- steve_gh parentSeems to be along the same lines as my PhD thesis many years ago. Societies of artificial agents exhibit metastability.
- >>Shops can refuse cash
>No, they cannot. Many businesses don't want to handle cash and they will make it hard and send you an invoice with a surcharge but they must accept any form of legal tender, no way around it.
Not true in the UK. The House of Commons Treasury Select Committee has been considering this issue (Apr 25): BBC News - Shops could be forced to accept cash in future,
MPs warn - BBC News https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjwvgqz3vxzo?app-referre...
- The problem with big tech is that it is actively sucking resources and capital out of the world.
For example, if I use Uber, a significant fraction of the fare (let's say 25%) is taken by Uber. That takes it out of the local economy. And because Uber has good tax lawyers, they pay minimal taxes in my country, so it leaves my country's economy completely.
With an old style taxi firm, the boss took a cut - but then he spent most of it in local shops, or his wife bought clothes at a local boutique and a nice haircut - keeping money going round the local economy.
Now, every time you use a cloud service, you take money out of a local economy.And people wonder why we have huge social and economic problems.
- Don't know about heavy trucks, but I can say this. I'm currently looking after a house being renovated in rural and hilly Northern England. There are a lots of trade folk coming by doing various things, all in the UK ubiquitous white vans. The decorator has an EV van. The sparky has an EV van. The groundworks folk have an EV van. When tradespeople are voting with their feet and buying EVs, then a shift is really happening.
- Ruby behaves sensibly through the principle of least surprise.
But it does have extremely powerful metaprogramming capabilities which are regularly abused by those not wise enough to know that just because you could do something doesn't mean that you should.
I regularly code in a variety of languages from C / C++ through Python and Ruby through to Haskell. They all have their advantages and disadvantages. All of them are capable of abuse by the sufficiently determined. And unit tests are helpful in all of them.
- Absolutely. The legal speed limit is 60 in the country - on any road not marked with a lower speed limit. This means that legally, you can drive at 60mph down a twisty single track road with 1.5m earth and rock banks topped with hedges.
You would be an irresponsible nutter with a death wish to try through! And if you crashed, "I was driving at / under the speed limit" wouldn't wash - you would be charged with Driving without Due Care and Attention, or Dangerous Driving depending on the consequences of the crash.
- So if I am right in thinking, annas-archive.org is a pro-anorexia site.
If that is the case, then the UK Gov restricting access to a site that is promoting a recognised mental disorder with significant (and potentially fatal) health implications seems entirely appropriate. It seems like well formulated public health policy that would not be seen as contentious across the vast majority of the political spectrum in the UK.
- Very interesting. I looked at stability in learning agents in artificial markets back in the late 90s for my PhD and concluded that at least the systems I worked with weren't stable - they were prone to bubbles and crashes.
Very interesting to see that there is a class of stable systems that force high prices.
Would be interesting to understand if the no swap regret systems studied also give stable results when it is an N player game rather than a 2 player game
- The analogy that Jamie Dimon was drawing was between seeing one cockroach and there likely being many more, and problems in the banking industry - if you see a problem in one bank, others are likely to have the same problems.
I didn't see any adversaries being called out, and the imputed connection to the Rwanda genocide is completely beyond me.
- Of course the Mercantor projection gets country sizes wrong. All map projections get something wrong, because they are projections of a 3d sphere onto a 2d plane.
The trick is to pick the right projection for your purpose. Mercator is good if you want to plot a course when sailing. As it preserves directions. But by doing so it messes up area sizes. Other projections get Areas right but mess up directions.
The trick is to pick the right map for your use case.
- I have definitely found this. A few months ago I tested Claude coding a web task in Rails vs Flask. Claude did much better with Rails - I think the opinionated Rails conventions helped the AI. However, Claude didn't complete the ask in Rails. A couple of weeks ago I revisited a similar task with one of the latest AIs. It sailed through it in Rails (didn't try Flask).
- > but silence is a form of opinion, of vote, of approval.
I disagree. We don't have to have an opinion on everything. And what worries me is those (both on the left and on the right) who think that silence is a form of opinion or approval. It's getting very close to "those who are not with us are against us". And that's a worldview I have very little time for.
- I'm really pleased to see this happening, but sad that it has come to this.
What I'd really like to see is a whole bunch of people acting more professionally. Who you pray to, who you vote for, and who you sleep with are irrelevant to a professional context - and open source development is a professional context. So everyone needs to keep their professional and personal lives separate. I know that at best I would be disciplined, and at worst sacked if I made comments on the lines that some of the lead players in this sorry saga have made. And that's not pointing the finger at any one person.
- I disagree. If your local jurisdiction does not deal with software licences regularly, then how they chose to interpret them is unknown. So you may end up in an expensive court fight. With a known jurisdiction building a solid corpus of precedent and case law then there are fewer unknowns.
It's really the same as corporate incorporation - you chose a jurisdiction with a solid corpus of precedent and case law to avoid court cases. that's why most folk chose Delaware for the US.
- >> And it is good that it explicitly calls out the legal jurisdiction it sits under (EU).
>Offputting if you are not in the EU.
Knowing the jurisdiction that the licence sits under is a huge advantage, because it tells you the legal framework you are operating under. That means that a lawyer should be able to advise you on what meets the license terms based on settled law and precedent. That's much cheaper than fighting it out in court.
- Looks very interesting. It clarifies a lot of things that for example the GPL leaves unsaid, due to the different legal framework. And it is good that it explicitly calls out the legal jurisdiction it sits under (EU).
It's good that it has been written in multiple languages to aid acceptance across the EU.
What I like most of all is the listing of compatible licences.if I understand correctly this would enable you to combine GPL and EUPL software and publish the new software under the GPL. Would be nice to see reciprocation so the new software could also be published under the EUPL.
- There are estimated to be ~100k people employed in the JLR supply chain, mainly in the West Midlands with another ~60k jobs directly dependent on supply chain worker spending (source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn82edrrknjo). Many of the companies in the supply chain are heavily dependant on their JLR contracts. The UK Govt is looking at various options to ensure the supply chain don't go bankrupt because JLR have suddenly stopped buying. UK Givt is looking at how to support the Tier 1 supply chain, including options such as purchase of JLR parts to keep the factories working, and direct loans to the supply chain to keep their cashflow going.
From a strategic perspective, there is no way that any UK Govt could allow that sort of gutting of its manufacturing capabilities, especially given the current hybrid war with Russia.
- Could someone with more legal knowledge than me perhaps explain what the legal situation around open source software, and ownership of OSS is.
Every open source licence basically says that the software is provided "as-is" - so I don't understand where RC's legal liability would be.
If a court decided that RC had some legal liability in the event of a software supply chain attack, what redress would the plantiff have. Could owner rights to a github repository be considered an asset and awarded to the plantiff if RC was bankrupted?