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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • You’re in luck!

    Why would you carry an Axe over the should opposite the hand you’re holding it with?

    That’s not an axe, it’s a bindle - exactly what a fool (in french, le fou) would carry.

    What is up with his pants

    He’s wearing medieval trousers - that is in fact two ‘hose’

    These trousers, which we would today call tights but which were still called hose or sometimes joined hose at the time, emerged late in the fifteenth century and were conspicuous by their open crotch which was covered by an independently fastening front panel, the codpiece.

    And again le fou is so stupid, his junk is out and all over the place.

    See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trousers



  • Actually, PDF is a turing complete programming language.

    PDF is a simplification and wrapper around the computer language PostScript - a PostScript or PDF doc literally runs on the printer or computer and outputs the rasterisation of the thing you want to print.

    PostScript is language based around a stack. You can define functions (which may be fully recursive) that run on the stack.

    Here’s a small example:

    /ANGLE {
       newpath
       100 0 moveto
       0 0 lineto
       100 50 lineto
       stroke
    } def
    
    10 setlinewidth
    0 setlinejoin
    100 200 translate
    ANGLE
    
    1 setlinejoin
    0 70 translate
    ANGLE
    
    2 setlinejoin
    0 70 translate
    ANGLE
    

    As such, PDF that’s actually similar to Python, and HTML is closer to something like a JSON or XML document.

    Note however that HTML can contain Javscript or WASM programs, but these are embedded rather than features of HTML.


  • modeler@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldHow Times Change...
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    2 months ago

    Linux was not muscled like that in 1991 - it’s first, barebones kernel was released in September of that year.

    I remember installing Linux on a 90MHz 486 in the mid 90s and it barely ran X server with a simple window manager. And if the machine was turned off while Linux was running, you might not be able to boot again.

    Linux now, however, is unrecognizeably better.


  • I’m guessing that exactly the same LLM model is used (somehow) on both sides - using different models or different weights would not work at all.

    An LLM is (at core) an algorithm that takes a bunch of text as input and produces an output of a list of word/probabilities such that the sum of all probabilities adds to 1.0. You could place a wrapper on this that creates a list of words by probability. A specific word can be identified by the index in the list, i.e. first word, tenth word etc.

    (Technically the system uses ‘tokens’ which represent either whole words or parts of words, but that’s not important here).

    A document can be compressed by feeding in each word in turn, creating the list in the LLM, and searching for the new word in the list. If the LLM is good, the output will be a stream of small integers. If the LLM is a perfect predictor, the next word will always be the top of the list, i.e. a 1. A bad prediction will be a relatively large number in the thousands or millions.

    Streams of small numbers are very well (even optimally) compressed using extant technology.



  • It seems you misunderstand the goal of goverment.

    This is your opinion of what you want governments to be, not what they actually are.

    What is the point of not researching and having bigger budget, if it can’t buy thing that did not get created?

    What a lot of negatives and hypotheticals. All solved by getting a return on investment and having that money to do more things with, including research.

    And then on goverment level there is no such thing as copyright or patent.

    I’d like to introduce you to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) which is an intergovernmental organisation that does precisely what you say doesn’t exist.

    They STILL need to put in money to create their own product.

    Sure, but the cost to duplicate the product is tiny compared to researching, developing then creating a production run for it. And this fake normally severely impacts the profits for the inventor.

    But now we’re just repeating the same arguments.


  • You appear to want to completely burn down a system you don’t understand because of some examples of misuse. For example, as there are slumlords, should we make all property free? Or should we solve the underlying problem (of massive capital flows to the rich?)

    You also have no idea how to read and understand a patent. The way they are written is horrendously verbose and highly confusing, but so are medical research papers or legal case summaries, and for the similar reasons: these are highly technical documents that have to follow common law (i.e. a long history of legal decisions taken in IP disputes).

    The real problem in the US IMHO has been the constant defunding of the patent office that has allowed a large number of very poor patents to be filed. The problems you are screaming about largely go to that root cause.

    But don’t throw the baby out with the bath water - you have no idea how bad that would be for everybody but the mega corporations.


  • modeler@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    Manufacturing lines are built all that time for unpatented products,

    And cheaply, because the research and productisation has been done by somebody else - this is an argument for patents

    plus a competitor can’t just “take all of that work and investment”, they will need to put in money to create their own product,

    Not true. One major issue is that many competitors literally copy the product exactly. Fake products wreck the original company

    even if it’s a copy they still need to make it work,

    That is 100x easier when you have a working product to clone

    They’ll be second to market, and presumably need to undercut price to get market share… This is a very risky endeavour, unless the profit margins are huge, and in which case, good thing that there’s no patents…

    The point is exactly that the fake product undercuts the original by a huge amount (they had no investment to pay off).

