Re downvotes: I suspect there are different forces at play. I would downvote such a post, not because supporting porn is one of my agendas, but opposing puritanism is.
Intuitvely, those opposing immigration have always known this. But tell that t someone from the left They will verbally kill you for stating obvious facts.
The left vs right theatre is really just two sides of the same coin.
By now every western democracy is being dragged along the same path with different stages of progression.
1. Move domestic production and jobs to lesser developed countries to increase profits.
2. Open the gates for mass immigration under the guise of openness and empathy to import wage slaves for the service sector and use every media channel to ostracize anyone who utters the slightest doubt about this policy.
3. Aggressively push DEI and gender ideology to alienate the social-democratic left from the academic left and drown out any other popular left topics like worker's rights or class warfare.
4. Amplify polarization on social media by creating as many conflicts as possible (left vs right, old vs young, men vs women, natives vs immigrants, ...).
5. Promote a right-wing populist party and trick enough people into voting for it.
6. Move the tax burden from the rich to the middle and lower class and remove regulations and restrictions on companies while ignoring all the other problems.
7. Establish surveillance and authoritarian rule under the guise of safety.
Everyone in this so-called culture war is being played, so maybe it's time to stop being smug about being smarter than the other side and start contemplating if there is any common idea that we can agree on that allows us to go forward.
There is nothing "smug" about having an opinion. And there are no compromises in sight.
However, while 2020 helped a lot to escalate the situation, I also feel like politics were always pretty hopeless. Its just that if you grow older, you learn more about what is going on, so things seem increasingly bleek.
Having an opinion is totally fine, of course. I meant that "I told you so" is a bit like pouring gasoline on a fire and doesn't really help the situation.
I agree that politics were always hopeless. We don't really have a mechanism to preserve political experiences, so every couple generations we repeat the same stupid mistakes.
No, because freedom of movement and commerce (specifically, selling one's labor) are human rights. No right is absolute, but the burden of proof is on the person claiming the consequences of exercising these rights are severe enough that they need to be abrogated.
There is no “human right” to cross national borders. It’s the opposite. International law recognizes both the collective right of “peoples”—groups of people—to form nations, and the right of nations to their territorial integrity.
If what you write were true, there wouldn't be any borders on this planet. However, there are. The right to free movement is simply not true. If you want that to be true, advocate for the removal of all borders worldwide.
Well, "data" can't be trusted either, because it is released/announced very selectively. And the media doesn't help either, because data which contradicts the chosen narrative isn't published/commented. In general, I am missing independent journalism. Most of what we get these days is agenda-driven.
Late child birth is not about fertility but about risks for the child. The only woman I know (yeah, anecdotes) who attempted to delay getting a child until after her 40th birthday got a baby with down syndrome. I know what living with a disability in our world means, from personal experience. And given that experience, I have a hard time giving these women some slack. I think they are risking the well being of their children just for their own selfish reasons. We are humans, and there are limits to what we can do. We need to accept them, or we will make other people suffer.
There is screening for down's syndrome in the first trimester, but then it becomes a matter of whether they are comfortable with pregnancy termination in case of down syndrome detection (down's syndrome can't be treated).
It is definitely something that you need to think about if you will have kids later in life (in addition to mother safety).
Late first child seems to have some substantial risks, though (what they call) geriatric pregnancies in general may not be as risky.
But even starting in your 30s gives you a big disadvantage, toddlers are fast (the fastest land mammal is a toddler who’s just been asked what he has in his mouth!).
Became a parent mid-30s and I cannot agree more. I didn’t feel old right away, but my first child is somewhat special-needs and it feels like parenting him has aged me 20 years in the past 7. This is a special case, but even with a ‘normal’ kid it’s still true.
The #1 thing I would tell any young person who would listen is that if you want them, finish having children by like 27. I know for most people, that represents a gamble (that you’ll be able to achieve financial stability in the future), but it’s a safer bet than betting that ‘future you’ will be better equipped in all of the non-money ways. Spoiler: older you is worse equipped in most ways. You might have more wisdom to impart, but the children won’t listen to you anyway so that’s moot.
Anyone can end up in an abusive relationship, not just women. Choose well, indeed. And choose a career which offers generous benefits.
Also, I know women who work in tech who did that advice and are fine. They make high enough salaries to afford good daycare (or it is provided onsite).
I've been told T&A after you bought a product is actually not legal in the EU. The popups still appear, and everyone clicks thorugh. It can't be legal. Whatever they want me to agree with, they have to force me at checkout time. Everything beyond that is plain ransomeware.
It kind of depends; there's a difference between Europe and the EU, for one. But there are also things you can hide away in the T&C and privacy statements, while other stuff (usually involving PII) needs explicit consent and opt-outs.
The EU mandates the presence of an emergency cellular radio on board of new vehicles in case of crashes. It took some convincing, but that radio is now supposed to be off by default.
You can demand a refund for Windows keys that came along with your computer if you disagree with the ToS (which has been tested by a French court IIRC), and that ability is actually included in the Windows EULA these days, but getting that kind of thing enforced will be draining. Repeated calls and repeated emails at the very least, filing complaints and threatening legal action if the vendor doesn't want to comply.
Not impressed. gpt-5-nano gives noticeably worse results then o4-mini does. gpt-5 and gpt-5-mini are both behind the verification wall, and can stay there if they like.
Well, speech synthesizers are pretty much famous for speaking all sorts of things wrong. But what I find very concerning about LLM based TTS is that some of them cant really speak numbers greater then 100. They try, but fail a lot. At least tts-1-hd was pretty much doing this for almost every 3 or 4 digit number. Especially noticeable when it is supposed to read a year number.
From the web demo this model is really good at numbers. It rushes through them, slurs them a bit together, but they are all correct, even 7 digit numbers (didn't test further).
Looks like they are sidestepping these kinds of issues by generating the phonemes with the preprocessing stage of traditional speech synthesizers, and using the LLM only to turn those phonemes into natural-ish sounding speech. That limits how natural the model can become, but it should be able to correctly pronounce anything the preprocessing can pronounce
Not entirely related but humans have the same problem.
For scriptwriting when doing voice overs we always explicitly write out everything. So instead of 1 000 000 we would write one million or a million. This is a trivial example but if the number was 1 548 736 you will almost never be able to just read that off. However one million, five hundred and forty eight thousand, seven hundred and thirty six can just be read without parsing.
Regarding humans, yes and no. If a human had constantly problems with 3 and 4 digit numbers like tts-1-hd does, I'd ask myself if they were neurodivergent in some way.
And yes, I added instructions along the lines of what you describe to my prompt. Its just sad that we have to. After all, LLM TTS has solved a bunch of real problems, like switching languages in a text, or foreign words. The pronounciation is better then anything we ever had. But it fails to read short numbers. I feel like that small issue could probably have been solved by doing some fine tuning. But I actually dont really understand the tech for it, so...
reply