The main thing I got from that is drug pricing is complicated. At least the extra expenditure comes from widening the pool of available drugs rather than just the prices of existing treatments being put up.

One of the things I like about Horizon Zero Dawn is they introduced cosmetics so you didn’t have to compromise your visual style for the right set of numbers for your current opponents.

Well to start with you need to stop running a deficit. Once we are spending less than we raise in taxes we can pay down the debt and bring down those borrowing costs.

Alternatively you wait for inflation to overtake interest and eventually your debt pile and interest becomes a smaller and smaller part of the overall budget.

The term I’ve heard is the “right wing grift drift”. Even the left leaning Russell Brand went through the drift when he got cancelled after SA accusations.

Modern machines have TPM so we can do attested boot and validate a system hasn’t been tampered with. They don’t need third party kernel modules to test that.

Well that looks fascinating. The first thing I thought was the Colin Mcray coders night have been ex-demo scene or at least aficionados of it.

Fundamentally the reason they want to use kernel modules is to observe the system for other executables interfering with the game. This is a hacky solution at best

The TPM hardware can support attested boot so you can verify with the hardware nothing but the verified kernel and userspace is running. That gives you the same guarantees but without letting third parties mess with your kernel.

It’s nice to see Valve and Igalia see the benefit of open GPU drivers for Proton and FEX utilise.

It’s an interesting model they have moved to (heavily discounted food Vs donations). There is probably more work to do on wages and energy costs as time to cook is the greatest reason people don’t make healthy food.

I would have thought unified memory would pay off, otherwise you spend your time shuffling stuff between system memory and vram. Isn’t the deck unified memory?

I’ll believe it when someone has put a discrete GPU in the slot that runs with open drivers and no hacky workarounds for the PCIe bus.

Google, who are not short of a few bob, raised $25B in bond issues so they can keep up with AI build out. All of big tech seen terrified they will be left behind if they don’t have oodles of floating point compute on tap.

Foundation was the first sci-fi I remember reading but I don’t understand what people want when they ask for a faithful adaptation. The individual characters weren’t especially well written, the dialog is very rooted in the 50s/60s that Asimov was writing in and the constant reference to atomics was also a function of the time.

To me Foundation is about grand space opera and the rise and fall of empires. I think the TV show captures that pretty well. The narrative hacks to introduce recurring characters across the seasons never really bothered me. The inventions and embellishments of the “lore” basically modernise the story and that is fine.

mu4e inside my Emacs session.

Things like Tianaman square aren’t Western propaganda, it was a thing that happened. There is a difference between alignment fine tuning and straight up wiping things from the models knowledge base.

It’s not like totalitarian regimes don’t have form on censoring inconvenient facts including various revolutions, the Nazis and the Catholic church.

I was aware of the phrase and roughly what it was about. I had no idea about the Discord and some of the shared practices. I guess a lesson in not looking too deeply into the darker corners of the internet.

When the transition from colonial rule happened there was a (naive?) belief that China needed Hong Kong’s dynamism in a rapidly globalising world. Time has proved that not to be the case and I guess Hong Kong just withers and is subsumed into the mainland while a brain drain of those that can leave continues.

Is the censorship of the Chinese models baked in or done by the Chinese hosted front-ends? I’ve seen some of the Llama models have de-censored versions on Huggingface so I wonder if the same is true for the Chinese versions?

Well that was a wild article. There is a bittersweet thread about how the internet enables communities for all sorts of people to form but also the nihilistic obsessions fueled by deliberate overstimulation to reach a mythical state where ego and self completely disappear.

I ran into something similar when in haste I went from Raspbian Stretch to plain Bookworm and discovered the Debian version of Kodi didn’t have all the userspace drivers to drive the hardware decoding. In the end I worked around it by running Kodi from a container with stretch in it until the official Raspbian Bookworm got released. Maybe you could build a stretch based container for your VLC setup?