Gotcha, thanks!

Oh, that’s a good point. The time doesn’t work out.

I’m assuming that it’s some sort of component from the air conditioner, but damned if I know what it is. Looks like power plugs on it, and someone else mentioned “caps”, so maybe a capacitor, though I wasn’t aware that there was some kind of plug standard for large removable capacitors.

kagis

Yeah, this capacitor looks similar.

EDIT: Apparently air conditioners can use large capacitors:

https://www.amazon.com/Capacitor-Conditioner-Multi-Purpose-Capacitor-5-Warranty/dp/B092ZQ3Y3N

Capacitor for Air Conditioner 5 uf MFD 370 or 440 Volt VAC, Multi-Purpose Round Capacitor for AC Motor Run or Fan Motor Start or Condenser Straight

EDIT2: Oh, I bet I know what it’s for, given the “Fan Motor Start” and what I assume is a misspelled “Condenser Start” text on the Amazon listing. Some hardware will draw a lot of juice when starting up. Laser printers are prone to this, for example. The references above are to mechanical things, moving components, and maybe one need extra power to overcome static friction, to get the parts in motion initially; once moving, they face (lesser) kinetic friction. One option is to just draw a ton of power from the line, but then that increases the peak power demands of a device. Another option, gentler on whatever circuit or external power source is providing the power, is to charge a capacitor for a bit and that’ll let you create a big surge of available power for a moment without having to have higher peak demands on the external power source. Adds to device cost, but limits its peak draw.

About 18 months ago, the defense secretary’s office floated the idea to the services

Presumably Hegseth had some idea, since it’s his office that pushed the idea. Also, since he personally has been an Army reservist, I kind of imagine that this is a personal Pete Hegseth idea.

https://apnews.com/article/tetris-win-kill-screen-blue-scuti-willis-gibson-df9325c62d42292e854cadb54d8f4cb3

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The falling-block video game Tetris has met its match in 13-year-old Willis Gibson, who has become the first player to officially “beat” the original Nintendo version of the game — by breaking it.

Technically, Willis — aka “blue scuti” in the gaming world — made it to what gamers call a “kill screen,” a point where the Tetris code glitches, crashing the game. That might not sound like much of a victory to anyone thinking that only high scores count, but it’s a highly coveted achievement in the world of video games, where records involve pushing hardware and software to their limits. And beyond.

For the hell of it, I used one as my main work laptop for a while. $199 plus $20 of RAM when I got it, IIRC.

External keyboard, put the laptop on a cantilevered board so that it’s right in front of my eyeballs so that the screen size doesn’t matter, use it mostly as a thin client to a beefier machine so the CPU doesn’t matter much.

Just don’t get a portable unit. They suck and are just a waste of money most of the times.

Get a dual-hose unit if you get one. There are a lot of companies selling single-hose units. Those are a lot less efficient and aren’t much cheaper. I would guess that in a situation where they get any kind of meaningful use, a dual-hose unit pays for itself quickly.

I don’t think I’d agree that they suck, but if you can use a window unit — not all rooms and windows are amenable to this — you normally want a window unit instead of a portable unit, unless you must take down the AC unit on a regular basis. Less noise inside, more energy efficiency.

Yes.

The Threadiverse has multiple intercompatible “Reddit-alike” software packages.

• Lemmy (the biggest). Example: https://lemmy.world/ Written in the Rust programming language.

• PieFed. Example: https://piefed.social/ Written in the Python programming language.

• Mbin (the successor of the defunct Kbin project). Example: https://fedia.io/ Written in the PHP programming language.

There’s also Sublinks, written in Java, but I don’t know for sure whether that’s going to actually get the ball rolling. https://demo.sublinks.org/ Think they need more developers contributing.

EDIT: Note that while this approach is unusual for the centralized Web-oriented social media era, where typically one company controls the whole shebang and has one codebase, it is common for federated systems. There are many different NNTP server implementations for Usenet, many different XMPP server implementations for instant messaging, many different IRC server implementations for chat, many different SMTP server implementations for email, many different FidoNet implementations.

dull…fixed my washing machine

I mean, an incorrectly-operating washing machine can make things quite exciting indeed.

Not what you asked, but you might check that:

• The central AC doesn’t need to be recharged. If it has leaked coolant and is low, it will drop in effectiveness.

• Or, even more simply, that the air filters don’t need to be replaced.

• You can’t improve insulation. Doing so is a one-off cost, as opposed to the ongoing cost of throwing more air conditioning muscle at the problem. Weatherstrip leaks, replace any single-pane windows with double-pane, etc.

Webster tried to reform English, and was a reason for a number of the American English changes from British English. Some of his changes caught on, like “public” for “publick” or “jail” for “gaol”.

But others did not.

