I'm guessing this doesn't capture manual restarts? I have the same experience as the commenter below: Plasma requires a restart a few times per day for me, as the panels disappear and one monitor's (of two) desktop goes black - usually after wake from sleep. This occurs on both machines that I run it on (only common component is Radeon graphics).
That said, it's a single command and not a big deal, and it's a great DE, so thanks for your work.
>Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons...
...I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that...
...I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted
>Try it today in the Gemini app. Available globally on desktop and mobile
Not quite. Gemini isn't available in Hong Kong. Unfortunately instead of telling Pixel users that, they updated their phones to use Gemini instead of the functional assistant, and then whenever the assistant is accessed, it just spins forever with a "just a moment" prompt.
It's not even clear why it's disabled, since it works just fine if you pay them for workspace subscription.
The government currently tendering for providers of different systems. See here [1] and here [2]:
Tender documents released on Monday show the technical trial is slated to begin “on or around 28 October”, with the provider also expected to assess the “effectiveness, maturity, and readiness” of technologies in Australia.
Biometric age estimation, email verification processes, account confirmation processes, device or operating-level interventions are among the technologies that will be assessed for social media (13-16 years age band).
In the context of age-restricted online content (18 years or over), the Communication department has asked that double-blind tokenised attribution exchange models, as per the age verification roadmap, and hard identifiers such as credit cards be considered.
They note that existing age verification setups largely either rely on providing ID, or on a combination of manual and automated behavior profiling (face recognition, text classification, reports from other users), both of which have obvious privacy and/or accuracy issues. The "double-blind tokens" point to a summary by LINC explaining how they _could_ be implemented with zero-knowledge proofs, but I could not find an article or a practical implementation (could just be a mistake on my part, admittedly)
At _best_ you end up with a solution in the vein of Privacy Pass - https://petsymposium.org/popets/2018/popets-2018-0026.pdf - but that requires a browser extension, a functioning digital ID solution you can build on top of, and buy-in from the websites. Personally, I also suspect the strongest sign a company is going to screw up the cryptographic side of it is if they agree to implement it...
The operative part being "that you can build on top of", because the "ID token" approach means it now has to act as essentially a mini-OAuth-provider for many other websites, not just government services
Yes. But I don’t think this type of regulation should care about whether it’s technically possible to do today. You could make a New York proposal type ban e.g banning algorithmic feeds to minors, even if it’s difficult to tell who is a minor and who isn’t. Social media companies would solve the ID problem or simply stop using those algorithms outright.
It's a bit wild that instead of parents just being responsible and teaching their children properly, we'll resort to neutering privacy and freedom on the Internet.
Less than low energy antitachycardia pacing (LEAP), which is itself a lower-energy alternative to the typical 1-shock defibrillation. Their "1000 times less" means three orders of magnitude. From the abstract of the paper:
We find that, rather counter-intuitively, a single, properly timed, biphasic pulse can be more effective in defibrillating the tissue than low energy antitachycardia pacing (LEAP), which employs a sequence of such pulses, succeeding where the latter approach fails. Furthermore, we show that, with the help of adjoint optimization, it is possible to reduce the energy required for defibrillation even further, making it three orders of magnitude lower than that required by LEAP
Important to note that the study uses:
"an electrophysiological computer model of the heart's electrical circuits "
and
"a simple two-dimensional model of cardiac tissue"
It depends, but it's not uncommon to completely forget the entire character. If you sort of remember it, then the muscle memory in your hands often helps to finish the character correctly once you start, at least that's what I've found and heard from others.
It may be contrived, but it still highlights the key difference.
Even if sneeze was a word that you were taught once in school and hadn't used for 30 years, you would still likely get close to the correct spelling from the sound (sneaze, snease, sneeze), and seeing the misspelling also helps with recall and to self correct.
This is the "virtual circle" of speaking/listening -> reading -> writing -> referred to by the author, which is not possible with Chinese.
It's true that there are some weird non-phonetic English words that PhDs would likely misspell, but it's not 100% of the language and you still could at least make an attempt.
It's possible to just write Chinese in phonetic form (e.g. pinyin), which bypasses this issue, but you have a secondary problem, which is the extremely narrow range of syllables (~400 * 4/5 tones = 1600-2000), resulting in quite ambiguous text.
Removing the added information would make it much more difficult to parse, though. Paragraphs don't exist in oral English - or spaces between words, quotation marks, capitalization, etc. - but we still find it much more easy to read properly formatted text than improperly formatted text.
Just because people are able to understand strict phonetic transcriptions, doesn't mean it's a good way to convey information (which is why almost no language relies on just strict phonetic transcriptions).
> how many people drink an espresso every day and think it has an x in it.
Arguably, "espresso" isn't an english word, but spelling it with an "x" as "expresso" isn't as incorrect as you may think. There's two main theories behind which word to use: "espresso" meaning to "press out" the coffee, or "expresso" meaning "expressly made for the customer" as it's quicker to make than a filter coffee. This is further confused by the Latin root being "exprimire" meaning "to press or squeeze out".
