Greenwich?

Yes, that’s the prime meridian, so if you’re looking for exactitude in your hemispheric definition it is the one to go with. Any system of coordinates is an arbitrary choice imposed on the universe for our convenience. It may seem attractively rebellious to reject the one we have, but you’re not going to gain anything but confusion by picking a different one.

Once you’ve blocked Signal, you might as well go ahead and block the rest of the outside world.

misogyny is woven into the fabric of our institutions and stitched into every aspect of modern life

… so clearly, the way to deal with it is to create a vast new system of censorship for the Internet. It can hardly fail to solve the problem.

https://www.youtube.com/@TheEsotericaChannel/videos

Not all of it is about religion, but much of it is relevant.

It’s not the rate, it’s the ratio.

That remark was so outrageous that it only took two days of polling data for Poilievre to find out that he disagrees with it.

Apparently there have been attempts to make a free OS based on Apple’s kernel, but wikipedia mostly talks about them in the past tense. Too bad, it would’ve been good to have such an option.

Good luck using it to get from Jupiter to Haumea.

In reality the flash drive mostly exists to be an extra air-gapped backup.

end-to-end encryption enabled by default

“By default” doesn’t even seem good enough. Can you imagine making or using a password manager that isn’t end-to-end encrypted? Why on earth would anyone ever do that? Anyway I’ll stick with my encrypted text file on a flash drive.

To whom it may concern: I’d prefer not to be impersonated by ghouls after I die, thanks.

My bold prediction for the near future: I will soon have my second cup of tea for the day.

Like many, back when it was fashionable I was open to the possibility of that idea being correct and I guess it’s still best to keep an open mind, but the results thus far suggest otherwise. Using Hurd is somewhat difficult for most purposes. Using cron rather than systemd timers on the other hand is much more pleasant and easy.

Lemmings have always been well-known for running in herds.

In that case there are alternatives for each component, most often more than one, though they may lack here and there some feature you believe to be indispensable.

There isn’t “an alternative” to systemd because nobody who hasn’t drunk the kool-aid believes that anything like it should exist. The syslog, the cron daemon, the dns config, the log rotation, the ntp server, and even the init system should not all be part of one giant tangled mess of a project.

That’s a fine illustration of the problem, whatever it’s properly called.

Having paused to search the web I find that “ablation” according to wikipedia is a term used in AI since 1974. Arxiv.org has a recent paper talking specifically about “semantic ablation” which phrase it uses to describe an operation deliberately removing semantic information from an LLM’s representation of a sentence in an attempt to see what purely syntactical information is left over afterwards, or something like that.

I’m not sure if that writer gets all the details right when it comes to how it works, but I do like “semantic ablation.” It’s good to finally have a name for that after we’ve already seen so much of it.

I like how the “FAQ” answers questions nobody was asking and accuses opponents of truth, freedom, and systemd of “decontextualising comments on merge requests” without mentioning what was actually said by whom in those merge requests so we could judge for ourselves. As a PR move to put out the flame war (which itself does seem really pointless) it seems counterproductive. But it looks like it’s just another reddit post, not an official KDE policy statement or anything.

Have you thought of trying MCTS? It’s a pretty easy algorithm to understand and was good enough to get computers playing Go up to the level where they could offer beginner to intermediate human players a satisfying game.