I think that some of those ones that didn’t catch on would be good candidates.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/53723/26-noah-webster’s-spelling-changes-didn’t-catch

E.g. “Island” to “Iland”.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/noah-websters-spelling-wins-and-fails

Or “is” to “iz”.

with a passion. It just doesn’t do what its supposed to, its not searching anything at all. Ive literally tried and written every word of the video title plus the channel name and it didnt show up bc I put onen word in the wrong spot.

If you want to just treat each search term independently, that works for me. Searching for battle of the solomons eastern has a top hit of “Battle of the Eastern Solomons”.

I’m sorry, you are correct. The syntax and interface mirrors docker, and one can run ollama in Docker, so I’d thought that it was a thin wrapper around Docker, but I just went to check, and you are right — it’s not running in Docker by default. Sorry, folks! Guess now I’ve got one more thing to look into getting inside a container myself.

While I don’t think that llama.cpp is specifically a special risk, I think that running generative AI software in a container is probably a good idea. It’s a rapidly-moving field with a lot of people contributing a lot of code that very quickly gets run on a lot of systems by a lot of people. There’s been malware that’s shown up in extensions for (for example) ComfyUI. And the software really doesn’t need to poke around at outside data.

Also, because the software has to touch the GPU, it needs a certain amount of outside access. Containerizing that takes some extra effort.

https://old.reddit.com/r/comfyui/comments/1hjnf8s/psa_please_secure_your_comfyui_instance/

ComfyUI users has been hit time and time again with malware from custom nodes or their dependencies. If you’re just using the vanilla nodes, or nodes you’ve personally developed yourself or vet yourself every update, then you’re fine. But you’re probably using custom nodes. They’re the great thing about ComfyUI, but also its great security weakness.

Half a year ago the LLMVISION node was found to contain an info stealer. Just this month the ultralytics library, used in custom nodes like the Impact nodes, was compromised, and a cryptominer was shipped to thousands of users.

Granted, the developers have been doing their best to try to help all involved by spreading awareness of the malware and by setting up an automated scanner to inform users if they’ve been affected, but what’s better than knowing how to get rid of the malware is not getting the malware at all. ’

Why Containerization is a solution

So what can you do to secure ComfyUI, which has a main selling point of being able to use nodes with arbitrary code in them? I propose a band-aid solution that, I think, isn’t horribly difficult to implement that significantly reduces your attack surface for malicious nodes or their dependencies: containerization.

Ollama means sticking llama.cpp in a Docker container, and that is, I think, a positive thing.

If there were a close analog to ollama, like some software package that could take a given LLM model and run in podman or Docker or something, I think that that’d be great. But I think that putting the software in a container is probably a good move relative to running it uncontainerized.

Double the Speed Limit, Hits Speed Bumps at Full Speed…Excellent

I remember a computer science professor telling us that he was once somewhere like New York City and was about to miss his flight and wasn’t going to reasonably make it to the airport.

He decides to do a Hollywood-style “if you can get me to the airport in the next twenty minutes, there’s X hundred dollars in it for you” to the first cab that pulled up. The prof says “The cabbie said okay and he got me there in time, and we didn’t die, but I am never, ever doing that again.”

Sometimes people might approve of that speed, though.

Parallel compute accelerator.

Nobody is gonna say that in full, just like “graphics processing unit” becomes “GPU”, so maybe “PCA”.

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/busy+as+a+beaver

busy as a beaver

Very busy, assiduous, or hardworking. The phrase refers to beavers’ reputation for being extremely industrious.

Between working two part-time jobs, volunteering on the weekends, and looking after his little brother, Sam’s been busy as a beaver this summer.

social media has destroyed the spirit of the internet?

I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet.

I mean, Lemmy is social media. You might dislike centralized social media or something, but…

I definitely enjoyed the original Syndicate. While I like the aesthetic and the music, it isn’t an incredibly deep game, but I did like the thing. I could go for playing the thing in HD, 24-bit color, maybe upscaled graphics, and at a high framerate.

IIRC, Syndicate Wars didn’t review as well. I can’t recall whether I ever got around to trying it.

For anyone who hasn’t tried Syndicate, the game is a cyberpunk, squad-based isometric-view pixel-art game where one has to perform various missions to gain control of territory; might be assassinating someone, capturing someone, clearing enemies from an area, etc. Doesn’t have destructable terrain, though vehicles are destructable. Late game missions tend to have so many very-durable bionically-enhanced enemy agents charging at one’s squad that one has to keep the squad pretty much bunched up and using either rocket launchers or miniguns just spewing out a ton of firepower in their direction.

In its time, Syndicate was pretty well-known, though I dunno how many people born later would be familiar with it today.

I’ve had good luck with Goo Gone.

It has an extremely strong citrus smell (which I don’t think is an additive for smell, as it’s overpowering).

kagis

No, according to them, orange extract is one of the solvents.

https://googone.com/media/ingredient/goo-gone-goo-and-adhesive-remover-spray-gel-ingredients.pdf