In Stone v. Graham, 449 U.S. 39 (1980), the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a Kentucky statute was unconstitutional and in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, because it lacked a nonreligious, legislative purpose. The statute required the posting of a copy of the Ten Commandments on the wall of each public classroom in the state. The copies of the Ten Commandments were purchased with private funding, but the Court ruled that because they were being placed in public classrooms they were in violation of the First Amendment.
In his remarks, Kosiniak-Kamysz revealed that Poland could consider renouncing the Ottawa Convention, which aims at eliminating the use of anti-personnel landmines. But he added that “the arming of minefields will only take place when we are sure that war is inevitable”, reports broadcaster TVP.
Hmm. It might be possible to use mines that self-disarm. That addresses much of the UXO concerns, while still permitting for defensive use.
In his remarks, Kosiniak-Kamysz revealed that Poland could consider renouncing the Ottawa Convention, which aims at eliminating the use of anti-personnel landmines. But he added that “the arming of minefields will only take place when we are sure that war is inevitable”, reports broadcaster TVP.
It might be possible to use mines that self-disarm. That addresses much of the UXO concerns, while still permitting for defensive use.
In a warehouse off Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway in an industrial area outside Dallas, the future of American military ammunition production is coming online....
If you’re familiar with how to sharpen an ordinary chef’s knife, you know that it involves applying a series of long strokes on a sharpening stone, then reversing it and doing the same to the other side of the blade.
This is fine for a straight edged knife, but serrated knives are totally different and they need to be sharpened differently.
If you look closely at the edge of a serrated knife, you’ll see that it consists of a series of individual curved serrations. You’ll also notice that one side of the blade is beveled (meaning it has indentations in it) whereas the other side is flat.
So when sharpening a serrated knife, you need to sharpen each one of these beveled serrations separately, one at a time. And you won’t be sharpening the flat side of the blade at all.
Fortunately, there’s a special tool designed to let you do just that. It’s called a sharpening rod.
They should probably be more wary of the likelier—and grimmer—alternative: becoming something closer to most of the other casinos in America, where no parent would ever dream of throwing their kid’s birthday party.
I haven’t been to a Dave & Busters in ages, but I’d guess that their existing business model may not be in great shape. What did they offer? A restaurant with an attached arcade aimed at adults.
Generally, arcades have not done terribly well. There used to be a lot of video arcades all over out there in the 1980s. Video game hardware has gotten a lot cheaper, and a lot of people just have it at home now.
Last I looked (which was not recent), the kid-oriented Chuck-E-Cheese and the adult-oriented Dave & Busters tried to compensate with hardware that had a high hardware cost and couldn’t readily economically be brought home, like light guns, enclosures that enhance immersion (e.g simulated motorcycle seats to ride on on motorcycle games). But for at least some of that, VR setups are probably a partial competitor, and they’re a lot more available.
Many of the setups are aimed at letting multiple people play games together, but wide availability of broadband and VoIP and good headsets has made it easier to play games remotely. That won’t replace all of the experience of playing against someone else in person, but it is a partial substitute.
According to the NRA, on-premises traffic hasn’t returned to its pre-pandemic highs. But drive-through and delivery orders have grown so much that together they now account for a higher share of customer traffic than on-premises dining, for the first time ever. Meanwhile, the only parts of the day with growing foot traffic are the morning and late night, when customers are likely to be on the go.
Like, they may not be able to keep doing what they had been doing.
I mean, there’s probably still some niche, but the niche can get pretty small.
Movie theaters kinda did this before the arcades did. Used to be that it wasn’t normal to be able to watch movies at home, but once that happened, the space for movie theaters got a lot smaller.
