tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
I think a mobile phone camera is vastly superior to these, although might not be great at night vision for the reasons you said, but is it entirely crazy to not just use a spare phone? It has built in backup power, can store videos locally if there is an internet outage, and can use its own data connection if wifi is not available.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 92%
Actually, I am very lazy, thank you.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
You can use superconductors to create Josephson junctions, which can be used for standard logic operations (but also useful in quantum computers). These junctions are much more efficient and much faster than transistors.
This particular superconductor will not be useful for transmitting power because the effect breaks down at very low current limits in this material, but it will be very useful for studying superconductors.
So contrary to what you said, this will in fact not be useful for power transmission, but could be useful for CPUs and GPUs, and could lead to computers that are hundreds or thousands of times faster and more efficient than what we have today.
To be fair this material may never see a practical use though.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 75%
The UFO craze probably peaks in summer because people go outside on summer evenings. Outside there are things that they are not used to seeing, like planes, satellites and planets.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
A less divisive goal of reducing your consumption is a good first step to get mental uptake. People are not ready to be told to stop entirely. If we could set a goal to reduce our consumption by 50% that would an awesome start.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 71%
One of the things that weighs me down is posts making me dwell on the things that weigh me down.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
"Despite being so common in English as to be known as the "Chinese curse", the saying is apocryphal, and no actual Chinese source has ever been produced." - Wikipedia
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
I'm located in a van in New Zealand so I only use mobile data. I pay NZ$40 (US$25) per month for "unlimited" data, which is all I can eat but capped at 1Mbps. I can stream 720p barely, but I mostly torrent. I typically use about 60-80GB a month.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
OruxMaps (android) supports several navigation methods, kml overlays, offline maps, various online and custom maps, good tracking, routes, gps, etc, etc. Waaay better than Google maps - although it can also happily use Google maps.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
I think you're right there. My bad.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 86%
TLDR; the front side is 23% efficient, and the rear side 20% efficient.
They don't actually give an overall efficiency but it implies a total of 43%. They compare this to typical panels also at 23% efficient, so it's really remarkable if true. Other emerging solar tech is up to about 32% but if that could also benefit from multiple layers then total efficiency could become insane.
Seems a little too good to be true, really, but great if so.
Edit: Yeah, I don't think these efficiencies can be added like that. I guess the overall efficiency will depend on how reflective the ground under the panels is, and they will extract 20% of that. Maybe that's why they don't give an overall rating.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 90%
I think it's intellectually lazy to stick with the stochastic parrot line of thinking now. There's a number of emergent properties that are appearing as LLMs scale that give them abilities beyond that paradigm. Check out the "Sparks of AGI" paper from Microsoft research - or more realistically one of the youtube summaries of it since its quite a big read... Here's one from the horse's mouth: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qbIk7-JPB2c
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
Yes, I don't think people realise the scale of production involved. We're currently producing about 8500 TWh of power with renewables annually (nuclear is about 2600 TWh), and adding about 585 TWh of renewables per year (this is steadily increasing). A typical nuke plant generates about 8.5 TWh annually, so we would need to be building 68 new nukes every year to keep up with renewables (at current renewable numbers). The cost and construction time is massively prohibitive for nuclear, uranium mining is pretty dirty and there's some downsides of nuclear waste at present. Yes, there's some emerging tech but we won't be building many of those for some time to come.
It seems unlikely nukes are a practical path to any significant contribution to new generation required and they will continue to fall behind. They can help but they're not the magic bullet many people seem to think. Solar, wind and hydro will dominate in the medium term. I think they will ultimately make way for geothermal to dominate, maybe via plasma deep drilling like Quaise or PLASMABit utilise to potentially make bores up to 20 km deep, which opens much of the world up to being suitable.
Fusion may become practical in the next 20 years or so, but that will also be ludicrously expensive, so also unlikely to make a meaningful contribution in the medium term either.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
Worth noting that if you want a local LLM on android MLCChat can run Vicuna-7B, RedPajama and several other models from huggingface on fairly average hardware. The interface is still basic but it's functional.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 80%
Oh nice. An entire language that is write-only.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 94%
Anyone who isn't at least mildly interested that you know Morse code isn't someone you want to know :-)
Good filter technique.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
No. I only use Android as my PC via AR glasses. Is there even any antivirus software for Android? Probably, but I don't care I guess. Never had a problem.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
I'm just using a Samsung S20+. You need a Samsung if you want Dex.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
My phone is my sole PC and has been for about 7 months now. I use it for everything. I'm using nreal AR glasses for a massive virtual 80" screen via Dex. I use a Bluetooth mouse and mechanical keyboard. I use libre office for real work, I do development work right on the phone. I also use andronix on the phone for when I need a more full blown Linux desktop for gimp, IDEs, GIS, etc.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
At risk of running against the obvious tide here, if you take the word "skilled" literally then of course everyone becomes skilled in whatever job they do. However, here "skilled" is used not literally, but in the sense of the industry term that means the job generally requires formal training and/or qualification before employment.
