Trainguyrom
@Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
- Comment on same shit every day, on god 3 days ago:
But more seriously, watch the water in your sight glass, keep it about 3/4 full at all times and check it like you check your rear view mirror in your car, and don’t forget to open the cylinder cocks every time you stop (or at least when you first start moving) and you should be pretty good to avoid unexpected damage to your locomotive!
- Comment on same shit every day, on god 3 days ago:
I’ll be real, I absolutely loved the first story, it took a little bit to get into the second one (but thoroughly enjoyed it after all) and I gave up partway through the third one because I was struggling to get pulled in and my library book was due soon anyways. So absolutely worth it for the first two stories at least, and hopefully you enjoy the third one more than I did!
- Comment on same shit every day, on god 3 days ago:
Hilariously this was a plot point I read recently. Isambard Kingdom Brunel replaced the firebox with some poorly shielded uranium, but the initial locomotive that was to demonstrate the technology was sabotaged and exploded, killing his parents.
This same book also had a fictional mad inventor who created a part newt-human hybrid named Victoria with womanly assets if you catch my drift, who upon failing to educate it he sent to a brothel because he couldn’t stand to “dispose of it” but when the princess and heir to the throne Elizabeth went missing, the newt-human hybrid Victoria was installed on the throne to prevent a constitutional crisis. And this is all events that occurred in the first 2 pages, so I’m not even spoiling anything!
spoilers for ending of the story *Victoria* in *A Steampunk Trilogy*
To spoil where the Queen to be Victoria was so well hidden that she couldn’t be found, she was in fact working in the newt-human hybrid Victoria’s room at the brothel! Seriously bonkers stories in that book!
- Comment on same shit every day, on god 3 days ago:
Reminds me of one of my favorite photos, a steam engine being delivered by steam engine!
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 5 days ago:
Hey it’s never too late to get things better under control! My parents only just started that journey and they’re old enough to be grandparents
- Comment on It improves the morale of the future worker. 6 days ago:
Oh absolutely without actual government action the overall population decline will be catastrophic. Basically if it’s handled the way that climate change has been, our kids/grandkids/great-grandkids will be screwed because it’s a similarly significant world-wide challenge for humanity that like climate change will require some changes to how people live and run the world. However, unlike climate change, population decline won’t necessarily kill off humanity entirely, because it will self-resolve one way or another, either by society collapsing due to the medical system collapsing or by actual social change to adapt to the normalizing population level
- Comment on It improves the morale of the future worker. 1 week ago:
This is a problem that’s being co-opted by right-wing nazitards like Elon Musk who are making it about race, but it’s really a global issue without a lot of clear causes or solutions
Its really only an issue in the context of capitalism. Capitalism relies on growth. No growth or negative growth means capitalism collapses and all of the hoarding that the rich and powerful have been doing was meaningless. Capitalism grew out of Mercantilism which was an extremely similar economic theory but Mercantilism largely assumes that any trade is bad because someone is “winning” and someone is “losing” meanwhile capitalism learned that trade is good because the same money can be spent more times by more people.
The short term solution is to create significant financial and other incentives for people to go into healthcare, particularly CNAs because a larger aging population than the working population will require lots of CNAs to care for the elderly. Right now these workers are woefully underpaid and largely abused by both their patients who lack the mental faculties to know what they’re doing and their workplaces which are increasingly frequently owned by private equity
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
Honestly the questions you’re posing require a level of market analysis that could fill an entire white paper and be sold for way more money than I want to think about. Its a level of market analysis I don’t want to dive into. My gut instinct from having worked in the tech industry, working with datacenters and datacenter hardware at large companies is that the AI industry will contract significantly when the bubble pops. I’m sure I could find real data to support this prediction but the level of analysis that would require and the hours of work are simply more than it’s worth for an internet comment.
You have factors including what hardware is being deployed to meet AI bubble demand, how the networking might be setup differently for AI compared to general GPU compute, who is deploying what hardware, what the baseline demand for GPU compute is if you simulate no present AI bubble, etc. etc. it’s super neat data analysis but I ain’t got the time nor appetite for that right now
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
That’s super interesting! I didn’t know other languages handled side thoughts better!
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
Is there enough demand for thousands of servers with purpose built ARM processors (which may or may not have any publicly available kernel support) driving 4-8 600w a pop Nvidia datacenter chips though? Yes some will be repurposed but there simply won’t be the demand to fill immediately. Realistically what will happen is companies operating these datacenters will liquidate the racks, probably liquidate some of the datacenters entirely and thousands of servers will hit the secondhand market for next to nothing. While some datacenter structure city empty and unmaintained until they’re either bought up to be repurposed, bought up to be refurbished and brought back into datacenter use of torn down, just like an empty Super Walmart location
Some of the datacenters will be reworked for general compute, maybe a couple will maintain some AI capacity, but given the sheer quantity of compute being stood up for the AI bubble and the sheer scale of the bubble, basically every major tech company is likely to shrink significantly when the bubble pops, since we’re talking companies that currently have market caps measured in trillions, and literally a make up full quarter of the entire value of the New York Stock Exchange, it’s going to be a bloodbath.
