Someone's eager to downvote this, but it's been known for a long time and still happens in obvious ways. First page of results for booter services contains https://zeusstress.com/ which is hosted by Cloudflare (yes yes, ceo will send lawyers to say they only proxy not host - doesn't matter in practice)
.. 9 out of 10 unhappy customers are currently unable to cause any blame, because they cannot even reach customer service because they are getting the "bot" treatment.
Note that almost all tests and marketing claims about M-DISC (most notably the 1000-year claim) where about the DVD versions. The main distinguishing characteristic of DVD M-DISC is that they do not use organic dyes like standard DVD+/-R, which can degrade relatively quickly. This is also why M-DISC DVD is not always compatible with any DVD reader/writer.
Verbatim / Millenniata loves to conflate claims about the original DVD M-DISC and the later BD-R M-DISC. But unlike DVD-R, standard BD-R already don't use organic dyes (with the exception of some low grade "LTH" discs). AFAIK there has never been good evidence that the BD-R M-DISCs have any special sauce compared to any other non-M-DISC BD-R. (Strengthened by the fact that there have never been compatibility issues or special equipment requirements to read/write M-DISC BD-R.)
It seems that Mistral is moving in that direction anyway:
"Our customers particularly value us for pioneering open models. Open weights give them what mission-critical work demands: the ability to see inside a model, adapt it, and retain the intelligence they build with it. This is why we are enthusiastic contributors to the Open Secure AI Alliance and NVIDIA Nemotron Coalition. We are now extending that openness beyond our own models. Mistral’s platform will support third-party open models, starting with Z.ai’s GLM-5.2."
There are probably three main reasons: 1) unified memory (but you can also that with DGS Spark / Strix Halo), 2) access to your Apple account, so you can have a bot handle your iMessages, email, calendars 3) energy efficiency.
Apart from that, if it doesn't work out you still have a Mac Mini, which in itself is more desirable for many than a DGX Spark or Strix Halo if you have no AI use case.
I understood from informal chatter that researchers in the top Chinese labs are pretty open with sharing knowledge with each other. Additionally, it seems that anywhere between 30-50% of key researchers in the top US labs are ethnically Chinese. I wonder if this situation might give Chinese labs/researches some advantage just due to language and informal networks. Chinese researchers can understand all the English research, but research in Chinese is far less accessible to non-Chinese.
Chinese ML researchers primarily publish in English and only secondarily in Chinese. For example, take the Qwen-3.8-Next blog post https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.8-flash-next (which apparently doesn't include the language choice in the URL, so you'll need to switch to the 简体中文 translation manually). Even in the Chinese version, the "Hugging Face", "Tech Report" and "FlashQLA" links point to English documents, and the ModelScope link has a brief flash of English content before autotranslation kicks in to turn it into Chinese. I'm not sure what is used on the Qwen Discord, but I would guess it's a mix of languages.
Personal communication is of course different from official documentation, but a researcher who wants to establish a working relationship with Chinese colleagues could easily do so while communicating entirely in English.
> From a cursory read of their white paper, my impression is that LISEP is trying to quantify the sense that making a livable income is harder and more disparate than it used to be.
But their own defined measure shows the opposite. The first graph on their website shows that their True Rate is currently at its lowest level over the past 30 years.
The point is that it's still high and stagnating. And the living wage calculation is using a CPI adjusted fixed level, so inflation that's heavy on critical sectors for lower income people (housing, fuel, groceries) will show up less than the real damage it's causing.
They set it up this way because TRU is a conservative measure designed to stand up to criticism. The true under-living-wage rate is probably even higher but that would depend on stronger assumptions that are easier to attack.
The same reason tar and dd and practically everything operates on blocks not bytes, plus the same reason the shell doesn't act until eol delimiter, the opportunity to edit before submit.
I think talk could get away with it because on a shared local host both sides are accessing the same local physical resource directly, no tcp packet per byte.
I wonder if someone already made a somewhat turnkey setup like this? Small models should ideally not waste a lot of parameters on trying to memorize too much knowledge and then hallucinate / interpolate a lot of the gaps.
I don't think this type of legislation will have any kind of real world effect. Apple App store labels all their buttons with "Get". Google Play Store just prints the price on the button for paid apps/games.
In a thread about movies, it's perhaps more relevant to talk about how those two platforms handle movies.
In a browser, the top category on Google's "Movies & TV" is "New to buy or rent". The buttons on the page for a movie are labeled "$X.XX Buy" and "$X.XX Rent". In the Google TV app on my android phone, the two buttons are "Rent 4K // $X.XX" and "Buy 4K // $X.XX".
The splash images in the Apple TV app iOS say "Buy or rent it now.", and the buttons on the page for an individual movie are labeled "Buy $X.XX" and "Rent $X.XX".
Not to defend this, just to further observe the different nature of their marketing -- games also haven't historically had similar "rent" options in the first place. Timed demos are a newer trend, demos in general have usually been smaller sections of the content, and they typically aren't something you're paying for.
There needs to be a carrot or stick to discourage this kind of practice. Perhaps when companies sue users for piracy, the valuation of what was "stolen" should be dependent on the nature of that company's sales practices. e.g. A company that merely "rents" media in a deceptive way would only be eligible to claim small fractions of a penny on the dollar were stolen when prosecuting a pirate. This way companies would be encouraged to respect user ownership rights if they want their own rights to be respected.
Apple does the same thing as Google, the button is only labeled "Get" for free apps, for paid apps it's labeled with the price.
Paid apps largely failed as a business model though (why would a consumer take a risk on buying a paid app that they can't try before they buy) so most apps that you pay for are free apps with IAP subscriptions... which I guess makes it a little more explicit that you're renting the app, for better or worse.
I think we've also moved towards subscriptions as apps become clients for a backend service.
EG. A mapping app that includes a one time bundle of maps that don’t get updated can be sold as a one time purchase. If you provide continuous updates, which most people expect now, pulling off a one time purchase business model is HARD. The other option is versioned access or time limited support, which is really just a subscription model by a different name. That said I wish versioned access was still a thing. Photoshop CS is still fine for what I want, I’m happy to pay for an upgrade when it makes sense, but a continuing subscription to software that hasn’t substantially changed in a decade sucks.
9 out of 10 corporate decisions are for blame avoidance / ass covering.
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