Dude the issue in Barcelona is that AirBNBs take up housing that’s supposed to be occupied by supercomputer researchers. The city also already has plenty of Hotels. Licensed ones.

If more tourists want to come than there are hotel rooms tough luck why should Barcelona tank its economy for them. Barcelona is a city, not a theme park. The reason it’s beautiful is not because it was built to attract tourists, but because it’s an economical powerhouse run and lived in by people who value things like architecture and urban planning.

Take your tourism dollars and spend them in Extremadura, Barcelona won’t mind. Great food there, nature, small places, little industry, Roman architecture, they can actually use that money.

Both Motorbikes and trucks are vehicles but motorbikes are not trucks.

The song in question, it would’ve been glorious.

They talk a good game about eliminating child labor, but always seem to look the other way in their supply chain.

Maybe in the past, but they actually lobbied against the EU diluting the supply chain act which makes companies responsible for human rights abuses of their suppliers.

My best guess it’s that it’s a combination of being sick and tired of being sued and not having due diligence documentation at the ready to defend themselves not just in state courts but also the court of public opinion, as well as the realisation that human rights abuses don’t make cocoa any cheaper for them: It’s not like slave plantations would cut them a share of the extra profit, they’re still paying word market prices. So for them it’s a way to get rid of grift and corruption within their own supply chain and they don’t want to be the only ones playing along those rules.

It definitely isn’t caused by Nestle suddenly growing a conscience, it’s just that making money, for a change, in this specific case, actually aligns with corporate responsibility.

Here’s the ZDF documentary, German only, German subtitles available.

Here’s an interview with the makers, also German but as it’s on youtube you might have some success with auto-translated subtitles.

None of those are fast fashion. Hanes and Gildan make underwear, t-shirts, maybe the odd hoodie. Boring and casual (both in a good way), most of all comfortable. Under Armour is similar but for sports.

NixOS. Gentoo gets into trouble when you need multiple versions of the same library at the same time. Also while the infrastructure supports it it’s annoying that gentoo doesn’t provide pre-built binaries, like yes some people might want to have reason to build their own bash but I think I’ll be fine with a standard build. NixOS? If you install something usually it’s going to be pre-built. Change a couple of configuration flags? May or may not be pre-built. You want to apply a custom patch? It’s going to seamlessly build from source.

I don’t know whether you’ve been alive during the “games make people violent” craze, where the establishment was trying to pin school shootings on a harmless hobby: The same establishment which caused the systemic issues driving youth into desperation was now blaming an escapist hobby for the issues they, themselves, caused. It’s like framing jugglers for knife attacks. Do some jugglers juggle knives? Yes. Does that have anything to do with anything? No.

Is that in any way comparable in scale and intensity to what various groups had to go through historically, or are now, no of course not. But gamers, as a wider culture, know what it’s like to be victim-blamed. The average person who picks up playing games as a hobby is not any more racist, misogynist, or drivelling rape apologia than the population average. They do it because they enjoy it, no further qualifications necessary.

But OTOH, nope. The copypasta is pumped-up to 11 when it comes to the capacity of gamers to be a community, to organise, take joint action, be a force, everything. I’d be easy to go “no true gamer” on some people but face it “gamers” as a group are still pre-ordering games and letting GPU scalpers have their way with us. Just as powerless as, say, football fans are powerless in he face of FIFA corruption. Concert goes in the face of ticket platform monopolies. We’re a hopeless case in any other aspect but whinging: That, we are masters of.

The point being it’s obnoxious that discussions of any female politician at some point have to bring up their attractiveness.

Her badassery was brought up. Yes, badass women are attractive, deal with it.

If we take your proposal for example, that would mean that we were very alike to the Scandinavians, since those are mostly the “pagan” traditions that remain in some thinned out, distorted ways, here too.

I guess what I want to say overall is that you shouldn’t confuse the impact of Christianisation with the impact of being neighbours for millennia. Of course you both have Saunas, why wouldn’t they copy you, long before the crusades. There’s indubitably lots of influence in areas such as administration, but folk dances, music? Which tax collector has ever cared about that, that kind of thing travels from village to neighbouring village, the occasional travelling musician, not via state structures.

The Catholic Church definitely had influence on music as they had their stuff standardised but then not every village had a church much less a choir much less organ, nor would you want to dance to their chants. They didn’t unify Europe musically, why would they care to. What they did do is popularise polyphony.

On the flipside: Tradition is not praying to the ashes, but passing on the fire. If there’s some specifically Finnish spark that makes you produce the amount and quality of metal that you do then, by all means, do blaze on. Why go backwards, how would that be more authentic.

might we have something equally powerful and captivating to preserve?

