xbkingx (u/xbkingx) - Readit News

xbkingx commented on 256TB SSD from Samsung semiconductor.samsung.com... · Posted by u/chukfinley2

rbanffy · 2 years ago

While I agree, it's been hard filling up the 2TB drive in my laptop.

My home server has a couple dozen terabytes (on spinning metal) and, with current fill rate, it's predicted it'll need an increase in space only after two of the drives reach retirement according to SMART. It hosts multiple development VMs and stores backups for all computers in the house.

Another aspect is that the total write lifetime is a multiple of the drive capacity. You can treat a 256TB drive as a very durable 16TB drive, able to last 16 times more writes than the 16TB one.

xbkingx · 2 years ago

Blu-rays can take up 25gb each, so just a decent collection of those could easily consume most of one of these drives. If you want to do basic model tuning in stable diffusion, each model variation can take 7gb. This level of storage would mean you could almost setup a versioning system for those. And finally, any work with uncompressed data, which can just be easier in general, could benefit from it.

xbkingx commented on A fridge from 70 years ago has better features than the fridge I own now mstdn.social/@Pandamoanim... · Posted by u/zhte415

hobo_in_library · 2 years ago

> You really need to factor in a literal 6-10x lifespan difference into efficiency and environmental impact figures, too...

I would love to see energy efficiency regulations take the item's expected lifespan into consideration instead of being a mere "energy per hour" measurement.

One simple/naive way to do it would be to divide (energy per hour) by the number of years on the warranty. Your warranty is for twice as long as the other guy? Then your device can use 2x the energy.

Obv, this would require the warranty to be a "full" warranty, and not something manufacturers can too easily weasel out of.

xbkingx · 2 years ago

I would love that, too, but it's not possible today. Everyone would offer 25 year warranties, close up shop in 5 years, and reopen as a new subsidy or company.

The only way I see it working is to hold some large portion of the revenue in a trust and relinquish it to the company over the warrantied lifespan. The company would have to operate at a loss for a while to books those reserves, so there would have top be something like a zero interest government loan to cover the cost, which can't be escaped through bankruptcy.

Or maybe a contract like the shitty cell phone plans in the US. Buyer agrees to pay for the full price of the appliance over the warrantied lifetime in installments. If you want to sell it or trade it in early, you either have to finish off the payment or transfer the contract. The company would have to service the product (within reason), or the contract is voided, releasing the buyer from payment obligations. Again, this system can be easily gamed, too, in today's market, but I just can't imagine a scenario that doesn't require a major paradigm shift.

I do a decent amount of 3d printing and I cannot count the number of random letter Amazon brands for filament that have popped up over the last year. Most are simply rebranded waste from larger manufacturers. Once the product gets below 3.5 stars, the brand disappears and a suspiciously similar new brand pops up with the same spool design and 20 5-star reviews overnight.

xbkingx commented on PhD Simulator research.wmz.ninja/projec... · Posted by u/Smith42

xbkingx · 2 years ago

lol I wish it was this easy. I got through the simulator in 6yrs 11mos on the second try. At no point was hope above 40%, except once early on (ended at 33%).

The funny thing is that I had 1 conf paper, 1 major result, and 1 figure left over. That's a good year extra, so I assume a perfect game would be to get the 3x papers and GTFO (which is the second best outcome, after not enrolling). There were a couple folks I knew that made it out in 5 years, but more that took 7+. Our lab was notorious for taking over 10, which I skirted by.

Like others said, this was lacking outside events (social/political junk). Hopefully version 2 will take into account: at least 1 family death and 1 additional tragedy, at least two months lost to helping or waiting for help from another grad student or post doc (they did have the lab equipment breaking, which was good to see, but missed the lobbying for every little purchase), at least one scope change, a half dozen favors to gain some political cache, a few experiments and/or rewrites to satisfy faculty members that just read about a technical issue they should have known, but didn't so they're highly sensitive to it, at least 6 months of arranging the data/results in a way that faculty can understand, 3 months of arguing that the lab standard procedure for some basic component is a decade out of date, a few months worth of preparing premature data for unnecessary meetings, one (and it better be just one) instance of an offer to help getting waaaay out of control, the hope boost after your first big conference and subsequent conference hope drops, the drops with each thesis defense from folks a year younger, etc. There's more, but that's off the top of my head. Oh, and that slight boost in hope when you hear someone else has a worse problem than your current one. That's a fun one.