One reason for the decline in ticket sales in the 2000s is that “home-entertainment options [are] improving all the time— whether streamed movies and television, video games, or mobile apps—and studios releasing fewer movies”, which means that “people are less likely to head to their local multiplex”. This decline is not something that is recent. It has been observed since the 1950s when television became widespread among working-class homes. As the years went on, home media became more popular, and the decline continued. This decline continues until this day. A Pew Media survey from 2006 found that the relationship between movies watched at home versus at the movie theater was in a five to one ratio and 75% of respondents said their preferred way of watching a movie was at home, versus 21% who said they preferred to go to a theater. In 2014, it was reported that the practice of releasing a film in theaters and via on-demand streaming on the same day (for selected films) and the rise in popularity of the Netflix streaming service has led to concerns in the movie theater industry. Another source of competition is television, which has “…stolen a lot of cinema’s best tricks – like good production values and top tier actors – and brought them into people’s living rooms”. Since the 2010s, one of the increasing sources of competition for movie theaters is the increasing ownership by people of home theater systems which can display high-resolution Blu-ray disks of movies on large, widescreen flat-screen TVs, with 5.1 surround sound and a powerful subwoofer for low-pitched sounds.
Several factors contributed to the decline of the drive-in movie industry. Beginning in the late 1960s, drive-in attendance began to decline as the result of improvements and changes to home entertainment, from color television and cable TV to VCRs and video rental in the early 1980s. Additionally, the 1970s energy crisis led to the widespread adoption of daylight saving time (which caused drive-in movies to start an hour later) and lower use of automobiles, making it increasingly difficult for drive-ins to remain profitable.
Mainly following the advent of cable television and video cassette recorder (VCR), then with the arrival of DVD and streaming systems, families were able to enjoy movies in the comfort of their homes. The new entertainment technology increased the options and the movie watching experience.
And, they apparently did a similar-to-D&B’s, more-adult-oriented shift to try to mitigate losses:
While exploitation films had been a drive-in staple since the 1950s, helped by relatively limited oversight compared to downtown theaters, by the 1970s, several venues switched from showing family-friendly fare to R-rated and X-rated films as a way to offset declining patronage and revenue, while other venues that still catered to families, began to show R-rated or pornographic movies in late-night time slots to bring in extra income.[citation needed] This allowed censored materials to be viewed by a wider audience, including those for whom viewing was still illegal in some states, and it was also reliant upon varying local ordinances controlling such material. It also required a relatively remote location away from the heavier populated areas of towns and cities.
I don’t have an answer for you, partly because there isn’t enough information about your aims. However, you can probably work this out yourself, compare prices for different hardware. You’d need some of that missing information to run the numbers, though.
I would imagine that an important input here is your expected usage.
If you just want to set up a box to run a chatbot occasionally and you get maybe 1% utilization of the thing, the costs are different from if you intend to have the thing doing batch-processing jobs 24/7. The GPU is probably the dominant energy consumer in the thing, so if it’s running 24/7, the compute efficiency of the GPU in terms of energy is going to be a lot more important.
If you have that usage figure, you can estimate the electricity consumption of your GPU.
A second factor here, especially if you want interactive use, is what level of performance is acceptable to you. That may, depending upon your budget and use, be the dominant concern. You’ve got a baseline to work with.
If you have those figures – how much performance you want, and what your usage rate is – you can probably estimate and compare various hardware possibilities.
I’d throw a couple of thoughts out there.
First, if what you want is sustained, 24/7 compute, you probably can look at what’s in existing, commercial data centers as a starting point, since people will have similar constraints. If what you care about is much less frequent, it may look different.
Second, if you intend to use this for intermittent LLM use and have the budget and interest in playing games, you may want to make a game-oriented machine. Having a beefy GPU is useful both for running LLMs and playing games. That may differ radically from a build intended just to run LLMs. If you already have a desktop, just sticking a more-powerful GPU in may be the “best” route.
Third, if performance is paramount, depending upon your application, it may be able to make use of multiple GPUs.
Fourth, what applications you want to run may (it sounds like you may have decided on Nvidia already) affect what hardware is acceptable. First, AMD/Nvidia, but also, many applications have minimum VRAM requirements – the size of the model imposes constraints. Have a GPU without enough VRAM to run what you want to run, and you can’t run the model at all.
