The lessons are questionable. I did the Japanese one, and despite answering all of the incredibly easy questions perfectly, it dumped me into lesson 6, which is also incredibly easy and was the same thing I'd already answered correctly.
Beyond that, some of the Japanese text didn't exactly match what was being said, and some of it was basically the same thing twice, but once with more emphasis. (An exclamation mark.) As a long-time Japanese learner I knew which to expect would be expected as the answer, but a novice would not and it would be just frustrating.
Another was a whole question spoken out loud, but just 1 word from the question as an answer. It can be used like that, but it's asking a lot for a learner to get through it. It's like asking, "Okay?" when you mean "Are you okay?" and expecting a learner to figure it out.
I'm not really sure who this is for. It doesn't seem to fit well for beginner, intermediate, or advanced learners. Beginners need more basic info and explanation. Intermediates probably need things that are more topical. Advanced users probably need things that are more... Well, advanced.
Yeah - on the second point. AI-based Japanese TTS do that, issing arts of ords and/or inexanct with literacy import used. I don't know precisely why, but probably part labeling, part over-acting. Agreed on lessons being shallow.
The UI also hanged the browser for full 5 seconds in places.
It absolutely is. I don't understand how people are so delusional to think that their AI slop has any value.
If I were fine with AI, I could just prompt the LLM myself to create a course perfectly catered to me. Why would I need you? Because your prompting skills are magic? Yeah, no. That is like charging for google search results because you searching skills are so great.
The whole problem with Duolingo is that it got so much worse once they started using AI. Switching to another AI driven project would be out of the frying pan into the fire.
It would be interesting to see if there could be a sustainable OSS model where customers are required to pay for the product, and that was the only way to get support for it as well.
Even if the source was always provided (and even if it were GPL), any bug reports/support requests etc. would be limited to paying customers.
I realize there is already a similar model where the product/source itself is always free and then they have a company behind it that charges for support... but in those cases they are almost always providing support/accepting bug reports for free as well. And maybe having the customer pay to receive the product itself in the first place, might motivate the developers to help more than if they were just paying for a support plan or something.
Some software providers sell software including support, no restriction on number of deployments as well as the possibility for private modifications, then publish under a permissive licence two-three years after a release. That seems to me like a good way of doing things.
Well, I think this is what SchedMD do with Slurm? GPL code. You can sign up to the bug tracker & open an issue, but if you don't have a support contract they close the issue. And only those customers get advanced notice of CVEs etc. I'd expect nearly everyone who uses it in production has a support contract.
Ceph is a non-starter for me because you cannot have an existing filesystem on the disk. Previously I used GlusterFS on top of ZFS and made heavy use of gluster's async geo-replication feature to keep two storage arrays in sync that were far away over a slow link. This was done after getting fed up with rsync being so slow and always thrashing the disks having to scan many TBs every day.
While there is a geo-replication feature for Ceph, I cannot keep using ZFS at the same time, and gluster is no longer developed, so I'm currently looking for an alternative that would work for my use case if anyone knows of a solution.
> "Ceph is a non-starter for me because you cannot have an existing filesystem on the disk. Previously I used GlusterFS on top of ZFS"
I became a Ceph admin by accident so I wasn't involved in choosing it and I'm not familiar with other things in that space. It's a much larger project than a clustered filesystem; you give it disks and it distributes storage over them, and on top of that you can layer things like the S3 storage layer, its own filesystem (CephFS) or block devices which can be mounted on a Linux server and formatted with a filesystem (including ZFS I guess, but that sounds like a lot of layers).
> "While there is a geo-replication feature for Ceph"
Several; the data cluster layer can do it in two ways (stretch clusters and stretch pools), the block device layer can do it in two ways (journal based and snapshot based), the CephFS filesystem layer can do it with snapshot mirroring, and the S3 object layer can do it with multi-site sync.
I've not used any of them, they all have their trade-offs, and this is the kind of thing I was thinking of when saying it requires more skills and effort. for simple storage requirements, put a traditional SAN, a server with a bunch of disks, or pay a cheap S3 service to deal with it. Only if you have a strong need for scalable clusters, a team with storage/Linux skills, a pressing need to do it yourself, or to use many of its features, would I go in that direction.
> prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to
make users of an AI system the authors of the output
> While
highly detailed prompts could contain the user’s desired expressive elements, at present they
do not control how the AI system processes them in generating the output.
Aren't there other tokens one can use in a prompt like (((important thing))) to influence how it's processed?
Plus, there are other variables one can change that affect how the output is generated, besides the prompt. Would claiming that you intentionally used specific other variable values (like temperature/threshold/penalty/seed/etc.) then deem the work as copyrightable? What if you could explain in greater detail what the AI tool was actually doing behind the scenes?
