Thanks for sharing, that's fascinating. I've only started using ollama within the last month, and I'm really, really regretting I didn't load up my MBP with more ram. When I bought it, 36gb seemed like more than I would probably need..
What models are you using for coding?
What CPU? How well does the CPU + 128gb ram run the models we're talking about?
Calling Belgium 3rd world isn't fair at all. It's a fledging 3rd world country at worst, nothing at all similar to the imminent 3rd world country that (say) the UK is.
You spend a lot of time on X, huh?
but I don't really consider women with 20% bodyfat in their 50s overweight..or men with 15% bodyfat at any age.
Well, you'd be wrong. BF% of >15% for men and >20% is overweight.
The reality is that most women over 50 are closer to 40%, and for any age it's >30%. Over half of women over 30 are obese. (Men aren't great but it's nothing as dire as this.)
This is even with our greatly-loosened criteria for what is considered obese - it used to be even more strict. People today are disgustingly unfit.
Coal isn't 'dirty energy'. Particularly with EPA regulation, it's considered "green" now. It's overall ecological impact (that is, in terms of total lifecycle cost) is significantly lower than wind.
Saying "wind is green" is myopic and short sighted, and doesn't include the massively disproportional material and ecological cost of producing the disposable steel and concrete towers with large, easily damaged fiberglass resin blades.
Wind isn't the lowest cost for baseload - if it isn't subsidized. It's not even competitive with natural gas, and is markedly less reliable.
It's subsidization which makes it cost competitive. And even then, it's only competitive per kwh, it's not competitive for primary base load (which is 100% what a datacenter needs) because wind is cyclical and periodic. It isn't always windy in WY, and it's often too windy for wind power (35mph+ winds). I'm really tired of the tripe propaganda about wind/solar. I LIKE wind and solar, conceptually (and for the ability to run it off-grid), but let's be real.
The solution here, long term, is likely SMR generation at-scale. You've got many datacenters, and the capacity scales rapidly. A single large reactor doesn't make fiscal sense, but a national program to produce industrialized SMRs at scale which could be deployed as needed over a period of years would, enabling cheap power generation. When you build at scale, you're able to drastically drive costs down.
Fission is also now on the horizon.
But in the interim, green coal and NG are likely to be the thing.
(I'm not looking forward to the massive impact that this is going to have on the regional NG market; NG has already gotten significantly more expensive, and so many people use it for heating.)
I do accept it. CO2 is 0.042% of our atmosphere. It has not been shown that CO2 is primarily or even significantly contributory to the greenhouse effect, however.
Even if it would, an increase of 500ppm (which would make the atmosphere itself terminally toxic to most mammal life) would only increase the global temperature 0.18C (according to original calculations I had chatgpt just do), which is hardly consequential in and of itself. And CO2 isn't going to increase that much from human action alone.
Nothingburger.
Almost all of them are deceit through omission, deception, or outright fabrication. So much of their data is falsifiable, particularly when it gets to the media as some sensational datapoint - like "The Gulf of Mexico is 110F! Climate change disaster!" or some such nonsense - when they're getting the data from the reading from one buoy inside a single marina. Happens all the time.
The thing is, there hasn't actually been an increase in extreme climate events. There's actually been a decrease.
Our infrastructure has simply become more intolerant of them, because we haven't been maintaining it or building it towards the possibility of exceptional weather. The result is more damage and more death, but it isn't caused by an increase in either the frequency or the severity.
You can quite quickly see there's a strong correlation between solar activity and the status of our severe weather events, too - it's well known and established fact - so I'm unclear how this in any way relates to (human-caused) climate change. Someone explain this to me?
The problem with the K-12 system is that it's just _bad_. There is no drive for excellence, so students that don't have engaged parents are just coasting. In some places (Seattle) you could graduate with a passing score without even attending the classes and randomly filling out the tests. Then there are busybodies that try to cancel math and magnet schools because they're racist (see: California).
There's a lot of variability here. The Seattle and California models are baffling to me. Totally agree that the US system is largely focused on irrelevant (or immutable) things. I have a kid in highschool now. His peer group is very, very impressive. Multiple perfect scores on the ACT every year. ~55% of the highschool is English-language learners and 60%+ is free lunch eligible (meaning poverty level or close). There's an engineering magnet program that does really, really cool stuff. The school was on lockdown 3 times last year for gang fights.
