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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Algorithmic patents amount to patenting maths which, by very longstanding precedence, is not a thing, for good reason. Same goes for business methods and other stuff.

    In the EU there’s only one way to patent software and that’s if you’re using it to achieve direct physical ends. E.g. you can patent washing machine firmware in so far as you patent a particular way to combine sensor data to achieve a particular washing result. Rule of thumb: If, 30 years ago, you’d have an electromechanical mechanism to do the task then you can patent the software that’s now replacing it.

    Oh: It’s also possible to patent silicon, that is, you can patent your hardware acceleration methods for video decoding. That doesn’t extend to decoders running on general-purpose hardware, though.

    If you want to monopolise your brand-new hash algorithm there’s a simple way: Don’t publish the source, use copyright to collect royalties… though that doesn’t mean that reverse engineering is outlawed, especially if necessary for interoperability. Practically speaking nope hash algorithms just can’t be protected which is fair and square because it’s academia who comes up with that kind of stuff and we paid for it with taxpayer money. Want to make money off it? Get tenure.



  • The vast majority of sales are made to US based firms so they likely have a lot of sway.

    The sway is TSMC uses ASML EUV lithography machines and the US holds patents on those because they did foundational research regarding EUV lithography. Also, the EU hasn’t put China on the “it is illegal for EU companies to kowtow to US sanctions” list. Ironically ASML could sell to Cuba and Iran. If the EU were to tell ASML to sell to China the US would be free to not buy ASML machines any more and, doing that, kill off Intel’s fabs.

    None of this stuff has military relevance, you don’t need or even want to use small nodes (which require EUV) in military applications you want hardened chips instead. Run off the mill consumer chips go all frizzy if an EMP looks at them sideways. This is about the US protecting US fabs, foremost Intel. Not the chip design part but the manufacturing one.

    Europe hasn’t played the high-end end-consumer chip market for ages and I doubt we’ll do it any time soon. Having ASML, Zeiss etc. means that whoever actually produces that stuff wants to be friendly with us and strategically, both military and economy, our own production facilities are perfectly sufficient. Hence also why ESMC will only go as small as 12nm, it’s the most cost-effective node size and performance is perfectly adequate for a missile, a CNC mill, or a car infotainment system. Or the gyroscope chip in your phone (it’s almost certainly a Bosch), EUV doesn’t make a lick of sense when you’re doing MEMS. Where we have to catch up is chip design lets see how that RISC-V supercomputer chip turns out.



  • that meme makes is that it’s clear the gal doesn’t want to participate in the conversation due to body language.

    Not trying to argue against the meme, how it’s used and understood etc, but: You can’t interpret body language from a still image, you need at least like two or three movements, you need to see how someone reacts to their own movements so to speak. She might just as well be going “woah, cool”, slight backward surprise movement, and the two are the most wholesome couple you’ve ever met. Or she actually really wants to get out of there. That’s the point: The still image itself is too little information to make the distinction.


  • The problem is: Data is code, and code is data. An algorithm to compute prime numbers is equivalent to a list of prime numbers, (also, not relevant to this discussion, homoiconicity and interpretation). Yet we still want to make a distinction.

    Is a PAQ-compressed copy of the Hitchhiker’s guide code? Technically, yes, practically, no, because the code is just a fancy representation of data (PAQ is basically an exercise in finding algorithms that produce particular data to save space). Is a sorting algorithm code? Most definitely, it can’t even spit out data without being given an equally-sized amount of data. On that scale, from code to code representing data, AI models are at least 3/4th towards code representing data.

    As such I’d say that AI models are data in the same sense that holograms (these ones) are photographs. Do they represent a particular image? No, but they represent a related, indexable, set of images. What they definitely aren’t is rendering pipelines. Or, and that’s a whole another possible line of argument: Requiring Turing-complete interpretation.




