They/Them, agender-leaning scalie.
ADHD software developer with far too many hobbies/trades: AI, gamedev, webdev, programming language design, audio/video/data compression, software 3D, mass spectrometry, genomics.
Learning German (B2), Chinese (HSK 3-4ish), French (A2).
This is awesome news. Not because of the car, but because it builds the supply lines for an alternative battery chemistry.
People have been using lithium-ion batteries for home and grid storage, which is nuts if you compare it to other battery types. Lithium is expensive and polluting and only makes sense if you're limited by weight & space. Cheaper batteries, even if they're bigger/heavier, will do wonders to the economics of sustainable electricity production.
The website does a bad job explaining what its current state actually is. Here's the GitHub repo's explanation:
Memory Cache is a project that allows you to save a webpage while you're browsing in Firefox as a PDF, and save it to a synchronized folder that can be used in conjunction with privateGPT to augment a local language model.
So it's just a way to get data from browser into privateGPT, which is:
PrivateGPT is a production-ready AI project that allows you to ask questions about your documents using the power of Large Language Models (LLMs), even in scenarios without an Internet connection. The project provides an API offering all the primitives required to build private, context-aware AI applications.
So basically something you can ask questions like "how much butter is needed for that recipe I saw last week?" and "what are the big trends across the news sites I've looked at recently?". But eventually it'll automatically summarize and data mine everything you look at to help you learn/explore.
Neat.
China is also still building new coal plants at a truly alarming rate.
Don't let heavy carbon emitters steer the narrative this way. Building renewables is just the cheapest way to keep expanding your energy grid at there moment, but if you're not actively taking power plants offline to reduce carbon emissions, you're not actually getting greener.
EDIT: LMAO I'm being mass-downvoted. This is why it's important to think critically about every headline about China - there is an army of propagandists trying to make sure you only see the good stuff.
In two languages I'm learning, German and Chinese, I've found it to suffer from "translationese". It's grammatically correct, but the sentence structure and word choice feel like the answer was first written in English then translated.
No single sentence is wrong, but overall it sounds unnatural and has none of the "flavor" of the language. That also makes it bad for learning - it avoids a lot of sentence patterns you'll see/hear in day to day life.
Saying goodbye to their life in France, where they were paying around £2,574 (€3,000) in taxes every year,
So these people who were rich enough to own a second home wanted to spend more than 50% of their time in France, but were paying the vast majority of their taxes back to the UK?
No wonder the laws got tightened.
The funny thing is that YouTube's code is already so laggy that we all believed this without a second thought.
But the comments below say they're not able to access the new page, even with the direct URL... It seems certain tiers of customers can't opt out. Possibly they can't be included in the first place (e.g. EU users), but it's a pretty big screw up to hide one's status on such an important privacy setting.
Google also is responsible for the SEO industry. They made ads hugely profitable, then started directing traffic to sites that serve more of their ads, regardless of quality.
Replace mindless entertainment with enriching entertainment. E.g. YouTube video essays, lectures, history podcasts, DuoLingo, Anki, Brilliant, artsy/niche movies/games, etc. Always be learning something, even if you'll never need it. Try to limit yourself to memorable, unique, or mind-opening content.
It's no fix, but it trains your brain to be able to wait just a little longer for its dopamine. Also you get to feel like you're sort-of achieving something, not just losing time every time your impulsive brain takes over.
I'm intermediate level in 3 languages, know a shit ton of science, and have played thousands of unique indie games. Is any of this useful? lol no. But do I feel accomplished and in control of some big parts of my life? Hell yes.
Western companies no longer operating in the Russian market, but still producing desirable content. ... Western companies have 'legalized' piracy in Russia.
100% this.
Media is culture, and IMO people have a right to participate in culture. If it's excessively difficult or impossible to legitimately access culture, one has the moral right to illegitimately access culture, and share it so others also have access.
It's inexcusable to refuse to directly sell media. The internet has made it easier than ever to trade access to media for money. Geo-restricted subscription services should be a nice add-on option for power-consumers, not the only way to get access to something.
