Yes! Unexpectedly good movie!

Apropos Shampoo Ich hab ab Covid angefangen mitm rasierer die Haare selbst zu schneiden. Seit dem brauche ich aucv kein Shampoo mehr. Trocknen können sie auch von alleine.

Das ist ein wichtiger Punkt.

Der Vergleich mit Deutschland ist da schon echt krass. In Berlin hat mit zum großen Teil den Stimmen der Außenbezirke die CDU gewonnen und sofort angefangen Radweg-Projekte zu stoppen, bzw sogar zurückzubauen. Diese Radwege waren aber fast nur in den Innenbereichen, do wo die CDU keine Mehrheit hatte. Das ist unglaublich Rücksichtslos. Denn solche Radwege werden (bei uns) typischerweise nicht auf stadtebene geplant, sondern auf Bezirksebene. Das sind eher so pilotprojekte, die aufgrund von lokalen Initiativen entstehen. Die baut die CDU wieder ab mit der begründung, dass irgednwelche Außenbezirkler dafür gestimmt haben. Das isr absolut übergriffig.

In Paris werden solche Radwege zum Glück nicht bezirksweise von irgdnwelchen Initiativen geplant, sondern direkt zentral. Dadurch konnten die auch so einen Fortschritt machen. Ich bin recht regelmäßig in Paris und diese Transformation ist großartig zu sehen. Vor 10 Jahren hatte ich um meinen einsam Fahrradfahrenden Freund dort große Angst. Jeden tag durch das Getümmel aggressiver Autos zu fahren schien selbstmörderisch. Dann wurden stück für stück Autoparkplätze durch Leihräder-Parkplätze ersetzt, wichtige Straßen für Autos gesperrt. Sehr radikal und gegen riesiges Geschrei wütender Leute. Aber es hat gewirkt und inzwischen fährt die halbe Stadt Rad.

Don’t use brave.

And: I don’t know if Otto is really that great. It’s just a marketplace where people sell cheap stuff imported from china. I just ordered a mirror that I have to send back, because it’s not even (as in flat).

Klingt nach ner marktlücke. Produkte für Arschlöcher sozusagen. “Fleisch aus unmoralischer Aufzucht” - und dann isses Bio. Hedge-Fund-Ltd-Inc-Owned-Bier, aber dann isses die Hippy-Brauerei um die Ecke.

I really like star trek as a whole (besides discovery and picard (mostly)). I think JJ Abrams Star Trek is absolutely great. It’s a cometely different take and it’ great entertainment around some great themes.

I mostly agree with you, but his Star Trek film from 2009 is absolutely great. I say that as a big trekkie who gets offended by a lot of these new shit, because of action-over-plot-or-consistency and bad writing and all. “Star Trek” additionally has all the stuff I normally hate with a passion - L E N S E F L A R E S, constant camera movement, a lot of quick cuts. But in this movie everything came together and made it absolutely great. It feels like if the original Star Trek series is an ancient tale od Kirk and his merry crew of brave scientists that boldly go… And so on. Just a new interpretation of it. The movie in spite of being just a cool scifi sction flick also gets me really hard emoionally. A lot of the scenes - the way they are edited and combined is really hitting hard. The scene when kirks mother is in labor whole his father is in the process of sacrificing his life - oh boy - I prefer watching that movie alone in order to not embarass myself 😅 Or captain pike’s speech to kirk after the bar fight. A lot of the themes are about virtues that are just so well done.

I guess it’s because of a well written script that abrams could work with. But his style just perfectly fits there. His other stuff is just forgettable. Maybe he’s just a bad writer? He wouldn’t be the only one.

Thank you! Nicely put. The problem isn’t people like your aunt, its massive shareholder-controlled investemet machines that own thousands or even millions of homes. Your aunt probably knows eafh renter by name - there can exist a personal relationship. There’s two things limiting your aunt becoming a money-hungry antisocial ghoul:

1. raising the rent is a relatively large amount of work for relatively small of a reward. If she raises rent she has to write these 4-5 renters a letter explaining why she has to increase it. Those renters might disagree, have objections, ask for reasons and proofs (like the central heating bill or maintanance costs etc). If she raises the rent by lets say 2% it’s 2% of not that much money (with her single digit number if houses).
2. she is raising the rent on people she knows. She is taking money away from people she even may like - have a personal relationship with.