Edit: Not to say I don't think it's not a demeaning term (possibly intentionally so). It's a sucky word but let's not allow ourselves to become overly indignant by misconstrueing the sense of the term used.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
That sounds much like the "just asking questions" excuse. As a writer you should know the power of words and how the nuances of their meaning affect the message. Dismissing the meaning of your words with the excuse of just "throwing words around" is dangerous and frankly shameful for any writer who isn't a hack.
Edit: maybe I got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning. You're good, but that did not resonate well with me.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
It seems likely, even highly likely, but not "definitely". Making absolute claims without supporting evidence is the sort of thing that antivaxers do.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
Creating a new sub so I'm a moderator brought Boost back to life. Maybe that will help here?
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 90%
It's not like it needed further proof. It's clearly happening. The latest starlink sats are better, and we need to continue to minimise it where we can, but the problem is not going away. Not much point in complaining really. For a lot of the science it's not a huge problem since it can be removed from the data, but it's terrible for astro-photography.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
FYI, you are able to edit titles on the fediverse in case you want to the missing word.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 75%
This may be a silly question, but what is wrong with lemmy for this purpose? You're already there, friend.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
The Khan academy approach to ai-assisted learning looks amazing and it's just a first attempt. I think having individual, endlessly patient AI tutors leading each student via the Socratic method will revolutionise teaching. Teachers actually have more time to socialise with the students, so fears that ai learning would deprive children of the social interaction may be put to rest. It looks really promising.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 91%
Counting calories/macros is good thing to do to zero your brain in on what foods contribute what - it's honestly quite surprising and informative to do. But, doing it constantly is kinda obsessive and annoying. Same applies here too.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 0%
He said not from America.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 66%
Not to be dismissive of these deaths, but there should not be any expectation of self-drive cars being perfect, ever. The reality is that if they are safer than humans overall, then they have reached a point where we can (and should?) adopt their use. It's not a huge surprise that there is some form of bias in the current deaths simply because biases arise in any complex, real-world systems.
We should, and must, accept some glitches.
But, uh, yeah Tesla may well try to delay addressing the biases if we don't call them out, so this info is good.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
Stop trying to stack overflow the fediverse, please.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
Well of course, putting it on the open internet is very intentionally making it available for everyone to see. If you don't want everyone to see it, don't put it on the open internet. The issue is what people do with it, not whether they can access it. Copyright forbids distributing copyrighted data. The entire point of that it is so that you can make it available to be seen but protected from people copying it. However, there is no distribution or storage of copyrighted material with an LLM - there is no copy. I think OpenAI will be OK, but these things are never certain when the big lawyers are let loose.
Distributing the training dataset, though, that could well be a problem.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
Feral cats are usually pretty easy to distinguish. They're often in poor condition; skinny, dull coats. They have outbreaks of cat flu when numbers build up, with gross mucus around their eyes, and they are mostly wildtype tabby. You know you have a problem when you start seeing them frequently stalking through the hedges and you start seeing the same cat causing trouble. They shit in the hay barns and cause toxoplasmosis-induced abortions in sheep and humans, not to mention the catastrophic impact on native birds. They need to be controlled. Taking every feral cat in to see if they are chipped is really not an option practically, financially or sensibly.
Even so, mistakes are possible, but if at any point they directly start attacking livestock, like chickens, it really doesn't matter if they are a pet or not. That's the outcome for any animal hassling livestock, including dogs, and it doesn't matter a jot if they are someone's pet.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
For the love of God, no! It ain't a host if it ain't up. This will just end up being very annoying.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 50%
Which fediverse software is the best pile-of-dogshit alternative? hmm.
Time for a new direction. You're already here!
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
No mention of The Handmaid's Tale... I guess it doesn't need saying.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
Be a better lemming and realise this is the fediverse and not just lemmy. Why so specific when it is relevant to all users of the fediverse?
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 50%
Ah, well I come from a more brutal rural background I guess, but if any cats cause me problems with the chickens it's a cage trap followed by a .22 to the head through the bars of the cage. Quick, painless, no burden on animal control but understandably some people would be reluctant to do it. I do the same for friends with feral cat problems who are uncomfortable with the final act.
I still find it abhorrent that people put animals in sacks and drown them. That really makes me feel ill (and angry), but I can swallow the lump in my throat when I have to dispatch a cat, sheep, chicken knowing that it's the way that causes the least stress, and there really are no better options.
Assuming you're in the US (I'm not) it can't be too hard to find a gun-toting maniac to do the deed! (sorry)
I'll take the downvotes for being evil now if you wish.
tinwhiskers 1 year ago • 100%
Mods: Please delete this post. Enough damage has been done.
Imagine a stick man standing on top of a building and jumping off. In your mind's eye, what colour was he drawn in and what colour was the background colour? I see him drawn in white on a black background and I wonder if that's because blackboards were used in school in my day. I am interested to know what your colours are and whether that relates to what you used at school, or other thoughts.
In 2016, Joe thought Brexit was a great idea. But he soon realized his dream of retiring in Spain was going be limited by his new status as a non-EU citizen.