Why do we need to ban these? I'm not trying to be contrarian, but why do some people appear to be for banning tobacco but not alcohol? I don't claim to have all the answers or even strong opinions, but if your going to ban one recreational drug with negative externalities you should ban them all. I'd much rather hear people's opinions then ask AI.
> If alcohol came inside of little battery powered computers, we should ban those too.
I too am agnostic but do not understand this reasoning. BTW let me get severely downvoted by saying that if alcohol prohibition came up for a vote I'd vote yes in a heartbeat.
It reduced the amount of people who drank and it increased health. It increased safety for women and children and reduced violent crime on the streets and in the home. It reduced alcohol related diseases and death. People missed less work. Like with passive smoking, a ban on alcohol positively affects non-drinkers too.
It was the organised crime side effects and societal unpopularity which lead to it's "failure". Alcohol prohibition continues to work in some countries today but I wouldn't want to live there.
Ultimately it's a bio-ethics and freedom issue, issues that continue to raise their head from time to time here and there, e.g. coronavirus responses.
Control of vaping could also be classed in this category.
It doesn't stop addicts from craving and it doesn't curb the appeal of the product. People who think tobacco/nicotine bans would work are people who think they don't have any positive effect associated with them.
People don't smoke because the evil cigarette companies tricked them and now they are addicted. It's a drug, it feels good to do it.
A tobacco/nicotine ban will end up exactly like aby other recreational drug prohibition.
> People don't smoke because the evil cigarette companies tricked them and now they are addicted.
Isn't this exactly what happens, and why cigarette advertising is banned in many countries, and why marketing child-friendly tobacco products is commonly restricted, and why there are even regulations/guidelines around portrayal of smoking on TV in some regions?
People have been stealing and killing other people as many years if not longer. That doesn't mean you cannot do a bit of legislation and obtain some positive results against that.
I think not banning the cigarette and non reusable vape is the wrong solution but banning smoking in lots of public spaces has improved the situation, maybe not to curb consumption but at least non smokers can breath a little. I wish it would also applies to outdoors cafe/restaurant terraces too as smokers effectively ban to non smokers by spreading their poison around them. They could walk away for a couple of minutes to get their hit but they don't on purpose. There should be a radius around an outdoor terrace where smoking is effectively prohibited.
Outdoor cafes/restaurant terraces that allow smoking effectively are marketing to smokers. Smokers generally stay longer (therefore may order more), and basically are giving themselves dopamine at this venue, therefore creating associations to possibly draw them back in the future. These places could just not provide ashtrays and could just not allow smoking, but they do allow it, because it's good for business.
If you really don't like it, you could just not visit these establishments. To these businesses, the benefit of allowing smoking doesn't outweigh the negatives (some people not liking it). Obviously you don't not like it enough to just not go there. Not a smoker, but i've never understood this puritanical attitude towards smoking and only smoking. Yeah, it's not great to breathe in an enclosed space, but in an outdoor space, I don't see how much worse it is than car exhaust, air quality, etc.
> If you really don't like it, you could just not visit these establishments.
Well I go inside, because there are no establishment in my area that ban smoking in their terrace.
> it's not great to breathe in an enclosed space, but in an outdoor space,
It is exactly the same unless there is significant wind is in a direction that push the fumes away. Obviously it depends on how tightly the tables are put as well but it is just super annoying. I have a friend whose eyes turn red immediately when exposed to tobacco product fumes and he suffers way more than I do.
Also it ruins the taste of food and drinks.
> I don't see how much worse it is than car exhaust, air quality
Usually those that are close to traffic and car exhaust are less popular than those that are less directly Unless you live in a complete smog, cigarettes/vapes fumes that goes directly to your face are always more annoying.
You would have compared to sweaty and smelly bodies in a dance club you would have got a point.
> People have been stealing and killing other people as many years if not longer. That doesn't mean you cannot do a bit of legislation and obtain some positive results against that.
This thread is/was about prohibition of smoking. I was making the point that tobacco/nicotine is a drug that has positive psychoactive effects, that's why people use it.
People seem to have this misconception that smoking is just some thing tobacco companies tricked people into doing and so prohibition would work. It wouldn't. We can already see in places where the prices of cigarettes create a nearly de-facto ban that it creates black markets and we know that black markets create crime.
