plenipotentprotogod

Copy pasting my reply from the last time this came up:

Check how nearby colleges and universities dispose of used assets. The state school near me maintains a very nice website where they auction off everything from lab equipment to office furniture. It's also where all their PCs go when they hit ~5 years old and come up in the IT department's refresh cycle. The only problem in my case is that they tend to auction stuff in bulk. You can get a solid machine for $50 to $100, but only if you're willing to pay $500 to $1000 for a pallet of 10.

1

Those big pupils make it look like a cartoon come to life.

I looked into it a while ago but I gave up on the idea after realizing how few programs can actually run on one. There's no "reverse VM" software that allows you to seamlessly combine multiple physical machines into one virtual one. Each application has to be specifically designed to take advantage of running on a cluster. If you're writing your own code, or if you have a specific project in mind that you know supports cluster computing then by all means go for it, but if you're imagining that you'd build one and use it for gaming or video editing or some other resource intensive desktop application, unfortunately it doesn't work like that.

Edit: I dug up a link to the post I made about it in /c/linux. There's some good discussion in there if you'd like to learn more https://lemmy.world/post/11528823

Check how nearby colleges and universities dispose of used assets. The state school near me maintains a very nice website where they auction off everything from lab equipment to office furniture. It's also where all their PCs go when they hit ~5 years old and come up in the IT department's refresh cycle. Only problem in my case is that they tend to auction stuff in bulk. You can get a solid machine for $50 to $100, but only if you're willing to pay $500 to $1000 for a pallet of 10.

The AI hype has become so stifling that I can certainly understand the knee-jerk reaction that many are having, but at the end of the day it's just math. It's a tool which, like all tools, can be used for good or bad. If you're interested, I'd highly recommend looking into the story of AlphaFold. You can find some really good long form articles that have been written about it. It's not only a truly impressive technical achievement, but also one of the few technological breakthroughs in recent memory that is (at least as far as I can tell) truly, indisputably, good for humanity.

5

Your thoughts are very similar to mine. The usefulness of machine learning to bridge the gap between the endlessly messy real world and the strictly regimented digital one can't be overstated, but throwing all your problems into an LLM chatbot is never going to yield good results. Case in point is the AlphaFold project which used AI to basically solve one of the hardest problems in modern biochemistry. They didn't do it by asking ChatGPT to "please fold this protein for me" they did it by assembling a multi-disciplinary team with a deep technical understanding of the problem and building a fully custom machine learning system which was designed from the ground up for the sole purpose of predicting protein structures. That's applied AI. All these so-called AI startups who's product is basically a coat of paint and a custom system prompt on the ChatGPT API are nothing more than app developers chasing the latest trend.

Incidentally, I had a very similar experience to your "Exchange Server / Exchange Online" problem. I was asked to make updates to an old VBS code base, and VBS is a language that I have neither experience with nor interest in learning, so I was using a chatbot to try and save a few minutes on some super simple beginner level questions. It kept confidently spitting out answers for VBA code, which is similar to, but very much not the same as VBS.

1

TBH I just use the Feeder app on my phone. Fully self-contained. No account, no server, no middleman of any kind. Just the app.

I've been meaning to set up something more elaborate, but this really does work fine, and I like to mention it in these threads for anyone who's interested in RSS but thinks it's a big lift to set up. It can be complicated, but it doesn't have to be. Download an app and start adding publications that interest you. That's all it takes to get started.

1

Time to quote Dan Olson again. This was originally written about NFTs, but just replace "crypto" with "AI" and it's still 100% relevant:

When you drill down into it, you realize that the core of the crypto ecosystem ... is a turf war between the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy. Techno fetishists who look at people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, billionaires that have been minted via tech industry doors that have now been shut by market calcification, and are looking for a do-over, looking to synthesize a new market where they can be the one to ascend from a merely wealthy programmer to a hyper wealthy industrialist.

From the incomparable line goes up

Well, it's certainly better than solar-freakin-roadways, but any time a "put solar on [thing]" project is proposed, it's important to consider the relative cost and complexity of doing that instead of just building [thing] normally and putting a ground mount solar installation nearby. In this case, it seems like the primary benefits of putting solar on canals are:

Conserves water by reducing evaporation from the canals.
Increases efficiency and possibly lifetime of the panels by keeping them a bit cooler
Doesn't require developing new land in areas where a canal is already present.