It's a tough environment, comparatively.
This is really apparent when you look at college admission tests. In the US you have SAT tests that are trivially easy to pass with perfect scores (more than 2% of people get them!), and ACT with a bit more reasonable 0.22% of perfect scores. In China you have Gaokao where _nobody_ ever got the perfect score, in Korea you have CSAT with something like 5 people a year getting perfect scores, etc.
I have a different take! What's the point of a test that nobody ever gets a perfect score? I guarantee you that I can design a test that nobody ever aces, but it also wouldn't be worth anything. I think there needs to be a middle ground between overtesting, teaching to the test, and tests being the be all and end all of education, and the loosey goosey approach one often encounters in the US (most commonly among leftists) that thinks all testing is bad and racist and invalid and hurts kids.
Another thing to look at is the competitions. You can likely remember your high school's football team name, but you probably have never heard about your school's math olympiad teams. Schools in the US spend a lot of money on stadiums and gyms, but hardly any on academic competitions. It's the opposite in China and Russia. Nobody cares about the athletic performance, but schools actively compete academically with each other.
You are probably assuming the wrong things given the demographics of Slashdot and those few of us who have hung on for decades at this point! I was not on the math team, but I had friends who were. I participated in both Latin and Computer Science competitions (and marching band). Our football team sucked (I know this from marching band). But yeah, I'm sure a huge amount of money was spent on the gym and fields and athletics, far beyond what was spent on supporting the best academic achievers.
You will get NO argument from me that America's obsession with sports, from the cradle to the grave, is hugely detrimental to our society and culture.
I hope that the current mess with NIL, paying college athletes (I will NOT call them "student athletes" -- what a joke) forces some or many schools to back off on their sports expenditures and focuses, but I'm not holding my breath.
It's mostly an artifact of the way the Science proficiency is tested, the questions are mostly the logic-type deduction questions and require little if any specific knowledge. If you look at physics in particular, the US is far behind China.
Hey, I asked you your metric, I wasn't planning on nitpicking it!
China is not a member of the OECD, but they did unofficial scoring for the Beijing-Shanghai area, and they came out in the top 3 countries.
Sure, just like micro-regions, individual demographic groups in the US, etc., score higher.
IMHO, US public education is amongst the very best in the world at the high end and pretty bad at the low end. The real confounding factor is that demographics are hard to escape.
I agree PISA is a reasonable standard.
So, in the context of STEM that you raised, the US scored 14 points above average, #16 in Science placement. That seems strong to me.
Math is slightly below average (-4 points), number 34. Weak.
Reading, US placed #9, seems strong again.
You mentioned immigrants being the majority of STEM students. I don't know if that is true, but, using the metric you picked of PISA scores, some of the countries that send the most immigrants to the US in STEM
The chart at the bottom of the Wikipedia page that includes 2015 US State results and racial breakdowns for the Mathematics portion for the US over multiple years is fascinating, and I think, should make an impact on your thinking.
(For instance, in the 2018 math results, Asian students in the US scored 539, whites scored 503, and the US average was 478. That puts US Asian students between Hong Kong and Taiwan in position #5 and white students in between Seden and Finland at #20. Black students in the US scored 419, the level of Thailand and Uruguay, around the upper 50s in rank. Kind of changes things a bit?)
What are you smoking? The US K-12 is the reason immigrants are now the majority of STEM students in the US universities. It's a disgrace.
What metric would you use to compare K-12 public education systems around the world?
Both of my grandarents died from lung ailments.
One of my grandfathers worked in factories his entire life, smoked for about 20 years of his youth, and and was generally of the socioeconomic level that wasn't able to live an extremely healthy lifestyle. He developed emphysema and associated conditions, and died in his low 70s. He had been on oxygen for years at that point.
My other grandfather never smoked a day in his life, never drank, worked in academia, swam daily until sometime in his 80s, and died right around age 90--from lung cancer! One of the doctors asked him if he had any career asbestos exposure and he answered "Well I did go down into an asbestos mine in 1934..."
You never know what will get you, but dying at age 90 and being in good physical and mental shape is pretty good by me!
"Joy is wealth and love is the legal tender of the soul." -- Robert G. Ingersoll