Remember how small the AI field was 6 years ago? It was purely the domain of academic research, fighting for scraps outside of a handful of companies big enough to invest in am AI engineer or two on the off chance they could make something useful for them. We’re probably looking at a correction back down to nearly that scale. People who have drank the coolaid will wake up one day and realize how shit the output of generative AI is compared to the average professional’s human work
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
Machine learning models have much different needs that crypto. Both run well on gaming GPUs and both run even better on much higher end GPUs, but ultimately machine learning models really really need fast memory because it loads the entire weights into graphics memory for processing. There’s some tools which will push it to system memory but these models are latency sensitive so crossing the CPU bus to pass 10s of gigabytes of data between the GPU and system memory is too much latency.
Machine learning also has the aspect of training vs inference, where the training portion will take a long time, will take less time with more/faster compute and you simply can’t do anything with the model while it’s training, meanwhile inference is still compute heavy it doesn’t require anywhere near as much as the training phase. So organizations will typically rent as much hardware as possible for the training phase to try to get the model running as quickly as possible so they can move on to making money as quickly as possible.
In terms of GPU availability this means they’re going to target high end GPUs, such as packing AI developer stations full of 4090s and whatever the heck Nvidia replaced the Tesla series with. Some of the new SOCs which have shared system/vram such as AMD’s and Apple’s new SOCs also fill a niche for AI developer and AI enthusiasts too since that enables large amounts of high speed video memory for relatively low cost. Realistically the biggest impact that AI is having on the Gaming GPU space is it’s changing the calculation that AMD, Nvidia and Intel are making when planning out their SKUs, so they’re likely being stingy on GPU memory specs for lower end GPUs to try to push anyone with specific AI models they’re looking to run to much more expensive GPUs
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
Huh I’d never looked into that! Thank you!
I mostly used zram because there’s an easy-peasy script in the Debian repos making it dead simple to setup and never looked deeper into it
- Comment on dating profile 1 week ago:
Its an interesting prospect, but realistically it would be comparable to eating wild boar and maybe comparable to wild fish?
Livestock populations that are bred and raised for human consumption are heavily monitored for health while they’re alive, mostly by the farmer and companies they contract with (and the USDA and Farm Bureau has some involvement in the farms overall production process), and at the meat processing facilities the USDA (and CFIA in Canada) are heavily involved with actual staff on site every day monitoring the health and safety and with the power to stop production if they observe a single thing out of place that poses a danger to food safety. Plants don’t want to have production stopped so they will invest heavily in mechanical and workforce resources to maintain an acceptable standard of cleanliness and limit the potential for contamination. We’ve really already got a pretty dang solid understanding of the risks and tolerances in our existing food chain of beef, pork, poultry and fish.
Wild animals need to be tested for disease before they can be safe for consumption. Deer hunters know this all too well, especially during Chronic Wasting Disease and similar outbreaks. We also don’t have the industrial scale apperatus yet for processing felines for human consumption. I’m sure small butchers can work with the meat since they rely on humans rather than machines and assembly lines, but it would also take time to ramp up demand. Of course the real challenge is trapping thousands of feral cats per day for human consumption. With cattle you know where the herd is, you can load 30 head onto a truck in just a few minutes (assuming none of the cattle get crafty and escape) and be off.
At a scale of thousands or tens of thousands per day, you’re looking at farming cats, not just culling feral populations. So ultimately you’re trading farming one animal that’s been selectively bred for centuries to be the perfect meat source to another that’s been selectively bred for centuries to be good companions and good vermine catchers
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
Side thoughts in the middle of sentences are definitely weird in written form. Heck they get messy in spoken form too! Some punctuation to help the reader understand what’s being communicated can go a long way, and in the format of a forum discussion where folks will quickly tap out a brain fart from a 5" slab of plastic and glass, when I see what appear to be multiple sentences mashed together into one incoherent one, I’ll generally assume it’s a writing error, because folks don’t proof read, they aren’t writing literature with multiple drafts. They’re just quickly jotting down a thought or two and somethimes errors compound with that level of quick communication
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
Yikes you’re literally financing your hobby! Better financial move is to get a used system to start with (usually a used gaming PC can be had for like $500ish, and I’m sure there’s plenty of people online you can ask for help speccing something out), squirrel away money for a couple of years (I like to keep a dedicated savings account just for big purchases like tech upgrades. $40 biweekly dissearing into another account you don’t touch is $2k every 2 years, so a 4 year complete refresh cycle for 2 people) and buy when you feel like it. Good news is it’s a small enough amount of cash to easily right the financial ship but still yikes!
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
Are people throwing 128GB in for shits and giggles these days? I’m kinda out of the loop and still used to people arguing about if 32GB is excessive or not. Used to be only needed for media production and honestly it’s still debatable for pure gaming systems if more than 16GB is overkill
- Comment on dating profile 1 week ago:
Is it even meat we’d want to eat though?
Also the easier solution is more TNR and more education and resources to help prevent dumping unwanted cats.