Melatonin
I can't do sleep hygiene. My cell phone is the first and last thing I see every day. I stare at screens all day for work and for leisure. With moderate melatonin use I can somehow maintain regular and restful sleep.
No side effects if you use it responsibly (e.g. 5 days on, 2 days off, stick with low doses). Very safe. Can improve sleep even if you're already sleeping well. I don't know why more people aren't on it.
Fucking finally! Now when will they let me transfer all the games I had to put on an alt account back to my main?
(Ok really it's just 1 game that I haven't played in ages. I'm not that horny. I just hate having multiple accounts as it eats up headspace)
They've had days to prepare this response. They didn't rescind or explain the one thing that people universally hated, which means they're just stalling and trying to save their reputation without actually changing trajectory.
We've seen this corporate bullshit so much in recent years. No more "benefit of the doubt".
I agree that older commercialized battery types aren't so interesting, but my point was about all the battery types that haven't had enough R&D yet to be commercially mass-produced.
Power grids don't care much about density - they can build batteries where land is cheap, and for fire control they need to artificially space out higher-density batteries anyway. There are heaps of known chemistries that might be cheaper per unit stored (molten salt batteries, flow batteries, and solid state batteries based on cheaper metals), but many only make sense for energy grid applications because they're too big/heavy for anything portable.
I'm saying it's nuts that lithium ion is being used for cases where energy density isn't important. It's a bit like using bottled water on a farm because you don't want to pay to get the nearby river water tested. It's great that sodium ion could bring new economics to grid energy storage, but weird that the only reason it got developed in the first place was for a completely different industry.
Nooooo! Not Naomi!
I don't really follow her content, but I love her existence and all her efforts towards education and awareness on many topics.
I hope she's able to find freedom again somehow.
I had to unsub from Luke Stephens after hearing him throw that insult about hbomberguy needing more testosterone. Most toxic thing I've heard all week...
I love the playlist of worthy queer creators he gave. Not only was it an almost 4 hour video, now I have to watch another 12ish hours of random video essays to decide who else I want to follow!
As someone with untreated ADHD, I absolutely don't feel I'm the highest level of control in my brain. I can make all the plans and decisions I want, but I can only gently steer what I ultimately end up doing and paying attention to. My "executive function" wields ultimate power and not only can overrule me, but also prevent me from having the thoughts I want to have.
Another indicator that I'm not the only consciousness in here: anxiety-inducing events like deadlines and exams can give me physiological symptoms even when I've forgotten about them. I'll just be sitting there wondering "why is my stomach upset at me?" and only later realize it's from stress for an upcoming test I hadn't paid attention to.
Assuming enthusiastic consent, good faith, and that you meant "sex/body they want" instead of "gender they want" (because gender is just a social construct):
On another hand, it would erase their identity as trans people.
I don't think it would. Identities are built from life experiences, and having lived through transition they'd still be trans even if there were no traces of it on their body. A war veteran doesn't stop being a veteran just because the war ended.
consider it a genocide
The definition of genocide depends on intent! Even in wars, etc. It's only genocide if you're specifically trying to erase/displace people/culture.
Trying to cure gender dysphoria: it's not genocide, it's medical treatment.
Trying to "fix" people to make them fit into society: it's genocide.
turning them into what they want would mean there is no more trans people
There are identities that don't stop being trans even if you give them the body they want:
A non-binary person's desired sex/body and social gender might not match. Even with the perfect body (if one exists), they might still identify as trans because that body doesn't match their social gender.
For genderfluid people, there might not be one singular perfect body. Even if their body constantly updated to suit them, they'd probably still identify as trans because they'd be constantly transitioning...
ooo, I love this. It reminds me of how nice C#'s LINQ is...
"Pipeline style" DB queries have some interesting advantages as well:
To accept it, you just move on with your life. Find the next thing you should do and do it. The more you dwell, the harder it will be to stop dwelling, so just break the cycle and go do anything else.
You will encounter plenty more people who are insistently wrong. Each one will affect you less than the last.
