@cstross@wandering.shop apropos absolutely nothing: "enrichment chapters" is an anagram of "The Merchant Princes" and "mega premise" is an anagram of "Empire Games"
Remote
joat
@joat@mastodon.scot
mastodon 4.7.2DRI Linux sysadmin, occasional Rubyist, and vintage calculator collector with an acute patriotism deficiency.
"You can't spell fail without AI."
I boost kitty floofs.
(Un soupçon de français.)
Profile picture is the top half of a glasses-wearing white guy's head, brains being eaten by a bright green plushy Cthulhu.
320 Followers
213 Following
50 Posts
Joined April 25, 2022
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
My favourite #astronomy fact is in this article
https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/
Which is brighter, a supernova seen from the distance the Earth is from the Sun, or a hydrogen bomb detonated while resting directly on your eyeball? The answer is the supernova, by 9(!) orders of magnitude.
Pleasantly surprised to find there is now an ARM build of the #CrystalLang compiler, so I can run Crystal code in #Termux on my phone
Wake me up once all this AI stuff is gone
#CatsOfMastodon
I think Newton may be comfortable with us now
#Caturday
Replying to
@djfiander@code4lib.social the bus I would take if I hadn't been on the bike today currently shows as 27 minutes late, so it's nice to see that campus traffic when students return is one of those traditions that never changes
@stephanie@ottawa.place we've been a couple of times. I think it's cheap because the nicest thing you can say about the food is that it's "good value"
@stephanie@ottawa.place yeah I had "okay" ribs last time we were there. My opinion is that ribs are so unhealthy that if I am going to pay the metabolic price then they have to be really good. The price doesn't really matter 😀 and I don't want just "okay".
Is "pillow" a suitable occupation for LinkedIn?
#CatsOfMastodon
Look, if the government legally requires us to wear clothing in public then they can pay for them
Weird #security thing with #discord
Couldn't log in to the phone app because none of my second factors worked. Was already in on the desktop browser so tried to add another factor... nope, demanded an existing second factor to do so, and they wouldn't work there either. But... was able to remove all factors and disable 2FA without any further authentication. So... that makes sense.
Followup: after blocking public scraping of a #Gitlab instance we waited for a while to see if the #LLM botnet attacks would reduce; finally (after about 3 days) one of them finally realized it was getting the sign-in page instead of actual content and seems to have given up. At least one other botnet is still trying, but load is much reduced. So there is hope! Block access and they eventually go away.
Even the floor can be comfortable
#Caturday
This guy just ate a fly!
#Caturday
Replying to
@hedders@mas.to @WiteWulf@cyberplace.social if you go back 30 generations then the number of ancestors exceeds the population of the world at the time. Take as long as you like to think about that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedigree_collapse
Replying to
@sundogplanets please keep a tally of how many men explain to you why it's wrong and/or you didn't understand it
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@aparrish I tend to think that the majority of the players are just scammers now but a few people still cling to this fantasy of a machine where you can say "do X", wave a magic wand, and it happens. LLMs most definitely are not that but they resemble it to a first approximation. Although I suspect those people have not considered the dangers even if that worked... what happens to their own agency? How do their own abilities degenerate? What's the point of life without a few challenges?
He's tired after spending all day watching the birds outside
#CatsOfMastodon
I just lost situational (situGUInal?) awareness and accidentally deleted two entire photo albums from my phone gallery thinking they were just two images. And #Syncthing replicated the deletion to all my computers. But, happy ending, not only do I take regular #BorgBackup backups, I also use #btrbk so recovered everything via the snapshots on the laptop within 60 seconds, and of course Syncthing copied them back to the phone immediately.
Check your backups.
Replying to
@Strandjunker Canada, Australia and the UK have a significant number of medical bankruptcies: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/medical-bankruptcies-by-country 🙁
Was just in one of those natural green hippie stores and they had "96% natural dishwasher pods". What's the other 4%? Witchcraft?
Replying to
@cstross academic HPC loads are 99% batch scheduled, not interactive, so this stuff could even run only off-peak so costing basically nothing, just maintenance costs
Tried to change credit card on #Britbox but couldn't get to the account page, so asked the chatbot. Useless AI so submitted a tech support request. Email back from same useless AI with same wrong response. Solved problem myself (main page loads on a VPN, account page will not, with no error). Ended up so pissed off about the support and VPN bullshit that I cancelled the subscription instead, Fuck 'em.
