This was long overdue! …and it’s not just a meaningless fine, since a solution needs to be proposed within 2 months:

In addition to the fine, Google was ordered to end these self-preferencing practices. It has 60 days to propose a solution, after which the Commission will asses the proposal and either accept Google’s remedy or impose its own.

Do you have a source or is it a guess?

As I understand it, it’s not limited locally. Africa’s Continental Internet Exchange (CIX) connects Africa internally first, but it still links globally. It’s about sovereignty, not isolation.

In terms of networking, this is not different from Europe and other regions with many local IXPs that allow regional traffic within the continent… the thing is that in the past, Africa has not had an infrastructure that allowed connecting to another African country without it being routed through international networks outside the continent.

And what search engines do you enable/disable in SearXNG?

SearXNG is one of those “alternatives that pull from google or similar”, which is what @[email protected] wanted to avoid.

But I don’t understand why don’t they go after the abusers, instead of imposing a fine to the platform. This looks like a criminal case, it’s not just a matter that should be left in the hands of the platform to begin with… so why focus on blaming the platform?

Someone got bullied so hard they died, and the response is to simply ban them and then punish the platform? It sounds like an approach designed by lawyers who just want to make money, instead of actually an attempt to fix/correct the problem.

It’s like blaming the email provider for allowing the exchange of messages and video files in a mailing group that was organizing crime… instead of actually investigating the people who committed the crime and enacting laws / setting precedent that could act as deterrent, independently of which channel was used while committing the crime. Then punish the platform if they are not collaborating or if they are found to be complicit (while investigating the criminals).

the OS community found -often painful- ways to deal with excentric or even toxic and erratic developers.

Do you have an example? I’m honestly not sure what you are referring to here. And I’ve been around for a while.

Yes, what makes it a genocide is the intent to target the civilian population belonging to that nation. It does not necessarily have to be about race or religion, it can still be genocide if it targets the nation. Russia doesn’t have a problem with the kids race, religion or ancestry, but with them being raised under Ukranian society and values.

Yeah, I think the confusion is assuming that it’s only a genocide when it targets specific subgroups inside a population. It also applies in terms of national groups (whole or in part). This means any attack that intents to kill civilians of a country (or that at least intents to not make any distinction between civilian or not) is a genocide.

For example, that list also includes genocide of Ukrainians by Russia.

In case someone somehow didn’t know yet: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

I feel we are gonna need to reach at least that 1.4M with all the companies being against it and actively lobbying. I bet they they are gonna be extremely nitpicky with the signatures to invalidate as many as possible.

Or not buying any new Ubisoft game that requires online. I don’t want to buy something that isn’t gonna last.

It’s ironic how WebP lossless mode is actually better at compressing the image than the lossy mode.

I bet most people would use the default thinking that they are making a compromise and that increasing the quality would make the compression worse. They wouldn’t know unless they tested making the images themselves, because it’s not easy for users to differentiate lossy webp from lossless webp.

This imho is why lossless should be in its own format, instead of trying to make a single container format do everything like WebP was trying. A new compression level for PNG would be most welcome.

There are many philosophers of the mind that agree that intelligence and consciousness are separate things.

Some examples are Daniel Dennett and John Searle.

There are also currents of thought in philosophy of the mind that disagree that even things like “slime mold” are mindless. Both from the materialist direction (like panpsychysm) and from the idealist direction (Bernardo Kastrup’s idealism).

Most philosophers of the mind would disagree that the reason for their field to exist really has anything to do with any specific terminology / position. I’d say it has more to do with curiosity and the interest for seeking truth. Like most fields of philosophy do.

Your definition of intelligence, which is what the AI companies use, has made people more confused than ever about “intelligence” and only serves the interests of the companies for generating hype and attracting investor cash.

I’d argue it’s your definition, which includes consciousness, what makes AI an attractive term for investors. Precisely because you say intelligence include awareness and it can lead to people to misinterpret AI as self-aware.

Promoting your definition helps the interests of the companies who want to generate hype, and causes just as much confusion as you attribute to mine in that regard.

