barsoap

It's not actually any safer, they taped thin rubber strips over the exposed edges. Someone's friends with an inspector who played dumb, me thinks.

And that's not the case with Ukraine because...?

As far as I know we have no data to that end, and I consider it unlikely because it's not strategically opportune for the Chinese: The Russians are perfectly capable of bending the algorithm to their favour without being given a leg up so why risk burning the asset that is TikTok to support a war that the Chinese aren't fans of, anyway, for an "ally" that's already busy vassalising themselves to them.

I don't think that the Chinese are actively using TikTok for anything at the moment, on the side of ByteDance they're using it as a money maker, research platform to figure out things they can't figure out with their highly restricted domestic version, and on part of the CCP it's something they may care to use actively in the future, but there's no need or use now, but they sure as fuck slurp up all intelligence they can get from there. Long story short don't dunk on China if you want to visit it, especially not on TikTok. Personally I recommend dunking on China and visiting Taiwan, instead. Better tea, anyway.

You see, for cellular, a tower is truly limited on the bandwidth because it must be shared among all cellular devices connected to it

That's still a limitation on bandwidth, not data volume. It's still the bandwidth that costs money, not the volume.

The difference between cable and cellular is that in the cellular case it's much more forgivable to have bandwidth collapse when lots of people want to transfer things at the same time, but not because it's a single tower, but because it's a shared EM field. To duplicate bandwidth with cables you can use a second cable, to duplicate bandwidth with cellular a second tower doesn't suffice, you need a new generation of transmission technology.

A fair pricing scheme would operate on a flat fee for your home connection (at a particular speed), plus flat fee for guaranteed speed to the internet, and allow for faster speed if someone else currently isn't using their allotment.

That's it. That's what ISPs are, themselves, paying, and thus what the customer should pay. All this volume nonsense is suited-up business fucks grifting people.

(For completeness' sake: Those guarentees are bound to be asymmetric because downstream the ISP only pays port costs, while upstream the ISP pays port costs plus max bandwidth used in a particular time-frame. Not volume, bandwidth. "What was the fastest speed, in this particular month, at which the data moved through the tubes")

In Germany, it was found that it's very very very easy to fall down an AfD propaganda hole when browsing TikTok -- and the way that was fixed was by other parties, non-party actors etc. starting to give a fuck about the platform.

I'm not saying there's no Chinese shennanigans going on on TikTok, there probably are at least low-key and they're keeping it around as an asset they can use more intensively, push come to shove. But that doesn't mean that everything bad on TikTok is a Chinese plot, it could be, you know, just our own societies dropping the ball. Shocking, I know, how would that ever happen. Algorithm-wise TikTok didn't prefer AfD content the AfD just figured out how to use it effectively.

Then it's going to be an autonomous territory (like e.g. the Faroer) called the Mauritian Indian Ocean Territory. Countries don't need to be sovereign to exist and have ISO codes. If Mauritius wants to they can do it even if the IANA insists on the letter of their rules.

Looks like a skill issue on your part.

A CD doesn't really mean anything, the license and the physical medium generally aren't tied. If you break the medium but have a backup you're not pirating anything. I'd say the primary difference to a CD isn't more or less secure but physical or not.

Downloading the game also requires an online connection. You'd only need one when you're buying or selling the license NFT or moving it from one download platform to another, and of course to download the game. Whether you need an online connection to play depends on the game, not the NFT.

Oh, speaking of: Are you an EU citizen? Have you already signed this?

NFTs would make sense for things like tradable software licenses. E.g steam is going to be forced to allow users to sell their games soonish (they're appealing the ruling and it's only a matter of time until they lose) and you wouldn't want such a license to be tied to a particular marketplace, so NFTs make sense: The game publisher mints it, it's tradable freely, sites like steam and gog can look at them and say "yep this hasn't been tampered with and was minted by the publisher", and serve you the game files. Presumably they'd want you to occasionally buy something on their platform to let you use their servers to download games they didn't sell you, or you could pay a small sum for the service.

The NFT itself, of course, doesn't enforce anything. It's just a non-fungible token representing usage rights in the game. Like a cd key but more secure, for the publisher (key can't be duplicated / used multiple times, I mean a platform that would allow that could just as well go all the way and be a torrent release group) and the buyer (can check validity of key before spending money) and seller (buyer can't claim bullshit like "key didn't work").

What you probably would not do is put that stuff on already-existing blockchains because why should the industry pay ludicrous transaction fees when you can roll your own.

An NPU is a cut-down GPU to allow running ML workloads on restrained power budgets.

Quite literally. Keep the memory architecture, keep the massive banks of ALUs, remove the little intelligence GPU cores have in their control units and you have an NPU. Oh, one more thing: Make sure those ALUs support ludicrously low precision arithmetic. GPUs can do the same without any real downside, though, the reason GPUs floored out at fp16 is because there were no workloads benefitting from lower precision.

It makes sense on mobile devices and phones have been shipping them for ages to do their AI image processing, listening for voice commands etc, it makes sense for at least some data centres because specialising your hardware to save electricity is worth it, it doesn't make sense anywhere in between. Just get a proper GPU and you can do AI and play Crysis.

The latest annoyance is that they will AI-translate posts and stick those into search engines.

I don't know where you got North Carolina from, I was speaking in general. Also the place has plenty of coastline. Also you don't need to live near the coast to live in a flood area, plenty of rivers that can and do flood. In mountainous regions it's not about building on the right side of the dike, but not at the bottom of the valley, and in the places in between it's about... well, it's usually not really about not building in one particular place, but making sure that there's areas that you can flood to protect areas you want to keep dry. Much cheaper to pay off a farmer for a lost harvest and cleanup than half a million people for losing their homes.