Hence legalizing where you can smoke vs prohibition of the sale. There will always be some private place hosting semi-public parties where people can smoke but if you enforce non smoking in public areas that forces everyone to reduce a bit their consumption, makes it more an antisocial thing and allow those that don't like being exposed to it.
I was suprised to see recently that ban on smoking is still not enforced in some bars/club playing music in Germany. It was like a blast from the past to me after living in countries that implemented that strict ban much more seriously for years.
I've been blind since birth. When it comes to 2d things such as linear and quadratic graphs, shapes such as triangles, circles, squares, etc, I had no issues when the material was provided using braille graphics. I can't comprehend representing a 3d object in two dimensions. When I was in college I switched from Computer Science to Telecommunications the second time I failed calc ii. I just couldn't comprehend rotating a shape around the access of a graph to get a 3d shape. This may be something solvable by 3d printing, but that was not easily available when I was in college.
Is there a good place for easy comparisons of different models? I know gpt-oss-20b and gpt-oss-120b have different numbers of parameters, but don't know what this means in practice. All my experience with AI has been with larger models like Gemini and GPT. I'm interested in running models on my own hardware but don't know how small I can go and still get useful output both for simple things like fixing spelling and grammar, as well as complex things like programming.
One easy way to test different models is purchase $20 worth of tokens from one of the Open Router-like sites. This will let you asks tons of questions and try out lots of models.
Realistically, the biggest models you can run at a reasonable price right now are quantized versions of things like the Qwen3 30B A3B family. A 4-bit quantized version fits in roughly 15GB of RAM. This will run very nicely on something like an Nvidia 3090. But you can also use your regular RAM (though it will be slower).
These models aren't competitive with GPT 5 or Opus 4.5! But they're mostly all noticeably better than GPT-4o, some by quite a bit. Some of the 30B models will run as basic agentic coders.
There are also some great 4B to 8B models from various organizations that will fit on smaller systems. A 8B model, for example, can be a great translator.
(If you have a bunch of money and patience, you can also run something like GPT OSS 120B or GLM 4.5 Air locally.)
This one runs at perfectly servicable pace locally on a laptop 5090 with 64gb system ram with zero effort required. Just download ollama and select this model from the drop-down.
This is the answer. There's a half dozen sites that let you run these models by the token, and actually $20 is excessive. $5 will get you a long long way.
I don't know how it works now, but in my case the Doctor had nothing to do with it. It's obvious I'm blind since I use a cane. I showed the person in charge of accommodations how bulky a braille printer along with all its paper is, and the noise it makes that's loud enough to wake anyone who may be trying to sleep in the same room. They granted me the accommodation since I had to use braille for math, physics, chemistry, and computer science. I think in some ways it's easier having an obvious disability. You can't hide it, and the only time people don't believe your blind when using a cane is at the bar on Halloween.
Why are frequent attendance exemptions granted? I'm totally blind and when I went to college my lack of attendance had nothing to do with the fact that I was blind and everything to do with the fact that I made poor choices like other college students. If I didn't have the mobility skills to get to class then I shouldn't have been granted an exception, I should have been told to get better mobility skills before going to college. I think the only time I asked for an attendance exemption was during finals week. There was a blizzard at the same time as one of my finals and the sidewalks and streets were not plowed. This made it incredibly dangerous for me to go to take the test. I just emailed explaining the situation and took the test the next day.
My understanding is that attendance exemptions are mostly to allow a student to regularly see healthcare professionals (ie weekly respiratory therapist visits) without suffering the wrath of a prof who feels that anyone missing more than 2 lectures deserves to auto-fail a course.
I didn't realize that using disability accommodations to get a single was so common. I used the fact that I was blind to get a single in the early 2000's. It may not have been strictly necessary, but I justified it by the fact I had an incredibly loud braille printer that took up a bunch of space. I didn't try to stack accommodations though, since I could walk as well as anyone else I didn't get preferential treatment when it came to location.
What I don't understand (but also wouldn't be surprised about if it is misrepresented by the article) is:
- why would you get a single, for ADHD, non-social-related anxiety, non-sever autism or depression (especially in the later case you probably shouldn't be in a single)
- I mean sure social anxiety, sever autism can be good reasons for a single.
through in general the whole US dorms thing is strange to me (in the EU there are dorms, but optional (in general). And 50%+ of studentsfind housing outside of it (but depends on location). This allows for a lot more individualized living choices.)
