Sconrad122

@Sconrad122@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Low income taxes. And our sales tax is typically lower than European VAT when the comparison is valid. But those generally go to the feds and the state, that do not fund municipal services, so municipalities have to collect the remainder they need through property taxes, typically on real estate and cars. And none of them fund healthcare, so we have to pay a company premiums for that. Basically the same for higher education. When you look at our total financial burden to receive the kind of services that are funded by taxes in other developed countries, we can be deceptively expensive, especially if you start thinking about the comparative quality of those services. But our income and capital gains tax rates are low, especially if you are very rich! I made myself sad

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  My city has a senior discount on property taxes, where seniors that have a net worth and income both below certain numbers pay reduced or as low as 0% of their regularly assessed property tax. I’m not sure how they verify net worth, but it seems like a good system to me as long as they have figured out a way to do that efficiently and effectively

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨John Oliver promoted alternatives to big tech in last night's episode, including Mastodon and Pixelfed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Is sh.itjust.works not federated with lemmynsfw.com? Or maybe you use a Front page or Local feed. Here on world (no comment on the instance wars), lemmynsfw communities pretty regularly show up on my All feed. Seems like whatever they do with posts over there really makes the “Active” sorter happy, if you know what I mean

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Only 22 countries have never been invaded by Britain⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So many times depending on who you trace modern Brits to. Romans invaded the Celts. Saxons invaded the Romans. Normans invaded the Saxons. And that’s just England. Wales and Scotland could probably come up with another dozen plus examples between them

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OLED displays with up to five times better lifespan may be on their way sooner than you think, thanks to a manufacturing breakthrough⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know your circumstances, and it’s your money to do with what you like, so I’m sorry if this is unwelcome or inappropriate advice, but if you are living paycheck to paycheck, there are probably better priorities for your money than the newest generation of OLED monitors. Which is basically what you are saying, but I know how easy it is to fall into the trap of “keeping up with the joneses” on internet comments, and someone reading the comment and then buying a new generation OLED monitor at the expense of building their emergency savings because they can “afford” it without some serious thought and reflection on what that decision means would be tragic

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Singapore Approves 2,600-Mile Undersea Cable to Import Solar Energy from Australia⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  12x GW*km at 9x the price is better than 1:1 performance/cost scaling. Obviously labor price and other factors make it not apples to apples, but that doesn’t seem like an awful scaling price premium

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You don't say⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s easier to read if you read it as a line spoken by the Silicon Valley TV character Jian Yang

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘It’s the perfect place’: London Underground hosts tests for ‘quantum compass’ that could replace GPS⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you use the right color of light, then the doppler effect means that the atoms will only absorb (and be pushed by) light that they are headed towards. That means that the light will always act as a brake for the atoms and never an accelerator, so the fluid will cool. If you do this from all directions, the fluid will start to stay still in one place and get very close to absolute zero. Idk, I just read the Wikipedia article, but that is my best attempt at an ELI18

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is Windows 11 'AI Explorer'? Everything you need to know about Microsoft's upcoming defining AI PC feature (including it always watching you)⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re not wrong that GPU and AI silicon design are tightly coupled, but my point was that both of the GPU manufacturers are dedicating hardware to AI/ML in their consumer products. Nvidia has the tensor cores in its GPUs that it justifies to consumers with DLSS and RT but we’re clearly designed for AI/ML use cases when they presented them with Turing. AMD has the XDNA AI Engine that it is putting its APUs separate from its RDNA GPUs

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is Windows 11 'AI Explorer'? Everything you need to know about Microsoft's upcoming defining AI PC feature (including it always watching you)⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Fair enough. Was just asking because the choice of company surprised me. AMD is putting "AI Engines in their new CPUs (separate silicon design from their GPUs) and while Nvidia largely only sells GPUs that are less universal, they’ve had dedicated AI hardware (tensor cores) in their offerings for the past three generations. If anything, Intel is barely keeping up with its competition in this area (for the record, I see vanishingly little value in the focus on AI as a consumer, so this isn’t really a ding on Intel in my books, more so making the observation from a market forces perspective)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is Windows 11 'AI Explorer'? Everything you need to know about Microsoft's upcoming defining AI PC feature (including it always watching you)⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Why call out Intel? Pretty sure AMD and Nvidia are both putting dedicated AI hardware in all of their new and upcoming product lines. From what I understand they are even generally doing it better than Intel. Hell, Qualcomm is advertising their AI performance on their new chips and so is Apple. I don’t think there is anyone in the chip world that isn’t hopping on the AI train

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Or we could do metric time⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh god, converting imperial kHz to metric kHz sounds awful

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨mycology⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Based on the Wikipedia article on biological immortality referencing species that live for a couple hundred years and the Wikipedia page on armillaria ostoyae mentioning living specimens that are multiple millenia old (and thousands of acres large!), I’m guessing that may be what the prof is referring to?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨NASA uses laser to send video of a cat named Taters over 19 million miles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  You are giving ants way too much credit. Those fuckers are brutal war criminals, the lot of them. Humans are bad, but we’ve had nukes for almost 80 years without glassing ourselves, ants wouldn’t last a day

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Challenge accepted⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  And no Howoming, Whatoming, Wheroming, or Whooming, missed opportunities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Old RTX 3080 GPUs repurposed and modded for Chinese market as 20GB AI cards with blower-style cooling⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Blower is specifically referring to coolers that are designed to blow air through the GPU heats ink and then out the back of the case. In contrast, open air coolers use (typically more numerous and larger fans) to force air at the GPU heats ink but without much concern for where it goes after that, so the air ends up partially blown out the back of the case, and partially recirculate back into the rest of the case where the case fans are hopefully promoting enough exchange that ambient temps remain sufficiently low. The recirculation is less than ideal, but is offset by the larger fans and heatsinks for a typically quieter and cooler solution. The fans can be larger because they are blowing on the larger side/cross section of the heat sink. Pass through are a somewhat newer variant of open air coolers common on newer Nvidia cards that push or pull air through a heat sink that is not blocked on one side of a pc so air flows though the heat sink with less back pressure for more efficient dissipation at the expense of a more compact PCB to put all the GPU components on

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Choose wisely!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Congratulations, you now speak Khitan and only Khitan. Good luck finding one of the few researchers in the world who will understand that you are speaking an extinct language before being thrown in the looney bin for spouting nonsense Andreas Toma-style

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Players have no patience", says Blizzard president - "they want new stuff every day, every hour"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Blizzard: willfully engage in a business model that manipulates players into constantly looking for the next thing, and structures their games around that model to drive sales of microtransaction

  Blizzard’s Player Base: fills with people responding to that manipulation

  Blizzard:

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A.I. tools fueled a 34% spike in Microsoft’s water consumption, and one city with its data centers is concerned about the effect on residential supply⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  There is a net loss of potable water (or potable water capacity, if you prefer), which is often a capacity bottleneck before non-potable water due to the infrastructure required to generate it. However, according to a comment above, Microsoft is using evaporative coolers, which specifically work by losing water (through evaporation). It’s not a 100% loss rate to the watershed, but it’s not net zero either

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  OP is from sigmoid.social according to the profile, and that is a mastodon instance. They tooted on Mastodon with the correct @ mention of the community, resulting in the toot showing up as a post in this lemmy community. We can reply to and interact with this specific post, although I’m not sure how it shows up to a mastodon user, seeing as the front end is quite different. We are unable to interact with Mastodon toots that aren’t tagged in a way that tie them to a Lemmy community and create a correlating post