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.

The railroad switch also contains a device that may turn it into a Banach-Tarski switch, depending on the quantum interaction of an electron (Schrodinger cat style), but that electron entangled with an electron in one of your synapses responsible for making the decision, but you don’t know in which way. Think fast!

Are there any actual dwellings around the road? If so, those speed limits are quite reasonable or even on the high end. In Europe it is 50 km/h (30 mph) if there are houses around a road, and 30 km/h (18 mph) for actual town streets. The streets are also specifically designed to be narrower and there are a lot of traffic calming measures to make drivers naturally want to drive the speed limit. This way it is safe & pleasant for townsfolk to cross the street, the town doesn’t end up split in two by the highway, and if you’re a sane driver you won’t get fined even if you accidentally miss a speed limit sign.

Perhaps the best solution is to make the highways go around towns completely to avoid all of this. (and then we can also work towards banning cars in populated areas)

Huh, that’s fair. I mostly play non-DRM games (or I guess games which don’t check steamlib to start?) so never noticed this.

PC allows you to (mostly) own your games once you buy them, at least the offline functionality. Sure it’s legally still just a “license to play the game” but technically you can back up your Steam library, move it to a new PC, whatever. Steam can’t really “take the game back” from you (again, at least the offline functionality).

Meanwhile on console if Sony decides to remove some game from their store, well, that’s it. IIRC it will even become unplayable on your console if you have it downloaded.

Same difference as buying & downloading MP3/FLAC files vs subscribing to a streaming service.

Actually you don’t really have to “flatten” anything, the parking lots are already flat enough. Remove asphalt and build mixed-use housing there. Take away a couple lanes from cars and build a tram line or at least a dedicated bus lane. It’s not that difficult if there’s political willpower for it.

Don’t know about Farsi, but in Russian you would have to declare your knowledge and specificity of the subject. You can transmit some of that information by changing word emphasis, but it’s not very clear.

As for your sentences I would translate them as:

1. The girl downstairs was playing violin → Девушка [girl] внизу [downstairs] играла [was playing] на скрипке [violin].
2. A girl downstairs was playing violin - Внизу [downstairs] девушка [girl] играла [was playing] на скрипке [violin].

The first one puts more emphasis on the “girl”. The second one puts more emphasis on “downstairs”, almost suggesting that the identity of the girl doesn’t matter, kinda “some girl who happened to be downstairs”. But it is not as explicit as a definite/indefinite article for sure.

If you want to make it certain that the identity of the girl doesn’t matter, you could use an adjective to that extent: Внизу [downstairs] какая-то девушка [some girl] играла [was playing] на скрипке [violin].

If you want to make it certain that both you and the person you’re talking to know about the girl, you can use a determiner: Та девушка [that girl] внизу [downstairs] играла [was playing] на скрипке [violin].

Honestly nothing wrong with that, not my cup of tea but content like that definitely has an audience…

Yes, fair.