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One time I did a cross-country move from Germany to the NL. Booked myself a 1st class ticket, because I had a ton of luggage and wanted a chill experience. Of course-- train is canceled, which means my seat reservation is also canceled. Next train comes and it's standing room only.

So I paid 3x for comfort, only to get stuck standing in the aisle with all my luggage for 6 hours and an additional transfer. Yes, I can get the ticket refunded, but the point is not about the money. What should I expect out of a service that can so easily be completely downgraded at a moment's notice?


At least you were able to make a seat reservation. In The Netherlands I frequently had to stand in first class while paying €600+ a month for the subscription. Ended up buying a car, that way I had a guaranteed seat with climate control.

Something similar happened to me, but with Lufthansa. Canceled my flight 1 day in advance and told me to take a hike, didn't even bother to find/recommend another flight. Germany has really deteriorated, it's no longer matching its past reputation of getting things done.

With a flight, an airline that cancels a flight with less than two weeks notice owes you cash compensation of 250, 400, or 600 Euros depending on the length of the flight. The airline can only avoid this obligation if the cancellation was due to extraordinary circumstances outside their control.

A similar regulation for trains would likely tighten up reliability, though it could also raise ticket prices.


They returned me the money but didn't pay anything extra. So my hotel cancellation fees were paid from my own pocket.

I think the time limit to request compensation under EU261/2004 in Germany is 3 years. If this happened within the past 3 years, you can demand that they pay you.

Their claim form is here: https://www.lufthansa.com/us/en/fast-compensation

An overview of the regulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passengers_Rights_Regulati...


This summer I took a DB train from Amsterdam to Berlin. Being from the midwest USA, I didn't have a lot of experience with trains so I bought a first class ticket. The air and power in my car weren't working. There was no beverage car or service so we sat sweating to death. After a couple hours they gave in and told us to go to another car. Then at the next stop someone got on and yelled at me because I was in his assigned seat.

Amsterdam to Berlin is probably cheaper and faster by airplane. Even a car is sometimes faster if you count for delays.

It really should be a three hour train ride but due to incompetence it takes over six hours.


True. But it was my first time in Europe so I wanted the experience. If I go again I will probably fly.

The US companies are all basically GPUaas. I’m not sure what the financial model is here, but I like it.

This is true but sometimes your codebase has unique quirks that you get tired of repeating. "No, Claude, we do it this other way here. Every time."

Quirks are pretty much unavoidable. I tend to get better results using Codex. It sticks to established patterns. Slow, but more deliberate. Claude focuses more on speed.

You could make a hook in Claude to re-inject claude.md. For example, make it say "Mr Tinkleberry" in every response, and failing to do so re-injects the instructions.

I could see these being worn by walking-around security in a place where filming by the audience isn’t allowed. Super cool.


This is a weapon that the US has been honing for a long time. Pretty much every modern company has some footprint in the US (for example, maybe trades on a US stock market) and is liable for even mild sanctions violations to the tune of millions at least.


And the EU apparently has the counter ready, which would make such companies liable for millions when they enact US sanctions in the EU.

I'm very curious what would happen then? Nothing presumable, as nothing ever happens, or it might be another step to separate the EU market from the US.


Good. We've been in the age of super national global corporations living playing fast and loose. Maybe this will keep them from gobbling up even more power.


No, it won't. And lashing out with random shots in the dark tends to advance corporate control, as we've seen with the results from the trumpist tantrum. As long as ownership (/controlling interest) of companies continues to be basically unregulated cross-border (because the class of people having it also have the ears (if not the necks) of politicians), then things like sanctions are merely speed bumps on commerce that increase large-scale market friction and thereby increase the domestic power of corpos.


Ah, now I understand why Cloudflare was down.


I don’t understand at all why Seedream gets a pass there. The neck appears the same length but now it’s at a different angle.


Alright I think it's time to concede defeat! Seedream has been summarily demoted to a failure and I've added in the following minimum passing criteria to that particular test:

- The giraffe's neck should be noticeably shorter than in the original image, while still maintaining a natural appearance.

- The final image cannot be accomplished by simply cropping out the neck or using perspective changes.


I don't think it will be easy to just remove it. It's built into the image and thus won't be the same every time.

Plus, any service good at reverse-image search (like Google) can basically apply that to determine whether they generated it.

There will always be a way to defeat anything, but I don't see why this won't work for like 90% of cases.


> I don't think it will be easy to just remove it.

No, but model training technology is out in the open, so it will continue to be possible to train models and build model toolchains that just don't incorporate watermarking at all, which is what any motivated actor seeking to mislead will do; the only thing watermarking will do is train people to accept its absence as a sign of reliability, increasing the effectiveness of fakes by motivated bad actors.


There will be a model trained to remove synthids from graphics generated by other models


> I don't think it will be easy to just remove it.

Always has been so far. You add noise until the signal gets swamped. In order to remain imperceptible it's a tiny signal, so it's easy to swamp.


It's an image. There's simply no way to add a watermark to an image that's both imperceptible to the user and non-trivial to remove. You'd have to pick one of those options.


I'm not sure that's correct. I'm not an expert, but there's a lot of literature on digital watermarks that are robust to manipulation.

It may be easier if you have an oracle on your end to say "yes, this image has/does not have the watermark," which could be the case for some proposed implementations of an AI watermark. (Often the use-case for digital watermarks assumes that the watermarker keeps the evaluation tool secret - this lets them find, e.g, people who leak early screenings of movies.)


That is patently false.


So, uh... do you know of an implementation that has both those properties? I'd be quite interested in that.



You could probably just stick your image in another model or tool that didn't watermark and have it regenerate the image as accurately as possible.


Exactly, a diffusion model can denoise the watermark out of the image. If you wanted to be doubly sure you could add noise first and then denoise which should completely overwrite any encoded data. Those are trivial operations so it would be easy to create a tool or service explicitly for that purpose.


It would be like standardizing a captcha, you make a single target to defeat. Whether it is easy or hard is irrelevant.


I have often found that the illegal sites have much better UX for finding movies to watch. I can filter by review score, year of release, genre, country of origin, or half dozen other variables and in all combinations. And then they're presented in a big readable table rather than five options I have to scroll endlessly through one at a time.


Not true. My experience is the UX is okay to good, but often there's click-bait ad-serving friction and distraction.

You never know if your search is get you what you want, bring up a pop-up of HotLonelyBabes4U (when you're looking for kids cartoons), or take you to a scam site that wants you to download a "helper."

Aside from that, the experience is rarely terrible - like the trad video streaming sites that give you endless horizontal scrolling lists sorted very broadly by topic, kind of, with an entertaining randomness about the categories.


It sounds like we used different sites.

To be fair, a good adblock is MANDATORY on these streaming sites.


With usually the best reviews compared to Rotten Tomatoes et.al.


I have been seeing "AI psychosis" popping up more and more. I worry it's going to become a serious problem for some people.

It's not safe or healthy for everyone to have a sycophantic genius at their fingertips.

If you want to see what I mean, this subreddit is an AI psychosis generator/repository https://www.reddit.com/r/LLMPhysics/


https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI is the terrifying sub you want to look at

Especially if you go back to when they first tried to retire 4o


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