Fifth, if you have not already, you may want to consider the possibility of not self-hosting at all, if you expect your use to be particularly intermittent and you have high hardware requirements. Something like vast.ai lets you rent hardware with beefy compute cards, which can be cheaper if your demands are intermittent, because the costs are spread across multiple users. If your use is to run a very occasional chatbot and you care a lot about performance and want to run very large models, for example, you could use a system with an H100, for example, for about $3/hour. An H100 costs about $30k and has 80GB of VRAM. If you want to run a chatbot a weekend a month for fun and you want to run a model that requires 80GB – an extreme case – that’s going to be a lot more economical than buying the same hardware yourself.
Sixth, electricity costs where you are are going to be a factor. And if this system is going to be indoors and you live somewhere warm, you can multiply the cost for increased air conditioning load.
The Dispatch reported that the entire flock will be culled, with the remains isolated, to help prevent further spread.
Kind of unfortunate that they can’t figure out which ones got sick and cull just those. Would be nice to move towards chickens that are more-resistant to the flu, but that can’t happen unless the vulnerable ones are selected against in terms of survival. An across-the-board cull doesn’t do that.
Even aside from those particular birds, the shortage of chicken and eggs from bird flu has driven prices way up. Fewer wings to go around, so parties bid up what’s available.
A ranch (from Spanish: rancho/Mexican Spanish) is an area of land, including various structures, given primarily to ranching, the practice of raising grazing livestock such as cattle and sheep. It is a subtype of farm.
Poultry farming is the form of animal husbandry which raises domesticated birds such as chickens, ducks, turkeys and geese to produce meat or eggs for food.
I don’t think that lack of availability means that the dealer doesn’t want you to buy a Prius. I suspect that it’s more that they want you to buy from them rather than someone else, and if they don’t have Priuses available, they’ll try and sell you what they do have…shrugs
For the Prius, my understanding is that during the COVID-19 pandemic, a large backlog built up at automakers due to the disruption to production. Manufacturers don’t want to hugely-overbuild production capacity just to throw it away when the backlog is resolved, so the backlog persisted through 2023 and is still apparently present for some cars. According to this, this apparently includes the Prius:
In 2024, most Toyota models no longer have long waitlists for an available allocation, with the exceptions being the Prius, GR86, GR Corolla, Grand Highlander Hybrid, Land Cruiser, Sienna, Supra M/T and Spec Edition TRD Pros. For these models, you can expect to wait 3-4 months for an allocation that’s not already spoken for.
The thing that @JohnDClay mentioned was something that surprised me when I discovered it too – consumer preference has shifted from sedans to hatchbacks. But you can still get sedans…just that not all companies are making them.
My impression is that every generation that has kids wants to drive something other what their parents drove, because doing so would make them stodgy and boring.
Go back to the 1960s, and the “family vehicle” was the station wagon.
Then it became the minivan for the next generation.
The US also imposes a tariff on import of light trucks – which I understand large vehicles like crossovers are also classified as – due to a 1960s dispute over US chicken exports to Europe that was never resolved, making those more-profitable for domestic manufacture, since the market is less-competitive.
The Chicken Tax is a 25 percent tariff on light trucks (and originally on potato starch, dextrin, and brandy) imposed in 1964 by the United States under President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to tariffs placed by France and West Germany on importation of U.S. chicken. The period from 1961 to 1964 of tensions and negotiations surrounding the issue was known as the “Chicken War”, taking place at the height of Cold War politics.
Eventually, the tariffs on potato starch, dextrin, and brandy were lifted, but since 1964 this form of protectionism has remained in place to give US domestic automakers an advantage over imported competitors. Though concern remains about its repeal, a 2003 Cato Institute study called the tariff “a policy in search of a rationale.”
I suppose that if European chicken protectionism ended, American auto protectionism also might, and so would the misincentive to sell as many light trucks as possible.
Another fun quirk that I expect – though haven’t looked into – derives from this: American towing requirements have long been much higher than those in Europe. One needs a considerably larger vehicle to tow a given trailer legally. That effectively means that if one wants to tow things in the US, one effectively needs to pay the “chicken tax” to domestic automakers.
I was going to make a post on unpopular opinions saying comic sans is not as bad as people make it out to be and can be useful in some cases since it is easier to read. But decided not to because I wasnt sure kbin/lemmy felt about it.
