I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It’s not the unhealthiness of this that disturbed me, but the fact they did it without the requisite paperwork.

Unlike those disorganised people I have a formal waiver. I primarily drink steam and crushed glaciers.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I was amazed that we transitioned from one GPU heavy bubble (Crypto) to another (LLM/AI). Whilst the hype for crypto imploded the use for the hardware sort of didn’t. I wonder if the next bubble with be the same, or if we get some refreshing variety to our money sinks?

    Microsoft et al are subsidizing GenAI to an insane degree. […] prices shoot up for their customers and serve as a rough awakening to all the websites that integrated a crappy chatbot.

    I’ve run some much simpler chatbots on just my desktop PC, so they will have some fallback (if they really choose to take it). Still it locks up my entire computer for a few second for each reply, so even a few hundred users per second peak would be an expensive service.

    (Insert joke here about customers not noticing or caring about the difference between website chatbots built on big company services vs smaller ones, because they have exactly the same problems just in different hues.)












  • There have been constant news articles coming out over the past few years claiming the next big thing in supercapacitor and battery technologies. Very few actually turn out to work practically.

    The most exciting things to happen in the last few years (from an average citizen’s perspective) are the wider availability of sodium ion batteries (I believe some power tools ship with them now?), the continued testing of liquid flow batteries (endless trials starting with the claim that they might be more economic) and the reduction in costs of lithium-ion solid state batteries (probably due to the economics of electric car demand).

    FWIW the distinction between capacitors and batteries gets blurred in the supercapacitor realm. Many of the items sold or researched are blends of chemical (“battery”) and electrostatic (“capacitor”) energy storage. The headline of this particular pushes the misconception that these concepts can’t mix.

    My university login no longer works so I can’t get a copy of the paper itself :( But from the abstract it looks first stage, far from getting excited about:

    This precise control over relaxation time holds promise for a wide array of applications and has the potential to accelerate the development of highly efficient energy storage systems.

    “holds promise” and “has the potential” are not miscible with “May Be the Beginning of the End for Batteries”.



  • Meanwhile the fan PC port is absolutely amazing. I couldn’t play my copy of PD on my actual N64 because the low framerate made me motionsick, the fan-made PC port runs smooth.

    This makes me remember what happened with the re3 and revc (GTA III and GTA Vice City) projects. Fans fixed so much in those games, in their spare time, and published it as a patch (so you still had to own the games). Take Two DMCA’d and sued them just before releasing their the maligned “GTA Trilogy”. I wonder if Microsoft would have done the same before releasing new Perfect Dark content?


  • Oh. Back to resistance: Doesn’t really matter audio quality doesn’t care it’s still the same AC signal just with less amplitude

    Only for ideal resistors.

    Resistors are noise sources. Intentional resistors tend not to be too bad (and probably won’t be heard in this situation unless you have super-high-impedance headphones, perhaps 10’s of K), but unintentional resistors (eg corroded unstable metal contacts inside a plastic part) can be atrocious.

    A few things to add to this:

    (1) If your resistor acts even slightly like a diode then you will encounter partially rectified RF signals (more noise yay). Metal oxides between metals can do this, eg if the connector has crimped two badly-plated bits of metal together.

    (2) Plasticisers in some plastics can leak out, causing corrosion on unseen internal metal parts.

    (Of course linking all of this together is just conjecture, the causes of Moss’ bad adaptors might be something completely different)