With jobs, maybe. With careers, especially in STEM, you get lots of exceptions like extremely rewarding but low paying positions in academia, and tech companies that think they can just spend money instead of effort to fix their culture and broken hiring process.
Citizen Kane and 2001: A Space Odyssey suck now.
There are old movies that have aged much better, like The Man in the White Suit and Colossus: The Forbin Project. These should be the ones we call classics.
Some minor/hard-to-notice health-related things can dramatically reduce alcohol tolerance and/or give "hangovers" shortly after starting a session.
For me, inflammation is a big cause. I have (barely noticeable) cat allergies, and (obvious but hard to avoid) food intolerances & gut issues. If I don't stay on top of avoiding triggers, my alcohol tolerance goes from multiple G&Ts giving a nice buzz, to 1-2 sips of G&T giving dizziness and headaches. Electrolyte imbalance can also cause it. I've found I have to add magnesium and potassium salt to my diet, or else I generally feel tired more, and my alcohol tolerance plummets. Once you start controlling these factors, you'll start getting clear feedback from your body when you have too much or too little salt, in the form of water and food tasting different and general feelings of tension or tiredness.
My advice: try antihistamines, easily-digestible meals, and/or sports drinks for a few days before you drink. If those help your tolerance, you probably have some health stuff going on - figure it out and you'll probably find a way to generally feel better.
An increasing proportion of renewables doesn't necessarily mean a decrease in overall carbon output. Our per-person electricity consumption keeps rising. AI, electric cars, crypto, air conditioning to mitigate climate change, etc. all demand more electricity each year as they become more popular.
Wins don't come from new growth being sustainable. We need to be actively shutting down the existing unsustainable energy production. It doesn't matter whether this is done by replacing it with renewables, or by reducing our consumption with e.g. efficiency standards for AI and cars.
I've used a cheaper Braun Silk Epil model. It was a bit slow but was thorough. I'm currently using a mid range Panasonic cordless epilator with 2 rollers. It's much faster but misses quite a few hairs. The battery has run out on me on a few longer sessions, but usually it's fine for arms and lower legs.
Epilation hurts my upper legs too much though. I have to go to an electric shaver above my knees.
IPL may be worth a look if you have the right skin and hair color. It stops most colored hairs from growing. You still get transparent hairs, but I found they can grow longer before getting ugly, and cause me much less dysphoria because they're less visible.
Are willing to pirate content from this niche 3D printing YouTube content creator that you enjoy? I’m not.
I cleanse my conscience by supporting many of them on Patreon.
Accidentally clicking on clickbait without an adblocker directly results in a spammer getting money, and that just makes me feel like crap. There's so much spam out there that wouldn't exist without ads, which makes it harder for quality creators to get attention and fair compensation. I feel I can only engage with the internet ethically by refusing to participate in the ad economy.
It sucks that alternative payment models like Brave's "Basic Attention Token" (or a fairer alternative) never got popular. The idea was to track the creators of websites/videos/etc. you visit and automatically split your monthly donation between them. IIRC it was proportional to the number of ads blocked for each creator, but you could tweak creators' multipliers to deny profit to spam and reward higher-quality creators. I'd also accept microtransactions for individual videos, news articles, etc. but no platforms for these exist because the big players in internet monetization are all so focused on ads.
I've had psychiatrists push this crap.
One even refused to write me a prescription and insisted I just needed to get outside more after listening to an hour-long recounting of how my ADHD makes self-care difficult to impossible.
The easiest way to get the basics is to search for articles, online courses, and youtube videos about the specific modules you're interested in. Papers are written for people who are already deep in the field. You'll get there, but they're not the most efficient way to get up to speed. I have no experience with textbooks.
It helps to think of PyTorch as just a fancy math library. It has some well-documented frameworky structure (nn.Module) and a few differentiation engines, but all the deep learning-specific classes/functions (Conv2d, BatchNorm1d, ReLU, etc.) are just optimized math under the hood.
You can see the math by looking for projects that reimplement everything in numpy, e.g. picoGPT or ConvNet in NumPy.
