deleted by creator

The only reason I can think of to get that data is to circumvent archive.org’s limitations on renting out stuff so your bots can slurp books without getting throttled.

That is, my best guess is that this was pirates seeing if they can’t add to libgen.

Or it’s a “prove you can do stuff” kind of deal.

An NPU is a cut-down GPU to allow running ML workloads on restrained power budgets.

Quite literally. Keep the memory architecture, keep the massive banks of ALUs, remove the little intelligence GPU cores have in their control units and you have an NPU. Oh, one more thing: Make sure those ALUs support ludicrously low precision arithmetic. GPUs can do the same without any real downside, though, the reason GPUs floored out at fp16 is because there were no workloads benefitting from lower precision.

It makes sense on mobile devices and phones have been shipping them for ages to do their AI image processing, listening for voice commands etc, it makes sense for at least some data centres because specialising your hardware to save electricity is worth it, it doesn’t make sense anywhere in between. Just get a proper GPU and you can do AI and play Crysis.

It’s European baseline quality. Still I’m low-key addicted to their cream/coffee combo. Moser-Roth (also Aldi, produced by Storck just like Choceur) is approximately Lindt quality, that is, still meh but at least it’s not overpriced AF.

Actually good chocolate costs actual money. Stuff like Domori where you’re looking at 20 Euros for 100g, or stuff you don’t even get in retail, any retail, you have to drive to Belgium and visit a small chocolatier hidden in some back alley. People who buy top-grade beans at auctions, instead of whole harvests from trusted producers, much less random shit off the commodity market.

Decent Criollo cocoa powder (also nibs) can be had for the price of supermarket “brand-name” cocoa powder, though, definitely worth it. If you compare it to the likes of Nesquick you’re getting at a like 1000x price difference (Nesquick is mostly sugar and starch, not cocoa).

Figures that I don’t like to go to bed late, I just like to be up the hours after midnight. Oh how the tables have turned.

No, no, and no.

The question is whether what’s understood as the standard is set by bowing to random influence from people being careless or plain uninformed, or by reference to how people specialising in the thing do it.

This whole thing is just a declaration of bankruptcy on part of the standards body because the natural authorities of the language – and that’s editors, not barkeeps – will not be adopting this one. They also prevented some details about the 1996 spelling reform, while adopting the rest: In the end it was the reform that bent to the editors, not the editors bending to the standards body.

You’re talking about “But shouldn’t randos be free to choose how they spell things” – yes, and they are. And the rest of the republic is free to consider that usage wrong, especially if those randos didn’t choose a spelling, but simply didn’t care. The standards body saying “hey shouldn’t this be right” has no authority over the opinion of the rest of the republic we’re not in France.

The latest annoyance is that they will AI-translate posts and stick those into search engines.

As you might have gleaned from my comment, everyone uses language differently. Very differently. Scots vs. English kind of differently and that’s not even covering all autochthone minorities. To make sure the whole country has a way to understand each other we need to agree on a standard that’s half-way acceptable and half-way convenient to everyone. In setting that standard, why should we follow the practices of simple but bold businessmen (“Lara’s hair stylez”) over newspapers. One knows stuff about hair and not so much language, the other knows quite a bit about language and less about hair. Why are we asking plumbers how to bake bread and bakers how to fix faucets. Explain it to me.

Exact same pronunciation, at least in Northern and Standard.

One sock, a pair of socks, a pile of soxen.

First off, a) Standard German is not a language that’s spoken anywhere in the country in the first place, not even at the Tagesschau studios. It’s a solely literary language, defined somewhat semi-democratically by book and newspaper editors and b) this is about orthography, not language qua language.

This is not about telling people whether they should say “ich bin am gehen” or “ich bin gehend” – both are incorrect in Standard Geman, the reason it doesn’t have a present progressive is that people couldn’t agree which form to use, and the different forms are quite far apart. So it’s avoided by editors, hence it’s not part of the language, “ich gehe gerade” is used instead which is (IMNSHO) unnatural but also not terribly awkward. That kind of thing is way more at odds with how people actually speak than orthography, and accepted without second thought: Because Standard German is a Dachsprache. If I want to talk to a Bavarian, compromises will have to be made.

Then, an orthography has to be, and this might be surprising to Anglophones, one thing: Logical and predictable, inferrable from how you speak and what things mean. The idiot’s apostrophe is not. It makes no sense, it follows no rule. If I say “gehn” then I can infer, from a uniform rule, that I should write “gehen” – because folks in the south say “gehe”, and well a compromise is when noone is happy. But using a different rule for “the dog’s bone” and “Jane’s bar”? There’s no justification for that. None. It introduces a distinction where there’s none.

The issue I have with this whole thing isn’t that it seems to be influenced by English, the issue I have is that it makes as much sense as English orthography.

I don’t know where you got North Carolina from, I was speaking in general. Also the place has plenty of coastline. Also you don’t need to live near the coast to live in a flood area, plenty of rivers that can and do flood. In mountainous regions it’s not about building on the right side of the dike, but not at the bottom of the valley, and in the places in between it’s about… well, it’s usually not really about not building in one particular place, but making sure that there’s areas that you can flood to protect areas you want to keep dry. Much cheaper to pay off a farmer for a lost harvest and cleanup than half a million people for losing their homes.

