- te0006 parentDoes anybody think Aluminium as a brand name is a good choice? Especially considering the intended expansion towards the premium market. To me it sounds cheap, second-rate, ersatz. What you use if you cannot afford a better metal. Chrome is shiny, aluminium surfaces soon get dim again after any polishing attempt.
- Perhaps you are looking for larger savings but I would count the RWKV line of LLM architectures in this category: https://wiki.rwkv.com/basic/architecture.html
- If you have a south (or SE or SW) facing wall without much shadowing from nearby buildings or trees, vertikal mounting does work OK. Do not expect to reach the panel's nominal Wp rating though, output will peak at 50-70% of that. But panels are cheap - if there's enough room, just overprovision twofold. Just take care to buy an inverter that is OK with such a bigger configuration. And vertically mounted panels will generate more power off-season than tilted ones.
- Loooking closely, the shop does not seem to be located within the EU. And the 50€ discount does not apply to the 128GB config. Also, if you are interested, it might help to have a look into the user forum: https://de.gmktec.com/community/xenforum
- Interesting - do you need to take any special measures to get OSS genAI models to work on this architecture? Can you use inference engines like Ollama and vLLM off-the-shelf (as Docker containers) there, with just the Radeon 8060S GPU? What token rates do you achieve?
(edit: corrected mistake w.r.t. the system's GPU)
- This brings back fond memories from the 8-bit era. Tasword II was a text processor for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum where the developers resorted to extra-narrow fonts to cope with the Speccy's very limited (256x192) screen resolution. The lower screenshot in [1] provides a glimpse of what seems to be a 3px wide font.
OP's 2px width are a bit too extreme for my taste though.
[1] https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/4000080/Timex/Tasword_...
- Another country with highly developed district heating system is Denmark. They heavily invested in this technology since the 1970s, and currently around 2/3 of all households have district heating, in the capital, Copenhagen, 98%. Moreover, more than 60% of the energy used for these systems comes from renewables. No nuclear power involved (which hast been banned in the country since 1985). A few sources: - https://dbdh.org/all-about-district-energy/district-heating-... - https://stateofgreen.com/en/news/new-plans-to-expand-the-dan... - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...
- This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the feasabilty of this idea: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/ee/d0ee0...
"Due to the emergence of low cost renewable electricity from solar and wind, there is renewed interest in decentralized opportunities for electricity-driven nitrogen fixation."
"This analysis shows that the energy consumption for NOX synthesis with plasma technology is almost competitive with the commercial process with its current best value of 2.4 MJ mol N−1, which is required to decrease further to about 0.7 MJ mol N−1 in order to become fully competitive"
Note that this measure of competitivity is based on energy, not cost. So the (intermittently) ultra-low cost of electrical energy generated by modern PV installations (where substantial overprovisioning is becoming normal) has not been taken into account.
An Agri-PV installation that produces all the fertilizer it needs from its own surplus electricity would be cool indeed.
- You might find Stanislav Lem's Golem XIV worth a read, in which a what we now call an AGI shares, amongst other things, its knowledge and speculations about long-term evolution of superintelligences, in a lecture to humans, before entering the next stage itself. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10208493 It seems difficult to obtain an English edition these days but there is a reddit thread you might want to look into.
- Interestingly, owning even a small PV setup like these "balcony solar" devices, and monitoring its output, causes many people to think more about their grid power consumption, and to reduce it or adapt their usage pattern to solar energy availability to some extent. There is something like gamification going on.
- Good job indeed.Started happening some time in Novenber, and they merrily keep rolling out this buggy Google Authenticator update after people reported the lock-out behaviour you encountered. Apart from corrupting the TOTP seeds for some users, this update also introduced the splendid new feature of backing up those secrets in, of all places, the Google cloud, opening up new vistas for hackers to take over your Google account completely. Which apart from being a rather catastrophic issue in general for many people is a very good starting point for emptying your online bank or crypto exchange account: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=42450221 So farewell, Google Authenticator, won't miss you.
- My first impulse after ruling out Google Authenticator was to simply switch to Microsoft's Authenticator app (which I already had to use for a work-related thing anyway), thinking "of course MS would not make the same stupid mistake". Turns out they would, and they did. So alternatives from smaller vendors were the only option. In evaluating them, I focused on popular open-source solutions that had the features I deemed important (notably, local backup), and looked into the history, provenance and reputation of their vendors. Nevertheless, some risk will always remain.