    If the research is so costly and complex (pharmaceutical, aeronautical,…), then it should be at least partly funded by the government, through partnerships between universities and companies.

    I agree that the government model makes sense for a lot of areas and products. But note that a government won’t invest millions or billions in developing a product if another country immediately fakes the product and prevents the government from collecting back the taxes it spent on the research.

    As I discuss above there are lots of criticisms to the current IP laws - adjustment is 1000x better than abolishing a system that has driven research and development for several hundred years


  • All evidence points to the opposite of your conclusion.

    In places where IP laws are weak or non-existent, very little fundamental or expensive research is done by companies - because the result is immediately cloned by 100 competitors. In medicine, companies will not research and develop new drugs to market unless they can get a return on the investment. Even in places with strong IP laws, development of drugs that can’t produce a return in the limited monopoly window is simply not done (eg with a small number of patients or when 1 course of a drug will permanently cure the patient), so many diseases do not have treatments.

    In countries where there is strong IP laws, innovation jumps because innovating creates new things that people/companies can sell for profit. A personal area of interest is development of small-arms - every single advance from muskets to modern weapons is documented in patents in the US and Europe; the rate of innovation in the 19th and 20th centuries was incredible - and that is via patents and profit in the free market.

    Now, we can have a productive argument about state sponsored research - but unless the state undertakes all research in an economy (which would be staggering overreach), we need IP laws.

    We can also discuss patents on software (which IMHO are not needed because companies do fundamental research without patent laws like in the UK).

    We can also discuss what is the appropriate time that copyright should remain - the Disney law in the US is a ridiculous overreach. It was 25 years or until the death of the author/artist - that worked very well for centuries.

    You don’t need government promises of monopoly rights to create innovation in the marketplace, competition drives innovation.






  • TSMC and Intel both use ASML lithography, but there are many many more steps than just lithography - Intel, TSMC, Samsung and other chipmakers use different processes to make the components on their chips (many of which are patented and so owned by specific parties).

    These things include the physical structure of the components and wiring on the chip, how the silicon is doped and with what ions, what coatings are put on to be etched in the lithography and what coatings are applied to the etched layers, how the chips are packaged and also how multiple chips can be combined into one package.

    Basically there are similarities but also hige differences between the different manufacturers, and a lot of trade secrets.

    If you’re interested in this kind of thing, I’d recommend the youtube channel Asianometry - the content creator is amazing.



  • This is true for only red and green loght detecting proteins (opsins) - the blue opsin gene is on chromosome 7.

    The red and green detecting proteins have an interesting history in humans.

    Fish, amphibians, lizards and birds have 4 different opsins: for red, green, yellow and blue colours. And the blue opsin sees up into the ultra-violet. Most animals can see waaaay more colours in the world than we (or any mammal) can. So what happened that makes mammal vision so poor?

    It’s thought that all mammals descend from one or a few species of nocturnal mammal that survived the catastrophe that wiped out the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous. The colour detecting cells (the cones) need a lot of light compared to ones that see in black-and-white (the rods) and therefore nocturnal animals frequently lose cones in favour of the more sensitive rods for better night vision. The mammals that survived the Cretaceous extinction had also lost the green and yellow opsins while keeping red and blue - basically the two different ends of the light spectrum.

    Consequently today most mammals still have only 2 opsins so your cat or dog is red-green colourblind.

    Why do humans see green? Probably because our monkey forebears, who lived in trees and ate leaves, needed to distinguish red leaves and red fruit (visible to birds) from the green background.

    But how did we bring back the green opsin? A whole section of the X chromosome (where the red opsin is coded) got duplicated in a dna copying mistake and then there were two genes for red opsins. As there are different alleles (versions), they could be selected for independently and so one red opsin drifted up the spectrum to be specific for green. So our green opsin is a completely different gene to the green opsin in fish, birds, etc. This kind of evolution happens a lot which is why, for example, there are many families of similar hormones like testosterone and estrogen. And steroids too.


  • It is terribly sad - they must live in a world of hurt.

    However so many of these people actively try to hurt LGBTQ+ and trans people by inciting hate and changing laws to harm the non-straight. In particular they have been preaching that being gay/trans equates to being a child molester. This is horrific and needs to stop. Exposing the hypocrisy is essential to reducing the harm they are inflicting to real people right now