Even if you self-host matrix there are still multiple ways you could be liable for content you don't even know exists. Especially the last 4 points here:
There are even custom message/media types that people use to upload hidden content you can't see even if you're joined to the same channel using a typical client.
20. "ask someone else’s homeserver to replicate media" -> also fixed by authenticated media
21. "media uploads are unverified by default" - for E2EE this is very much a feature; running file transfers through an antivirus scanner would break E2EE. (Some enterprisey clients like Element Pro do offer scanning at download, but you typically wouldn't want to do it at upload given by the time people download the AV defs might be stale). For non-encrypted media, content can and is scanned on upload - e.g. by https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse-spamcheck-badlist
22. "all it takes is for one of your users to request media from an undesirable room for your homeserver to also serve up copies of it" - yes, this is true. similarly, if you host an IMAP server for your friends, and one of them gets spammed with illegal content, it unfortunately becomes your problem.
In terms of "invisible events in rooms can somehow download abusive content onto servers and clients" - I'm not aware of how that would work. Clients obviously download media when users try to view it; if the event is invisible then the client won't try to render it and won't try to download the media.
Nowadays many clients hide media in public rooms, so you have to manually click on the blurhash to download the file to your server anyway.
That K-ID bypass has already been patched, and even if it's bypassed again, Discord is apparently directing some users to Persona instead now. Persona does server-side classification so that one won't be as easy as nulling out the checks on the client.
The 3D model method might work on Persona, but that demo only shows it fooling K-IDs classifier.
Eh, the worldwide rollout hasn't happened yet so for now the only people getting sent to Persona after they promised client-side scanning are those who are fiddling around with Discords internals to trigger the age verification flow early. But yeah if they stick with Persona then they will need to retract the client-side promise before the proper rollout, and that'll be even more fuel on the PR fire.
I cannot even use Discord if I wanted to... every time I try to sign up I get immediately phone-walled and/or banned, and the appeal is always denied with "our automated system is working properly." I have been trying for close to ten(!) years now off and on, with all different combinations of browsers, OSes, ISPs and physical machines. No VPN or proxy either.
And even if I was able to register, that "automated system" still randomly bans people whenever it feels like it. Search the r/discordapp subreddit or just google "discord random ban", it's a widespread problem with no solution and I have no idea how so many other people seem to have no issues, yet at the same time you can find lots of people just as frustrated as me.
"Automated system discriminating against me with no appeal or recourse" may not be the biggest injustice in the world right now, but I fear/loathe that it seems like it's going to keep getting bigger.
A bug blocking functionality is an annoyance, but a Scarlet Letter branded onto a secret dossier is terrifying.
Does phone-walled mean you have to verify with a phone number? Are you unable to do it because it doesn’t work, or because you don’t want to give it your phone number?
Even times when I've given up and put in a real phone number that has never been used with Discord, it still just bans me immediately after verifying, so they basically just stole the number.
On the two occasions I’ve tried to chat with someone on the public Matrix server, I was completely unable to get it to work. I’ve tried with the new Mac app and with some older thing years ago.
So… choose your poison? I’m sure Matrix/Element works for someone or they would be out of business, but it does not work for me.
I have a similar issue with Matrix as well... even though it's federated, most large rooms use the same bots and blocklists so I end up getting banned from many rooms before I've even attempted to join.
Apparently my monopoly ISP rotates IPs fairly often and I am sharing them with people that have been doing bad things with them, so not only are many Matrix channels blocked but even large regular websites like etsy or locals are completely blocked for me as well. Anything with a CF captcha is also an infinite loop.
As far as I know I wasn’t banned or restricted or anything. The client just never managed to create a room or initiate a chat or whatever they called it.
I had the same issue but in instagram, not for personal use, but few years ago I made few startups, and every time I register the company I create few social accounts, all works well except instagram for some reason, always get flagged and asked to take a selfie with a book or something.. and even after providing that selfie I still get perma banned! I tried to call support, like how you would expect from any company let alone a multi billion one, only to find out that there’s actually no support in anywhere in fecebook wise! And the only way you can get something fixed is through a secret syndicate-like community where you should know someone who knows someone to talk to some person there to fix your issue. Long story short, never bothered with that shitty company again, good riddance.
Why do you have JavaScript disabled? That would break the vast majority of websites. Plus it's the opposite of private because it greatly narrows down the bucket of possible visitors you might be (since comparatively almost nobody does it), which ruins any attempt to randomize/un-unique your fingerprint.
It doesn’t break anywhere near as much as you may imagine. Nothing like “vast majority”. It’s a significant minority of the sort of sites that get posted here, but much smaller still in general.
