I don't live in the US but I recently moved to a rural area and in doing so I have started to plan out a utility-independent future.

Why? Well, various reasons, including water and sewage companies taking the piss (or actually... not... just dumping the piss in every river in the country and crying that they can't process it because they gave all my money to their shareholders, but... anyway) but also because electricity is literally a con too.

And nowadays? I *can* viably make my own electricity. So... why wouldn't I? Why would I pay a company to do a bad job when I can do it myself?

I did a number of things when I moved to that area, including demanding smart meters on everything, and I monitored my electricity down to 30 minute intervals for 2 years. And you know what it showed? That 1% of the time, I have no power. That's in dribs and drabs, a power cut here or there, a scheduled one lasting a day or there, and so on. But 1% of the time they can't even get electricity to me and... there's nothing I can do about that.

So, if I want a computer to stay on... I already need to spend money and do it myself because they simply can't do it. 1% may not sound a lot, but that's 3.65 days a year if you think about it. Spread out randomly - an hour here, an hour there. Literally my computer "uptime" was "two nines" and that was driven entirely by grid power supply.

That's ATROCIOUS in my opinion, in the 21st century. And I wasn't prepared to tolerate it. I was already buying the house with the intention of becoming utility-independent but that really drove home why I need to. So I started to build my own solar, for several reasons.

1) To ride out the outages
2) To reduce my bills so they got as little money from me as possible
3) To not be reliant on the grid
4) To ultimately remove the need for grid entirely

And it's really not been hard. I started with cheap junk just to see if it would even work in my climate, with that house orientation, etc. It did. I started with a small 12v panel and an old car battery. And it was actually worth doing when I ran the numbers. It would take a few years to pay off the cost of the panel, but it would do so.

And then every month for 2 years, I would get more panels, more and better batteries, more efficient and powerful equipment in between. And it got to the point where it is technically capable of running my whole house for much of the year. And that's before I ever got onto SERIOUS panels and professional installs. That's just me, a bunch of cheap 12V panels, some 12V LiFePO4 batteries and a serious enough charger/inverter, then later going onto 24V by re-arranging them.

And I'm looking at that and thinking: Why the fuck hasn't government / the utilities done this for me? Why am *I* having to do it? Because it really is that simple and they have access to far more land, far better kit. But, no, I'm still paying inflated grid prices from when Ukraine was first invaded because of the price of GAS. What the fuck are we doing?

So now, more than ever, I plan to be utility-independent by retirement, which is 20 years away, and whereas before I was wondering if that was even viable in that timeframe, I'm now expecting that to be 100% done way ahead of schedule, just by a factor of "whenever I can be bothered". It was that easy, and doing the maths was that easy.

I might retain a grid connection, or not. It depends on what happens and what kind of low-usage tarrifs I can get in the future but I'm looking at the whole thing thinking "Fuck you, I'll do it myself" because even as an amateur... it's perfectly viable to do so. I don't care if it even costs me more (it won't). I don't care about having a grid connection or not. It's just that I will be able to be *independent* of it. When they play games, raise prices, or have power cuts, I won't be reliant on it at all. I'll use it when it's to my benefit, and not other times.

But all I ever think about the whole thing is: How have I, an amateur, cobbling cheap Chinese shit together, come up with a more reliable and cheaper power supply, that's utterly independent of fuel prices, than an entire national electricity grid could do?

The answer, of course, is corruption and profiteering. That's the only part that I've eliminated. And that's the part that, when it's gone, makes it all viable and even cheaper.

And that's the thing that's going to see me having zero electricity bills when I retire. Just by removing the profit and corruption.

I'll say it again:

Active military personnel carrying around standard mobile phones is such a breach of all kinds of basic security protocols that it should be illegal.

But can't let the troops get bored, eh? Have to let them do their fitbit on board your cruiser that you're trying to keep secret, and have them checking into Facebook while they're in Helmand province, and giving away their movements when they're running around your bases at home, and having an always-on device capable of tracking and recording everything from audio to the radiowaves to location, made by the Chinese, wherever they go.

Dumbest fucking idea ever.

"OpenAI's success in hardware will hinge on bringing a novel approach to the market"

It says as it releases an Alexa....

While Paramount claims they cancelled Colbert as a cost cutting move, that makes no sense since other late night shows on other networks with smaller audiences continue. They must make some sort of financial sense.

It is widely understood, though not provable, that the move was a bribe to Trump in order to get the merger approved. Trump has had a longstanding dislike of Colbert because of his commentary on Trump as a person and as the President.

When is a hard question. Rationally it should never have blown up this much in the first place (some expansion would be rational, but not like we've seen). Clearly the minds driving this are not rational.

Insanity is notoriously hard to predict. That's why short selling is so risky. The market can clearly remain irrational longer than most people can remain solvent when betting against it.