Tip for those interviewing - ignore all the year 1-3 folks. 1 and 2 are basically undergrads plus some extra classes. 3 probably hasn't hit the first pile of bullshit yet. Find a year 5 or 6 in your field and talk to them alone. There's a reason they generally don't have senior grad students at recruiting events, and it isn't because they're too busy. Talk to them long enough to get to their exhausted attempts to rationalize some aspect of the experience. If their demeanor doesn't change, you might be safe. If they start hemming and hawing, that's a problem. They haven't even gotten to a specific, non-personal problem and they're having trouble keeping up the facade. The layers are: 1) Hey, social event, I get to take my mind off lab problems. 2) Getting a little boost by talking to someone still excited. 3) The quiet whisper, "Let me give you some advice." 4) The realization that there's nothing but lab to talk about. That's the threshold. 5) The rationalization alpha - The view from 30,000 feet isn't terrible. 6) The rationalization beta - The rundown of broad problems they're having. This is the point where they will probably, as if by magic, remember that thing they were going to do needs to be done now. (I've got some analysis running I need to check, I need to feed some lab animals, I promised my parents I would call, I told a lab mate I'd help them with this thing and will be up all night, etc.) 7) The rationalization gamma - Specific cases of major problems they're seen other have. 8) The rationalization delta - Specific problems they're having.

xbkingx commented on Google search's death by a thousand cuts matt-rickard.com/google-s... · Posted by u/rckrd

superasn · 2 years ago

The funny thing is the site which should have been removed like the of Stackoverflow spam clones, or sites like Canva and Pinterest that make thousands of similar looking pages with slightly different heading are still allowed and rank on Google.

Also hate the top 10 pages whenever you search the best something, like best domain name registrar. I don't want to read a spam blog post with affiliate links, I wish google would show me the actual domain registrars instead (like chatgpt does when i ask it). Google has been gamed so badly and they have been doing nothing about it just because the spam blog posts contains their ads.

There are some tricks I learned on HN to use uBlock origin to filter these spam sites but Google really needs to fix this. There is only so much an adblocker can do to fix search. And right now all the useful content is getting blocked while the spam content is not only allowed but ranking on top of everything.

xbkingx · 2 years ago

The moment I saw the term "SEO" it was like a stopwatch ticked on until search was dead. It used to be frowned upon to do little tricks, like keywords in a tiny, transparent font picked up by crawlers, but not seen by users.

When gaming search engines became a profession, the end of search appeared on the horizon. Guess we're headed back to web rings and link indexes (which will be consolidated, heavily monetized, and abandoned). If we're lucky, we'll be back to dialup BBSes by the 2040s.

xbkingx commented on After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted gfycat.com/... · Posted by u/davikr

charcircuit · 2 years ago

Okay, but I don't see it as bad as the source material being lost. You can always remake those clips. The reverse can't be done to go from clips to the original.

xbkingx · 2 years ago

And the people that put significant effort into their work will reupload it to other services, if they haven't already. Similarly, exceptional work is probably saved by random folks elsewhere.

xbkingx commented on Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely old.reddit.com/r/technolo... · Posted by u/rajeevk

traverseda · 2 years ago

I'm the head mod of a pretty big subreddit, /r/3Dprinting, with 7 million views a month and 1.8 million subscribers. At the beginning of this I set up a lemmy instance at https://rhombik.com and linked to it from that subreddit. From the roughly 150k uniques per day we had on /r/3Dprinting zero of them have tried the lemmy instance.

So make of that what you will.

xbkingx · 2 years ago

I'm pretty active in r/3DPrinting and r/FixMyPrint, and strongly support the blackout. I've been avoiding Reddit entirely and getting my news from other sources, while also exploring the fediverse. I had no idea about the rhombik instance/magazine/whatever.

The core problem with the migration is that the information on where to go EXACTLY is hosted on the platform being boycotted. I decided to not visit Reddit anymore and watch for instances to pop up on the fediverse. If others do the same, the migration will be slow. Don't be discouraged if it takes a few days to pick up steam. There's another 3DPrinting magazine that has some users already. https://kbin.social/m/3dprinting@lemmy.world or https://lemmy.world/c/3dprinting

That leads to the second problem of on-boarding migrating users to a highly distributed platform. I've mentioned in the boycott server the need for "racks" (the subjects within instances are called magazines, this would be a collection). These would be moderated aggregators of instances, like the invisible step between lots of disparate subreddits. There would be no limit of the number of racks, so technically you could have a permutation of every associated magazine-instance combination. The purpose would be to have a single link new users can click on to get subscribed to a set of magazines all at once, basically making the federation concept seamless to less technical users while still highly flexible on the backend. I'm going to shoot the suggestion up the chain for kbin.

We want to avoid leaving folks like this: https://lemmy.world/post/97417

That leads to the third problem, which is all these alternatives are new and going through growing pains. Trying to add features comes second to keeping the service stable. I'm hoping others with more coding experience can assist kbin devs.

And I wanted to mention that last I heard (and saw evidence of), some of the main Lemmy devs were kinda garbage people (Tiananmen Square massacre supporters, not just questionable opinions on government). The more controversial instances have been defederated from the primary/intake server, but it's still worth mentioning. Kbin doesn't have that baggage, but there are only a couple devs, and really only one main dev, last I heard.

Kbin users can see and respond to Lemmy and Mastodon instances that are federated, so it has been the migration choice for most of the Reddit boycott groups.

edit: btw - I just looked at the comments on the one post. If you want to run a poll, fine, but most of the people protesting won't be there to vote. I thought the 3D printing subs were largely positive and supporting, if those comments represent the community I was supporting, I now have zero qualms about deleting my comments on Reddit.

xbkingx commented on The most satisfying checkbox andy.works/words/the-most... · Posted by u/feross

droptablemain · 3 years ago

Not everything must be gamified and "improved."

