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Comment Windows Autoplay - the gift that keeps on giving (Score 4, Insightful) 25

Goddamn Autoplay/autorun.inf, a script kiddies wet dream for spreading crapware.

The day M$ enabled flash drives to run a program as soon as a flash drive is plugged in, with zero user intervention was just BEGGING to be abused. And it has for decades now.

Idiots. I've been disabling it from day one on my builds and its saved me (and my clients) a LOT of headaches.

Comment Re:Ads and captchas (Score 4, Interesting) 84

I run a small web site with a decent level of human traffic for what it is. I haven't run the figures recently, but last time I did, about 90% of the page accesses were from bots. Fortunately, most of the bots are dumb and measures like captchas block them from the pages that need protection, as a first layer of security.

So it isn't a question of letting some bots through, it's a question of letting a hoard of bots through that will dominate traffic to the site.

Comment Re:Flash is costly? (Score 5, Informative) 37

Creating the training dataset is the *last* step. I have dozens of TB of raw data which I use to create training datasets that are only a few GB in size. Of which I'll have a large number sitting around at any point in time.

Take a translation task. I start with several hundred gigs of raw data. This inflates to a couple terabytes after I preprocess it into indexed matching pair datasets (for example, if you have an article that's published in N different languages, it becomes (N * N-1) language pairs - so, say, UN, World Bank, EU, etc multilingual document sets greatly inflate). I may have a couple different versions of this preprocessed data sitting around at any point in time. But once I have my indexed matching pair datasets, I'll weighted-sample only a relatively small subset of it - stressing higher-quality data over lower quality and trying to ensure a desired mix of languages.

But what I do is nothing compared to what these companies do. They're working with common crawl. It grows at a rate of 200-300 TB per month. But the vast majority of that isn't going to go into their dataset. It's going to be markup. Inapplicable file types. Duplicates. Junk. On and on. You have to whittle it down to the things that are actually relevant. And in your various processing stages you'll have significant duplication. Indeed, even the raw training files... I don't know about them, but I'm used to working with jsons, and that adds overhead on its own. Then during training there's various duplications created for the various processing stages - tokenization, patching with flash attention, and whatnot.

You also use a lot of disk space for your models. It's not just every version of the foundation you train (and your backups thereof) - and remember that enterprise models are hundreds of billions to trillions of FP16 parameters in their raw states - but especially the finetune. You can make a finetune in like a day or so; these can really add up.

Certainly disk space isn't as big of a cost as your GPUs and power. But it is a meaningful cost. As a hobbyist I use a RAID of 6 20TB drives and one of 2 4TB SSDs. But that's peanuts compared to what people working with common crawl and having hundreds of employees each working on their own training projects will be eating up in an enterprise environment.

Comment Putting numbers into perspective (Score 4, Interesting) 134

This is all to produce a peak of 240k EVs per year. Production "starts" in 2028. It takes years for a factory to hit full production. Let's be generous and say 2030.

Honda sold 1,3 million vehicles in the US alone last year - let alone all of North America, including both Canada and Mexico. If all those EVs were just for the US it'd be 18% of their sales, but for all of North America, significantly less.

In short, Honda thinks that in 2030 only maybe 1/7th to 1/8th of its North American sales will be EVs. This is a very pessimistic game plan.

Comment Re:Gotta start somewhere (Score 5, Informative) 155

Ford made the Ford Ranger EV 1998 to 2002, then the Ford Focus Electric from 2011 to 2018 before switching to the Mach-E. They are not "new at it". They're just bad at it.

To be fair, I have a lot more hope for Ford than GM, as Farley seems to actually understand the critical importance of turning things around and the limited timeframes to do so, unlike GM, which still seems to only care about press.

Comment Re:How much is really delayed maintenance? (Score 1) 116

Copper is not "the last mile". It's the last five meters. If that. When people talk about "the grid", they're not talking about the wiring in your walls. Which you don't have to redo anyway for adding an EV. Nobody has to touch, say, your kitchen wiring to add an EV charger.