  • Not to mention ARM chips which by and large were/are more efficient on the same node than x86 because of their design: ARM chip designers have been doing that efficiency thing since forever, owing to the mobile platform, while desktop designers only got into the game quite late. There’s also some wibbles like ARM insn decoding being inherently simpler but big picture that’s negligible.

    Intel just really, really has a talent for not seeing the writing on the wall while AMD made a habit out of it out of sheer necessity to even survive. Bulldozer nearly killed them (and the idea itself wasn’t even bad, it just didn’t work out) while Intel is tanking hit after hit after hit.


  • See there’s the stuff that happened, there’s the version that tankies want to believe (complete denial), which is actually different from the official CCP stance (“necessary and proportionate police action to ensure stability”, with the implication “enough questions, comrade, nothing more to see”), which is different from western public… myth, I have to say. Back when the stuff went down western journalists didn’t know what was happening, there were confusing reports, there were reports of violence, and then there was the tank man – taken the day after (IIRC, but definitely later and no he didn’t get run over). The collective imagination somehow constructed an image of the Chinese army rolling over students. Which is… metaphorically true, but not literally. And then the CCP is using that western imagination to spin their own tale of how the evil west is slandering them.


  • Lore books eh you’re giving me ideas. Hard to justify spending budget on that kind of stuff even if you have money to work with… how would one even get one’s hands on a woodprint artist? You know, the chisel and printing press kind? Imitating it is going to be hard indeed and figuring out how to do it not worth for a couple of one-off images you could just as well do without so either generating from prompt or telling the model to re-paint an input image in that style seems like the obvious solution.

    I think a similar rule applies as when it comes to code, and NIH syndrome syndrome: Whatever it is that is your primary focus you should write yourself, use libraries for the rest. If you write a shooter, you’re going to write the gunplay, but can take the renderer off the shelf. I you’re writing a walking simulator that happens to have a gun somewhere but is generally focussed on graphical atmosphere, go grab the gunplay off the shelf but write the renderer yourself.

    So unless the focus of your game is rummaging through books in an ancient library, go use that model.



  • Eh the massacring happened on side streets, local Peking residents were trying to keep the army from moving into the square not really knowing that other Peking residents had already briefed the army on who the protesters actually were, and what they wanted, and how they behaved. Once the army was on the square and set an ultimatum it was cleared with no or few casualties, the reports are a bit fuzzy.

    That doesn’t excuse the CCP in one bit, of course, or rather it doesn’t excuse the hardline faction who couldn’t stomach that others in the party were actually talking to the protesters as that would set a precedent that you can just turn up on the square and get an audience with the party, or maybe more precisely could boost the influence of one party faction over the whole.

    The whole situation really can’t be divorced from Hu Yaobang and his role in the party: The protests were essentially a wake for him and his ideas. Which the hardliners thoroughly buried afterwards and the situation in China hasn’t improved to the point where Chinese would even be comfortable to criticise that decision – you’d get invited for tea, if you can catch on to the euphemism.

    If it had been up to the hardliners yes the army would’ve massacred the whole square, if that hadn’t been their intention they wouldn’t have mischaracterised the nature of the protest towards the army. Without ordinary Peking citizens stepping in, and getting butchered for it, that massacre would have happened.

    And yes the Uygur situation is a genocide that’s without question or asterisk.



  • ICANN isn’t really a massive organisation, it’s a technocratic non-profit with a buttload of advisory committees, including one for end users. The rules surrounding ccTLDs were tightened after Russia didn’t sunset .su, so they tried to take politics out of it, make it a wholly rules-based thing, but now it figures that the rule everyone wants to have is “decide on a case-by-case basis”.

    There’s also been various initiatives regarding reform of internet governance over the decades but in the end noone can agree on what would be better so ICANN keeps on chugging on.

    You know what would bring a quick end to this? If Mauritius doesn’t incorporate those islands into itself, letting them stay an autonomous territory. From British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritian Indian Ocean Territory.