…no. As in: That’s not the kind of cultural practice Christianisation wiped out or we wouldn’t be burning stuff come spring, dance around maypoles, and whatnot. The Faroese are still into singing sagas as an actual community practice. Missionaries back then weren’t trying to regiment people into factory workers, make them sit still on chairs and such.

It’s kind of a grass is greener on the other side kind of situation. There’s a good reason stuff like Heilung is captivating, but that’s because they’re modern-day shamans speaking to instincts buried by modernity, not because they’d be historical in their music or practices. Norse folk music indeed sounded pretty much like Norse folk music does today.

Honourable cause, not good praxis interjecting it into random topics making people more fed up hearing about it than they’re fed up hearing about vegans.

Just a sentence further on:

However, in both World Wars the break of gauge did pose some amount of obstacle to the invading Germans.

And of course there’s another good reason: Compatibility with the rest of the EU. Notably, the proposed Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel is supposed to have standard gauge because Rail Baltica has.

I don’t think they’ll do it in one go, though, makes much more sense to do it, mostly, at natural infrastructure replacement speed. Tracks need new sleepers and new rails every so often, the trackbed needs renovation (though narrowing of course is easier than widening), you might want to upgrade the speed rating of the lines. Each of those is an opportunity to do this kind of thing for essentially free, modulo having to deal with the different gauges on your network.

I would guess it’s pretty hard to reconstruct data with a different LLM

I think the idea is to have compressor and decompressor use the exact same neural network. Looks like arithmetic coding with a learned function.

But yes model size is probably going to be an issue.

So… crystal ball, I don’t have access to the paper either. Think arithmetic coders as neural nets are function approximators. You send an initial token and the NN will start to generate deterministically, once you detect a divergence from the lossless ideal you send another token to put it on track again. Make it a sliding window so things don’t become too computationally expensive. You architect the model not to be smart but to need little guidance following “external reasoning” so to speak.

The actual disadvantage of this kind of thing will be the model size, yes you might be able to transmit a book in a kilobyte (100x or more compression) but both encoder and decoder will need access to gigabytes of neural weights, and that’s just for text. It’s also not going to be computationalliy cheap, though probably cheaper than PAQ.

Those thresholds are irrelevant because they’ve been crossed in seven countries already, the important bit is getting another 560k votes from anywhere (in the EU).

The actual hurdle is those 1m votes, any initiative that is not completely lopsided will take the per-country hurdles with ease, as you can tell by this initiative having achieved that while not yet having half of the votes it needs. In fact taking all the thresholds together you wouldn’t reach 1m votes but ~0.5m, that is by design.

That’s not to say that it’d be a bad idea to do pushes in certain countries, particularly large ones which are less hooked into English media than the usual suspects. By population: France, Italy, Spain, Romania, Belgium is covered by Netherlands+France, Czechia, Portugal, Greece, that’s all >=10m member states lagging behind. No point in going after Sweden or the Netherlands people there are already in the loop, and Poland seems to have rallied itself.

Not the customer’s problem. Also, fraud.

But probably failure of due diligence because any seller who’s not a complete idiot would rather let the sale fail and let the company go bankrupt than risk committing fraud.

There’s a better way: German flour types. They’re specifying mineral content, e.g. standard “white flour” is Type 405, meaning that when you pyrolyse 100g of flour, 405mg of ashes will be left. As the minerals were all in carbon solution before, and temperatures are low enough to not melt them into slag, you’re essentially left with single atoms. Close enough at least for an assumption. If you disagree I shall hand you a mortar.

Of course, that doesn’t specify everything. I suggest also measuring the released energy, then jot both numbers down on the complex plane. So you have joule-moles of flour.

Not really, they’d clash all the time. 8080 is the default port for a non-privileged webserver, that is, web server, something you put your own stuff on, not applications/daemons that happen to have a web interface. E.g. ComfyUI uses 8188 for its web interface, deluge 8112, neither will serve your index.html.

Eh. Ben-Gvir is Mizrahi, while Hippie Kibbutzim are full of Ashkenazi. Netanyahu is Ashkenazi, but also from a Russian background. Jigal Amir is Mizrahi.

Not saying that European BS doesn’t have a role in this, it laid the foundations, but the current political landscape of Israel would look quite differently without all the newer arrivals. There’s definite electoral trends among the ethnic backgrounds, long story short Mizrahis don’t hail from places where there’s ever been anything like a functional social democracy, they’ve also been minorities there, mix that with European fascism and you get… well, people like Ben-Gvir and Amir.