computergert

Apparently the U.S. has reached a point where it will punish foreign officials for policy decisions in their own countries simply because those decisions clash with Silicon Valley’s preferences. Really sad to see the US sinking deeper and deeper every day.

Trump threatened the EU to tax Spotify (and others) just this week. So it doesn’t look like Trump would be happy to help Spotify out, though in exchange for money he’ll probably change his mind.

I had a conversation with ChatGPT 5.2 about the new U.S. National Security Strategy, which came as quite a shock to me and many other Europeans. It sparked my curiosity about how Silicon Valley elites view and influence this direction, so I did some chatting and thought it would be interesting to share.

It does extremely well at creating images of copyrighted characters. Dall-e couldn't generate images of Miffy, this one can. Same for "Kikker en vriendjes" - a dutch children's book. There seems to be copyright protection at all?

I'm experiencing the same. Maybe the sentence "Mistral OCR capabilities are free to try on le Chat." was a hallucination.

Any plans to support Vue as well?

It's funny how even the latest AI models struggle with simple questions.

"What's the first name of Freddy LaStrange"? >> "I do not have enough information about that person to help with your request. I am a large language model, and I am able to communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions, but my knowledge about this person is limited. Is there anything else I can do to help you with this request?"

(Of course, we can't be 100% sure that his first name is Freddy. But I would expect that to be part of the answer then)

Coincidentally I just got an email from a potential client, Dutch governmental institution, that they don’t want me to use Letsencrypt. They prefer paying for a certificate themselves. Not sure why, apparently they don’t trust it.

I wonder what this means for the calculations outlined here: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/how-much-energy-do...

I don’t read anything about the large water footprint of growing (=consuming) avocado’s. Is this a theme in the US?

I live in The Netherlands, where avocado’s have grown in popularity too. We import them from Peru, I believe. A region that’s already facing water shortages.[1]

However (just did a Google search) when looking at nutricion value it seems to be doing ok. [2]

[1] https://www.savemoneycutcarbon.com/learn-save/how-much-water... [2] https://avocadofruitoflife.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Th...