There's nothing wrong with the humble checkbox. It is simple, utilitarian, and easy to understand.

The "most satisfying checkbox" which you have crafted (that which I am still unsure is satire or earnest) is convoluted, needlessly complex, and a visual disaster.

xbkingx · 3 years ago

What? You don't want to watch the full box set of Star Trek TNG between when you push a button and the animation ends? That ruins my plans of designing a scrollbar that plays 45 random tracks from you music library between lines scrolled.

OTOH, it IS very satisfying to realize you don't really need to do whatever requires those interactions in the first place.

xbkingx commented on Classification of Omicron (B.1.1.529): SARS-CoV-2 Variant of Concern who.int/news/item/26-11-2... · Posted by u/nycdatasci

ChuckNorris89 · 4 years ago

>This literally reads like post apocalyptic fan fiction.

I find it incredibly fascinating how fast this virus can mutate in order to throw curveballs around our natural and engineered defenses and become more efficient at killing us.

How is this even possible in such a short amount of time? I thought evolution takes tens of thousands of years. It's not like viruses have giant brains with massive IQs to come up with all this so fast.

Would be cool if someone could ELI5.

xbkingx · 4 years ago

It speaks to the more serious problem with vaccine hesitancy - the more virions (individual virus 'particles') that exist, the greater the chance of a mutation that finds a way around our defenses. It's just basic evolution.

The variants arise randomly and proliferate with the current major strains. The infected population adapts to reduce the transmission of the most virulent/contagious strains. Selective pressure (tug of war between infecting people and people fighting off the infection) increases on the new variants until one or a few maintain or exceed the transmission of the progenitor strain.

That's the problem with the, "I'll get over it/I'm not worried/My segment of the population doesn't die from it" mentality. The more infections - subclinical, asymptomatic, severe, fatal, undetected - the more rolls of the dice. We (humans) are selecting variants that are worse for us, hoping we can snuff out the infection before some key mutation that eludes our immune system and/or testing develops.

Two other thoughts with internal conflicts/points worth mentioning - First, recovered patients should be more resistant to new strains. Their immune systems threw everything at the virus to defeat it, so their response will be more diversified than those with mRNA vaccines targeting a specific protein sequence. (The magnitude and usefulness of the variations in immune response can negate that advantage.) Second, the reasons that a 'novel' virus is dangerous are that we, as a species, don't know if we can (naturally/innately), and we don't know how much the virus can change in protein sequence (to evade our defenses) or our response to infection.

Anyways, I'm rambling. Not a virologist, but a PhD (and as such, I think I know more about stuff than a really do) and that's how I think about it. :)

xbkingx commented on The Hindenburg disaster denoised, upscaled, and colorized using ML [video] youtube.com/watch?v=GhoGT... · Posted by u/DamnInteresting

turtletontine · 4 years ago

I don't know if this is a breakthrough but... Frankly this looks awful.

I think I could handle unrealistic colors but the way they flicker so much frame to frame is really jarring.

It's interesting that the algorithm seems to generate chromatic aberration at hard edges? Most clearly around the letters on the title cards.

xbkingx · 4 years ago

I kept waiting for it to get better than a light brown haze with flashes of green... but it never did. The fire looked okay, but even that looked weird at the beginning of the sequence.

What really made me laugh was the blue smoke followed by a headline implying that was all at night. The AI filled in pristine blue skies and inverted the wreckage colors. It actually made up history. I'm calling it: Unintentional automated disinformation.

xbkingx commented on High genetic barrier to SARS-CoV-2 polyclonal neutralizing antibody escape nature.com/articles/s4158... · Posted by u/SubiculumCode

openasocket · 4 years ago

Additionally, could that even happen naturally? Since viruses only reproduce asexually, there's no way for multiple strain's mutations to somehow be combined together, right?

xbkingx · 4 years ago

I think it's more of an emergent pattern.

Mutant ABC is the target. First Mutant A becomes the predominant strain. There might be some Mutant AB or AC in the population, but the controlling factor is currently Mutant A.

Eventually, Mutant A therapies/vaccines are introduced and Mutant A starts to lose its hold. Mutant AB isn't treated by the new treatments (or they're less effective, or Mutant AB goes undetected longer, etc.). Mutant AB becomes king of the hill. Repeat with Mutant ABC.

All this would assume that there's no Mutant B or Mutant BC or Mutant AC that increases in prevalence. All the mutations would have to build up over time or occur simultaneously by coincidence (or you could get a combination).

It's just basic evolution - organism follows the niche. We have a hard time recognizing it because generation turnover is so rapid. Instead of taking ~30 years for 2.5 offspring, it's a few days for millions of offspring.

I don't think mode of reproduction matters much when we're talking at this scale. While the virus creates stable clones across generations, I would think they're more susceptible to mutations and any viable mutation is quickly amplified exponentially. Just like the old high school bio experiment to demonstrate antibiotic resistance, only your respiratory mucus membranes are the medium. Those bacteria reproduced asexually.