If you can't get your head around the tensor operations, I suggest searching for "explainers". Basically for every impactful module there will be a bunch of "(module) Explained" articles or videos out there, e.g. Grouped Convolution, What are Residual Connections. There are also ones for entire models, e.g. The Illustrated Transformer. Once you start googling specific modules' explainers, you'll find people who have made mountains of them - I suggest going through their guides and learning everything that seems relevant to what you're working on.
If you're not getting an explanation of something, just google and find another one. People have done an incredible job of making this information freely accessible in many different formats. I basically learned my way from webdev to an AI career with a couple years of casually watching YouTube videos.
Yes! Scientific trials have shown that for most people, 0.3mg of melatonin gives better quality of sleep than 3mg.
I've seen pills as high as 10mg on the shelf and have to wonder wtf they're for. If you take too much your body becomes less sensitive to it and you become dependent on supplementation. 10mg is definitely too much.
Though my lizard brain demands me to be around other people, most of the things that bring me genuine life satisfaction are just easier to do solo. When I'm at purely social events I also get this sense of dread that I could be making better use of my time.
The voice in my head is making contradictory demands, so I've learned to not feel bad for circumventing it. I have my own goals in life, instincts be damned.
I find that listening to people casually talking is usually enough to satisfy the lizard brain, so I listen to a lot of stuff in the background: YouTube video essays, Twitch Just Chatting streamers, etc. When it gets particularly demanding I'll try engaging with the people, but usually I just let my subconscious listen while I'm focusing on more important stuff.
There's a weird divide between self-determined identity and external classifications. Often, a culture forms around the label and the external label stops being relevant because the term has more social/cultural implications than practical implications. Some people internalize the label as that's how they wish to steer their future interactions, and others ignore the label and move on with their lives.
You can watch all of Star Trek, and some parts of society will label you a Trekkie if they find out, but it's up to you whether you choose to identify as a Trekkie, or just go about your life not making a big deal about it.
Please let it be like Alpha Protocol. That game was amazing (albeit glitchy af), and has too be the closest realtime video game to the tabletop SpyCraft experience.
I do. I also messed with the iOS accessibility settings to color shift even more. It helps so much.
I even went to monochrome red at one point and it felt like me cellphone was actively putting me too sleep. Unfortunately monochrome also kills a lot of the enjoyment of using a phone. I was getting sleepier, but felt so bored I just wanted to find something too do to fill the dopamine void.
Since it's a natural hormone the body already has ways to get rid of it. It has a half-life of less than an hour. The lethal dose is so high we haven't been able to intentionally kill animals with it: "Melatonin is not fatal even at a dose of 800 mg/kg in animal studies".
The big risk of ongoing high doses is becoming so dependent on it that you wake up as soon as it wears off (e.g. after only 4 hours of sleep). At this level you basically can't sleep without it and have to slowly wean yourself off to get back to normality.
I'm glad to hear I'm not missing out on anything. (It's still not out in Europe.)
That's some awful gaslighting.
I have no idea how these people make it through 8-12 years of college without even getting their understanding of common diseases up to a wikipedia level.
Plural? How many idle games are we talking here?
Arg, my first reply was completely off topic. I thought this was a reply in another post.
Yeah, it's great that VRE is cheaper now, but we shouldn't celebrate companies/countries for just taking the cheapest option. It drowns out the legitimate celebration of the companies/countries that are actually making hard decisions by funding renewables when they aren't the cheapest option, investing in long-term R&D, taxing carbon, fixing bureaucratically-entrenched perverse incentive structures, etc.
I'm impatient. I usually eat it still half frozen. The outside gets warm enough for the cheese to melt, but the core is still usually frozen and covered in ice.
For context, due to histamine intolerance severely limiting my food choices, I've given up and just eat the same frozen meal prepped lunch every day. It'd have lost its flavor by now due to repetition, even if I hadn't gotten bored of waiting for it to fully cook.
Anyone else morbidly curious about what happens if they don't fix the bill's wording and accidentally ban "human-shaped behavior" at school?