"The grid" is the wiring leading up to your house. Those conductors are alumium, not copper. Occasionally the SER/SEU cable will occasionally be copper, but even that's generally alumium these days. And that's only to the service connection point (not even to the transformer - to the point of handoff between grid-owned and the homeowner-owned, generally right next to the house), e.g. after the service drop line with overhead service that descends down to the building. The "last mile" is absolutely not copper. Approximately zero percent of modern grid-owned wiring is copper, and even the short customer-owned connection from the drop line into the house is usually alumium.

Grids are not copper. Period. This isn't the year 1890 here.

And no, grid operators don't make money selling power. They make money providing the grid through which power is sold.

I have never seen a single utility that charges a flat grid access fee to residential consumers, anywhere on Earth.

Distinction can be hard to grasp for someone utterly ignorant on the subject

Says a guy who thinks that there's a mile of copper leading up to your house.

Comment Re:How much is really delayed maintenance? (Score 5, Interesting) 116

The grid is not made of copper. You thought it was? Copper is for home wiring, if that. Up to that point, it's alumium, bundled with steel on major lines for tensile strength. Does it look like copper to you?

As for the article: grid operators don't build out grids on a lark. They do it to sell power, because they make money selling power. If people want to buy more power because they want to charge an EV, then that's more money available for them. EVs are a boon to grid operators. They're almost an ideal load. Most charging done at night, steady loads, readily shiftable and curtailable with incentives, etc. Daytime / fast charging isn't, but that's a minority. And except in areas with a lot of hydro, most regions already have the ample nighttime generation capacity; it's just sitting idle, power potential unsold. In short, EVs can greatly improve their profitability. Which translates to any combiation of three things:

1) More profits
2) A better, more reliable grid
3) Lower rates

    * ... depending on the regulations and how competitive of an environment it is.

As for the above article: the study isn't wrong, it's just - beyond the above (huge) problem - it is based on stupid assumptions. Including that there's zero incentives made for people to load shift when their vehicles charge, zero battery buffering to shift loads, and zero change in the distribution of generation resources over the proposed timeframe. All three of these are dumb assumptions.

Also, presenting raw numbers always leads to misleading answers. Let me rephrase their numbers: the cost is $7 to $26 per person per year. The cost of 1 to 5 gallons of gas per year at California prices..

Comment Re:Working on Sopwith, AMA (Score 1) 42

Hi, I'm the lead dev so I can also answer:

1. Nothing specific to Linux/BSD. The hardest part of the codebase to work with is probably the movement/collision/AI code which is very hard to follow. It's hard to change because any change can break things in subtle ways.

2. Nope

3. Probably the networking code. Sopwith always had network code (it was written as a tech demo for an early LAN) but almost nobody ever got the chance to really use it. Seeing it finally working over TCP/IP was very satisfying.

4. I'm planning on adding a level editor which I think should really open up the game to expansion.

5. Fun and comical gameplay. Trying to avoid debris as everything around you is exploding in complete chaos is hilarious to me.

6. No plans for these at all, I'd personally be against adding them. I want to keep it as a great old game, not a lame modern one. I could talk at length about this kind of thing but that's the brief summary.

7. I've actually considered this, yes. The original HUD is very ambiguous and hard to read; effectively just some small lines with no labels. I've actually gone as far as to mock up some better graphics but there's no integration into the game yet.

8. Yes, support for custom levels was actually added recently and the latest release includes an example level. There is not yet a level editor, however, which is a big obstacle for modders. I also think that to make modding interesting the game will need expanding to support different gameplay types, new types of planes, enemies and items, etc. I have some ideas but a level editor should be the first priority.

9. I've personally lost interest in the modern game scene. There have been a couple of recent games I've enjoyed, Elite: Dangerous is one example. I suspect it's partly because I'm old now and don't have the time to follow this stuff. In general I tend to prefer playing (and modding) older games and have had fun recently introducing my daughter to them.

Comment Re:Israel (Score 2) 119

Funny that to you, "Israel" and "Jews" are synonymous. As if all Jewish people unconditionally support all actions of the state of Israel, even those which are highly controversial within Israel itself.

This false synonymy creates an extremely harmful backlash. Stop doing it.

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