abra0 (u/abra0) - Readit News

abra0 commented on Europe's first geostationary sounder satellite is launched eumetsat.int/europes-firs... · Posted by u/diggan

abra0 · 2 months ago

> MTG-S1 is the first geostationary meteorological sounder satellite to fly over Europe

I was confused for a minute on how it's both _geostationary_ and _over Europe_ -- you can't be geostationary if your orbit is not over the equator!

Turns out[1] the MTG-S1 satellite is in fact geostationary and parked at exactly 0°00'00"N 0°00'00"E (off the coast of Ghana), 42164 km up from the center of Earth, it's just pointing at Europe at an angle.

1 - https://space.oscar.wmo.int/satellites/view/mtg_s1

abra0 commented on Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge mrwint.github.io/winter/w... · Posted by u/abra0

skocznymroczny · 4 months ago

Interesting, I remember the speed skating issue being a problem in the copy I had back in the 1990s, but I don't remember the issues in other games like downhill and such.

People usually find these gameplay based copy protections amusing as in "hehe stupid pirates let them play a broken game", but I have bad memories of them because I often had them trigger when playing legit copies of the game. All it took was having CD emulation software installed (not even running) and some games would already flag you as a pirate.

abra0 · 4 months ago

Tbh it still puzzles me why gameplay degradation specifically was chosen as a way to try to discourage piracy. I imagine many more people hit the degradations, thought the game was just buggy and abandoned it, compared to people who were motivated by bad gameplay to give the developers money.

The mindfuck angle is pretty effective though. This article wouldn't have been written otherwise.

abra0 commented on Ozempic linked to lower Alzheimer's risk in people with Type 2 diabetes nbcnews.com/health/health... · Posted by u/benchtobedside

voidfunc · 10 months ago

Gonna be fun discovering what side effects it causes in 20 years tho.

abra0 · 10 months ago

The real question is whether these side-effects are going to be worse than 20 years of not taking it.

abra0 commented on Dokku: My favorite personal serverless platform hamel.dev/blog/posts/dokk... · Posted by u/tosh

Balladeer · a year ago

How long did it take you to go from "making a new server / copying configs is fine" to "this is tedious enough I'd like to abstract it?"

Like, was it a years-long journey or is this the type of thing that becomes immediately obvious once you start working w/ N servers or something?

I'm trying to learn the space between "physical machines in my apartment" and "cloud-native everything" and that's led me to the point where I'm happily using cloud-init to configure servers and running fun little docker compose systems on them.

abra0 · a year ago

That's where I am too right now for personal projects, and I ended up reimplementing parts of Dokuploy for that, but I don't feel much of a need to move from "fun little docker compose" for some reason

abra0 commented on Building a deep learning rig samsja.github.io/blogs/ri... · Posted by u/dvcoolarun

Yenrabbit · 2 years ago

Note that they shared part two recently: https://samsja.github.io/blogs/rig/part_2/

For those talking about breakeven points and cheap cloud compute, you need to factor in the mental difference it makes running a test locally (which feels free) vs setting up a server and knowing you're paying per hour it's running. Even if the cost is low, I do different kinds of experiments knowing I'm not 'wasting money' every minute the GPU sits idle. Once something is working, then sure scaling up on cheap cloud compute makes sense. But it's really, really nice having local compute to get to that state.

abra0 · 2 years ago

That's a great point! I'd agree that just the extra emotional motivation from having your own thing is worth a ton. I get some distance down that way by having a large RAM no GPU box, so that things are slow but at least possible for random small one offs.

abra0 commented on Building a deep learning rig samsja.github.io/blogs/ri... · Posted by u/dvcoolarun

imiric · 2 years ago

> On vast.ai renting a 3x3090 rig is $0.6/hour. The electricity price of operating this in e.g. Germany is somewhere about $0.05/hour.

Are you factoring in the varying power usage in that electricity price?

The electricity cost of operating locally will vary depending on the actual system usage. When idle, it should be much cheaper. Whereas in cloud hosts you pay the same price whether the system is in use or not.

Plus with cloud hosts reliability is not guaranteed. Especially with vast.ai, where you're renting other people's home infrastructure. You might get good bandwidth and availability on one host, but when that host disappears, you should hope that you did a backup, which vast.ai charges for separately, and if so, you need to spend time restoring the backup to another, hopefully equally reliable host, which can take hours depending on the amount of data and bandwidth.

I recently built an AI rig and went with 2x3090s, and am very happy with the setup. I evaluated vast.ai beforehand, and my local experience is much better, while my electricity bill is not much higher (also in EU).

abra0 · 2 years ago

Well if you are not using a rented machine during a period of time, you should release it.

Agreed on reliability and data transfer, that's a good point.

Out of curiosity, what do you use a 2x3090 rig for? Bulk not time-sensitive inference on down quanted models?

abra0 commented on Building a deep learning rig samsja.github.io/blogs/ri... · Posted by u/dvcoolarun

abra0 · 2 years ago

I was thinking of doing something similar, but I am a bit sceptical about how the economics on this works out. On vast.ai renting a 3x3090 rig is $0.6/hour. The electricity price of operating this in e.g. Germany is somewhere about $0.05/hour. If the OP paid 1700 EUR for the cards, the breakeven point would be around (haha) 3090 hours in, or ~128 days, assuming non-stop usage. It's probably cool to do that if you have a specific goal in mind, but to tinker around with LLMs and for unfocused exploration I'd advise folks to just rent.

abra0 commented on Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI 1a3orn.com/sub/machine-le... · Posted by u/sroussey

yreg · 2 years ago

I find it unhelpful that several different ideas are covered under the blanket term of AI safety.

- There is AI safety in terms of producing "safe", politically correct outputs, no porn, etc.

- There is AI safety in terms of mass society/election manipulation.

- There is AI safety in terms of strong AI that kills us all a la Eliezer Yudkowsky.

I feel like these three have very little in common and it makes all debates less efficient.

abra0 · 2 years ago

The third effort is referred to sometimes as AI not-kill-everyone-ism, a tacky and unwieldy term that is unlikely to be co-opted or lead to the unproductive discussion like around the OP article.

It is pretty sad to read people bash together the efforts to understand and control the technology better and the companies doing their usual profit maximization.