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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • The most important risk you face is if somehow mains voltage ends up contacting somewhere you get electrocuted and die.

    There are 2 purposes of an earth ground: First it can be used as a reference for certain signals, such as microphones. Second, it can be used to protect against turning yourself into a sparker.

    There is a clear separation between mains voltage and system voltages so it’s typically not going to be a problem, but if a little wire ends up contacting the power supply case it can become energized and things start to get really bad.

    Most of the electrical code where I live focuses on grounding as “Bonding”, which is purely safety related for giving dangerous voltages a safe place to go.









  • I’ve been using a number of different tools which I interface to my nextcloud.

    My main nextcloud has a llm plugin which was really easy to install, you just install the plug-in, make sure that you are configured properly with python in your path, and then run an OCC command to download one of a few models.

    https://localai.io/

    I also hosted localAI, which was a little bit more involved, but the website did a decent enough job of explaining exactly all the things that you needed to do in order to get all the different types of AI model working. Besides LLMs, it also supports text to speech, speech to text, and image generation.

    Two things that are important: first, if you are server doesn’t have a pretty advanced video card then you’re going to be using the CPU exclusively for AI, and that’ll be pretty slow. Second, I found it very quickly that the amount of RAM you have is critical. My main server is a core i5 4th gen, and so I put AI software on another one of my servers which is a core i5 7th gen. You would think that the latter would work a lot better, but it had half the ram, and it basically wasn’t even able to get started.

    Besides hosting ai, if you have a desktop computer or gaming laptop you can run local AI models. There’s a fantastic piece of software called Faraday that works pretty well on my laptop. You can get more and more sophisticated models depending on how much memory you have.

    https://youtu.be/aLy_vVLUHZk

    Krita has AI dal-e support for image generation available as a plug-in. I haven’t used it yet because I just got it started downloading last night before I went to bed, but the installation process has defined in the video seems accurate and was extremely easy and mostly automated.

    https://youtu.be/AU8NDSBIS1U







  • sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.nettoGames@lemmy.worldSteam keeps on winning
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    6 months ago

    The key is to use an alternative that’s actually good, and most of these companies were never going to make an alternative that was good, just one that was exploitative.

    Most of my purchases the last few years have been gog. The only game service where you actually own the game afterwards.




  • You might be surprised, on many fronts.

    Empathy for others who are not exactly like you is actually considered a virtue when you’re not in the little bubble that is reddit’s toxic, hateful political disease. Despite what you seem to think, empathy for someone who isn’t exactly like you is a key requirement of a healthy marriage.

    Man, I hope I live to see my grandchildren read my book, The Graysonian Ethic: Lessons for my unborn son (He’s born now, and he’s beautiful). I bet parts of it will seem archaic, since it’s directly addressing contemporary issues, but other parts will likely be timeless. It’d be really interesting if I could see them come of age and we’d get to see what they thought of their grandparents. The world will likely be a much different place by then, and not in ways you think.


  • Interesting thing about gasoline engines, they become more and less efficient when the temperature drops.

    They become more efficient because the air being brought into the engine is denser and cooler which is better, but they become less efficient because rubber parts become stiffer, lubricant becomes harder to move, and overall everything is tougher to deal with.

    One result is that if you drive long ranges in -40C, your fuel economy is relatively similar to what it would be in warmer weather. You can blast the heat and your vehicle is toasty warm since it’s just moving waste heat around. I’ve done such drives many times since resources are not where people tend to be.

    As you approach -40 you’ll probably want to have your block heater plugged in overnight on a gasoline engine, but generally speaking you can get pretty cold and have the motor turn over just fine. I drove a diesel for a while in the far north and going back to a (really crappy) gas engine was surprising for how easy it was to just get up and go in really cold weather.



  • EV performance in -40C is something nobody talks about but I’m extremely interested in.

    There have been lots of videos of Teslas leaving a heated garage then flying around a snowy track in Norway, but that’s much different than getting in a car that’s soaked in the cold all night, driving it to work, then driving home after it sits all day. Or even better, taking that same cold soaked car and driving to the next city 13 hours away with only one or two places to stop along the way.