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> your registered address

There's no Anmeldung system in America. Actually voter registration is the closest thing you have to an official current address, and it's a lot easier to do (no appointment required).


Yes I know, which is strange, and I know many Americans are proud of it (no snooping state etc.) but overall I think there are more downsides to it. I feel this is an artifact from times without phone lines and computers with many small towns hundreds of miles apart (also see electorial college) and was a necessity but is now kept b/c of identity and tradition.


RedLetterMedia Phantom Menace review. A remarkably unique mix of comedy and genuine insight.

I feel like the Star Wars prequels were largely ignored culturally for years, but after the Plinkett review they keep coming up. There are even weirdos who insist they're good now.


Compared to the sequels?


It's basically a whole parallel tax collection system, which is truly nuts. Like the administrative overhead alone surely outweighs any abstract concerns about independence from government, which doesn't really exist in the UK anyway.


This gets raised every charter renewal and they always find the administrative overhead of e.g. collecting Netflix subscriptions, etc. is pro rata higher than the overhead for the licence fee.


I interpreted the parent as suggesting "just pay for it out of general tax revenue", which makes a lot of sense to me. No additional administration and enforcement required.


This is how Australia's public broadcaster is funded. But it means politicians directly decide its budget, which makes it a political football.


Politicians also decide on the license fees even where they are oficially not a tax.


The lines that really got me in this post were:

> A Licensing officer may call at your property not to collect the letters but to check that you are not watching a TV.

and

>...Cas Scott has said that the letters are not sought by TVL/BBC agents who make street visits.

Like, they show up at your home and ask to physically view your TV to make sure you aren't watching TV! It's so incredibly bonkers to me, I'm laughing out loud at work at the mental image!

Never change, UK, never change.


It’s weird. They don’t have any actual authority, so if they turn up you can just say “No”.

In my seven years of living in the UK, I’ve paid the TV licence for two years, and had one visit (who I shut the door on).


depends on the system, austria for example used to say if you don't have a radio or tv you do not need to pay.

As of 2024 you pay even if you have no tv, which means the overhead is probably near zero, as you already have lists of where people live.


Same here in Norway.


What's when more mental is that they are essentially all funding state propaganda agencies and so you're literally paying to be propagandised.

Not that much of none state media is really that much better to be honest.


We all pay to receive propaganda, be it governmental or not. A private TV channel will spread the ideology of their owners, and it is usually an ideology that is useful to them.


With private channels you can choose which ones to fund. Not so much with forced TV license fees for state broadcasters.


The purpose is psychological to attach a monetary value to the government TV channels, which makes the viewer consider them valuable and therefore trustable.


No. It really isn't.


Basically the behavior is hardware-dependent, and nobody wants to mandate that C++ compilers generate a ton of extra instructions on hardware which does not behave a particular way.

Of course you can define your own checked integer types, using inline assembly to check the overflow flag where available.


Just so we're clear, yes, it's "hardware-dependent", but literally every single architecture and CPU model does the same reasonable thing, which is to wrap into the negative.

Any architecture that doesn't use 2s complement is so esoteric by now that it does not make any sense for a general-purpose C compiler to pretend they exist.


Zillions of people are out there wearing cheap AirPod knockoffs too.

I don't think any ear buds are "cool", but certainly nobody cares, it's perfectly normal.


None of this is going to exist in a month. It's nonsensical to make a fork not because you disagree with technical decisions, but because you don't like the community management.

Like at most it's going to be an Iceweasel.


>not because you disagree with technical decisions, but because you don't like the community management.

Isn't this description every fork ever?

Popular reasons are a disagreement about a license change, or unreasonable barriers on getting things done.

When the community manager (first assumed rogue, but later found to be aligned with Godot's founder) threw a fit and made it clear that anybody who doesn't toil very narrow ideological and political lines is not welcome in the project, there's not much left to do but fork.


> for those of using open source

That should be just about everybody. MSVC STL was open sourced several years ago, so you'd have to be working on something pretty obscure/old.


I have yet to see an LLM produce even a competent short story, an extremely popular and manageable genre. The best I've seen still has the structure and sophistication of a children's story.


I used to come up with a bedtime story for my kids every night. They were interesting enough that my kids could recall previous stories and request I tell it again. I've since started using ChatGPT to come up with bedtime stories. They're boring and formulaic but good for putting the kids to sleep.

It feels dystopian to have AI reading my kids bedtime stories now that I think about it.


It's certainly looks like you have lost some magic in the process. But I could never come up with stories, I read them lots, lots of books.


Just retell stories you know from books you've read or movies or whatever. They haven't read any books they'll never know. I mean until eventually they will know but that's also funny.


That’s uncomfortably similar to the google Olympic ads.


Or those repulsive AT&T ads for the iPhone 16, where someone smugly fakes social interactions and fobs people off with AI summaries. It's not only not genuine, but it's manipulative behavior.