Water conservation could be achieved by a shade structure without solar panels attached. That would presumably also be cheaper to build and require less maintenance. I'd be interested to see numbers for the efficiency and lifetime claims. It's well known that solar panels run better when they're kept cool, but I question whether the effect is large enough to outweigh the downsides. As for land use, that's absolutely true in areas where land is in demand, but most of these installations seem to be in remote areas with plenty of unused space on all sides.

Not a terrible idea overall, but I'm not convinced that the cost/benefit pencils out unless you assign a lot of value to being able to claim that your solar installation is "innovative" compared to all the others.

That reminds me, we should also never forget that around the same time Mark Zuckerberg got so deep into Metaverse hype that he renamed his company after it and sunk 10s of billions of dollars into development with nothing to show for it

It's not quite the same tone as internet historian, but if you're looking for an entertaining takedown of NFTs, I highly recommend Line Goes Up by Folding Ideas.

1

https://youtu.be/XbGchfT3yMs

Not sure if this is an intentional reference to the Lonely Island song "Sushi Glory Hole," but either way here's a link

6

Alright, I'll take the bait. Let's do some recreational math

This web page contains average passenger car fuel efficiency broken down by year. The most recent year available is 2016, so we'll use that: 9.4 km/L or 22.1 miles per gallon. A gallon of gas has about 120MJ of energy in it. So, an average car requires about 120,000,000 / (1/22.1) = 5.4MJ per mile

This web page has calories burned for different types of exercise. I separately searched and found that the average adult in the US weighs around 200LBS, so we'll use the 205LBS data, and I'm going to assume that "cycling - 10-11.9 MPH" is representative of the average commuter who isn't in too much of a hurry. That gives us 558 calories per hour, or 55.8 calories per mile (using the low end of the 10 to 11.9mph range). That's equal to about 0.23MJ per mile (as an aside, it's important to note that the calories commonly used when talking about diet and exercise, are actual kilocalories equal to 1000 of the SI calories you learned about in school.)

Moral of the story: an average bike ride consumes around 20x less energy than an average drive of the same distance.

2

For anyone else who's never heard of hydrogen reduced steel before, here's the gist as far as I could understand from a quick web search:

Raw iron ore is usually mined as iron oxide. To make that into metallic iron, you need a way split up the iron oxide molecules and carry the oxygen atoms away. This is traditionally done in a blast furnace using coal. In addition to being burned as fuel, the coal also provides carbon atoms, which will rip the oxygen off the iron and use it to form carbon dioxide instead.

The hydrogen reduction process proposes to substitute hydrogen for carbon. This changes the byproduct from carbon dioxide to dihydrogen monoxide, AKA water.

2

I'm a little disappointed that the article didn't put more emphasis on the fact that this latest instance is proof that earlier statements from the manufacturer were straight-up lies.

Back in February, when Stellantis (the parent company of RAM) was caught doing the same thing in Jeeps, they gave an official statement:

This was an in-vehicle message designed to inform Jeep customers about Mopar extended vehicle care options. A temporary software glitch affected the ability to instantly opt out in a few isolated cases, though instant opt-out is the standard for all our in-vehicle messages. Our team had already identified and corrected the error, and we are following up directly with the customer to ensure the matter is fully resolved.

Even at the time, that statement was dishonestly trying to pretend like the problem was that the message kept coming back, rather than the problem being its existence in the first place. But, even if you give them a pass on that, they said in no uncertain terms that "instant opt-out is the standard for all our in-vehicle messages."

This article says that the only way to permanently opt out of the messages in the RAM is to call a customer service number. That's not "instant" buy any definition I've ever heard.

So, in conclusion, this is the third time stellantis has been caught doing this, and they've lied about it on at least one of those occasions in the past. Anyone considering purchasing a stellantis vehicle should assume that these ads will continue, will most likely become more aggressive, and any promises to the contrary aren't worth the paper they're printed on.