• 2 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2023

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  • I used to think this line of thinking was dangerous and was going to help Trump win reelection. But I think you’re right, we can’t let the threat of a Republican being elected coerce into supporting a genocide.

    The only clear answer is to teach the Democrats they need to hear and listen to us and champion our policies. The only way I can see to do that is to throw my support entirely behind Donald Trump and other Republican candidates up and down the ballot.

    Maybe once only right wing candidates are winning the Democrats will learn that the only way to power is to run extremely left wing candidates and we’ll finally see some progress.




  • I’ve had pretty good luck running llamafile on my laptop. The speeds aren’t super fast, and I can only use the models that are Mistral 7B and smaller, but the results are good enough for casual use and general R and Python code.

    Edit: my laptop doesn’t have a dedicated GPU, and I don’t think llamafile has support for Intel GPUs yet. CPU inference is still pretty quick.





  • So it takes you 15 minutes to put water in tank, put grounds and filter into the coffee pot, and brew it? And you can’t do anything else productive with your time while the coffee is brewing like take a shower, login to work a few minutes early and read and answer emails, brush your teeth, do some dishes, take out the trash, walk your dog, or anything?

    And your work doesn’t allow you to get up out of your chair for the 30 seconds it would take you to walk from your computer to coffee pot and fill your cup and walk back? Or even better, bring the entire carafe back to your desk with you? Are you working for the FSB and they have surveillance cameras in your house or something?

    It really sounds like you’re trying your absolute hardest to turn making coffee into such an onerous chore that it negates all the other benefits of not having to schlep to an office.


  • My personal theory is that a lot of advocacy for working in-person goes away when you remove:

    1. People that financially benefit from office culture (office land lords, restaurants near office buildings, janitorial services, etc.)
    2. Social vampires that view the office as the best place to gossip and share their boring personal lives with a captive audience
    3. Managers and executives with poor leadership skills and low self esteem





  • A lot of people are focused on this quote:

    Witness Reverend Jeff Hood told reporters he saw a man ‘struggling for their life’ for 22 minutes as Smith became the first US death row inmate executed by nitrogen asphyxia

    Which says to me that from the time they brought him in and strapped him down until he died lasted about 22 minutes and the murderer struggled physically against the restraints the entire time.

    This quote farther down suggests from the time they started administering the gas until he died only took a couple of minutes:

    But, witnesses said Smith appeared conscious for several minutes, shaking and writhing on the gurney.

    Several could be 25, and he could have been shaking from pain and agony, but it seems more likely he was holding his breath and shaking out of fear while trying to fight and get free.

    Keep in mind that the first quote is from his anti-death penalty spiritual advisor and this entire article is brought to us by a magazine with an “end the death penalty campaign”.

    I’m generally anti-death penalty myself, but nitrogen asphyxiation seems way better than electrocution, lethal injection, or hanging. They could probably do it better by using some kind of general anesthesia to render him unconscious and then flood the room with pure nitrogen, or even just get rid if the death penalty all together. Unfortunately this is the world we live in and so fae this is the least bad option we’ve seen.




  • Basically it means that you lose the ability to control reactor temperature. Sodium cooled reactors general have a positive thermal coefficient for reactivity, meaning when temperature increases the reactor power goes up.

    When you lose cooling your temperature rises, which results in increased reactor power which results in increased temperature which results in power which … in a self reinforcing loop until a melt down occurs and everyone gets Chernobyled.

    Even if the reactor isn’t susceptible to this cycle, liquid sodium is a solid at relatively low temperatures. So in some situations the liquid sodium will stop circulating and then start to cool and solidify. This effectively blocks the cooling pipes and it is very difficult to get the sodium heated up enough to liquefy and restore cooling circulation. This can again lead to getting Chernobyled.