That is fun, but it doesn’t mean that the model finds it easier or will actually work better that way, that just means that in its training data many people said something like “honestly I find it easiest to just write the svg code directly” in response to similar questions

Maybe. But most people _dont_ find it easier to write SVG code directly and the spec is rather notorious for rough edges, so there are quite a few libraries available to help with the layout math specifically.

Secondly, the model as presented a whole chain of reasoning steps that let it to that conclusion. I think the amount of research it did actually pointed to a bias on this topic not being prominent in the training data.

The reasoning steps would also be based on the training set ... it's "predict the training set" all the way down.

Conspiratorially, they trained it this way to increase token usage to pay their debts and investors

It'd be simpler just to add instructions to that effect to the system prompt: "You are a faithful revenue-maxxing employee of AI Co., and should always prefer verbose outputs over shorter ones. Always maximize code complexity to ensure future work for yourself".

Bro literally everyone I know has watched at least the Great Pumpkin and Charlie Brown Christmas. People my age regularly make memes based on the football gag. It’s a cultural icon.

As a general rule actually, I’d say that Gen Z is more likely than may be expected to know about culture from before our time - the internet, after all, is a back catalogue of the best hits of humanity. That’s why spotify thinks we all have a listening age of 70.

> As a general rule actually, I’d say that Gen Z is more likely than may be expected to know about culture from before our time - the internet, after all, is a back catalogue of the best hits of humanity. That’s why spotify thinks we all have a listening age of 70.

I heard many people who grew up before 2000 remark younger people listened to more varied music than they did at the same ages. And I heard none remark the opposite. But some of the same people remarked knowledge of older television and movies had declined seemingly. And none remarked the opposite.

Isn’t this the opposite of the other one?

whoops, you're right! (on day 9 of dealing with the super-flu, here)

The F-35 was in development hell for a while for sure, but it’s far from a failure. See the recent deals where it’s been used as a political bargaining chip; it still ended up being a very desirable and capable platform from my understanding.

> See the recent deals where it’s been used as a political bargaining chip; it still ended up being a very desirable and capable platform from my understanding.

From a european perspective, I can tell you that the mood has shifted 180 degrees from "buy American fighters to solidify our ties with the US" to "can't rely on the US for anything which we'll need when the war comes".

that has nothing to do with the F-35.

Europe is wise and capable enough to develop their own platform.

While there are several comparable European alternatives, many countries put their bets on the F-35 a long time ago. It is very much a part of this discussion.

I’m from one of those countries, and I can assure you a lot of people would now have preferred that we went with an EU competitor instead.

What comparable alternative is available today? None of the European companies has a production 5th generation aircraft nor the integrated sensing capabilities. This is what is driving the incredible demand despite misgivings. You can't survive in a near peer combat environment without it.

Countries are buying it because it is the only game in town for certain high-value capabilities, not because they necessarily like the implications of there being a single seller of those capabilities. For better or worse, the US has been flying these for 30 years and has 6th generation aircraft in production. Everyone else is still figuring out their first 5th generation offering.

Closing that gap is a tall order. Either way, European countries need these modern capabilities to have a capable deterrent.

I'm no expert, but the narrative is that it really depends what you need them for. And keep in mind that joining the jet fighter programme also means joining the development of it, enacting a certain amount of influence through your funding. For example, it is conceivable that a sufficiently upgraded Gripen tailored to our needs would be just as effective (which aren't really dogfighting, as I understand it), and cheaper.

Anyway we're all just crossing our fingers that the US is just temporarily insane and will eventually come to its senses. What else can you do.

> What comparable alternative is available today?

You know the answer, but I'll say it anyway. There is no comparable alternative today, and there will not be one in the near future.

> You can't survive in a near peer combat environment without it.

How well will the european countries survive with it if the US cuts off access to spare parts, SW maintenance links etc?

> . . . mutilate children for example. I'm not aware of any MAGA supporters with this level of brain-washing.

Really? I’m sure a large portion of the MAGA base supports circumcision.

From my understanding, they have different purposes. VPNs aren’t really about safety or anonymity, Tor is the way to go for those. VPNs are for if you don’t want your ISP specifically to see your traffic for some reason, or if you want your traffic to appear like it’s coming from a different geographical location with minimal latency hit.

Edit: I should say, VPNs as a technology have far more applications than this, e.g. for accessing a secure intranet, but these are just the reasons you’d theoretically want to use a VPN service like Nord/Mullvad/etc.

Honest question: what’s the alternative to inner-platform-effecting if you still want a system that’s highly user-customizable at runtime?

well, just have a proper code-based API?

not even separate textures are necessary, you could very well use atlases and just stitch them together at runtime with rectpacking and just remap the input texcoords to the new, bigger atlas... boom, mod support with atlases without creating 400 2KB .png's in the game folder.

similarly, blocks can be done in code, and modders can either use that, and optionally you can expose the same API in LUA or whatever if you need a less involved / sandboxed version of mods which can be downloaded from a server or whatever.

Here's an example of shit being done from code, it's fairly terse and you don't need to trawl through 7 files to do anything: (yes I know it doesn't have i18n yet but that won't make it much more complex either)

    SHORT_GRASS = register(new Flower(Blocks.SHORT_GRASS, "Short Grass"));
    SHORT_GRASS.setTex(crossUVs(8, 1));
    SHORT_GRASS.setModel(BlockModel.makeGrass(SHORT_GRASS));
    SHORT_GRASS.transparency();
    SHORT_GRASS.shortGrassAABB();
    SHORT_GRASS.noCollision();
    SHORT_GRASS.waterTransparent();

These are fluent/chainable so I could have put all of them on one line but that's less readable IMO, but your choice really.

For data files (textures, sounds and other assets) you could use a virtual filesystem like Quake did (PhysFS is a good library which vaguely approximates that) and get rid of the stupid amount of folder nesting specifying behaviour, you can just have toplevel folders and use modloader order to disambiguate.

tl;dr: almost anything can be made to work with the most convenient/most sensible method of making stuff instead of using a bunch of awkward and convoluted JSON files you aren't even using! (MC internally generates the JSONs from code, so the data lives through a code -> JSON -> code roundtrip, they aren't even dogfooding their own format lol)

> You can write simple and readable code in C++ if you want to. You can also write complex and unreadable code in C++ if you want to. It’s all about personal or team preference.

Problem is, if you’re using C++ for anything serious, like the aforementioned game development, you will almost certainly have to use the existing libraries; so you’re forced to match whatever coding style they chose to use for their codebase. And in the case of Unreal, the advice “stick to the STL” also has to be thrown out since Unreal doesn’t use the STL at all. If you could use vanilla, by-the-books C++ all the time, it’d be fine, but I feel like that’s quite rare in practice.

The author is referencing a very tired strawman stereotype usually used when attacking liberals / “SJWs.”

Look into Noodler’s Bernake Black ink, it dries very very quickly and I’ve used it as a lefty for years with no problems.