But why do I do it by default? It makes the web better. Things load faster, memory usage reduces, annoyances don’t load… most of what you miss out on is actually better gone. Privacy and tracking stuff is actually more a convenient benefit than the main purpose, to me.
Similar deal with disabling font selection (Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced… → untick Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above). Rarely it actually breaks things (three times in six years, all last year), and that misbegotten nonsense which is Material Icons makes occasional things ugly if you also block web fonts altogether e.g. in uBlock Origin (by default, Firefox whitelists some icon fonts for this reason—see pref browser.display.use_document_fonts.icon_font_allowlist), but using your own chosen fonts only really does make things better.
Like sibling commenter, I use uMatrix to block this. Also I don’t have it enabled in Private Browsing windows, so they get JS, which I find a handy way of managing it.
It makes first party fingerprinting easier, but it pretty much eliminates third party fingerprinting. It also improves the responsiveness of many sites and improves battery life.
I wouldn't recommend completely disabling it though. Use something like uMatrix to selectively filter things.
> pretty much eliminates third party fingerprinting
Maybe, but there are still ways to send a fingerprint to a third party, even from the client side. For example you could inject a JA3/JA4/TLS fingerprint into URL paths for resources in the HTML, such as stylesheets or images.
I think the misunderstanding is in a combination of wording + practical application.
Tariffs in the legal sense are technically paid by the importer who sells a product. It's their responsibility to pay it... always.
The importer could technically eat that cost, and the consumer wouldn't see a difference on their price tag.
But what happens in practice, the vast majority of the time, is the importer passes that extra cost on to the consumer by raising the price they're selling it for. This is technically a business decision made by every importer individually, it is not a requirement.
The people saying tariffs are paid by the importer, or tariffs are paid by the consumer, are both right, but within different perspectives and depending on how each importer chooses to handle their tariffs.
I know of a 10-12 employee business in my town who custom-designs kids products that are manufactured in China because they want to keep their products affordable for parents. Getting them manufactured in the US (even though they wanted to) was way too expensive and would require them to charge way above retail just to stay open.
Once the tariffs dropped, their cost of goods more than doubled.
Their business in that capacity, was gone overnight.
It's easy to think in some vacuum businesses can just "absorb" costs, but as many businesses know, this is rarely the case.
OK, so the custom-designed kids product becomes a luxury item and the business has to charge above retail. The kids learn that adults time is too valuable to be spent on manufacturing trinkets that get thrown away. They take better care of the few toys they do own. There is less plastic crap in landfills. Seems like a win all around?
These products were specifically designed to help care for kids with special needs. And the goal was to keep the items as affordable as possible because their customers were often on a shoestring budget for one reason or another.
Genius, though. Just have them pay more for their "luxury" items! Why didn't they think of that! They would be glad to know helping kids with special needs is a "luxury."
Tariffs can be paid by the seller/exporter. If a very significant part of a company's business is done in the US, and the tariff is sufficiently high, they will lose market share if the customer eats the entire cost of the tariff (which is the whole point of the exercise in the first place). So they may decide to socialize this cost a little bit, by increasing prices in all countries, by a lot less than the tariff, and making customers in other markets in effect subsidize the Americans. Everyone except Americans .pays a bit more, prices don't rise as much for Americans.
It's interesting to see how little of that is going on, empirically, by looking at these kinds of quantitative studies.
Because a corporation doesn't have trading partners, it has a mission to sell to customers. If customers are disproportionately in the US, which happens quite often, then you can entirely rationally decide that pissing them off with a big price hike is worse for the bottom line than pissing everyone off a little.
Why would they be pissed off at the business for not absorbing the tariff? The business didn't arbitrarily enact them, Donald Trump and ipso facto his supports did.
IMO the people claiming that "technically the importer pays the tariff" are deliberately using the letter of the law to confuse and distract the main thrust of the arguments.
What we mean when we ask who is paying the tariff is this: when we increase tariffs, who becomes poorer?
A part costs what a part costs, and the consumer is always going to be the one who pay for that. If tariffs raise the price of the part, then the consumer pays more for the product the part is used in. The cost of the part goes up (because tariffs), the price of the product goes up too. It's really that simple.
No "importer" is going to eat the cost of the tariffs, and it is ridiculous that anyone would think that.
I'm going to call bullshit on that. They likely had stock on-hand that they purchased before the tariffs.
I have a hardware startup (parts imported from China, assembled on-shore), and I guarantee you that my customers are paying for every cent of the tariffs that make my product cost ~30% to 100% more (depending on the whims of an imbecile). No way am I paying it. I can't afford it. The parts cost what they cost, and there simply is no alternative part that can be purchased locally. If my customers can't swallow the extra cost, then I have less customers, which hurts my small business. If you were my customer, you would be paying for the tariffs.
reply