If you are wondering why the US government is upset about this, here is a brief list of companies below that have headquartered in Ireland because they are a bit of a tax haven. So I consider this to be a quite astute move by the Irish government to place pressure upon the US government via its corporate overlords.
Apple: Historically used notorious loopholes to lower its effective tax rate to under 2%. Following a landmark European Court of Justice ruling, the company was ordered to pay back $14 billion (€13 billion) in unlawful tax benefits to the Irish state.
Microsoft: Routinely routes astronomical sums through Irish subsidiaries. One of its main Irish entities notoriously posted £220 billion in profit in a single year while paying zero corporate tax via loophole setups.
Google (Alphabet) and Meta (Facebook): Both long utilized complex accounting strategies like the "Double Irish" to transfer intellectual property (IP) and globally generated revenues into the Irish jurisdiction.
Medtronic: A major U.S. medical device firm that legally moved its corporate headquarters to Ireland via a $48 billion tax inversion acquisition.
Allergan: A pharmaceutical giant that executed a similar $66 billion corporate inversion to establish its tax base in Ireland.
Other Tech & Biotech Leaders: Major corporations like Pfizer, Oracle, Dell, Airbnb, and LinkedIn maintain substantial operations and book vast non-U.S. revenues through Ireland.
Have you been living under a rock? This messaging about the AusAlert test has been going on for a solid two months, on television, on radio, in printed media, and all over the internet.
The alert system utilises existing software in nearly every modern smartphone and it is used in plenty of countries around the world.
Japan uses it for earthquake alerts before the actual earthquake arrives.
States in the US use it for missing kid alerts - when they've just been noticed missing, right in that critical timeframe where they are easiest to find.
South Korea uses it for alerting when their North Korean neighbours are getting a bit antsy, and for other, less emergency-ish uses. When I was in South Korea during covid the local government would loudly broadcast daily infection numbers as an emergency alert, so I went into my phone's settings and turned it off
Of course, the Australian government won't mention how to turn it off because they want people to be aware of these alerts. But for people with hidden phones it's very important information to know, and I dislike that no mention of the ability to silence it has been made in media.
In Android, it's under Settings -> Safety and Emergency -> Wireless Emergency Alerts. You can turn off numerous sub-categories of emergency alerts in there.
In iPhone, it's in Settings -> Notifications -> Government Alerts/Enhanced Safety Alerts -> Again, you can turn off any categories you deem irrelevant.
English definitely needs more clues for pronunciation. Plenty of homographs could have been cleared up with diacritics. Wind/Wind, Bow/Bow, Sewer/Sewer, etc.
I actually have been using claude to go through all my old projects and review from a security perspective.
It flags a heap of things that I never considered, mainly because a lot of my projects were ad-hoc solutions to various issues that were written in a hurry and never intended to be visible to the general internet. But it also has been suggesting architectural and robustness changes that have some value, as a lot of stuff I wrote grew organically and weren't structured particularly well for future growth.
He's using a "thorn" cuz he's so tistic and awesome.
The poster's stance is that one day they hope to see thorns in AI generated text.
This is probably quite difficult to actually happen, as LLMs will see the characters as a spelling mistake compared to their general corpus of text and correct them.
In the meantime it makes their posts difficult to parse and irritates other readers, so surely this can be considered a win for everyone in the fight against AI. /s
Privatisation of a service that is a hard requirement for the dole means that there is no need for those providers to provide quality outcomes for the people forced to use their services.
Edit: oh, there are "requirements" in place for these companies to get their money. This just means that it's an endless game of effort minimalisation for employment companies so they can extract maximum profit (See also: the current Aged Care debacle). Nationalise the jobs system, let's keep that money in-house for a better outcome.
You're typing your comments using a blob of goo with about a hundred million neurons in it that cycles under a hundred hertz and draws less than 20 watts.
I don't think that we'll be running packs of goo in our PCs any time soon. But I do think some entirely different way of looking at the problem will emerge that will reduce computational requirements by many orders of magnitude. And it won't involve gigantic statistical engines trying to find the best average response to a question.
Luckily hydrogen floats upwards pretty quickly. So paradoxically, storage tanks are safer the less protection they have around them. Or at least, above them.
I'm just waiting for the closed-source AI industry to have their Black Swan moment.
Something's going to come out of left field from the open AI community and all that investment in proprietary models and mega-compute is going to be rendered useless.
Surely there should be settings in their NTP clients regarding skew as well. If you're trucking along and then your time server says, "Hey I know we've been sync'd within 3 milliseconds for years now, but you just need to step the time back 19.8 years real quick for me", then that should raise a tiny red flag with your client?
If you are wondering why the US government is upset about this, here is a brief list of companies below that have headquartered in Ireland because they are a bit of a tax haven. So I consider this to be a quite astute move by the Irish government to place pressure upon the US government via its corporate overlords.
Apple: Historically used notorious loopholes to lower its effective tax rate to under 2%. Following a landmark European Court of Justice ruling, the company was ordered to pay back $14 billion (€13 billion) in unlawful tax benefits to the Irish state.
Microsoft: Routinely routes astronomical sums through Irish subsidiaries. One of its main Irish entities notoriously posted £220 billion in profit in a single year while paying zero corporate tax via loophole setups.
Google (Alphabet) and Meta (Facebook): Both long utilized complex accounting strategies like the "Double Irish" to transfer intellectual property (IP) and globally generated revenues into the Irish jurisdiction.
Medtronic: A major U.S. medical device firm that legally moved its corporate headquarters to Ireland via a $48 billion tax inversion acquisition.
Allergan: A pharmaceutical giant that executed a similar $66 billion corporate inversion to establish its tax base in Ireland.
Other Tech & Biotech Leaders: Major corporations like Pfizer, Oracle, Dell, Airbnb, and LinkedIn maintain substantial operations and book vast non-U.S. revenues through Ireland.