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merc

@ merc @sh.itjust.works

Posts
10
Comments
3681
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Beware

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  • Same, I've been saying I'll upgrade when the prices become sane since shortly before the asteroid hit and killed off the dinosaurs.

    But, it's amazing how well the 1080 has aged. I can still play most of the games I want to at 1440p while still keeping the frame rate at at least 60 fps average, and only rarely dipping below 40. Admittedly, I sometimes do have to turn down the graphics settings, but not so they're immersionly-breakingly-bad.

    My next card will definitely be AMD, but I want to make it a good one. So, I'm annoyed that the 9000 series didn't even have an "enthusiast" tier.

  • Times have changed

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  • $1.35/day to eat? No expenses for entertainment? I guess you're posting this from the public library, because your expenses don't include internet or a cell phone. The library must also be where you get your entertainment.

    In addition: no laundromat or new clothing for a month and a half? Your clothes must reek. Speaking of which, no gym membership or hotel days, so is that 1.5 months without a bath or shower?

    Also, 1.5 months and no insurance payments, so does that mean the vehicle is uninsured? I hope (assuming this is USA) that you have some kind of health insurance, despite not making any health insurance payments.

    Something about this just doesn't seem plausible.

  • Everything's fine. Nothing to see here.

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  • It was just answering specifically "what could make a project task at risk?" and then giving a hypothetical answer

    It wasn't even doing that. It was "looking" at training data for what a an analysis like that might look like, and then inventing a sequence of words that matched that training data. Maybe "vendor quality issues" is something that appears in the training data, so it's a good thing to put in its output.

  • Everything's fine. Nothing to see here.

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  • It's not trained to get the right answer. It's trained to know what sequence of words tends to follow another sequence of words, and then a little noise is added to that function to make it a bit creative. So, if you ask it to make a legal document, it has been trained on millions of legal documents, so it knows exactly what sequences of words are likely. But, it has no concept of whether or not those words are "correct". It's basically making a movie prop legal document that will look really good on camera, but should never be taken into court.

  • Everything's fine. Nothing to see here.

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  • I just got around to watching some of the ads that the big AI companies aired during the Superbowl. Each time I was thinking "wow, if this is true, this person is an idiot and is in for a world of trouble".

    Like, there was one where a young farmer was supposedly taking over the family farm from her grandfather or something. She said something like "I uploaded all our data to ChatGPT and now I do what it tells me to do." If that's the case, wow. That farm is going to fail.

    Another one was some guy who ran some kind of a machinist's shop, and was claiming that the bookkeeping and inventory control the shop used was really old fashioned. So, he had ChatGPT create him a whole bunch of new part numbers to make online ordering easier. Again, wow. You're trusting this key part of your business to a machine that just randomly makes stuff up?

  • Everything's fine. Nothing to see here.

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  • But that's wrong. It's not trained on correct answers. It's trained on whatever happens to be out there in the world.

    It's mathematical approximations of words that are likely to be found near that question.

  • Market efficiency

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  • If the RAM they were building for the datacenters was identical to the RAM for PCs, then maybe. Instead, I think they'll have to slowly switch back to making regular PC RAM, and the shortages will continue.

    What seems possible is China intervening. RAM isn't as difficult to produce as other chips, so it's possible they might spin up fabs and factories to supply their own domestic market, and eventually start exporting too. Currently 90%+ of RAM is made by Micron (USA), SK Hynix (South Korea) and Samsung (South Korea). China doesn't like to depend on other countries, and it probably has the capacity to manufacture RAM. And, it probably knows that if it gets good at making RAM it has a good chance at outcompeting the other 3 in the long run. So, I don't expect any short term fixes, but in the long run this might mean cheaper RAM with a 4th major supplier.

  • Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software

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  • So, don't fund the larger projects. Fund the smaller ones, they're the ones that probably need support anyhow.

    Besides, I would bet that if you asked Mr. Torvalds, he'd have a list of kernel contributors who live in the EU and would love to be paid for their work.

  • Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software

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  • For number 2, require that the people doing the open source work live and pay taxes in the EU. That way you're keeping the money in the union, and you're investing in local knowledge and skills.

    As opposed to proprietary software where you're basically handing dollars over to American companies (or to supposedly "Irish" companies that just so happen to be named almost identically to American companies, but somehow are magically based out of Ireland and don't pay proper taxes anywhere).

  • Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software

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  • Two economists are walking down the street and pass by a pile of dog shit. One of them (a sadist) turns to the other and says "I'll pay you $1000 if you eat that dog shit".

    The other performs an internal utility calculation and eats the dog shit.

    Continuing their walk, the second economist sees another pile of dog shit and makes the same offer to the first. The first economist also agrees, and eats the dog shit. They walk on.

    After a while the second economist says to the first "I can't help thinking we're worse off than when we started this walk. We both have the same amount of money we started with, but we both had to eat shit."

    The first economist replies "Worse off?! We've just engaged in 2000 dollars worth of trade!".

