherwise crushed.

I’ll copy the bit here that I just edited into my reply after you edited the first post:

In the face of your edit, I see that you’ve misunderstood the exploit. You need write access to the System Volume Information directory of your own USB stick, not anything on the target machine. It’s much easier to get access to things on a computer than it is to get access on one particular computer, and this exploit lets you jump from one to the other.

By exploit standards, that’s not especially hard. I don’t think there’s really anything blocking accessing it at all if an NTFS volume is mounted on a typical desktop Linux distro, as it’s just NTFS permissions blocking it, and they’re not typically obeyed by Linux in the first place.

In the face of your edit, I see that you’ve misunderstood the exploit. You need write access to the System Volume Information directory of your own USB stick, not anything on the target machine. It’s much easier to get access to things on a computer than it is to get access on one particular computer, and this exploit lets you jump from one to the other.

I’ve never needed release agent with platinum-cure silicone as it’s not stuck to anything except itself unless it was porous. I have needed to lubricate bits of moulds that would have had too much of a vacuum if just pulled, though. Also, when I initially referred to coating the mould, I didn’t mean a release agent but rather something like PMMA (acrylic) dissolved in acetone to protect the silicone from the resin as described here: https://blog.honzamrazek.cz/2022/07/preventing-platinum-cure-silicone-cure-inhibition-in-resin-printed-molds/

If you’ve got a manifold mesh for the object you want, you could make a mould by getting a cube that contained it, using a boolean modifier to subtract the mesh from the cube, then adding one or more cylinders for pour holes at the high point(s) of the mesh and subtracting those, too. If you only need one of the object, so don’t need to reuse the mould, you can stop there and print it, then once you’ve cast it and let the silicone cure, just hit it with a hammer until the mould smashes and the silicone will probably be fine and pull out in one un-scarred piece.

Could you perhaps print a mould and then cast platinum-cure silicone in it? This can be a pain, as lots of resins contain things that stop silicone curing, but some combinations work (e.g. some bbdino silicone I had cured just fine in contact with Sunlu ABS-like clear blue resin I had) or can be made to work (e.g. coating the resin mould with something that it’s more compatible with).

If you don’t need the properties of platinum-cure silicone, you might even be able to get away with tin-cure, which is much cheaper and more tolerant of other chemicals.

Reform got a shitload of votes in this week’s elections, and one of their few actual policies is repealing the online safety act, so it’s not even particularly safe to say that voters don’t want their kids seeing porn if it means it’s any more inconvenient for adults to see porn.