Alexandra is the hero students (and scientists) all over the world need! And I’m so glad that my former profs acknowledged and recommended Sci-Hub to us. So many people wouldn’t be able to graduate without debt (or “even more debt” for the Americans) otherwise.

Not only is it voluntary (can confirm that 1&1 doesn’t block the subset of sites I just now tried out which are on the list) but Germany’s approach seems to be pretty tame in comparison, still. Doesn’t make it good, but a lot less bad than it seems by just reading the highlighted section.

While the CUII website lists 24 platforms for blocking, at last count the exposed list contained well over ten times more domains/subdomains, over 300 in total. For perspective, Germany’s site-blocking program is very modest when compared to schemes in the UK, France, Italy, and Spain, for example, where thousands of sites are blocked with information on domains mostly restricted.

Holy cow that’s a horrible take. Please, if you can spare the time and money, come visit our country and don’t just look at the few high-criminality places or the corruption of key politicians. Yes, they exist and should be criticized, but if your conclusion from that is to think that Germany is still just like during one of the most horrific regimes, then you’ve been grossly misinformed and need to experience the daily reality instead.

“Break a leg” (or “Hals und Beinbruch” in German, which is “Neck and leg fracture”).

I don’t even know what the logic could be. Is it supposed to be some sort of reverse psychology?

It depend on the context/group.

At work, no biggie, it just tells me that you acknowledge my message and currently have nothing useful to add.

With my friends, who usually heavily rely on emojis and “oldtimey smileys” (like xD or y.y)? Ya, unless you completely eminate happiness and friendship, I’m concerned about your mood / standing with me.

As @apotheotic@beehaw.org mentioned, that is actually not allowed and against the spirit of the “cookie banner law”. But since hundreds, if not thousands of sites break this law, it takes quite the time for government workers to sift through all of that (provided they even get around to it).

Big agree on all of that, including the Any Austin recommendation!

Skyrim is amazing for this kind of mindfulness with its environments. The NPCs are a little so-so (once you spend an extended amount of time at the same location) but you can’t go wrong with setting up campfire and just taking in the wilderness and everything around you. X4 Foundations actually is pretty great, too, for this vibe-intake, when you land on a station and just exist (or sneak into another captain’s ship and see where it takes you)

I occasionally check my surroundings (especially when staying at a spot for more than just a couple minutes) for potential ambush and sniper locations.

The funny part about that is that I only served for two years and not once left my home country to even be at risk of combat.

You’re right! I thought of the typical soda can and, as far as I remember, those tabs are lifted a little so you can get underneath even by just shoving your finger skin in. But just yesterday I tried opening a can of tuna and was surprised not only by how naturally I do the little lift with my finger nails but also by how very difficult it is to open when you don’t use your fingernails.

Genuine question because this might be a design difference between your country and Germany, where I’m from: Can you not lift the tab a little bit with the skin of your finger and then just pull on it? Are they welded onto the can?

True, true. We literally omly have a wood furnace, so are absolutely not affected by this, but I’ll see how reporting potential GDPR violations in the name of someone else works.

Sorry that it didn’t land as an obvious joke. With the NSDAP NPD AfD on such a steep rise, I think I have transcended gallows humour and arrived at necromancer humour levels to be able to cope with this reality.

This is my reasoning, too. I keep my keyboard QWERTZ + German Umlaute, but almost everything else is set to English. Pretty much the only exception are videogames and movies that have a superior German version to them (like Kingdom Come Deliverance)

Samesies!

One very important word of caution (unfortunately coming from experience): Syncthing, as the name suggests, makes it so the content of one device is the same as that of another device. So, even if you have one device set to only receive data, it means that if you delete a file from the sending device, the receiving device will also delete that file to stay in sync with the sending device.

There is a way to use Syncthing as a simple backup storage program (not necessarily the best solution but much better than manually backing up your files every few months and just hoping for the best). But it means that you have to use the advanced folder option “ignoreDelete”. I also use the file versioning system, so even if something is automatically deleted by mistake, it’s still versioned in a special subfolder and accessible to me.

Thank you a lot for the load of information! I just now got to reading it all. I was very skeptical about the fact that it is fed by the output of other LLMs but the way you explain it makes sense to me that it might not be that much of a problem. I guess a super blunt analogy could be “It’s only incest if it’s your children” lol

Hahaha the production lead actually suggested that I might have been sick and coughed germs onto the sample sponge or that the sponges themselves were already contaminated during manufacturing, because every single sample showed high counts of pseudomonas.

Maybe instead she should start listening to us when we tell her that production equipment from 1970 might not be sufficient to run a food production with the hygiene requirements of today. But no, replacing that would cost more money than just taking samples over and over until the results are low enough (probably because by the 37th swab I cleaned the surface better than the production workers)

Thanks for the explanation. I don’t understand enough about large language models to give a valuable judgement on this whole Deepseek happening from a technical standpoint. I think it’s excellent to have competition on the market and it feels that the US’ whole “But they’re spying on you and being a national security risk” is a hypocritical outcry when Facebook, OpenAI and the like still exist.

What do you think about Deepseek? If I understood correctly, it’s being trained on the output of other LLMs, which makes it much more cheap but, to me it seems, also even less trustworthy because now all the actual human training data is missing and instead it’s a bunch of hallucinations, lies and (hopefully more often than not) correctly guessed answers to questions made by humans.

Thank you for that perspective. It seems to be somewhat similar and thankless to when I get tasked with taking microbio samples from the machines to check for contamination and then get grumpy department leads because the analysis results show over and over again that their cleaning procedure is inefficient.

Does open sourcing require you to give out the training data? I thought it only means allowing access to the source code so that you could build it yourself and feed it your own training data.

Additionally, if a day one patch were actually enough to fix these issues, then just delay the game by a day. That way, the launch day gamers won’t suffer through a (sometimes) unplayable experience and possibly leave bad reviews.