Zos_Kia

You made me check the average density of earth and, yeah, good is 4x denser than that. I’m not sure about the black hole thing, though. Would it be enough mass to collapse or would it just sit there?

Especially considering it was created by the same guy as IT crowd! Check out his earlier work Father Ted too, it’s hilarious in an old school BBC kind of way

Minitel was a text only early internet that popped up in France in the 80s. You connected to it through a small terminal connected to the phone line, and had access to various commercial services such as phone book, train booking etc…

Most of those services have been shut down a decade or two ago but some hobbyists are operating new services on the network.

“Reliable access to food” as in “rowing bands of bandits won’t burn your crops, in exchange, you have to pay tax to the king”

Not just that. Centralized settlements allowed for pooling resources, better grain storage, and easier production of high-calorie items such as bread.

at first it was at eye level “we grow food, you fight”

I don’t think that’s how it came about. At first it was “we build our houses together and pool our grain so we can better defend ourselves against aggressors”, then “oh those guys at the temple are pretty good at keeping count and dividing the food among us”, then “oh this organization helps us produce surplus food so now we can have dedicated guards who train instead of growing food”, then “oh the priesthood sure became powerful now that they control the guards”, etc…

The monopoly on violence is an extremely modern concept which is easy to oversimplify, especially in historical contexts which can be very varied. The things you mention are really local to medieval Europe and don’t necessarily translate well to other settings.

Never heard it used. Maybe it’s regional or a family tradition? A common idiom is “mon chou” but I’d guess it comes from the pastry and not the vegetable.

No it’s not even sexy, and it’s the only idiom I can think of that uses shovel in this context. It makes absolutely no sense

snogging

In French the slang term for that is “rouler des pelles” , which means literally “to roll shovels” and… I mean what the fuck is up with that?

I think the real shocker was the step change between 3 and 4, and the hope that another step change was soon to come. It’s pretty telling that the latest batch of models was fine tuned for vibes and “empathy” rather than raw performance. They’re not getting the next a-ha moment and want to focus their customers on unquantifiables.

It seems logical that this would negatively impact performance and, well, looks like it did.

To be fair, the ancient world was wildly unsafe and governments did provide a modicum of safety. Not just against aggressions, but also in terms of reliable access to food.

Nah the 500B$ is for building data centers. Well, it would be if that money existed but the truth is it was just an empty announcement.

The companies involved don’t have that kind of money, even pooled together.

I don’t know any AI artists (as in someone who prompts a model and then calls the result a work of art), although most traditional artists i know have come to incorporate AI one way or another in their process.

You don’t really hear about it because it’s all intermediate material used during the production phase. For example, as a hobbyist writer, one thing i struggle with is writing action scenes cause i don’t have visual memory and i tend to forget a lot about continuity and “spatial realism” (“this guy starts in this corner of the room so there’s no way he could grab that object at that point”, shit like that). With AI I can generate some kind of “story board” of my scene, which helps me write it much better. It’s just laid out visually in front of me and i catch a lot more details.

Sometimes when i’m toying with an idea i’ll also have a model generate a few variations on it, with different points of view, writing style, focus etc… Even if the writing is mediocre, it gives me a really good idea of how each version could pan out, and whether an angle works or not. I’ll then select the angle that works best and rewrite it entirely from scratch.

There’s nothing innovative about it, people have been using assistants to avoid tedious work forever. It’s just that before AI you had to, you know, be rich and able to actually pay for the labor.

I am looking for a solution for a ~1TB collection, and the Glacier Deep Archive storage tier is barely above 1$/m for the lot. You may want to look into it ! If I remember correctly, the retrieval (if you one day need to get your data back) was around 20$ to get the data in a few hours, or 2$ to get it in a couple days.

I suspect op hasn’t set foot in France since the early 2000s, if ever. Smoking in public places has been banned since 2007