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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I agree with you on HLS, the whole thing seems foolish. I meant more like SpaceX will chuck something around the moon for sport than that they would actually get HLS working. After all, SpaceX can already get to the moon, a lot of the recent payloads to the moon have flown on Falcon 9.

    The hardest part of getting to the moon is getting mass to orbit, and Starship just proved it could get mass to orbit, even if the reusable components didn’t work out. Now they just need to put Blue Origin’s lander inside the payload bay with a kick stage to send it off to the moon 😉 Doing a ton of refueling just to send an entire, oversized Starship as a lander makes no sense.





  • True survivalist/libertarian types have always loved solar power.

    I don’t know how solar lost its space age coolness, though, aside from active lobbying from the fossil fuel industry to try to kill it. For awhile solar was undoubtedly the power source of the future, the same thing that was on our space probes and satellites.

    I have old oil-crisis era books and magazines on my shelf which absolutely loved solar power and billed it as the cheap energy solution for the common man. Somewhere we went wrong, and I think it was Reagan (in many ways…)






  • For free tier, Google Cloud is more transparent about what you get than AWS IMO.

    The only catch is to make sure your persistent disk is “standard” to make it totally free as it defaults to SSD.

    However if you do mess up the disk you’ll still only be paying $1-2/mo. Been using GC for years, and recently they finally started offering dual stack so you can do your own 6to4 tunneling or translation if you want, depends on your usage case.

    AirVPN also are legit and will let you forward ports to expose your local services if you’re worried about DMCA type issues.

    I finally got IPv6 here through Starlink, it’s nice to have full access to the internet again after a decade behind CGNAT



  • That’s not just a German thing, here in Canada or the USA it’s strongly frowned on to bring your own food or drink to a restaurant or bar. And “no public toilet” snuck in to a lot of places at Covid time and never left.

    Fast food is different and definitely not enforced but it’s still poor etiquette to eat anything other than small snacks or water there unless you’re part of a group. Like a bunch of guys stop at McDonald’s but one guy is like nah, I packed a sandwich, I’m gonna eat that.

    Still it’s kind of expected that guy would buy a coffee or something. This is what I would do in OP’s situation, have a coffee or a diet Coke if you’re hanging out there for awhile. I wouldn’t complain about “pricy consumables”, it’s like $2.



  • We’re talking about replacing lost content here though. And as such you can use the streaming services as a “backup” by re-ripping your whole collection if you lose it.

    I’m actually doing this now as part of a library cleanup. Zotify + beets are a great combo to pull down vast quantities of music and properly sort and tag it.

    Then I stream it to my phone in my truck using ampache and ultrasonic, which does have a local buffering option.

    However if you have some exotics that you ripped from rare discs, demos or prerelease, live recordings with sentimental value etc. I would suggest keeping those properly backed up. I don’t have many of these, but the ones I do have are backed up both cloud and offsite.


  • Nifedipine - vasodilator

    This cheap and common calcium channel blocker has an effect more localized to the peripheral vessels than most other calcium channel blockers.

    I started taking it as a cure for chilblains, which it was remarkably effective at despite not being officially listed for. Did my research and asked my doctor for it. Never had one since.

    However I soon realized the joy of never feeling cold again. Gone are the days of taking swigs from a flask to keep my fingers thawed out while working on a stalled tractor at -30C. Gone are cold/numb feet in ski boots and rubber boots, frozen thumbs on quads and snowmobiles. I can work in my unheated shop all day!

    Of course its main function is to drop blood pressure by decreasing arterial resistance, which I found provided a significant performance boost in someone with only high normal blood pressure. I box and jump rope, and realized a few days after taking nifedipine that I had been jumping so long that my legs were getting sore, but my endurance still felt limitless.

    My blood pressure is down to totally normal too. So drop your blood pressure, boost your endurance and never feel cold again for under $30/month… It’s a deal



  • You can download from Spotify using Zotify. Albums, playlists, if you set it to Artist unfortunately you will get a bunch of singles and EPs that you have to clean up.

    If you have Premium you can download at high bitrates, otherwise you get Ogg Vorbis at around 150 ABR. You can automatically transcode to whatever format you want, then I feed it to beets to catalogue and deliver it with Ampache.

    I like the moderate bitrate OGGs myself, as I often stream from Ampache to my phone and our mobile service is quite slow. So this system works great for me.


  • At this point at least, LLMs require vast amounts of GPU time, and the GPUs used likely need to be fairly close coupled to run at decent speeds, and as such one couldn’t spread itself over the vast network of consumer computers. At least not in a way that would still allow it to learn.

    Any near-term AGI or similar would be based on a similar approach, making it fairly “safe” in that respect at least. Only a million other disruptive ways it can affect society…

    In the event of such a worm/virus, we forget actually do have a very effective nuclear option: switch off the computers and re-image them. Painful as it might be, we could even shut off or partition the global IP network temporarily if faced with such an existential threat.

    We don’t live in a sci-fi novel after all, and this distributed AI wouldn’t be able to hide in a single machine, plotting against us. It would only be able to “think” as a giant networked cluster, something easy to detect and disrupt.