The official average salary is a half-truth (hence a russian saying: if my boss eats meat and I eat cabbage, on average we eat golubtsi), most people in the regions are living on 30000 RUB a month or so. It may still be better than the US because you get public transit and thus don’t really need a car but it’s still not good. Capitalism ruins everything.

China is a more enticing proposition but it’s very difficult/impossible for a foreigner to get a permanent residence permit.

C’mon, she even held up her hair perfectly for a photoshoot, it’s transparently performative.

Why would anyone leak their identity to Telegram when a certain RUssian torrent TRACKER forum ORGanization is right there?

As the other commenter said, not much point moving to Signal, while it is at least E2E encrypted it also suffers from potential privacy issues. I would say if you have to move, move to XMPP or (maybe) Matrix.

As (technically) a Russian dissident, the majority of Russian dissidents are idiots. See: support for Navalniy, support for Gaza genocide. FWIW I’m an idiot too.

Telegram is not private at all, it is not encrypted by default, and there are likely ways for three-letter agencies to leak your identity even without full cooperation from Telegram LLC.

While it’s true that Durov is somewhat anti-Putin, that doesn’t help you as (likely) a citizen of a western country. Durov will clearly cooperate with western governments on their demands, he holds French citizenship and regularly travels to Europe.

Fair enough. I tend to use it because it just reduces scanning ambiguity when reading text quickly.

Yeah, Google Translate also translates carpet as “ковер” instead of the proper spelling (ковёр), and it actually does translate “carpet mold” as “ковер плесень” (instead of a more proper translation like “ковровая плесень” or “плесень в ковре”).

I’d say it’s 99% google translate

“Ковёр” is closer to “carpet” I’d argue. I’d translate “rug” as “коврик”

I mostly understood at least the basic points of all of his movies… except Inland Empire. That shit was just impossible to decipher even after re-watching it three times, the third one with pen and paper to try and piece the plot together (cause the Wikipedia plot section is useless at capturing the detail). Honestly I feel like he was just throwing shit at the camera and seeing what doesn’t end up on the cutting room floor, and not in a good Linklater-esque way. A shame that’s the one he went out on.

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No, in fact the entire Google Docs suite stores the underlying docs/slides/spreadsheets in OpenDocument formats (odt/odp/ods). Apple is just being Apple.

Yeah, still, I wouldn’t claim “as no human would end up falling into that”, given that it may not be that unlikely to find at least one human who displays similar writing the more humans you involve.

No, it is actually statistically impossible for a human to replicate this on sufficiently long runs of text.

This is not about replicating writing like a model. This is basically about guessing which words to pick from the list of suitable words based on a rule that you don’t know (because the key is secret).

To reduce this to the simplest possible example, imagine you are writing a “text” from just two letters: “a” and “b”. Let’s say for convenience that the text is supposed to be random. So the text would look something like “ababaaabbababbbabababaabbbabaababbaaabbabaabbaaaaabaaabbbaabaabababbabbbbbbbbabbabaabbbbbbbaabbabaab”

(generated with '''.join(random.choice(['a', 'b']) for i in range(0, 50)))

The watermarking works as follows: the model owner holds a key, and then uses that key to influence the random choices between “a” and “b” somehow, in a context-dependent way. The actual algorithm is quite complicated, but for simplicity let’s just say we have a secret pattern which biases the random choice towards it. In order to see the exaggerated results, let’s say the secret key is “aaaabbbb” (of course this is a bad secret key, once again just an example), and that the bias is strong (let’s say 80%). So this would mean that the first four letters in our text are more likely to be “a”, the next four letters are more likely to be “b”, then the next four letters are more likely to be “a”, and so on.

Then the text would look something like “aaaabaabaabaabbbabaaaabbaaaababbbaaaabbbabaabbbbaaabaabbaaaaabbbabababbaaaaabbbbaaabbbbbaaaaababaaba”.

(generated with ''.join(random.choice(['a', 'b'] + ([key[i % len(key)]] * 3)) for i in range(0, 100)))

You can see visually that the secret key has affected the text. Of course in this example even if you didn’t know the secret key you could probably figure it out, in reality the algorithm is way more complicated than that, relying on cryptography, so you wouldn’t be able to know the secret key or see that the string has been biased at all.

If the text is long enough, and you know the secret key, you can guarantee that the text was generated with it. In our examples, the letters in the text match our key 77% of the time. The probability of an actual random algorithm generating a text like that is already very low, despite the base entropy being only 100 bits. If my math is correct, for our example the p-value is 2.7 * 10⁻⁸, or about 0.00000027%. I would bet a hungy that the text was generated by our watermarking algorithm, with odds like these!

Of course we did exaggerate the bias and our base algorithm was random. In reality the bias is smaller, the algorithm for determining the likelihoods of possible next tokens is very complicated (it’s the LLM itself), and the algorithm for determining which token to bias is also way more complicated (involving cryptography and real secret keys). That said, hopefully it should help you understand why, for sufficiently long texts, this fingerprinting is just not possible to be replicated by humans.

China has it but for some reason photos aimed at the western audiences focus on “we built even more asphalt and concrete so that a highway looks slightly more interesting from afar”.

Highways are awful city infrastructure. They are loud, polluting, dangerous, socially detrimental, and ugly. What if you have to get to other side of this river, or even just the other side of the highway? You probably need a car to do any of that.

Skyscrapers are a bad way to build a city. They exacerbate social inequality and generally require transportation for people to get to their jobs. Transportation which, it looks like, is limited to cars - there’s not even a bus lane on the 5-lane highway full of traffic, so a bus will be slow as fuck.

This is basically the same as many north american cities, but with a more pronounced cloverleaf and a viewing platform to look at it.

Show me the metro lines connecting walkable neighborhoods. Or high-speed trains between well-developed city centers. Or any other good urbanism. China has it but for some reason photos aimed at the western audiences focus on “we built even more asphalt and concrete so that a highway looks slightly more interesting from afar”.

I think it depends on the country and industry. I never ever had to write a cover letter, but then again most of my jobs the company recruiters found and messaged me instead of the other way around. On the other hand one of my friends had to recently write a detailed cover letter and heavily customize their CV for every job they applied to.

That photo is kinda depressing. Muddy river, a massive highway interchange, faceless skyscrapers and some smog to boot. Having been to China, it is full of places so much nicer than that.

Fair.

I am almost certain my projector actually outputs 1080p. I can tell the difference between 1080p movies and 720p movies, I just don’t care too much.

I think I might be weird because I also notice, but don’t care about the difference between 60Hz and 90/120/240Hz for my desktop monitors or my phone screen. I just leave everything at 60Hz which allegedly saves a bit of power. Other people tell me I’m insane for doing that and that they’d never come back to a 60Hz monitor.

I’m watching on a 2m wide projector screen, and honestly for most movies high-bitrate 720p is still acceptable. Heck, if the movie is good enough I’d even watch it in DVD quality (which is 480p). High-bitrate 1080p is nicer of course, but usually not enough to waste storage space on it. I’d much rather see 3-4 movies in 720p than 1 movie in 1080p (which is about the size difference you get).

I guess different people have different preferences, but for me movies are not about examining the pimples on character’s faces. It’s about temporarily transporting me to a different reality, starting some in-depth discussion with whoever I’m watching it with, or just making me think about some area of life. Don’t need 1080p for any of that, my brain is more than good enough at suspending disbelief with a million pixels at any one time.

Heck, some of my favorite movies have been shot on consumer-grade cameras and film. The medium doesn’t matter as much as the direction, acting, composition and cinematography in general.

Honestly that sounds really nice.