I worked with a shelter for a bit which specialized in feral cat populations. They would work with local landowners and municipalities to trap feral cats and engage in both TNR and they would separate out friendly cats to adopt out. They also worked with a local community college’s vet program to run an annual spayathon, with low cost spay/neutering services available, giving veterinary students valueble experience and helping reduce cat populations.
With enough funding such projects can be successful, but its ultimately a numbers game since one mother can have a litter of 5+ kittens every year, and those 5 kittens can have litters the next year and so on, so it takes a lot of hands on work trapping, spaying/neutering and releasing and maintaining that progress indefinitely to make a dent in the local popupation. There’s always going to be a few cats you never catch who keep the population going, so you have to limit their impact on the overall population
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
Its not just electricity but also water consumption, and noise pollution if not particulate pollution too.
They provide little benefit to the surrounding communities with very few jobs by design and just consume local resources at usually discounted bulk rates to sell a service that possibly nobody locally would be in the market for
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
Also the scariest part of this datacenter inflation is how much of these new data centers are going to be abandoned within the next 5 years when the AI bubble pops and suddenly the companies spending like crazy on datacenter growth need to cut back. There’ll be lots of big empty buildings outside of small towns costing taxpayers a ton of money, much like when any big box store closes up shop. You can either spend a ton of money tearing it down, a ton of money rebuilding it into something useful, a ton of money attracting another business which may or may not front the cost for remodeling the space or a ton of money maintaining the empty property so it doesn’t fall over and become even more of a blight. There’s no winning for these small municipalities that just get used and abused by large businesses
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
Zram on Linux is awesome! I’ve used it heavily in both memory constrained systems and systems with 16+GB of memory running very poorly optimized code
Running for example, Cities Skylines with 40GB of mods can easily lead to running memory usage being 20-30GB uncompressed. With zram I can load that same mod load out on a 16GB laptop with no swap and it won’t crash where it would crash for being out of memory before.
Another example is Proxmox with over-provisioned lxc containers. Since it’s still the kernel scheduler running all of the processes in those containers zram can keep them all running nicely even when a heavily modded Minecraft server gets a few players online and starts pushing past memory limits, where before I set it up I’d have some of the Minecraft server processes get killed to free up memory resources without warning or proper logging by Minecraft
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
The good thing about new AM4 boards being available at this point in time is you have options to keep older hardware running. Usually the CPU and memory will out-survive motherboard. Much like those new Chinese motherboards supporting 4th and 6th gen Intel CPUs, this is great for longevity and reduces how much production is needed
In a sane world, the limitations of a CPU socket would be reached, and then newer SKUs would no longer be released
I’d argue that it would be best if computers were more like cars, a new platform gets released each decade or so, and small improvements are made to individual parts but the parts are largely interchangable within the platform and produced for a decade or two before production is retired. More interchangable parts, slower release cycle and more opportunities for repair instead of replacement
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
Gaming GPUs during normal crypto markets don’t compute fast enough to mine crypto profitably, but if crypto prices get high enough such as during a boom cycle, it can become profitable to mine on gaming GPUs
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
There was a nice window from about a year or two ago to about 3 months ago where no individual components were noticably inflated. Monitors took the longest to recover since the pandemic shortages so that was arguably around the beginning of this year that they seemed to fully normalize
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
You can load a can’t stress how good planetary map into RAM wholly
This is the part people are struggling with, because it’s probably 3 difference sentences mashed together, whether in your head, by your fingers or by an autocarrot, but regardless its completely incomprehensible as a result
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
16GB is fine for most games, 32GB is handy if you run a lot of poorly optimized mods, but also memory compression helps with that significantly. 8gb of memory gets pretty cozy for gaming these days though, but again memory compression makes a big difference.
Both my and my wife’s computers have 32GB of RAM because it was cheap enough to not be worth worrying about, but if RAM is expensive you don’t need a ton of it to enjoy your games
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
This assumes machine learning models are able to get better than they currently are. Newer models have been plateauing in quality of outputs (improvements have been noticable in video and image generation, but even that is slowing down)
I don’t think we’re going to see machine learning models that perform well enough to create printing press level change to the world
- Comment on RAM is so expensive that stores are selling it at market prices 1 week ago:
That’s insane. I literally just got that same kit of memory free in a NewEgg bundle just 2 months ago! And the 32GB kits I was looking at were all priced at around $75-125 for 32GB
- Comment on This is the type of Q&A that makes the internet so important 1 week ago:
Ehhh all of my clean towels hang too because my bathroom is so small the sink is in the hallway, and I don’t have space for another dresser in my bedroom. Something something old house problems
- Comment on This is the type of Q&A that makes the internet so important 1 week ago:
I mean, when you use a towel to dry off your clean body, does it dirty the towel that much?
- Comment on Well, when you frame it like that it sounds absurd. But yes. 1 week ago:
It does raise the question of who is financing these accounts. Is it one of those skeevy conservative thinktanks that writes policies for politicians to rubber stamp? Is it the Republican party itself? Is it financed by the actual governments of the countries these accounts appear to be from as a way to try to encourage policy that benefits them?
