The oil industry is famously completely independent from government subsidy. Especially when it comes to setting urban development policy and planning transportation systems, these have no bearing at all oil demand and they also cost nothing.
This one pisses me off.
I fixed it.
That model is over a terabyte, I don’t know why I thought it was lightweight. Not that any reporting on machine learning has been particularly good, but this isn’t what I expected at all.
What can even run it?
I’m not in academia, but I’ve seen my coworkers’ hard work get crunched into a slop machine by higher ups who think it’s a good cleanup filter.
LLMs are legitimately amazing technology for like six specific use cases but I’m genuinely worried that my own hard work can be defaced that way. Or worse, that someone else in the chain of custody of my work (let’s say, the person advising me who would be reviewing my paper in an academic context) decided to do the same, and suddenly this is attached to my name permanently.
Absurd, terrifying, genuinely upsetting misuse of technology. I’ve been joking about moving to the woods much more frequently every month for the past two years.
It’s as simple as getting the EU site and privacy policy when you connect from an EU IP. These systems are typically not as rigid as you might expect and the only friction might be around things like payment processing or things like that.
I get relatively uncensored internet access through UK/Ireland servers. This law and this type of law completely terrifies me.
I do have an oversized battery buffer. Most people are discouraged from cooking or using any resistive load on the batteries, but I opted to invest in a bigger battery backup specifically to be able to do that, it’s why I said 85%+ and not like 40%. The battery buffer really is the point of this system, having 24/7 electricity in my home that I can pull over 20 amperes out of at the drop of a hat is without a question the most decadent luxury I have ever experienced. That’s not something I can just hook up to my house.
If I reconnect the grid-charging circuit, it is more than enough in the winter months nowadays (the grid was down more often in 2020-2023). But that gets really expensive, and relying on the grid is not wise.
If I use the secondary (mafia) grid more frequently (as I did in 2020-2023 out of necessity) I can pull a tiny amount of amps at an extortionate kWh rate, that’s enough to keep things like the fridge and lights and the water pump running. But turn on one hot plate or accidentally use the microwave, turn on the heater to the wrong setting (or the AC to the right setting but at the wrong time) and you have to cover up to get to the freezing street to switch the breaker back on. Sounds obnoxious? Well pre-solar that was the only option for 12+ hours of the day. I remember going down to flip the breaker over twenty times one day as a kid.
Let’s not get into the water situation. I just spent a weekend grappling with neighbors and floater valves.
They don’t, my current machine is a Maingear branded one that someone painstakingly hauled over from the US, and my potential new one would be an XMG branded machine, shipped at significant expense from the EU.
I’m in the armpit of the Middle East, I don’t have a local reseller, and even if I did, they’d want $1,000 more than just going through the pain of buying from overseas, alongside a blood sacrifice and the soul of my firstborn child, and a slap across my face for the insolence of asking.
I might be the wrong person to answer in this community since I daily drive Windows, but my Tongfang has been a dream and I’m thinking of buying a new one.
Although in OP’s case I’d probably still be looking for the cliche used Thinkpad. Unbeatable.
I live in a country with abhorrently unreliable electricity.
Even now that I have solar and even if I mostly (85%+) cook on a plug-in resistance hob and electric oven, gas is just unbeatable as a backup during the winter. No sun? Grid down? Milk boiled over and got into the hob’s thermostat? Need to cook more than one pot at a time? Israel decided to bomb a fucking residential substation for no reason again? Power company operator decided to accidentally pull an epic prank and route the wrong voltage to everyone’s house, frying a whole town’s fridges, during a year when people couldn’t afford to replace them (I can’t find an English article to link but I promise this happened)? No problemo
I also got a plug-in induction infrared plate and while it is pretty much magical it also makes my inverter shit itself uncontrollably (all my LED lights flicker and it makes an uncomfortable noise) so I really only use it when the ”good” grid is on (the bad one can’t handle it, the good one is the one from the prank above).
You can pry my backup butane from my cold dead hands. I replace the tank less than once a year, it’s fine. Not everyone who wants this option to stay is a regressive cultist.
As someone who VPNs into the EU specifically for the privacy laws, this is troubling. I do wonder what my next move should be. I’d hate to lose my Steam account in particular.
To be fair, I do this at work and while I get funny looks I do get complicated ideas across better when I can provide visual aid.