I think that it’s a pretty decent typeface – it looks decent and successfully evokes comic book text. But because Microsoft bundled it with its OS, where it was one of the few distinct-looking typefaces, it became overused, got put in a lot of material where it wasn’t really a great choice.
But I won’t blame the typeface for people using it in inappropriate spots.
I used to have a number of typefaces used for various things, but I kind of stopped messing around with decorative fonts once I wanted wide Unicode support.
Bharat Aggarwal, a former cancer researcher at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, had 29 papers retracted due to research fraud as of July 2021. Aggarwal’s research had focused on potential anti-cancer properties of herbs and spices, particularly curcumin, and according to a March 2016 article in the Houston Chronicle, “attracted national media interest and laid the groundwork for ongoing clinical trials”.
Aggarwal cofounded a company in 2004 called Curry Pharmaceuticals based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, which planned to develop drugs based on synthetic analogs of curcumin. SignPath Pharma, a company seeking to develop liposomal formulations of curcumin, licensed three patents by Aggarwal related to that approach from MD Anderson in 2013.
FDA warnings about dietary supplements
Between 2018 and 2023, the FDA issued 29 warning letters to American manufacturers of dietary supplements for making false claims of anti-disease effects from using products containing curcumin. In each letter, the FDA stated that the supplement product was not an approved new drug because the “product is not generally recognized as safe and effective” for the advertised uses, that “new drugs may not be legally introduced or delivered for introduction into interstate commerce without prior approval from FDA”, and that the “FDA approves a new drug on the basis of scientific data and information demonstrating that the drug is safe and effective”.
Alternative medicine
Though there is no evidence for the safety or efficacy of using curcumin as a therapy, some alternative medicine practitioners give it intravenously, supposedly as a treatment for numerous diseases. In 2017, two serious cases of adverse events were reported from curcumin or turmeric products—one severe allergic reaction and one death—that were caused by administration of a curcumin-polyethylene glycol (PEG40) emulsion product by a naturopath. One treatment caused anaphylaxis leading to death.
The yen has long been under pressure as the Bank of Japan kept interest rates remarkably low to encourage more inflation in its economy. Only last month did it end its policy to keep its benchmark interest rate below zero.
Louisiana could become first state to require display of Ten Commandments in classrooms (www.cnn.com)
In case you ever wondered the M1 is safe to operate in a school zone (lemm.ee)
Poland unveils details of €2.4bn fortification of eastern borders (notesfrompoland.com)
Polish MoD announced that the eastern border will be reinforced with 50km deep fortification line called Eastern Shield. (lemm.ee)
Pentagon Opens Ammunition Factory to Keep Arms Flowing to Ukraine (www.nytimes.com)
In a warehouse off Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway in an industrial area outside Dallas, the future of American military ammunition production is coming online....
I only slice or chop food with a serrated knife.
And I like it like that. Sharp knives don’t crunch the right way. Anyone with me?
Why Dave & Buster’s Is Transforming Its Arcades Into Casinos (www.bloomberg.com)
Archive link: archive.today/c0FEu...
What would be the cheapest and most cost-effeciant way of self hosting LLMs
I’ve a minipc running an AMD 5700U where I host some services, including ollama and openwebui....
More than 4 million chickens to be killed in Iowa after officials detect bird flu on farm (www.cbsnews.com)
Global sales of polluting SUVs hit record high in 2023, data shows (www.theguardian.com)
Half of all new cars are now SUVs, making them a major cause of the intensifying climate crisis, say experts...
What is your opinion on Comic Sans?
I was going to make a post on unpopular opinions saying comic sans is not as bad as people make it out to be and can be useful in some cases since it is easier to read. But decided not to because I wasnt sure kbin/lemmy felt about it.
After mice drink raw H5N1 milk, bird flu virus riddles their organs (arstechnica.com)
28 May 2024 (sh.itjust.works)
$20,000 annual pay: Japan's weak yen drives away Asian talent (asia.nikkei.com)
Takeshi Fukumoto, from Nara prefecture, obtained a working holiday visa in November and moved to Toronto, where he works at a restaurant kitchen....