In the hypothetical situation Windows desktop monopoly is over, there’ll be at least some internal pressure to do so. Cost of switch (in money = work hours) might be a pain, but if they believe they’ll profit more by using some competitor that is not Windows exclusive, they’ll eventually do it.

I had to dig through their annual report to find it:

Server products and cloud services revenue growth

Revenue from Server products and cloud services, including Azure and other cloud services; SQL Server, Windows Server, Visual Studio, System Center, and related Client Access Licenses (“CALs”); and Nuance and GitHub

So it includes Windows Server, but it’s way more than just that.

Hot takes are good when they’re like a campfire: other people gather around and start talking. This, though, is more like lighting a pile of used toilet paper on fire.

With the shit in the TP being false equivalence. It compares two situations (AI usage vs. the usage of other tools) as if they were the same for the sake of artistic credibility, when they obviously are not.

I saw in a recent Youtube video that between web services and AI, Windows licencing is only about 10% of Microslop’s business.

That’s correct. Here’s some data on Microsoft’s revenue:

40%     Server Products and Cloud Services
22%     Office Products and Cloud Services
10%     Windows
 9%     Gaming
 7%     LinkedIn
 5%     Search and News Advertising

IDK if that number is true, but it sure would explain how much they’ve put into user experience.

It does but it’s really short-sighted from MS’s part. Sure, Windows might be only 10% of its business, but the other 90% heavily rely on it. Or rather on Windows being a monopoly on desktop OSes; without that people Windows servers, Office and MS “cloud services” (basically: we shit on your computer so much you need to use ours) wouldn’t see the light of the day.

Worst hypothesis, even if counting just to 8, you’re still using a single hand, so it’s an improvement over counting to 5 with fingers. Couple it with the other hand and you’re counting up to 64.

There’s also the Chisanbop method @[email protected] mentioned, for that your unbending joint shouldn’t be an issue, and it allows you to count to 9 with a single hand (99 with both).

This is cute but not practical.

Memorising all 2^n for 0≥n≥10 (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024) is reasonable, but you’ll need to add a lot of them at the same time to convert the counting in your hands to a base 10 number (that’ll use elsewhere). Stuff like 256+128+64+8+2+1; it isn’t difficult but laborious, you know?

Plus the gestures can be sometimes awkward, depending on how flexible your hand is. For example, at least for me it’s a bit tricky to lift the ring finger up without either the middle or the pink.

I have a different strategy to count large numbers by hand. It’s up to 12 with one hand, 144 with both. But it feels comfortable, and rather intuitive:

Put the tip of your thumb on the indicated places to count 1, 2, 3… 12. With one hand; if you want to count past 12, use the other hand to count dozens (12, 24, 36… 144).

Provided you memorised the multiplication table for 12, for any given number you’ll perform at most a single addition, like 84+7 or similar.

(I have a suspicion the Sumerians counted this way with one hand, and one finger per dozen with the other. That’s why a lot of their units 5*12=60 as a basis.)

At this rate I’m calling dibs on your nickname 🤣

Fuck! I misread you. Yes, you’re right, Tim Sweeney is supporting CSAM.

Sorry for the misunderstanding, undeserved crankiness, and defensiveness; I thought you were claiming I was the one doing it. That was my bad. (In my own defence, someone already did it.)

Now, giving you a proper answer: yeah, Epic is better sent down the forgetting hole. And I hope Sweeney gets haunted by his own words for years and years to come.

Nobody here is supporting CSAM. Learn to read, dammit.

Yes, it certainly comes across as you arguing for the opposite

No, it does not. Stop being a liar.

Or, even better: do yourself a favour and go offline. Permanently. There’s already enough muppets like you: assumptive pieces of shit lacking basic reading comprehension, but still eager to screech at others — not because of what the others actually said, but because of what they assumed over it. You’re dead weight in any serious discussion, probably in some unserious ones too, and odds are you know it.

Also, I’m not wasting my time further with you, go be functionally illiterate elsewhere.

I wish I was as composed as you. You’re still calmly explaining things to that dumb fuck, while they move the goalposts back and forth:

• first they lie I was saying there were no victims;
• then they backpedal and say “It doesn’t matter if there’s a victim or not. It’s the depiction of CSA that is illegal.”;
• then they backpedal again and say what boils down to “talking about morals bad! Also I’ll talk about MY morals. I don’t see moral difference when people are harmed and when they’re not” (inb4 I’m abridging it)

All of that while they’re still pretending to argue the same point. It reminds me a video from the Alt-Right Playbook, called “never play defence”: make dumb claim, waste someone else’s time expecting them to rebuke that dumb claim, make another dumb claim, waste their time again, so goes on.

The Switch is definitely the last of their console I buy for the foreseeable future.

I’m glad the last Nintendo console I had was the SNES. Everything else was emulated.

But good news for Nintendo, I stopped pirating their games, they’re mostly junk nowadays. (I pirated PalWorld and I’m considering to buy it.)

Tim EpicFail.

That is a lot of text for someone that couldn’t even be bothered to read the first paragraph of the article.

Grok has the ability to take photos of real people, including minors, and produce images of them undressed or in otherwise sexually compromising positions, flooding the site with such content.

There ARE victims, lots of them.

You’re only rewording what I said in the third paragraph, while implying I said the opposite. And bullshitting/assuming/lying I didn’t read the text. (I did.)

Learn to read dammit. I’m saying this shit Grok is doing is harmful, and that people ITT arguing “is this CSAM?” are missing the bloody point.

Is this clear now?