    Look, by certain ways of calculating GDP growth and trade, it's probably true that if the money isn't being spent on software licenses and so on, it means there's less economic activity going on.

    The whole point of open source / free software is that you're not locked into someone's proprietary software ecosystem. You don't have to continue paying license fees. So, if the governments simply stop paying for software licenses, it's probably true that their GDP will technically shrink. But, that assumes the money won't be spent on something more useful.

  • Home renovations

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  • So, a fair estimate for a human body's resistance is about 1000 Ω. That's a case when the hands are sweaty, or there's an open wound, or other cases where the skin isn't acting as a massive resistor and blocking any current from flowing.

    According to this chart, a 16 gauge sheet of metal is about 1.5 mm thick. A 22 gauge is about 0.76 mm thick. I'm going to go in metric since everything is so much more straightforward.

    So, 9 feet long is about 3m long. Apparently stripper poles typically come in 38, 45 and 50mm diameters, so, let's go for the smallest one to have the highest possible resistance. So, 38mm diameter means a circumference of 0.038 * Pi = 0.12m. So, the area of the pole is its circumference multiplied by its thickness, or about 0.12 * 0.00076 = approx 0.00009 m2 (9*10-5 m^2).

    To calculate the resistance of something you need its resistivity. This table gives resistivities for common materials. Aluminum is listed at 2.82×10−8 Ωm. To calculate the resistance given the resistivity, cross-sectional area and length you plug the values into:

    R = ρL / A

    R = 3E-8Ωm * 3m / 0.00009m^2 = 3E-8 * 3 / 9E-5 = 0.333 E-3 = 3E-4Ω

    Or, about 0.3 milliohms, or 300 microohms.

    As a check, you can compare it to the resistance of a wire. Another chart gives the resistance of wires of various gauges at 1000 ft, or approx 300m. So, a 3m length of wire is going to be roughly 1/100th of that resistance. The values in the chart are on the order of 1 ohm at 300m, so 0.01 ohms (10 milliohms) at 3m. Of course, wires are much thinner than a whole pole, but wires are also designed to be good conductors, but 0.3 milliohms vs. 10 milliohms seems like we're in the right ballpark. So, even if the neighbour was dangling from a length of AWG 14 wire, and it was somehow not breaking, even then she'd be in no danger of electrocution.

    This is all just back of the envelope estimation, but we're talking 6 orders of magnitude difference in resistance. No matter what the pole is made of, or how thin it is, it's still metal, and metal has much lower resistance than flesh. The current is going to stay in the pole, and the pole dancer is in no danger.

  • Home renovations

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  • I'll answer that for you, but first tell me what the (typical, average, ballpark) resistance of a human body is.

  • Home renovations

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  • Ok, you're still failing here. The water content of a human body is irrelevant. A large contact area is irrelevant.

    Let me make it easier for you. As I'm sure you know, to be electrocuted an electrical current needs to flow through someone's body. What part of the neighbour's body is the current going to enter, and which part is it going to leave?

  • Home renovations

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  • I don't need to, because I know how electrical circuits work. I don't think you do. But, go on, explain why I'm wrong.

  • Home renovations

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  • Do you really? It seems like you don't actually understand, because this won't work.

  • Home renovations

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  • What makes you think that will work? That sounds like a very complicated way of just connecting the common to live with no human in the loop.

  • TPUSA's rule will never not be funny

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  • Valentine's day, 2018 was 8 years ago. The first cases in Wuhan weren't until November 2019. That's more than a year and a half later.

  • Home renovations

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  • Frangible nuts. Get the load onto the nuts instead of the floor/ceiling. Wait until the neighbour is in the middle of something very physical, then blow the charge allowing the bolts (screws) to slip.

  • Home renovations

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  • For someone to get electrocuted, the current needs to flow through their body. Electricity always follows the path of least resistance, so there's basically no way to do that from upstairs.

    If you attach both terminals of the battery (or a stripped extension wire) that wouldn't do it. Assuming the pole is conductive, the electricity would just go into the screws, into the pole, across to the other screw and out. If the pole isn't conductive it would probably do nothing at all. Maybe the floor is conductive, in which case it would go into the screw, through the floor/ceiling and out the other screw. There's just no way to do it where the electricity flows from a screw, down the pole, into the body of the pole dancer, then somehow back out and up to the battery.

    Even if the person who owned the stripper pole wanted to electrocute themselves it would be difficult. Assuming the pole is conductive, if you attached one electrode near the ceiling and one near the floor, the electricity would just flow through the pole. It wouldn't make a detour to go through the body of the pole dancer. You'd basically have to clip one side of the battery to your toe, the other side to the stripper pole, and then grab the pole with your hands. And, even then, it might not do it -- you'd have to have sweaty hands and toes to make the path through your body conductive.

    I really hate the movie trope where people can get electrocuted by stepping into a puddle that has something electricity-related in it. It's almost as bad as the trope that you get blasted backwards if you're hit by a bullet / shotgun blast.