- Google rolled out that hare-brained "improvement" in an update to Google Authenticator a few months ago, with the nice extra that for some users, when you dared unselecting the new cloud backup checkbox, the secrets stored in the app were instantly corrupted in some way, so you were locked out of your Google accounts immediately as a bonus <chef's kiss>. Happened to a family member, luckily they had a working emergency access method. We will never use Google Authenticator again.
Recommended alternative: 2FAS (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twofasapp) which allows you to import the secrets from Google Authenticator via QR codes, and has a local backup feature (e.g. to a USB drive).
- I wish this had come up on HN (or I had had that idea myself) some years ago when my mother suffered from that same cruel condition, for the last four years of her life. With her body, all her older memories and her considerable intelligence largely intact, she had multiple moments of clarity every single day, in which she fully realized the terrible and hopeless situation she was in. But of course, within seconds this thought and any decisions she might have derived from it dissolved in the black hole of her defective short-term memory. So she would not even have had the ability to take her own life to end this if she wished so. My brother and I tried many things to improve her life somewhat, only very few of those were actually a bit succesful. Two of them were digital gadgets, which we selected to provide some benefit without or at least with just very simple interactions: The best one was an LCD "picture frame" the only feature of which was to show an infinite loop of family photos stored on its SD card - she came to really like it and have it switched on quite consistently. The second one was an MP3 speaker which had a few hours of her favorite music on an SD card as well, and which could be used largely like a radio, just by pressing its play/stop button and volume buttons. This latter one she managed to enjoy at least from time to time. Best wishes to the author and his mom, and everyone in a similar situation.
- This seems to be the Feynman episode in question: https://thinkingwiththings.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/richard-...
If you are a fan, be prepared for quite some unpleasantness. Turns out, the story isn't even about topology. No, Feynman was, in his own words, "flabbergasted" that women were able to grasp and explain to each other rather basic matters of analytical geometry.
- I tried micropython, liked it, and developed and operated a few home automation devices with it. But changing anything after a few months was a pain - what flashing tool did I use, how did that detail work, etc. Now I run around 15 Tasmota devices in my household and would never look back. The initial flash, depending on the device at hand, can be trivial (e.g. using https://github.com/tasmota/tasmotizer on a device with builtin USB connectivity or with a USB-serial cable) or a bit less so (like the somewhat involved OTA reflashing process https://github.com/yaourdt/mgos-to- for the very handy and inexpensive Shelly devices). In any case, after that it all becomes easy, with web-based configuration, OTA updates, "fleet managament" software like https://github.com/danmed/TasmoBackup, and plug&play integratiom with Home Assistant. If somebody integrated micropython into Tasmota for cases where the countless configuration options and libraries integrated into Tasmota don't suffice, it would be perfect. But meanwhile there is a similar scripting language available within Tasmota for ESP32 devices so I can live with that.
- Agreed. I had it solve a little programming problem in a really obscure programming language and after some prompt tuning got results strongly superior to GPT4, Claude, Llama3 and Mixtral. As the language (which I won't name here) is acceptably documented but there are _really_ few examples available online, this seems to indicate very good generalization and reasoning capabilities.
- And whatever you select otherwise, definitely be sure to not miss Lem's "Golem XIV": Lectures by what nowadays is called an AGI to Humanity, short before that entity evolves to an even more advanced level - from which further communication with humans will no longer be possible, and that likely operates outside the physics known to us. Stunning, especially when considering it was written in 1973-1980. Seemingly, the English translation of Imaginary Magnitude contains Golem XIV in its entirety; in German and other languages it was published as a separate book.
- To do it some justice: a talking, very opinionated, intellectual, anti-capitalist, and overall absolutely hilarious kangaroo, which of course is some form of alter ego of the author. There is an english edition of a selection of Kangaroo stories here: https://marcuwekling.reimkultur-shop.de/marc-uwe-kling-the-k..., also one of QualityLand here: https://www.orionbooks.co.uk/titles/marc-uwe-kling/qualityla...