It's also useful if your blind, I know this from personal experience. The ability to recognize objects, read package labels, read bios and boot menus, etc has been very useful to me. Claiming that the only things it's good for is white collar work or battlefield targeting isn't accurate. In spite of how useful I've found it I'm not claiming it's going to be net positive, I have no idea how this will all turn out.
Where are these providers and do they offer batch processing? If they don't how does there cost compare to Gemini and OpenAI batch processing? For the hobby project I'm working on batch processing is a great fit. The only cost comparison tool I've been able to find is openrouter and it doesn't support batch processing for cost savings.
I'm rooting against Kotlin since it appears to be only usable with the JetBrains ide. I'm totally blind and Jetbrains tools are not nearly as accessible or easy to use as VS Code with all the Java extensions in my experience. At all the jobs I've had no one cared if I didn't use Idea, but considering it looks like there's no good VS Code tooling for Kotlin if I have to use Kotlin professionally it's going to be painful.
What's unexpected about that observation is that they have actually completely separated the presentation layer from the business logic because such a thing was required to have "Code with Me" and their "projector" project wherein one could use IJ from a browser https://jetbrains.github.io/projector-client/mkdocs/latest/a...
But, I am fully talking out of school because I don't know what the actual, no kidding, accessibility hurdles one faces when trying to do work in such a setup, nor what concessions VS Code has made to fix those problems
My major issue is that the IDE doesn't use the same hotkeys or similar interface to VS Code. This isn't necessarily a problem, but the fact that it's so different means the learning curve is absolutely brutal so it's not worth the effort for me to look at it. If there was a basic getting started tutorial that walked you through building a simple program, finding and fixing compilation errors, performing basic debugging etc, that was written from the perspective of a screen reader user that would be incredibly helpful. Something like this may exist, but if it does I haven't found it.
Thanks, I've starred the project so I can keep up with it. I don't currently have any plans to do anything with Kotlin but will look at this if I do in the future.
I figured it out, it's the CIA. Edward Snowden got no punishment for leaking despite "NSA reads minds" and yet the CIA leakers got 40 years and 8 months for not even leaking the code. The CIA has an AI that wrote several hundreds of millions of lines of software exploit code according to Vault 7. CIA and their Artifical Intelligence(s) are the deep state.
Re: another of my comments it is that bit about the stock market which got me to think that this is about psychiatry instead of technology.
I can't entirely discount even the most egregious possibilities of backdoors in software and hardware constrained by: (1) the difficulty of maintaining a conspiracy with a large number of conspirators (the number of people who know about it must be small) and (2) almost a physical law that any device which falls into the hands of the enemy will give up any secrets it has, especially if many instances of that device are available. Granted, in many cases you can make a back door look like an accident, if it is a C program for instance you are going to make a "careless" mistake that introduces a stack or heap overflow.
The thing is that if the US chip industry is caught doing something like than then you will see Europe wake out of its slumber and create an Airbus of chipmaking, that kind of thing has consequences.
That bit about the stock market is a "tell"
Paranoia though is a thought process and it is not going to stop with one idea which may or may not be true but it just runs continously and I suspect if you interviewed this person for an hour you'd see this thought process go through multiple times. My experience with psychosis is that delusions run on rails and you rarely see new or creative delusions but rather a fascination with perpetual motion machines, cures for cancer, unified field theories and the stock market (not like... shitcoins, swaps, options, other derivatives) It's always the same thing and there's barely a pause where one of them ends and something else from the standard playbook begins. Had he not said that about the stock market I might have engaged with it at face value.
The OP really should seek medical help —- a person in this condition who doesn’t have good social support could easily lose their housing.
> (1) the difficulty of maintaining a conspiracy with a large number of conspirators (the number of people who know about it must be small) and (2) almost a physical law that any device which falls into the hands of the enemy will give up any secrets it has, especially if many instances of that device are available.
They've literally done this. They released their historical document for it in 2018. It's a good read.
And you're right: in the Crypto AG story, an engineer noticed their intentional cryptography weaknesses and tried to get them fixed, so they noted that they needed to think of sneakier backdoors. They really have to be careful about who they let in on it.
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