Yes a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and well... diarrhoea is diarrhea
My point was addressing "tsinghua students..." and "Harvard students..." unless they were literary scholars or grammarians their wield of the language may be at the level of "educated" but still plenty fallible. I'm sure those of us who did any post grad would have met people who were smart in a given axis and otherwise very ordinary along the other axes.
Well in other comments, native Chinese speakers brought up that when you forget how to write a character you just write a homonym and readers can guess by the context - which is how Chinese speech works anyway.
I don't think that Chinese people have problems knowing how to spell a character as different characters share the same pronunciation (more or less) if they have the same phonetic component[1]. So pinyin helps literally zero.
What is harder is to distinguish the meaning of all these characters. Let's take this set as an example: 里理哩鲤鯉俚娌悝锂鋰
Ok, they are all pronounced the same, but guessing or knowing all their meanings is a different game. "鲤" has to be a fish that's pronounced li3. That might still be easy, but the more abstract the meaning-giving character radical is, the harder it becomes to distinguish all of them.
>An estimated 10 billion barcodes are scanned globally, every day, according to GS1, the organisation that oversees UPC and QR code standards.
GS1 are the ultimate gate keeping monopoly. They provide numbers as a service.
Most retailers like Amazon require you to have a GS1-issued barcode number on your product, and so you need to pay GS1 annually for the right to use a particular number. You can see the pricing here:
It is a gate that actually needs to be kept, though. Like domain names - which provides an example of how it might be done in a way that allows for competition to lower prices. Although there are of course differences. But dividing the number space across a few competing entities seems a simple solution that should work to some degree.
Don't get me wrong. As with ISO norms, I think it is worth having well funded institutions that ensure there is progress and reliability.
But that can lead to problematic situations like with norms where everybody is required to fulfill them by law, but you have to pay in the vicinity of a thousand eurdollars to get the current version, leading to the situation where private people who also would have to fulfill those norms cannot read them and the norm institute can issues minor corrections each year that are meaningless because it means you have to get the new version in your field.
The way I see it at least something like the ISO norms should be paid for by taxes and then made available for free — if you want to require people to uphold those norms.
Now that ISO-example might not be directly translatable to GS-1, after all having a little cost and friction added to the process could be a feature in that case, as it means people won't be as likely to squat on numbers for fun or because they forgot. The question there is only how easy/unbureaucratic it is to get/cancel the number and if the cost is reasonable for people entering the market. And then you have to think again if that model of financing is truly what gives us the best outcome.
It does, but the only real requirement is to prevent duplicates. It's not a limited resource like domains or IP4 addresses. There's no justification for the subscription model aside from "because we can". They used to give out numbers in perpetuity, but eventually realized there was a lot more money to be made.
Dividing blocks over multiple competing providers is a good suggestion.
Tbh I suspect part of the value is that it limits the amount of absolute junk filling the store. Requiring a unique ID for every product that costs some money is a very low bar for real products, but a high bar for AI generated slop tshirts that might not sell a single unit.
Interestingly, it doesn’t look like IKEA uses UPC barcodes at all and just has their own format and numbers. I guess since they only sell their products in their own stores, there is no need for it to be globally unique.
I've never seen actual junk that doesnt work from a fake brand with a legit UPC barcode, which seems to indicate it's an effective gate keeper, if people cared to look at it.
> It's not a limited resource like domains or IP4 addresses.
I'm curious why you say it's not a limited resource.
Although you could theoretically expand the length of UPC every couple years to keep growing, the reality is that all the systems communicating these numbers back and forth need to have a standard.
In addition, printed barcodes need to fit within the area they are designed to fit in, if they were regularly increasing in size it would impact various systems (e.g. conveyor systems scanners, item labels, etc.)
I wonder what happens if you stop paying? Do they reuse your number? That would kind make their service pointless if a number you get could have already been used in previous valid products.
UPC's do have a lifetime already, so it's not entirely outside of their model.
Large companies produce so many UPC's for short lived products, especially fashion apparel, that GS1's rule is that UPC's should not be reused for at least 3 years.
What I find fascinating is that they have a form to request single UPC barcode numbers. But that form is effectively putting an item in a shopping cart of an online store.
So they perfected the "numbers as a service" business model up to the point that your average Joe can now buy themselves their own UPC number for $30 with almost the same simplicity as buying a book on Amazon. Maybe they should literally start selling UPC numbers on Amazon next?
The Firefox CEOs earn something like 7M dollars per year while the browser is losing market share and in my opinion one bad decision is made after another (killing extensions, not signing extensions, claiming browser is safe but then updating via some strange mechanism, investments in random projects, not maintaining the core which is the browser).
For anyone interested in the the details, China Talk released a podcast last week on the updated export controls, which discussed the enormous quantity of ASML machinery purchased by China in the leadup to the regs being tightened [1].
From Bloomberg:
"China accounted for 46% of ASML's sales in the third quarter, compared to 24% in the previous quarter and 8% in January to March."
This has been going on for a while and China had plenty of time to place orders ahead:
"Wennink tells CNBC that the average lead time of ASML's machines is roughly a year and a half to two years and that “when you look at the relatively short expectations… of a potential recession, then customers are of course not canceling any orders because they could find themselves in the back of the queue when this" ...Jan 25, 2023
That said, it's a single command and not a big deal, and it's a great DE, so thanks for your work.
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