Replying to
@oddhack @cstross I'd have to look this up to be sure but you're right to an extent, different GPGPUs (to use the older term) have different balances of unit types on the die, but all have some FP capabilities. But even ignoring that, the GPUs don't exist alone, there are big fat CPUs and lots of RAM feeding the beasts, and even ripping out the GPUs and just using the CPUs would give you a useful computing facility. You'd just need to cap all the liquid cooling pipes or blank off the airflow.
Replying to
@oddhack @cstross NVIDIA CUDA is heavily used in research compute. Our cluster has some GPU nodes and other clusters in the Canadian federation have a lot more. They are primarily used for things other than machine learning, to accelerate FP32 and FP64 math. I don't know enough about the hardware that the hyperscalers are deploying for LLMs but I'd be very surprised if they had no floating point capabilities at all.
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@sinituulia we have a routine, now. He jumps up and lies beside me. I put my arm around him. He then grabs the arm and smooshes his head into it. Eventually he gets restless (too hot, perhaps) and leaves. It's pretty cute. 😀 And weirdly he never does it with my wife, only with me.
Replying to
I think we're overall a little further along the Trump regret path... there we are at the "I told you so" part but AI is still at "I'm telling you so" but there are still striking similarities.
So I decided to do a 10-minute test of the UPS on my NAS and turned the power off 6 hours ago, then wondered why it was down, in case you're wondering how my brain is working today
Replying to
@jd@ottawa.place what this tells me is that protest and outrage works. We get out on the streets for anything and these guys will fold overnight.
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@LibraryAndTea@ottawa.place @jd@ottawa.place we need to be like the French. General strike, flood the streets at the drop of a hat.
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@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social this reminds me of the saying "you can never do just one thing". I'd tweak some innocent looking fundamental constant and suddenly atoms would become impossible.
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@sheepfilms@mastodon.social it's good stuff but you need an infinite amount to draw a line
Imagine all roads were toll roads and tolls were based on road stress. Stress goes up as the 4th power of vehicle weight. Let's say we charged e-bikes 1¢ per km. A big ebike (35kg) plus a big person (100kg) weighs 35⁺100=135kg. The smallest current Ford F-150 (1993kg) driven by the same big person would weight 1993+100=2093kg. So the equivalent toll would be 1¢×2093⁴÷135⁴ or $577.75/km.
Replying to
@ostueker@mast.hpc.social pretty much. And it revealed a problem... I think the BIOS power setting is "restore last state" and because it cleanly shut itself down before the UPS powered off, when I manually turned the UPS on again the NAS didn't boot. So if this happened when I was away then it would stay down until I got home.
Replying to
@kDelta @Strandjunker in Canada there are significant gaps that often cause huge expenses. Most Canadians do not have drug coverage outside of hospital. Dental coverage is still spotty. It's much better than a few years ago when there was no dental or drug coverage at all, but it's still significantly worse than most other developed economies.
Replying to
@pewnack @NanoRaptor retcon that the companions were the Doctor all along, and hired a weirdo to act like the Doctor
Local pet shop has a joke on their board outside: "What do you call a fish with no eye? A fsh." Sorry but that doesn't work if it's written down.
Replying to
@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social no let's go more subtle. Let's have it randomly swap between American and Commonwealth spelling. So colour↔️color, neighbour↔️neighbor.
Replying to
Finally, one I actually knew!
#pastpuzzle en-577
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Replying to
@ostueker@mast.hpc.social this particular UPS is an APC which means I can use apcupsd which is a lot easier to configure than NUT - not surprisingly since you don't need to figure out which driver to use
Don't ask:
What's the cheapest X?
What's the easiest way to do X?
What's the best way to X?
Instead:
What are some budget-friendly X options?
What are some options to do X for non-technical people?
What are good ways to do X with their pros and cons?
Everyone has different skills, experience and perceptions of cost.
Somebody needs to tell Trump that Obama said he isn't humble.
Replying to
@tripleman I thought there was only private (outside of hospital) until relatively recently? And even then there has to be an agreement between the feds and the province? Maybe I misspoke about "at all" but there are nevertheless medical bankruptcies in Canada, although far fewer than the US.
Replying to
@TheRealPomax@mastodon.social @sue@glasgow.social reminds me of the morons that say things like "we didn't used to have calculators but now everyone uses them, AI is just a tool" yeah maybe but calculators give you the same correct answer every time and use like 8 orders of magnitude less power. I've got one that runs off dim room lighting.