So increasing rent is a lot of hassle and her renters might like her less after that - which might be a factor.

Now lets think of the hugr real estate company. They have thousands of renters and maybe hundreds of employees. They have lawyers employed. If they raise rent by 2% they have to send thousands of letters. But these letters are sent by people whose job it is to do so. Tyey can calculate in advance that from their renters X% will just accept the nrew rent, Y% will require some manouvering, Z% might move out and so on. They can estimate the cost of raising rent pretty well based on experience and compare to the profits they make. And with thousands of apartmants 2% is a lot of profit. The employees have no relationship to the thousands of renters. Renters are just numbers anyway. Everything is much more efficient. Also: Shareholders. They demand profits and dont’t care how. They care even less aboht the renters. They demand more profit and will just say “make it happen”. If thr ceo doesn’t raise profits - with whatever means necessary - the shareholders will replace the ceo.

The soltion IMHO would be some progressive tax That makes it basically unprofitable to have more than 10 apartments. And to prevent legal entities owning other legal entities owning apartments in order to circumvent this. If there exists (and can reasonable exist) a personal relationship between landlord and renter everything is alright in my opinion. People usually are not animals to eaxh other if they know eaxh other personal.

I have an old iPod that I got from eBay. I’m running Rockbox on it which allows me to put music on it with almost any format. Ive used it for about 4 or more years now and it’s working fine.

I can connect it easily to other old “dumb” tech. It just works.

Edit: it’s an old iPod classic of the last generation. There’s a bunch of mods/upgrades you can get online like HDD replacements with microsd-cards. You can increase the capacity that way. The battery even lasts longer then. Or you can get a bigger battery with a bigger metal case to fit.

I’m Markt scheitern, aber bei den Boni abräumen

The Pianist

“Meteor” by Dan Brown (could be a different name in the original language). It was the first time I read something that was bad. Up until then book were cool and fun and interesting. It was a puzzling experience.

Edit: it’s called “Deception Point” in the original.

Schon mal im Laboratory?

Well in a way all Art is being done indirectly by some sort of instrument. Only the degree of sophistication or degree of separation of this instrument is different. A pencil drawing is in principle also done by the pencil, but I provided a lot of guidance through my hand. A pencil - almost no sophistication - is on one side of the spectrum and Midjourney/Stable Diffusion etc is on the other side of the spectrum.

I don’t want to judge AI “art” in general - there’s so many awful traditional artworks that AI art doesn’t really stand out.

What rubs me the wrong way is that it is a tool that no human can understand reasonably well. Everybody can understand a pencil. It’s possible to understand a computer renderer that renders digital art. But no one can understand the totality of an LLM which was trained on terabytes of images. It’s a lot of trial and error, because what the tool does generate random images even with precise directions. It’s throwing dice until one likes the result.

The one thing I give this “artist” credit for: he was very early (maye even the first?) that entered AI art into a contest and fooled the jury. Being the first is often enough historically to make “great art”. Where art is more measured n the impact it has on a societal discussion. So I give him that.

But a court already decided you can’t copyright AI art, because it’s trained on other art without permission. So he can get fucked.

“Famous” A"I" “Artist”

The guy who wrote Winamp Sold it decades ago. So you should clarify who is defensive about their code :-) The original coder is really good - he also wrote the awesome AVS visualization plugin for Winamp which among other things utilizes a special programming language called “eel”. After selling Winamp he went on to create Reaper which also uses eel I think.

Ahh the event in 1054… Yeah that event was a banger!

the everything app

It cannot “analyze” it. It’s fundamentally not how LLM’s work. The LLM has a finite set of “tokens”: words and word-pieces like “dog”, “house”, but also like “berry” and “straw” or “rasp”. When it reads the input it splits the words into the recognized tokens. It’s like a lookup table. The input becomes “token15, token20043, token1923, token984, token1234, …” and so on. The LLM “thinks” of these tokens as coordinates in a very high dimensional space. But it cannot go back and examine the actual contents (letters) in each token. It has to get the information about the number or “r” from somewhere else. So it has likely ingested some texts where the number of "r"s in strawberry is discussed. But it can never actually “test” it.

A completely new architecture or paradigm is needed to make these LLM’s capable of reading letter by letter and keep some kind of count-memory.

I finally watched Caché by Michael Haneke. It was a lot different and puzzling than I expected.