Not the only downside - some MS developed extensions, e.g. their Python integration, have to be patched to work with VSCodium: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/discussions/1641

Yeah, they really added DRM.

This happened quite often for various UI settings etc. Often there were technical reasons for removing the option (e.g. rewrites where they dropped features with low usage), but it is a real thing.

When someone doesn’t know an initialism?

No, they did include “trying to stop it”. For example the ICC projections assume that, towards the end of the century, we start becoming carbon-negative by figuring out effective carbon capture.

You mean the ozone hole that spurred quick international collaboration and resulted in effective regulations which banned the harmful compounds wherever possible, leading to a slow yet steady recovery?

Wonder what’s the difference compared to climate change. Oh well, if we keep increasing emissions surely things will get better!

We wouldn’t stop strip mining by switching to hydrogen, but we would increase our reliance on fossil fuels.

Since it’s unscientific for me to assume your experienced pain, there’s no moral reason why I should let my assumptions affect my behavior. Consequently it’s just as moral for me to eat a potato as it is for me to eat you alive. Am I understanding you correctly? If not, please explain what your standpoint has to do with the discussion, as you’ve already ignored my previous attempt to bring it back to the topic.

No, I’m simply going by my best guess, informed by what I know about the current state of research. That’s not conclusive evidence, but it is morally incredibly hard to argue against it.

After all, I cannot measure pain for humans besides myself. You may just be a philosophical zombie. When I’m treating you like you can experience pain, I’m presupposing your feelings. What if you’re programmed to act scared of pain & secretly wish to experience it?

I do not know. Does that mean you may have a lesser pain experience than plants? How should that affect my decision making?

You only quoted part of their question. Yes, plants react to pain, but that doesn’t mean they feel pain the same way a lobster does.

I switched to LibreWolf when the privacy policy fiasco happened a while ago. It’s funny how every few weeks Mozilla manages to demonstrate why I won’t switch back.

The new CEO has also already lost me with this gem:

He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.

Even taking the statement at face value, it’s unacceptable for it to just “feel off-mission”. It should be a clear “no, never” instead of some wishy-washy answer.

But reading between the lines, such a statement is not just an off-the-cuff remark, but at best a threat to their users, and at worst a way to gauge the blowback of such a decision. They must have already taken it seriously enough to come up with the $150 million.

If I had to put up a number, I’d guess there’s a 25+% chance that Firefox will drop Manifest V2 in the next few years.

Ah yes, who could forget that the US is at war with Venezuela

What is Pete Davidson doing to that poor soul?

Then please explain to me one simple thing - how do you implement sanctions when they can be circumvented by setting up a single company?

No, it’s not new or strange. It’s a normal component of sanctions, and it’s fundamentally how they’re implemented. Otherwise you could circumvent them by setting up two companies.

It becomes impossible to predict which companies and services may be suddenly impacted.

It’s pretty easy to predict. Do you do business with a sanctioned country? Then you’ll be impacted. Easy enough.

I’m all for the EU sanctions against Russia, and consequences for those entities breaching them. But Microsoft didn’t breach the sanctions, and should be used as a tool to punish those that do.

Are you under the impression that Microsoft is being punished in any way? They aren’t, they’re simply not allowed to do business with companies acting against sanctions if they want to keep doing business in the EU.

I don’t know why you’re acting like this is such a strange thing.

Nayara supplies & operates in a sanctioned country. The EU doesn’t want companies supplying companies that do so. If Microsoft wants to keep operating in the EU, they aren’t allowed to keep supplying companies that do so.

Of course there is an indication that Microsoft was legally obligated to suspend their service in this case:

In this instance, the cutoff was sought by the European Union (EU), in an attempt to pressure Russia to back off its assaults on Ukraine.

If they wish to operate in the EU, they have to follow some of the EU’s demands.

It’s like getting the power company to cut your electricity because you have unpaid parking tickets - It’s probabkly a great way to get parking offenders to pay what they owe, but it undermines trust in general, yes?

It’s more like “getting your accounts frozen because you operate in a country that has sanctions against it”. Which is a totally normal thing to do. Companies cutting off other companies that operate in countries which attack other countries doesn’t undermine my trust - companies continuing to operate in such countries undermines it.

It’s the way it should work. A private company can only be compelled to enforce a government demand under due process of the applicable jurisdiction. Ensures trust through transparency.

They are compelled to enforce a government demand under due process of the applicable jurisdiction. For a multinational corporation, the applicable jurisdiction are all the jurisdictions they operate in. Since multinational corporations exist to funnel profits into their host country, that country has the ability to compel them under due process in other countries.

You might argue that it’s not good for companies to be this large, and I’d agree. You might also argue that specific sanctions aren’t good, and I’d agree. But the idea that a companies ToS should supercede jurisdictions and that they shouldn’t be curtailed by the governments under which they operate is fundamentally corrosive to the concept of statehood.

Sanctions exist to restrict trade with other countries. This can’t work if companies can just ignore sanctions, and I don’t want e.g. european companies to ignore sanctions against Russia.

“Sorry government, I can’t enforce your sanctions, my ToS don’t allow me”

Do you really think this works?

The sky color is part of the training data. How did the LLMs include the training data before it existed?

My god.

There are many parameters that you set before training a new model, one of which (simplified) is the size of the model, or (roughly) the number of neurons. There isn’t any natural lower or upper bound for the size, instead you choose it based on the hardware you want to run the model on.

Now the promise from OpenAI (from their many papers, and press releases, and …) was that we’ll be able to reach AGI by scaling. Part of the reason why Microsoft invested so much money into OpenAI was their promise of far greater capabilities for the models, given enough hardware. Microsoft wanted to build a moat.

Now, through DeepSeek, you can scale even further with that hardware. If Microsoft really thought OpenAI could reach ChatGPT 5, 6 or whatever through scaling, they’d keep the GPUs for themselves to widen their moat.

But they’re not doing that, instead they’re scaling back their investments, even though more advanced models will most likely still use more hardware on average. Don’t forget that there are many players in this field that keep bushing the bounds. If ChatGPT 4.5 is any indication, they’ll have to scale up massively to keep any advantage compared to the market. But they’re not doing that.