This paragraph is the most ChatGPT of paragraphs:

As Tesla continues to refine its products, it’s crucial to address these concerns and ensure the reliability of its vehicles. The abandoned Cybertruck incident serves as a reminder that even the most innovative technologies can encounter setbacks, emphasising the importance of rigorous testing and quality assurance.

After Elon started Elonning

I’ll steal that one. You can have “the Xührer” in return.

I’m guessing they’ll comply with India’s censorship demands in order to not get locked out of a large and potentially lucrative market. The fact that state governments can also demand ISP follow their own censorship rules might make things a bit more complicated:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India

The Model X is notorious for this. I know a doctor who just had to fix his Model X’s suspension for “thousands” (his words). He also complained that you can never ever reach anyone at Tesla, that parts are impossible to get and that you have to expect repair appointments to be pushed back at least a few times, often mere days beforehand.

At least the batteries seem to last forever, even on his very early Model S, even after hundreds of thousands of kilometers. There’s barely any degradation. Then again, this mirrors other EVs, even much cheaper ones without active cooling. EV battery packs usually outlast the cars they are in, which is why there’s a thriving market of second-hand batteries that are used for all sorts of applications, from converting normal cars into EVs to storing solar power at night.

This reminds me: In countries like Russia and China, it’s not unusual for police to just randomly stop people and search their phones, at which point even locally stored data isn’t safe anymore. This could happen in America as well.

Except that I know first-hand that German government institutions are already using this exact tool in order to make up for the chronic lack of translators. They are translating texts into languages they don’t speak, which means there’s no going over the output to correct for mistakes.

That’s a very good answer.

If I’m getting this right, this was a novel that you perhaps mentioned to your loved one, but a language barrier prevented them from reading it. They then suggested the use of an LLM to translate it, which you used as foundation to build upon. If I may ask, which story did you translate (it has to be good if you spent this much work on it) and which LLM did you use?

I can’t see anything wrong with this. I’ve used this kind of approach using all sorts of machine translation tools going back over 20 years (not for entire books though). Let the computer do its thing, then fix mistakes - but this was always noncommercial, private use for myself, friends and relatives, as well as the occasional friendly online community. Although, I’ve also done entirely manual work, with no machine translation at all in situations when I wanted the best possible quality or where complexity and nuance made anything else impossible - like with a long list of “whisper jokes” from Nazi Germany, subversive jokes that people told each other under the punishment of death that require a ton of context no translation tool could possibly have.

The point here is though that this is very different from a publisher doing this commercially - and you and I both know that these companies will not even allow for the bare minimum of time spent fixing mistakes made by the translation tools.

Did you inform your readers that most of the translation was done by the LLM?

Technically it does, but not locally in the age of national governments. Before you’re saying it, the moment it stops being a local movement, it would work even less and lead to the organized repression I mentioned. To support my point, see how harsh government reaction has been to activists merely gluing themselves to the street (not to mention, how most people were happy about this crackdown).

And no, I doubt “The Revolution” that magically solves all of our problems (unlike most revolutions) will be started by anti-AV riots.

How would self-driving taxis do this any better than taxis that already exist and aren’t relying on large tech corporations?

Singular acts of violence don’t work, organized violence doesn’t work either and will only lead to organized repression in response. The actual solution is to elect local representatives who are willing to prevent the nightmare scenario from the video from happening.

If you want to see a real-world example of this: Toppling over rental e-scooters didn’t get them removed from cities, but petitioning municipal governments to ban them did.

This is precisely the kind of niche, but vital use case that even places that have otherwise already completely banned cars (like certain islands) allow cars for. Nobody will ever take this away.

What matters is that TI has an effective monopoly on scientific and graphic calculators in the US in particular, which means that it’s the platform that matters to most. It’s irrelevant whether or not some alternative is better. It’s also extremely widely supported by software and tutorials.

I can’t imagine there being many comparable jobs for aerospace engineers in India.

There is one crucial difference between image editing software like Photshop and Gimp vs. 3D software suites like Maya and Blender: My hypothesis is (and feel free to pick this apart) that you can totally teach yourself to use the former rather competently without any outside help, not even documentation and tutorials, but I would argue that this is nearly impossible with the latter due to their far greater complexity. This in turn means that people will look up guides and tutorials and learn the idiosyncratic UI patterns that way, which is why Blender with its extremely nonstandard controls managed to gain a foothold far beyond the broke hobbyist sphere.

Thanks for gently letting me down on RISC OS. I guessed that there wasn’t much going on with it, but I wanted to be sure.

Forks to do this have come and gone.

Oh, absolutely. None of them have any momentum and suffer from 1) long-time Gimp users usually not caring 2) former or present Photoshop users (in the case of PS imitations) rarely hearing about them and 3) those that do being hesitant to commit to them due to both their often half-baked nature and what you said (and also no plugin support, which is one of those things that binds people to Adobe, often against their will).

This is part of a thing with open source, it’s not possible to force something on the developers.

Most open source projects are firmly in the hands of rather conservative people who are doing their thing and really don’t care about what people think. I’ve seen it often enough. I’m essentially saying the same thing as you do, but less kindly. It at least partially explains why so many projects are suffering from severely outdated UI designs, both in good and bad ways. Maybe it’s the lack of economic pressure and competition too, especially with programs like Gimp that aren’t actually competing with commercial tools, even though some of them could if there was enough motivation.

I am totally a freak in my software background

You’ve piqued my curiosity though. Risc OS is one of few operating systems of note I’ve never actually tried (and I have tried some freaky stuff - remember BeOS?). Let’s say I wanted to give it a go today (in a VM) would you recommend it and if you do, which of the two (Open or not) should I choose? What can you actually do with it today?

You have to admit though that your background is quite unusual. I would assume that there are far more people looking for a free alternative to Photoshop after having used Photoshop for a long time (especially in the wake of the switch to a subscription model, but even earlier when prices were increased) instead of coming from an OS and using tools written for an OS that even among techies are extremely niche.

Eh, depends. Windows? Sure, it’s highly inconsistent. Their console UIs? Waste of screen space. Office though? It’s so far ahead of Libre Office, it’s not even funny - and I’m saying this as someone who was using Open and Libre Office for decades. Both feel positively ancient by comparison and anything more complex than basic document formatting (which also works far better in MS Office) is a chore.

Coming from Photoshop 6 (which came out in 2000), Gimp is still playing catch up with that ancient program in terms of basic usability.

These kinds of conversions have been around for decades. They usually don’t survive big version jumps.