From other articles I've read: the commanders have their own bodyguards and soldiers get their weapons only when actually sent to front. Also, there are castes of soldiers. Those who are cannon-fodder are sometimes even brought in handcuffs (there are even videos of this).

> I hardly ever find myself behaving unpredictably or out-of-control - I remember sometimes feeling that way as a child, but now? As an adult? It almost never happens.

Good for you. I almost parted with a very good friend just because I had a very bad day and a big headache yesterday. Fortunately she is understanding enough. Due to lack of mental clarity I've said things that are simply untrue but I felt that the words I'm writing were correct at the time. I felt it was wrong reaction pretty soon after sending and rereading.

But I'm not "often" out of control. It just happens once or twice a year.

> I'm actually surprised that the NRA types haven't risen up against tyranny. That would be a real problem.

It's their team that is doing tyranny, so they don't have a reason to rise up against it.

> just mask the sensitive data with a single color which is impossible to reverse (for rasterized images, this is not a good idea for PDFs

Also not a good idea for masking already compressed images of text, like jpg, because some of the information might bleed out in uncovered areas.

Interesting - does a little extra coverage solve this or is it possible to use distant pixels to find the original?

yep, some padding fixes this

JPEG compression can only move information at most 16px away, because it works on 8x8 pixel blocks, on a 2x down-sampled version of the chroma channels of the image (at least the most common form of it does)

I'm not super familiar with the jpeg format, but iirc h.264 uses 16x16 blocks, so if jpeg is the same then padding of 16px on all sides would presumably block all possible information leakage?

Except the size of the blocked section ofc. E.g If you know it's a person's name, from a fixed list of people, well "Huckleberry" and "Tom" are very different lengths.

Progress is a little slower this days in hardware, but it's there. Last year I finally assembled a new PC after surviving almosta a decade on my old laptop. The hardware spec jump made me remember old days. 8x more memory, 10x faster disk, 4x more cores and each one 2x faster!!! Gpu has as much memory as my previous laptop after upgrading it! Seeing the cpu usage and temps, also seeing how much data now I can download from net (I also got fiber recently and lan in old laptop was not working) was exhilarating. I can now ask my computer a question and it will respond (but slowly, local llm)!

To me the jump from my GF's celeron laptop with 2GB to her current 8GB high end Celeron (i5-i7 speeds, almost) and a Intel UHD was as big as a Pentium III 500 with a TNT2 compared to a Pentium 4 with SSE2 and a Geforce 2ti/3. A big jump in very few years from the PIII, for 12 years the gap of the laptop and the current one it's nothing.

By comparison the El Cheapo laptop she bought should have been able to play RTX bound games, and yet we are stuck there. Remember, 12 years it's 2x the time. Except for the GL 2.1 ->Vulkan/GL 4.6 jump and videos from 1080p to 4k, the jump isn't that big. I would expect more. For young HNers, if the progress was like the 90s, in 12 you would buy a laptop for $300 and maybe play an RTX raytraced Quake... virtualized.

I had to drive in -30C once, the engine could not get up to final temperature after 2 hours of highway driving because I had to run cabin heater at full blast on windshield and side windows so they didn't cover with fog inside. But that was in very old low power car.

My tiny diesel car (2008 Toyota) needs its auxiliary heater below around -15 C for highway trips. It's a switch in my dash that burns extra fuel, otherwise the engine won't get up to or stay at temperate.

Pretty normal with diesel as it gives off less heat than petrol. I have a van with an 88kW engine, and even at -5c I can see the coolant temperature drop when I am idling down hill and have the heater on. Any colder and it's worth blocking the radiator with cardboard.

Protip for next time, cover the rad halfway with some cardboard and this will help a bit.

Epic was founded in US and didn't reach such success too. I think this is not because of US based, more like because of Gabe Newell.

Good example. I’d want to look at the first-mover(ish) advantage Valve had and other differences in product timing/delivery before I concluded it was impossible to found a company like Valve in the EU.

I am interested in knowing why it's impossible. Only because of first mover advantage?

I think you’re reading my post wrong. I’m not stating it’s impossible.

You're right, sorry.

I tried to learn Mandarin and it's really hard! That's coming from someone who is able to say Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz without a problem.

I feel the perceived difficulty varies from person to person. Personally I found Mandarin much easier to pick up than German or Spanish, since you don't have to worry about conjugation.

I think that's called feudalism. Maybe our reality doesn't work like it's named and we are starting to have other system despite what we are calling it.

> it should be possible for a regular person to own their computing

And regular persons will not care about this and will select a model with biases of anyone who they deem "works better for me at this one task that I needed".

Just like you said:

> previously, this happened with print media. Then it happened with the airwaves. It only makes logical sense that the trend continues with LLMs.

I wish it wasn't so, but I have no idea how to make people care about not being under someone's control.