That’s not bonkers that’s sanity. If you want to build your house in front of a dike don’t expect to get insurance. The trick is to build in a place where there’s a risk, not certainty, of damage.

It’s absolutely bonkers. I don’t get how Americans can build houses in leopard enclosures and then act all surprised when, inevitably, their faces get eaten. I know you’re a settler country with little connection to the land but it’s been long enough to know which parts get flooded and which don’t, now hasn’t it. Around here you don’t even get building permits for lots of stuff in places even if you were willing to take on all financial risk yourself because it’d put unconscionable load on disaster relief, and thereby society at large.

So, there’s two ways to go from where you are: a) Double-down on being Yanks and say “fuck you got mine sucks to be you”, abolish disaster relief and let those rugged individuals fend for themselves, or b) fucking build where it fucking makes sense. It’s not like you’re Singapore or something, you’ve got more than enough land.

It’s about taking a moral stance and being clear about what’s right and wrong.

I’m not much for moralising, I find it ineffective when it comes to influencing the world… though I guess your kind of take makes sure that takes like mine actually properly flesh out the strategic rationale.

I’m not interested in making compromises that would water down those values or make us complicit in systems of oppression.

If I were to chose to not be complicit in systems of oppression then I’d have to boycott parliamentary democracy and no I’m not going to effectively hand my vote to Nazis by refusing to vote. That kind of refusal works on the small scale, on the larger scale, well. Compromises have to be made regarding means/ends unity to protect what has already been achieved. Meanwhile, properly means/ends unified action has to be insulated against getting besmirched by those compromises, that means acting, in addition, outside of the parliamentary system. Uncompromising, universally perfect moral action is only possible in a world full of perfectly moral actors in the mean time we have to wear different hats in different places.

So to circle back: If Volt can make a dent into New Labour and Christian Democrat acquiescence with ultimately quite unchristian things, popularise a liberalism which isn’t crypto-feudalism, then yes I wish them all the best. They, too, will need to be overcome but that’s a topic for the future, currently they’re convenient. In principle my stance to Diem is the same but politically they’re rather stale. As in: Too much smell of Soviet mothballs, the parliamentary left will have to re-invent itself before it’s able to inspire masses, again.

I think that they’re just as much reformist as Volt’s stuff. And terminally parliamentarist. But that’s not so much a criticism as an observation, we certainly should get what we can get out of the parliamentary procedure, imperfect as it is.

TBH I’m not even sure whether revolution is possible any more, we might have already had it with the institution of liberal democracy but still have to get over the hangover. As in: The tipping point has been crossed, but old shackles are still dangling on our collective psyche, getting rid of them will simply take time. The state will not go out in flames, but wither. Or, paraphrasing Kerry Thornley: Failing that, it at least won’t annoy anyone any more.

If you look at the German program they’re mentioning increasing income and wealth inequality as a problem and are specifically mentioning the increase in low-wage work as a mistake. They want to make the tax system more progressive as well as bring taxation of capital gains more in line with existing taxation on income. In translation, that means tax hikes for the rich. Also stuff like cracking down on tax evasion and tax havens, also targeted at the rich (practically impossible to evade taxes as a worker, here).

Generally speaking there’s a ton of points in there which make them a red flag for parties in ALDE. Greens/EFA (which Volt are part of) might occasionally have neoliberal bouts, but their heart isn’t in it, just as with SocDems and Christian Democrats. Have you considered that your image of liberals in general might be unduly coloured by neolibs? There are liberals who understand that capital can be used to attain the very privileges liberals, back in the days, were keen on denying the nobility. Individually, who have about the same opinion of multinationals as the average worker does of the bosses.

Bullshit. Pirates are also liberals and most definitely prefer the UBI+flat tax model.

It might be inconvenient for the let’s call it tankie-adjacent left that liberals support an idea that’d actually be a net benefit for workers, OTOH a proper Marxist should be able to sort that under “yet another curious contradiction inherent in the system” and then vote in favour for it lest being considered an accelerationist.

I mean yes it’s electromagnetic radiation.

but it would also be a way of shutting people up, you don’t have enough money to get by? Well you get your UBI so it’s got to be enough, if it isn’t then tough luck I guess.

And the same thing cannot be said if you have means-tested welfare?

At least in the German discussion about this it’s generally understood that it’d replace regular unemployment and disability payments, but not abolish things like say money the blind get because braille displays are expensive. Our social systems already work with averages.

That the payment is sufficient is already included in the “B” term, btw. In German terms it’s supposed to cover the socio-cultural existence minimum: Enough to live and participate in society.

The difference it not billionaires but the middle class.

No. The difference you imagine would be due to the specific tax rate applied, not due to “everyone gets a flat 1000 Euro payment and pays a flat 50% tax” vs. “The tax bracket for people with income under 2000 Euro is negative”. Do the maths: With 1000 Euro and 50%, the break-even point, where you pay exactly as much tax as you get in UBI, is 2000 Euro income.

You’re getting tangled up in irrelevant details. The “universal” part is about not having means testing, about not having to take on every fucked-up job the dole office throws at you. It’s about the net amount in your pocket, not how it’s calculated.