IMO commenters here discussing the definition of CSAM are missing the point. Definitions are working tools; it’s fine to change them as you need. The real thing to talk about is the presence or absence of a victim.

Non-consensual porn victimises the person being depicted, because it violates the person’s rights over their own body — including its image. Plus it’s ripe material for harassment.

This is still true if the porn in question is machine-generated, and the sexual acts being depicted did not happen. Like the sort of thing Grok is able to generate. This is what Timothy Sweeney (as usual, completely detached from reality) is missing.

And it applies to children and adults. The only difference is that adults can still consent to have their image shared as porn; children cannot. As such, porn depicting children will be always non-consensual, thus always victimising the children in question.

Now, someone else mentioned Bart’s dick appears in the Simpsons movie. The key difference is that Bart is not a child, it is not even a person to begin with, it is a fictional character. There’s no victim.

EDIT: I’m going to abridge what I said above, in a way that even my dog would understand:

What Grok is doing is harmful, there are victims of that, regardless of some “ackshyually this is not CSAM lol lmao”. And yet you guys keep babbling about definitions?

Everything else I said here was contextualising and detailing the above.

Is this clear now? Or will I get yet another lying piece of shit (like @[email protected]) going out of their way to misinterpret what I said?

(I don’t even have a dog.)

I’m still reading the machine generated transcript of the video. But to keep it short:

The author was messing with ISBNs (international standard book numbers), and noticed invalid ones fell into three categories.

• Typos and similar.
• Publishers assigning an invalid ISBN to the book, because they didn’t get how ISBNs work.
• References "hallucinated"¹ by ChatGPT, that do not match any actual ISBN.

He then uses this to highlight that Wikipedia is already infested by bullshit from large “language” models², and this creates a bunch of vicious cycles that go against the spirit of Wikipedia of reliability, factuality, etc.

Then, if I got this right, he lays out four hypotheses (“theories”) on why people do this³:

• People who ignore the limitations of those models
• People seeking external help to contribute with Wikipedia
• People using chatbots to circumvent frustrating parts of doing something
• People with an agenda.

Notes (all from my/Lvxferre’s part; none of those is said by the author himself)

1. “Hallucination”: misleading label used to refer to output that has been generated the exact same way as the rest of the output, but when interpreted by humans it leads to bullshit.
2. I have a rant about calling those models “language” models, but to keep it short: I think “large token models” would be more accurate.
3. In my opinion, the author is going the wrong way here. Disregard intentions, focus on effect — don’t assume good faith, don’t assume any faith at all. Instead focus on the user behaviour; if they violate Wikipedia policies once warn them, if they keep doing it remove them as dead weight fighting against the spirit of the project.

I’m part of the proud “when your current phone breaks” 30%: my current phone is 4~5 years old, and I’m really not planning to replace it.

The bitter truth about electronics:

I think things are reaching a plateau for technical and economic reasons.

Too caloric for me. I’m trying to lose weight, okay??

Perhaps due to my heavy consumption of Japanese media, my views are biased. But frankly? I think Western design tendencies are the ones being weird here.

Note quotes are out of order. Also, that by “West” I’m including the Latin America I’m from.

“The West has an aversion to information density at times,” says Shoin Wolfe

Indeed, in a country preoccupied with safety, information overload is a part of daily life.

I think the difference is caused by advertisement: Western advertisement is so obnoxious, noisy, bossy, that it is bound to cause even more of a cognitive load than the Japanese counterparts. Western ads boil down to selfish arseholes screeching “are you too stupid to follow simple orders? I told you to consume it!” into your ears, while flashing loud lights. The following excerpt reinforces it:

“For the most part Japanese advertising has been ‘soft-sell,’ relying on the use of celebrities, attractive graphics, music or catchy slogans to sell products.” This was contrasted with “hard-sell” advertising, which uses “analytical logic, product comparison, or ‘annoy and attract attention’ tactics.”

And this might explain why people in the West avoid minor but still relevant info, while in Japan they seem to expect it:

In 2020, Lawson learned the hard way that too much minimalism can backfire. When the convenience store chain redesigned its branded product packaging to embrace negative space, it faced swift and loud mockery on Twitter. Users complained the now uniformly beige products looked too similar and gave no indication of the contents.

Moving on:

“(In web design) I think that negative space is an aesthetic, Western idea,” says Wolfe. “In the West, with physical products and just design in general, they have this idea that more negative space equals luxury.”

I have a better name for the so-called “negative space”: it’s “wasted space”. Space that failed to benefit the user.

And while some waste is unavoidable, I think the current Western design tendencies boil down to “cripple your design until you’re offering the users the bare minimum, before they stop bothering with it”.

“Because one symbol (of kanji) can compress what would be four to six letters in an alphabetic language, we grow up being accustomed to processing dense visual information very quickly,” says Akiko Sakamoto, a freelance UX designer and design strategist who works between Kyoto and Tokyo.

Under ideal conditions, the difference in scripts shouldn’t be relevant here. Sure, kanji is more informationally dense per character, but as a consequence your average kanji has more strokes than your average Latin letter. Thus requiring larger sizes for comfortable reading. And I think both things cancel each other out, forcing both scripts to convey roughly the same amount of info per area.

For the sake of example, contrast

• ⟨F⟩ vs. ⟨E⟩
• ⟨水⟩ vs. ⟨氷⟩ // mizu “water” vs. kōri “ice”

People here in the Fediverse are probably seeing all four characters the same size, right? Note how the difference between 水/氷 feels way subtler than the one between E/F.

…that is, under ideal conditions.