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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Not quite the same thing I think.

    My understanding of “no contingency” is more to do with inspections, certifications etc. I.e. an offer has been made that isn’t going to be cancelled if the structural survey comes back with a load of issues to fix.

    “Chains” in UK real estate lingo are about whether your sale is tied to other sales. For example, if you’re buying a house from an owner-occupier who won’t move out (and give you your new house) until the new house that they’re buying is ready- that’s an onward chain. A chain in the other direction would be someone who says that they’ll buy a house, but will only have the money to make the purchase once they’ve got a sale locked in for their current house. Selling a house with “no onward chain” is telling the buyer that they can have it as soon as they’ve got the money, and that the seller isn’t waiting for anything.

    Chains can get very messy and complicated, as you can end up with s dozen house sales all tied up with each other waiting for one house in the chain to be ready to go before any of the others can go.



  • “Species concepts are human classification systems, and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right,” she says. “You can use the phylogenetic [evolutionary relationships] species concept to determine what you’re going to call a species, which is what you are implying… We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal.”

    “If they look like this animal then they are the animal” really doesn’t sound like a particularly useful (or scientifically rigorous) position.

    Not least because there are lots of animals that look alike but aren’t the same species.


  • In my limited experience experience, Gemini responds better with flat, emotionless prompts without any courteous language. Using polite phrasing seems more likely to prompt “I can’t answer that sorry” responses, even to questions that it absolutely can answer (and will to a more terse prompt).

    So I think my point is “it depends”. LLMs aren’t intelligent, they just produce strings based on their training data. What works better and what doesn’t will be entirely dependent on the specific model.








  • I looked at Dino and another one mentioned here and they look dated. Windows 95 feel with better anti-aliasing, rounder corners, but same colors? Gtk 2 or something?

    Looks like a standard GTK4 app to me. Whether or not that is to someone’s tastes is obviously subjective, but it uses the same design language as every other GTK app under the sun.

    GTK apps always look out of place on Windows though. Looks far more sensible in its native environment (i.e. *nix running GNOME).


  • Having data means nothing if you can’t monetize it.

    As you say, AI can already access it all completely for free with nothing more complicated than a web crawler. Long term, charging AI firms for access is not a viable strategy unless the law changes.

    And they’ve been trying for years to monetize visitors through advertising and other schemes, and so far come up consistently short.


  • To be fair, there are (or were) lots of distros downstream of RHEL marketing themselves as drop-in replacements, not just Oracle. And this move isn’t likely to stop Oracle (and the rest), only make the transition experience less smooth for clients (ultimately all the downstream distros can just rebase off of CentOS Stream instead; they lose “bug for bug” compatibility, but will still largely be drop-in replacements).

    I also find it hard to muster any sympathy for IBM of all people, even when their opponent is Oracle (who are the lowest of the low).


  • We can’t immediately convert all cars to EV, we don’t have the grid capacity or enough charging stations, yet.

    Well sure, but there’s no suggestion of converting “all cars” to EVs “immediately”. Even if ICE cars were banned for new sales tomorrow, it’d still take a decade and more for the existing rolling stock to gradually be replaced by new vehicles.

    A 10 year period for utility companies to gradually upgrade their infrastructure doesn’t sound desperately unrealistic.


  • They started selling them in the UK this year, and I’ve already started to see them on the road. They claim to be on track for around 30,000 sales per year in the country, which would put them at about half of the number of Teslas sold (about 60,000).

    Why are people buying them? Well, the same reason people buy any car. They’re sold with a relatively high trim for a relatively affordable price, and they’re reviewing well with the auto press. It’s not like there’s any magic to it. China’s a cheap manufacturing country, and they’re undoubtedly willing to throw profit margins to the wolves to boost market share.