Frankly I need to improve my MS Paint skills. I need to get my mouse handwriting up to at least 70% of the Khan Academy guy’s level.
sufficient performance > sufficient beauty > power usage > max beauty > max performance
This is basically alien to me. I think it has to be game specific.
Euro Truck Simulator? Beauty is more important than performance, unless playing it on my handheld, in which case I can knock the FPS limiter down to 40 and crank the settings down
Satisfactory? Performance over everything.
Granted most of the games I play are older (so I don’t need to choose) or CPU-bound simulation games (Raising the graphics doesn’t make it run meaningfully slower if your CPU is the bottleneck).
Although I must also point out that I think the current trend of “fidelity=beauty” is ridiculous. I recently played INFRA, a game built in Source, and while the fidelity was clearly “outdated”, the game looked fantastic.
Plugging my system into a Kill A Watt was enlightening.
Laptop gaming is a harsh but educational mistress re: power consumption (even when it’s plugged in), I’ll tell you that. All the heat you generate is right in front of your face, as is all the airflow (and noise) needed to wick it away.
Some garlicky gravy-adjacent sauce and maybe something like chili flakes and I’d eat that with zero hesitation.
Even if these look like the abhorrent “olives” that are surely the leading cause of people thinking olives are disgusting. If these were freshly sliced regular brown olives (regular to me in the Mediterranean) they wouldn’t even need sauce at all. Although the chili flakes can stay.
The standard resistor values are a bit weird at first but when you’re in the zone and you start getting used to what they usually are you start becoming relatively decent at making an educated guess for what the values should be. The actual IRL values are predictably defined and you start remembering the possible options over time.
Someone’s probably made a program that can do it for you though. My own shitty circuits are all built from standard example circuits so I haven’t had to think about this stuff often. Or like I’ll mix and match them illogically in a pinch (on the breadboard) and figure it out later (I don’t build the final circuit lol). Or of course, the venerable using-a-potentiometer-exactly-where-you-shouldn’t technique, which is one of the pillars of modern engineering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceratothoa_oestroides
Geographically given where I am, it’s probably this one
Seems like a similar species is common where I am.
Horrifying. Thanks for the link, although to be honest I probably could have googled “fish tongue parasite isopod” at some point in the past decade+.
Interesting that the Wikipedia page has photos that wouldn’t have rang the bell for me, the one I remember was exactly like the one in the post.
Edit: the article describes a habitat that is pretty far from me, this was in Lebanon in the eastern Mediterranean over a decade ago. Could be a similar species.
A foundational memory for me was a fish dissection in middle school in which we respectfully sliced the innards of one of these bad boys only to find this exact parasite inside. All the other groups just had a fish to dissect, but we also took a supercurricular lab detour to dissect that other thing too, as my classmates from other groups gathered around with real curiosity.
Frankly haven’t thought much of it in years. Would be cool to know what this is actually called.
The only innovation most companies allow themselves to afford to make is in marketing. Most of the industry has to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing something legitimately better.
That’s why new PC hardware news is no longer in the realm of “This guy in our lab figured out how to propagate a clock circuit much better, giving us twice as much space to put logic at a very small cost increase” and more “The screen on the fan cover can now rotate!!! (*not compatible with AMD CPUs)”
At the risk of coming off as too gatekeep-y, Arabic is structurally so different from English and French (the other two languages I know). It has a reputation for being difficult for a reason.
Despite it being my native language I’ll occasionally still think of an idea phrased primarily in English, and contorting it into Arabic is very clunky (despite Arabic being much more loosey goosey with word order, in general, you can figure out how to tie up an idea as you go - this applies more to MSA, dialects usually sway more towards a small number of forms).
While strictly more rigid, you might be better off at least grasping the basics of MSA first before jumping into a specific dialect. It is antithetical to how I think about languages (go learn the specific prescriptive form of Arabic instead of the most commonly spoken popularly developed one) but it might be easier to learn that way.
(I’m thinking of it like learning piano (or MIDI?) as a baseline for music and more instruments vs learning guitar first and having an understanding of notes and scales that is very closely associated to the relational positioning of these notes on these strings.)
Or maybe it might not be easier that way. I didn’t learn Arabic as an adult with a background in western languages, fuck if I know what the pedagogically optimal way to learn Arabic is. Arabic is hard, dude. Doesn’t help that half of all Arabic media is (I say this as an Arab) embarrassing mindless drivel.