The ubuntu:24.04 Docker image is only 77.30 MiB.

alpine:3.19.0 is 7.38 MiB.

Of course those sizes are without a kernel. Typical everything-included distro kernels are generally a few hundred MiB as they include drivers for everything that might be needed, but a custom build for known hardware can reduce that to just a few MiB.

Most of this is personal opinion and snobbery that I can’t do much about except maybe ask that you examine how anarcho-capitalist your takes sound.

Objectivist, perhaps. They’re the ones who obsess over controlling and monetizing free external benefits. There is no copyright in anarcho-capitalism (including “moral rights” etc.) so the GP doesn’t sound at all anarcho-capitalist while arguing for infringement of others’ real property rights to prop up their own artificial (non-rivalrous) “intellectual property” rights.

They didn’t say it shouldn’t have been developed. Improving the AI models so they can deal with this kind of malicious interference gracefully is a good thing.

The EULA also prohibits using Nightshade “for any commercial purpose”, so arguably if you make money from your art—in any way—you’re not allowed to use Nightshade to “poison” it.

You’re restricting speech whether or not you confine your censorship to only AI-generated images.

Correction: Fortunately, not unfortunately. A rule like that would prohibit any form of public / street photography, news videos, surveillance videos, family photos with random strangers in the background… it’s not reasonable at all.

I’d settle for just the limits, personally.

The part that makes me the most paranoid is the outbound data. They set every VM up with a 5 Gbps symmetric link, which is cool and all, but then you get charged based on how much data you send. When everything’s working properly that’s not an issue as the data size is predictable, but if something goes wrong you could end up with a huge bill before you even find out about the problem. My solution, for my own peace of mind, was to configure traffic shaping inside the VM to throttle the uplink to a more manageable speed and then set alarms which will automatically shut down the instance after observing sustained high traffic, either short-term or long-term. That’s still reliant on correct configuration, however, and consumes a decent chunk of the free-tier alarms. I’d prefer to be able to set hard spending limits for specific services like CPU time and network traffic and not have to worry about accidentally running up a bill.

Sure, they don’t rule the world. They only have the power to ban you (either the company per se or its individual owners, officers, and/or employees) from ever again doing any business in the EU. Which naturally includes business with any individuals or companies either based in the EU (as a seller or a buyer) or wanting to do business in the EU. Or from traveling to the EU, whether for business or personal reasons. Little things like that. Nothing too inconvenient. (/s)

They haven’t taken things quite that far—yet. But they could. It’s dangerous to assume that you can ignore them without consequences just because your company doesn’t currently depend on revenue from EU customers. The world is more interconnected than that, and the consequences may not be limited to your company.

Geoblocking in such cases would not be sufficient. For one thing your geo-IP database will never be perfectly accurate, even without considering that “data subjects who are in the Union” can connect to your site via proxies or VPNs with non-EU IP addresses. For another you still need to respond to GDPR requests e.g. to remove data collected on a data subject currently residing in the EU, even if the data was collected while they were outside the EU, and you can’t do that if you’re blocking their access to the site. For a newspaper in particular the same would apply to any EU data subject they happened to report on, whether they had previously visited the site or not.

They never should have made opt-in an option in the first place. All the legitimate reasons to store data are already permitted without asking permission (required for the site to function, or storing data the user specifically asked the site to store such as settings). All that’s left is things no one would reasonably choose to consent to if they fully understood the question, so they should have just legislated that the answer is always “no”. That plus a bit more skepticism about what sites really “need” to perform their function properly. (As that function is understood by the user—advertising is not a primary function of most sites, or desired by their users, so “needed for advertising to work” does not make a cookie “functional” in nature. Likewise for “we need this ad revenue to offer the site for free”; you could use that line to justify any kind of monetization of private user data.)

Good point. You’d need at least 215 bits to represent all measurably distinct times (in multiples of the Planck time, approximately 10^-43 seconds) out to the projected heat death of the universe at 100 trillion (10^14) years. That should be sufficient for even the most detailed and lengthy simulation.

The fact that you’ve made it impossible to roll an 8 by replacing 2d4 with 1d6+1 might impact the game just a bit. Also with 2d4 a 5 is 4x as likely (1+4, 2+3, 3+2, 4+1) as a 2 (1+1) or 8 (4+4); with 1d6+1 all outcomes from 2 to 7 are equally likely, so you’re far more likely to get a critical hit or critical miss (if the game has that sort of thing, and you adjust it for the reduced range).

If you want one-second resolution, sure. If you want nanoseconds a 64-bit signed integer only gets you 292 years. With 128-bit integers you can get a range of over 5 billion years at zeptosecond (10^-21 second) resolution, which should be good enough for anyone. Because who doesn’t need to precisely distinguish times one zeptosecond apart five billion years from now‽

It might be more accurate to say that Unix time is the number of days since Jan 1st, 1970, scaled by 24×60×60. Though it gets a bit odd around the actual leap second since they aren’t spread over the whole day. (In some ways that would be a more reasonable way to handle it; rather than repeating a second at midnight, just make all the seconds slightly longer that day.)

Technically isn’t the Earth itself a sort of space ship which is orbiting (…a star which is orbiting…) the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy? Not really close enough for time dilation to be a factor, but still.

It’s similar, but JavaScript would use : and , for separators rather than = and ;.

This is valid Lua table syntax, however. A program creates an embedded Lua environment with an item callback function and runs this file inside it. Something similar could be done to convert it to another format; just define item to output the data as JSON, or whatever other format you prefer.

The Prosody XMPP server, written in Lua, generates files of this type when serializing lists with the “internal” storage manager. See functions list_store and list_load in util/datamanager.lua.

Your intake of sugar participation in extreme sports absolutely impacts other people when you end up with chronic health issues that other people have to help pay for.

It’s not as if there’s some natural law obligating you to pay for anyone else’s health issues. Your government is responsible for externalizing that private cost onto you and others, effectively subsidizing risk-taking and irresponsibility. If you don’t like it, insist that people pay for their own health care and insurance at market rates, without subsidies.

Not every work produced by a LLM should count as a derivative work—just the ones that embody unique, identifiable creative elements from specific work(s) in the training set. We don’t consider every work produced by a human to be a derivative work of everything they were trained on; work produced by (a human using) an AI should be no different.

I’m fairly certain that last one is UB in C. The result of an assignment operator is not an lvalue, and even if it were it’s UB (at least in C99) to modify the stored value of an object more than once between two adjacent sequence points. It might work in C++, though.

Historically speaking, people have gone to the trouble of manually digitizing hard copy books to distribute freely. There were digital copies of print books available online (if you knew where to look) before e-books were officially available for sale in any form. That includes mass-market novels as well as items of interest to historians. Ergo, your scepticism seems entirely unjustified.

OCR is far from perfect (though editing OCR output is generally faster than retyping), but even without it we have the storage and bandwidth these days to distribute full books as stacks of images if needed, without converting them to text. The same way people distribute scans of comics/manga.