Jake [he/him]

  • 4 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: April 3rd, 2024

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  • The offline AI that I tried a few months ago probably needed training on the noise environment to get decent results. I forget which ones I tried but likely the ones with extensions already in Oobabooga Textgen. I was messing with text to speech mostly, but some of the ones that do TTS also have packages and examples for STT. Nothing I tried for offline generation was good enough to speak as an AI prompt without manual corrections.




  • Yeah, but neither makes sense any more. I use yymmdd in my default file naming for natural sorting hierarchy. I just don’t think in that context. I guess that makes this post an interesting reflection from a couple of extra angles.

    Our US 3 digit area codes for phone number regions are likely not really paralleled elsewhere in the world either. It’s interesting all the little cultural subtleties that shape the mind.







  • The Expanse in the first couple of seasons did a decent job of showing that the characters were flawed and not at the center of the world while struggling against a system that is a more realistic portrayal of what monsters exceptionalism really creates.

    This aspect of Star Trek the next generation did a pretty good job of contextualizing the fact that the events on the Enterprise were the stories of one of many such vessels.


    EDIT:

    That is why I like Dune and Asimov’s universe as well.

    In Dune there is a ton of exceptionalism, and it is outright shown to be awful for the average person. I would argue that every form of exceptionalism throughout the books is always met with an equally negative outcome and flaw.

    In Asimov’s stuff there is exceptional altruism in Daneel. The most exceptional characters like The Mule is shown as a tyrant. Hari Seldon is unexceptional in his exceptional idea, but is dead for the exceptional events that followed and his exceptionalism is constantly in question.



  • I’m so sick of exceptionalism. Every damn thing seems to center around some shitty thinly veiled oligarch, their kids as some hero, or unhappenable origins and an impossible hero. Everything is geared towards cultural acceptance of some authoritarian neo feudal dystopian future.

    Stories can be interesting in other spaces. We all exist within those real spaces. We can fantasize about better places and times within similar realities as our own. I view all this exceptionalism like collective narcissism. I can’t tell if it is an universal writing bias or a publishing bias, but I don’t like it.




  • Having all that heat in a laptop sucks bad. Maybe if a person is super into gaming and in a dorm or something they might use one for gaming. The really capable laptop GPUs like a 16GB all but negate the benefits of a laptop. The battery life is terrible, the noise is annoying, and the heat is everywhere, like blowing around the keys onto your hand. Plus you have an even more obscure hardware chain with modern laptops having all kinds of closed source and poorly supported nonsense that sucks.

    Your thermals are tied between the CPU and GPU in a laptop. If either is over loaded thermally both will throttle. There are also a lot more thermal interrupt states in a laptop GPU. If anyone tries to hack around with these to push them past their inbuilt safety margins while following guides that are intended for the desktop GPU version of the hardware it can easily lead to failure.

    The only real reason to get a gaming laptop is if you travel a lot, if you’re extremely space restricted like sharing a bedroom with someone, or if you’re disabled and need the ergonomics for a specific reason.

    I don’t see how any aspect mentioned is regional in nature.


  • Which one. I've had 2 major collisions. Both were due to u-turns. Both involved vehicles that appeared to be stopped while parallel parked, and both were in areas where u-turns are illegal.

    The one that broke my neck and back was from a person making a u-turn directly in front of another SUV, on a downhill, in a turn.

    It was like the most stupid situation you could never imagine actually happening. The person was stopped, double parked. As soon as I saw the blocked lane a SUV was passing me in the second lane. I merged into the number 2 lane behind the SUV, and that is where my memory stops for 3 hours. Because of court stuff I know all the rest. The SUV in front of me never saw it coming and did not even brake as they tee boned into the double parked SUV that made a sudden u-turn in front of them from a dead stop with no warning. My GPS computer showed I dropped from 36mph to 29.7mph before the next way point was a great distance backwards where it broke off and landed. I’ve passed stuff like double parked cars many hundreds of times, but you just can’t predict someone this stupid.

    The driver was a foreign national asylum seeker from somewhere around the Mediterranean I’ll refrain from mentioning. They happened to be a first generation driver and had the measured competence of a US 3rd grader. Their license was restricted to work only, but they were self employed so the restriction was meaningless. Their driving record was atrocious, and they even got a DUI 2 days later while I was still under critical watch in the hospital ICU. In other words the poster child driver for fuck cars.

    Predicting just how stupid some functioning humans really are is impossible. Intuition lies to us about what we have control over in our lives. If we always held awareness of the potential catastrophes, humans would be completely non functional.

    I was known for riding safe. For a couple of years I commuted to my first bike shop job that was 26 miles each way by the most direct bike route. I rode that five to six days a week, the sixth being the group rides I lead out of the shop every other Saturday, and I raced a half dozen crits a year too. Even though the 26 mile route was considerably faster, and all was technically bike route, I rode a 33 mile version that maximized my time on dedicated bike trails even though it meant more hills too. I was also the guy that would fall back in the group ride to help newbies or help people learn to ride in a group. I was very cautious, a stop at all the stop signs type of roadie. I’ve been hit in other ways, but those are insignificant. U-turns are the biggest danger for the regular rider and commuter.


  • I'm all for ya having fun and your right to hurt yourself.

    I am a former racer, commuter, and professional Buyer for a chain of bike shops. I’m also disabled from the crash involving the 6th and 7th cars that have hit me in the last 170k+ miles of riding. I only barely survived what I simplify as a “broken neck and back.” Cars making U-turns are what will get you if you ride long enough, especially commuting. It will look like just another person turning in front of you, you’ll compensate like usual, and before your brain can even register what is really happening, what was your normal escape route will close and you’re going to crash really hard. It is the only kind of crash that your intuition is useless against.

    I digress, because I care too much. My point is that I still ride on a dedicated road bike trail. I encounter children on their Power Wheels™ /s doing wheelies all the time. I even have many playing chicken. Any small head injury is likely to kill me. I’m actually not all that concerned about dying. I’ve been present for two crashes where someone died. These things haunt you for life. I’d rather not die while stressed over the impact my struggle has on you for that 30-45 minutes if I am conscious. It will change your life nearly as much as mine.

    Never do anything on a bike that requires anyone else to “trust you.” Every time you have a close call in a car or on a bike due to another person’s error, and you’re mumbling to yourself “fucking idiot,” that other person is saying to themselves or others “trust me, you’re fine.” Every time you tell yourself “trust me” you’re everyone else’s “fucking idiot.”

    No one is aware of all the things that can go wrong. However, I’ve been riding for a lot of miles. I know more than most what can go wrong. The most likely cause of my death on a bike right now is a naive child doing a wheelie. All it takes is a snapped chain, a fractured freehub pawl or outer bearing race, a tire blowout, a snapped spoke that causes a cascade of 3 or more spokes to break, or simple over confidence and a lack of balance. I have seen all of these things happen at least once.

    The only time I appear completely fine to the casual observer is when I’m on a bike. I’m fast; likely faster than you typically ride at with lithium legs, and have a top speed in the mid thirties on flat ground without a tailwind, - if I care to try. What you can’t see is the 10 years of spending most days laying down from not being able to hold posture, my constant back pain on par with a bad bee sting that never goes away or fades to background, or how I can’t turn my head left anywhere near far enough to see over my shoulder.

    The only way to help the issue of youthful irresponsibility on e-bikes is to develop a culture of shaming and shunning any fellow riders that endanger others on bike trails. That is a tough ask from youths that are notorious for a lack of well established and outspoken character capable of aligning positive traits through peer pressure. I type all this in the hopes that you are the exception to this stereotype.