I’m mind blown you were willing to come up with random stories for your own blood and decided reading out ai drivel to them would somehow produce a better experience for any party involved.


The children's-story pattern, complete with convenient moral lessons at the end, is so aggressive with both ChatGPT and Claude that I suspect both companies have RLHFed it that way to try and keep people from easily using it to produce either porn or Kindle Unlimited slop.

For a contrast, look at NovelAI. They only use (increasingly custom) Llama-derived models, but their service outputs much more narratively interesting (if not necessarily long-term coherent) text and will generally try and hit the beats of whatever genre or style you tell it. Extrapolate that out to the compute power of the big players and I think you'd get something much more like the Star Trek holodeck method of producing a serviceable (though not at all original) story.


The holodeck method still requires lots of detail from the creator, it just extrapolates the sensory details from its database like ChatGpt does with language and fills out the story.

For example, when someone wanted a holonovel with Kiera Nerys, Quark had to scan her to create it so when using specific people they have to get concrete data as opposed to historical characters that were generated. Likewise, Tom Paris gave the computer lots of “parameters” as they called them to create the stories like the Adventures of Captain Proton and based on dialog he knew how the stories were supposed to play out on all his creations, if not how they ended each run through.

The creative details and turns of the story still need to come from the human.


In a made up story about a utopian future, and for now in our current reality, that is. There was also that episode where the holodeck created sentience and they put it in a box to explore a generated universe because it was too dangerous to let out into the real world. There's plenty of scifi predictions about the future of humanity, Star Trek's utopian future where humans are unique and necessary is not the only one, there are plenty of dystopian ones too.


>RLHFed

For those of us not steeped in AI culture, this appears to be short for "Reinforcement learning from human feedback".


GPT-4o can write surprising stories; you just need to become inhumanly creative at thinking of stupid premises.

https://chatgpt.com/share/66ff5c94-4dc0-8000-b33b-9321b4f99a...

https://chatgpt.com/share/66ff5d23-9ba8-8000-8a37-7bef91c688...


Ok that first one was very funny. Guess it shows even with the gptisms as long as the premise is an inspired one it makes for a good read.

Someone should try promoting it for creative story prompts :p


How many humans can sit down and linearly write a coherent, interesting story? — zero backtracking or revisions!

I’d bet very few if any.

By contrast, when you let the AI do its job in multiple steps and plan ahead, it seems to do much better. (Again, much like humans using a process.)

We’re often comparing apples to oranges evaluating the AI — comparing a single forward pass from the AI to an iterative process for the human.


Constructing short stories properly is an art form in and of itself, and is very hard to do well. But an LLM can help you somewhat, at least good enough to amuse yourself at least. But it does depend on your input.

There's a big difference between:

"Write me a story"

and things like

* "As the last star in the sky died, the shadows began to coalesce into a presence that wore the face of my own mother."

* "The red trees whispered quietly in the wind, their mana flowing around them in twisted strands. I reached out, pulled, twisted..."

* or even just: "write 10 dark fantasy prompts" (to give you a start. )

And it also depends on if you have the LLM write the whole story by itself, or if you're helping (or vice versa: have the LLM help you). And Claude, Llama and ChatGPT each give very different results! )

I mean, if you've convinced yourself that these tools can never lead to creativity, then I can't change your mind. But if you're a person who wants to see how one's creativity can be supported: Maybe you can get some ideas, perhaps just enough to break out of writer's block some time.


8-bit computers are fully comprehensible, they're something you can build on a breadboard from components with straightforward datasheets. They're a perfect learning tool.

I don't think future generations are going to be very interested in tinkering with a C64 or an Apple II, but the 6502 will live on for a very long time.


> I don't think future generations are going to be very interested in tinkering with a C64 or an Apple II

There's a decent bunch of Gen Z'ers absolutely fascinated by the DOS 3.11 / Windows 95 era, and almost certainly also C64 / Apple II. Both the hardware and software from that time period was still novel, innovative, and plain weird. On the other hand, it is very clearly just a computer: you can hook it up to a network or play games on it.

It brought us Microsoft Bob, who wouldn't want to poke around with that?


Windows 95 isn't that alien from WIndows 10, the usage it's almost the same.

With Retrozilla you can even comment into HN.

An Amiga or a classic Mac, OTOH, has a weirdness point.


>I don't think future generations are going to be very interested in tinkering with a C64 or an Apple II, but the 6502 will live on for a very long time.

I think it will be the exact opposite.


Future generations are somehow going to find a way to tinker with C64 and Apple II without involving the 6502?


There are a dozen 6502s in your vehicle.


Right, tons of gen AI stuff is super impressive. It's really cool that we can do all this stuff. In this thread we're talking about a fun toy.

But the actual practical applications are like, small useful tools. There's no real sign we're heading for a world-changing trillion dollar industry.


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