Your ICE has a significantly longer range, and the road network has evolved so that you can be reasonably confident that you’ll find a filling station when you need one.

Today I’m driving an EV that doesn’t have it, and I’m missing it. Different EVs have different ranges and not every filling station on the autobahn has chargers. On the other hand, there are lots of places just off the autobahn which do have chargers. It’s a different game. Your mileage may vary of course.

The Megane E-tech has functionality in its satnav that lets you plot a route with charging stations on the way, showing how much capacity you will have left when you get to them. Not essential, but very useful for somebody who is new to EVs.

Software that communicates with power companies to allow the car to charge overnight at advantageous rates, or even feed energy back into the grid. Again, not essential, but good for the customer and helps with the transition to green electricity.

As far as I can tell, Microsoft tried to hold off these anti-trust lawsuits by intentionally making the interoperability and feature-parity between its products shockingly bad.

If you make a painting now, it wouldn’t be based on those thousands and thousands of paintings since, although you have seen them, you apparently do not remember them. But, if you did, and you made a painting based on one, and did not acknowledge it, you would indeed be a bad artist.

The bad part about using the art of the past is not copying. The problem is plagiarism.

Inspiration is absolutely a thing. When Constable and Cezanne sat at their easels, a large part of their inspiration was Nature. When Picasso invented Cubism, he was reacting to tradition, not following it. There are also artists like Alfred Wallis, who are very unconnected to tradition.

I think your final sentence is actually trying to say that we have advances in tools, not inspiration, since the Lascaux caves are easily on a par with the Sistine Chapel if you allow for the technology? And that AI is simply a new tool? That may be, but does the artist using this new tool control which images it was trained on? Do they even know? Can they even know?

Maybe the AIs should mix their own pigments as well, instead of taking all the other artists’ work and grinding that up.

None of what you said makes me think the situation would be worse than having Putin in charge. It’s a stretch to say Putin came from the civil sphere, and he assassinates his enemies in foreign countries using nerve agents and throws people out of windows at home.

I wish Altman would read Accelerando.

But we do know how they operate. I saw a post a while back where somebody asked the LLM how it was calculating (incorrectly) the date of Easter. It answered with the formula for the date of Easter. The only problem is that that was a lie. It doesn’t calculate. You or I can perform long multiplication if asked to, but the LLM can’t (ironically, since the hardware it runs on is far better at multiplication than we are).

This seems to be a really long way of saying that you agree that current LLMs hallucinate all the time.

I’m not sure that the ability to change in response to new data would necessarily be enough. They cannot form hypotheses and, even if they could, they have no way to test them.

The period when dejanews just started to index newsgroups was a golden age for finding answers on the internet, IMO, and there’s a strong similarity to the fediverse. All we need is for it to be searchable… OK, I see your point now.

The water companies have been paying dividends to their shareholders while not doing anything to upgrade the sewerage system. Certainly the people won’t want to pay twice for the upgrade.

Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that the leaking process will be the next process to try to allocate memory after you run out. It might actually be your window manager, for example.

The OOM killer is a last-ditch attempt by the OS to keep running, but it is very likely to leave your system in an unstable state.

I think the convenience very much depends on the journey you want to make. To travel from London to Edinburgh by car means several hours where you can do nothing but hold the steering wheel. If you go by train, you can spend the time usefully … or sleep. If you’re talking about commuting, well, driving into most cities during rush hour means sitting in traffic jams every day, not just occasionally.

That’s true, but they did already try it and it didn’t catch on. There’s a section about it on the Wikipedia page (“Copy protection”).

That section also mentions that Philips stated that these discs couldn’t have the CD logo on them. Since Philips was behind SACD, together with Sony, you’d think they wouldn’t have imposed that restriction on themselves if they had the choice.

You can definitely put DRM-protected content onto the physical CD media - that is exactly what SACD is. But then it isn’t an audio CD, even if it will play on a regular CD player. Search for “nonstandard or corrupted” on the Wikipedia page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio .

It’s my understanding that only conforming CDs can carry the CD logo. It’s usually on the case, not the disc itself, and it isn’t always there, particularly when the case isn’t a jewel case. All the same, I think that most things that look like CDs are conformant.

Thanks for the tip - they do seem to have a lot. I had assumed that the labels had made it unprofitable for that type of service to exist. I guess maybe it’s simply that there is more money to be made from streaming.

There certainly are some services where you can legally download MP3 and FLAC files. Bandcamp, for example. If you download your music like that then, yes, you do own it.

But I’m not aware of anywhere you can get music from the major music labels nowadays (Amazon used to sell MP3s and so did Google Play Music, but neither does any more). If you do, I’d love to know.

On the other hand, you can still - although it’s getting harder - buy CDs for major label artists and then you own the music (that copy of it).

No, a CD that carries the actual CD logo cannot have DRM. It is true that the music industry has often pushed ‘enhanced’ formats that look like CDs that do; SACD, for example.

Ownership is different to possession, and I want to actually own my music, not just possess the files.

CDs are digital files plus ownership.