• 1 Post
  • 179 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 10th, 2023

help-circle

  • Militants specifically use these pagers for security and stealth. Everyone else just uses phones.

    It’s a brilliant way to target only combatants, and also expose them to their friends and neighbours. This attack is incredibly disruptive with very little collateral damage compared to alternatives.

    And yes, it’s terrorism, an attack meant to inspire terror and disrupt communication networks with a chilling effect much larger than the actual damage. However it’s interesting as unlike most terrorism it does not target civilians.

    It’s also terrifying to think we are living in a world where a malicious component attack is a legitimate concern. This is one of those moments that change the world - I’m sure every industry is thinking about the danger of their foreign supply chain right now.




  • This would work but assumes the primary use of the machine is Windows and derates your performance under Linux significantly due to USB speeds. Even if you’re storing your data on the Windows HDD, NTFS drivers are dog slow compared to EXT4 and other *nix filesystems.

    Also some BIOSes are a pain to get to boot off removable drives reliably so it really depends on what your machine is.

    I’ve used Linux as a primary dev system for well over a decade now, and with the current state of Windows I’d really recommend just taking the leap, keep your Windows box if you need Windows software and build a dedicated Linux workstation.



  • I play a lot of couch coop with my kid but adults would enjoy all these too. Most can be found under $20 on Steam and a lot are fairly lightweight games but have good coop mechanics and can be a lot of fun to sit down for an hour or two with.

    • Overcooked 1 + 2 (but 2 really is better) you will love or hate it depending on your personalities, nothing in between. We loved it
    • Ship of Fools
    • Enter the Gungeon
    • Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime
    • Moving Out

    On Switch

    • Cadence of Hyrule
    • Don’t starve together (only split screen on console not PC… Wtf)
    • Pikmin


  • Great to hear this story of success. That plus

    $266.99 per probe for the original proprietary one

    Reminds me of Schneider’s stupid proprietary dongle for programming their PLCs. It’s just a CH341 in a funny shaped case that fits into the funny shaped slot on the PLC, where it plugs onto an ordinary 0.1" pin header to talk logic level serial.

    Plus it has a custom USB ID of course. Probably costs $2 to manufacture, sells for almost $300 as well.


  • I don’t see how people like you miss the entire concept of “base load”.

    I live in a region with vast amounts of renewable energy resources. It’s always windy and the sun shines almost every day. I have solar panels on my house that cover most of my DHW and a large fraction of my summer cooling load, and keep most of my appliances running.

    But right now, the sun is down and the wind is flat. And I still need power. My battery storage would be depleted by morning, damaging it through overdischarge if I don’t buy power from the grid instead.

    And it’s a lovely summer evening with no heating or cooling demand! What about midwinter, -35C and dark and snowy? Where is my power coming from on that day, after a month of days just like it?

    Nuclear.



  • It’s complicated. The main issue is, I live on a remote farm without cell coverage, except in the tiny zone under my 50’ tower with booster.

    However I now have Starlink, and wired and wireless APs covering a large area with high speed, low latency data.

    So, port my number to VoIP.ms, which supports SMS, and make all my calls/texts through Wifi using SIP. On the road, use a basic cell plan with unlimited slow data that is still fast enough for voice. Tested, working, so far fairly simple.

    Now the issues. RCS won’t work with my now VoIP provisioned number, because there’s no SIM for it. The SIM in the phone has a different number, that of the new plan which will be unreachable at the farm by voice/SMS just like the old number used to be.

    This would all be a non-issue if my provider supported VoWifi on anything other than iPhones, but sadly this is not an option. So I’ve got service everywhere now, but am stuck with voice and SMS, no RCS or MMS.



  • Right, we need to come up with better terms for talking about “AI”. Personally at the moment I’m considering any transformer-type ML system to be part of the category, as you stated none of them are any more “intelligent” than any others. They’re all just a big stack of tensor operations. So if one is AI, they all are.

    Remember long ago when “fuzzy logic” was all the hype and considered to be AI? Just a very early form of classifier network but everyone was super excited at the time.


  • I’m just stating that “AI” is a broad field. These lightweight and useful transformer models are a direct product of other AI research.

    I know what you mean, but simply stating “Don’t use AI” isn’t really valid anymore as soon these ML models will be a common component. There are even libraries and hardware acceleration support for tensor operations on the ESP32-S3.


  • evranch@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe AI bill that has Big Tech panicked
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    4 months ago

    It’s possible for local AI models to be very economical on energy, if used for the right tasks.

    For example I’m running RapidOCR which uses a modern transformer architecture, and absolutely blows away traditional OCR at capturing data from character displays.

    Doesn’t even need a GPU and returns results in under a second on a modern CPU. No preprocessing needed, just feed it an image. This little multimodal transformer is just as much “AI” as bloated general purpose GPTs, but it’s cheap, fast and useful.


  • Look at Saskatchewan, Canada. We’re the only province with a public telecom, SaskTel.

    Most people in the cities and even larger towns have fiber, and our cell plans are significantly cheaper than anywhere else in Canada despite being a rural province with a large coverage area to population ratio.

    We also have decent electricity rates considering we have no hydro, and the cheapest natural gas in Canada. Thanks to SaskPower and SaskEnergy.

    Public utilities are the only way to do it, I’m always shocked to see people defend privatization in any way.