Good question. Their POWER series of CPUs were not insignificant in capability, their chip designers were clearly technically sophisticated, and GPUs are just specialised vector processors with a few extra bells and whistles - stuff IBM is extremely familiar with.

It would not have been difficult to release a GPU or other LLM-specific processor to go along with the POWER11. They'd been working on the POWER11 for 4 years, they knew in 2020 that LLMs had a strong potential to be significant for Big Data processing - an area you use big iron for, they're not rank amateurs, they have plenty of reserve, they could have assembled an emergency team to build a vector processor that was custom-designed for just LLM work, and released an LLM processor card that could run circles around nVidia.

They didn't. Because, as has happened before, their management is simply too stupid and too slow.

What if...

Someone (say someone who was familiar with doxygen and GCC) developed number of comment types, where some stipulated preconditions that must be true for the function to run correctly, postconditions that must be true once the function has run, kernel facilities that the function definitely needs, and kernel facilities that the function definitely doesn't need. These would all be optional for any given function.

A static checker could then validate if the code meets the behaviour expected by the programmer. This is precisely what is done in SPARK, a fork of Ada for high-reliability code. Combined with existing static checker capabilities, this would greatly increase the number of bugs that could be caught with all kinds of tools, AI included.

It could ALSO build a full fine-grained mapping for any fine-grained mandatory access controls system. You'd also want includes that you could import for precompiled libraries. This would allow someone to verify if the code was making unanticipated/undesirable calls but would also make SELinux possible to develop for at the application level.

It would not be trivial. If it was trivial, it would have been done simply because it already IS done in other languages and that makes it "obvious" to anyone who has been programming for a while. However, it should not be massively complicated, simply because you can use AI as the static checker. Once it has a definite set of bounda that must be satisfied, it should be much more capable of knowing what paths would violate those bounds. Which means that the checker stage essentially is trivial today, leaving only the markup stage.

Seems like a problem you could fix overnight with guaranteed national minimum wage, worker's employment rights, and opening up immigration to regain the trust of those people you shot, killed, kidnapped and ripped their children away from.

Who the fuck would CHOOSE to go work in the US at the moment?

Problem1 : You would need conduction (from each cpu/gpu in the server toward a radiator using cooling liquid for example) from the rack to a radiator.
Otherwise if you don't those 100kW would be dumped into very small surface of the GPU/CPU and small radiator they usually have.
At 300K blackbody radiance is ~450 W.m^-2 So you r calculation of the surface of the cylinder is OK, you would only need 222 m^2 to dissipate a blackbody at 300K of 100kW of heat. The problem is that the heat is not dumped into the cylinder directly, but would need to be conducted from the cpu/gpu radiator to the cylinder . And that's where the problem starts, as you would need almost certainly a liquid for the transport, and that brings a lot of issue itself (weight, pump failure, freezing/boiling etc...). And that's not even counting servicing & obsolescence.

IMO the feasability of this is near null zero enough to be disregarded as a tech bro stupid solution in wait of a problem.

much MUCH easier solution is to have the server on earth, in zone where you have a lot of renewable like solar, wind. easier to maintain , cool, and give energy.

Is to set coursework and exams that are specifically crafted to exploit where AI is weak or prone to hallucinate.

You do not ban cheating, because those who cheat will inevitably find ways to circumvent the ban.

Rather, you exploit the properties of the mechanisms of cheating to ensure that those who actually understand the ideas are marked relatively highly (regardless of whether they reach the textbook conclusion) and whose who do not understand the ideas cannot do well even if they give what is in the textbook.

The interest should not be in precise answers, but in precise use of tools of reasoning and analysis, because this is what actually matters when it comes to understanding. Yes, it means you can't standardise so easily, and you have to devise things in ways that don't penalise intuitive thinkers over methodical thinkers, but you cannot teach a subject properly if you are only concerned about the surface.

I didn't see a 5.6 option on the Windows client last night.

Haa anyone else observed 5.6 in the wild?

Trump doesn't need to have power, he only needs to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Companies are risk-averse, which is why Anthropic pulled their AI model for a while.

You can get Veracrypt to work with the Mac, via FUSE, but I don't know how safe/robust that is. It's probably more secure than anything Apple has. It's certainly more secure than anything Microspot has.

But, yeah, it's getting extremely irritating that useful stuff is being taken out of commercial OS' and junk put in.

There's no known client, but there is a very good unknown client:
(For those familiar with Kenny Everett...)

https://dev.to/jfscoertzen/cha...
https://snapcraft.io/chatgpt-d...

Whether it has all the official features, I don't know. But that's your best bet.

Worried about the news cycle moving on from AI, are we guys? Realising that's achievements are vastly outweighed by its costs still, and desperate for a use-case, much like IBM were in the Watson days when they literally had to ask people to suggest things it could do for them because they're run out of things that it could actually do?

Yeah, keep trying. Keep pretending that it's conscious or real intelligence or "looks like a human brain". Because someone's gotta pay those trillions back and you don't want it to be you, right?