At least mine is simpler and makes it easier to invalidate the hype, since if intelligence isn’t awareness then AI isn’t awareness. Many philosophers have agreed with that, for years, before LLMs were a thing. John Searle for example is famous for the Chinese room experiment.

Why is it a problem?

Generally, I’d say having clear, specific and useful definitions is a good thing to help communicate and understand what we are talking about and avoid misinterpretations.

What is the reason you think philosophy of the mind exists as a field of study?

Playnite

Interesting. Does it support gamepad input? I wonder how does it compare with things like Heroic Games launcher?

I don’t know, I feel it’s actually the opposite. Awareness is something you can only experience subjectively, it’s “qualia”, a quality that you cannot measure outside of yourself or detect externally. There’s a reason IQ (“intelligence” quotient) tests use puzzles/problems and don’t test conscious awareness. Most of the time in science intelligence is defined as problem solving and capacity to adapt/extrapolate because that definition makes it observable and more scientifically useful.

If it were to include awareness then we can’t in good faith answer the question: “is it intelligent?” …we can only say we don’t know. This is the main struggle of philosophy of the mind, what is often called “the hard problem of consciousness”. Empirical analysis would not show if something is having (or not) the conscious experience of being aware.

Yes, that’s what I meant 2 comments above by “fungus” (though to be fair, whether slime molds are fungi depends on your definition, they used to be classified as one, before “protist kingdom” was made up to mix protozoa, algae & molds, but I keep preferring the traditional autotroph / absorptive heterotroph / digestive heterotroph division).

I also mentioned ants who can find the optimal path by simply following scents left by other ants without understanding how this helps with that.

You can be intelligent without being aware of your intelligence, or you can be stupid without being aware of your stupidity… like how humans are actually creating problems for themselves in many cases.

Intelligence != awareness

Yes there there as many types of intelligence as there are types of problems. Emotional intelligence deals with emotional problems, social intelligence deals with social problems. This doesn’t conflict with my definition, it’s still problem solving.

Just because a being is intelligent does not mean it can solve all the problems of all kinds, it would require general intelligence, and even a generally intelligent being needs the right training… if you are trained wrong or trained for a different kind of problem that does not fit the current one then your current experience might actually get in the way, as you point out.

They’re no more intelligent than an AC/DC converter

The problem is in the definition of intelligence.

To me, intelligence is simply problem-solving ability. It does not necessarily imply consciousness, having self-awareness or anything like that. A simple calculator is already displaying intelligence, even if limited to a very narrow situational set of problems, in the sense that it can resolve mathematical questions.

That doesn’t mean the calculator is self aware… it just means it can resolve problems. Biological systems can also resolve problems without necessarily being aware of what they are doing… does the fungus actually knows it’s solving a maze the scientists prepared for it when it just expands following what is preprogrammed by its biological instincts determined by natural selection? Do the ants really know what they are doing when they find the shortest path just by instinctively following a scent of pheromones left by other ants?

Knowing exactly what causes consciousness is an entirely different problem… and it’s one that has not been resolved by any scientist or philosopher in a satisfactory manner. So we simply do not know that.

HDR and EXIF are great changes… APNG, if already being used for some apps/services, seems a logic choice. Maybe it’ll finally mean the end of gifs once and for all?

What I’m more excited for though, is the improvements in compression that the article hints that are being worked on. Specially if it can beat other more modern formats that have added lossless compression like jpegxl. I feel it’s best to have separate formats for lossless and lossy, to prevent the off-chance of lossyness getting through.

I wonder if freeing up those resources also implies that much of the adware Microsoft often includes in Windows might be removed too.

if it’s not: I’m skeptical that the gain in resources would be enough.

if it is: I skeptical that this OS won’t be locked down as much as possible to prevent it to be used for anything useful beyond this specific gaming usecase and/or specific to pre-authorized devices.

I think Microsoft benefits too much from the adware they add to Windows to allow this new version of the OS to potentially be used as an alternative.