@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

urusan

@urusan@fosstodon.org

Java developer by day, Julia developer by night.

Amateur philosopher

Sometimes funny...

Working Dad

Controversial things about me:
Everyone: transhumanist, into AI (art)
Right-wing: polyamorous (married), agnostic atheist, leftist, working class consciousness
Leftist: corporate drone by day, loyal citizen of the US (but a serious reformer), former libertarian

I hope you can look past all that though, we people need to stick together

Lives with: Wife, T (son), and A (daughter).

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

18+ urusan, to random
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

I was watching a YouTube video and they quoted that ChatGPT/GPT-4 uses 300Wh per request. This was so beyond reasonable that I had to go check and what I found was a rabbit hole.

It turns out that there's very little evidence that AI is actually using the truly staggering amounts of electricity that have been widely reported.

Yes, even in the giant companies at the center of the hype bubble (with one possible recent exception, because Google is being self-destructive).

urusan,
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

@TerryHancock You can copy my writings, I consider them public domain (or CC0 if you'd like more specificity). Mentioning me as the source would be appreciated of course.

Honestly this thread could probably use editing for long form anyway.

Also, I appreciate just getting these ideas out there. Giving people a clearer picture of the situation is beneficial.

urusan,
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

@TerryHancock I'll let you know if I get a blog together. I'm actually going on a trip with substantial downtime soon so maybe I could put something together. It's a good idea to house my occasional longer stuff somewhere public.

That said, there's nothing currently and no guarantee I'll actually get a blog together anytime soon, so I'd recommend just copying it.

urusan, to random
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

Me: Long story about doing X earlier in my career to great effect in a similar situation So, I would recommend you do X in this situation.
Junior Coworker: Maybe someone like you could do X, but an ordinary person like me couldn't possibly do that.
Me: I assure you...that you are not "ordinary" either.

urusan, to random
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I agree with both the decision to do the moon landings in the 1960s AND the decision to stop doing more moon missions after Apollo 17 in 1972.

urusan, to random
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If the rest of your body were conscious too, would you even notice it or just think it's part of your normal consciousness?

urusan, to random
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

File transfer on open source:

  • rsync over SSH, it's fast, efficient, secure, unlimited, and you can transfer anywhere you have a user account available
  • If it's text, you can also use git and get even more efficiency and detailed historical tracking and restore

File transfer on proprietary systems:

  • AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
urusan, to random
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

I want my cool ranch flavored chips NOT to taste like real ranch flavor.

RL_Dane, to random
@RL_Dane@fosstodon.org avatar

Dear God... trying to type into the chat field on major financial website on a 12th Gen i7 and it's like watching the text appear in slow motion.

LET'S JUST BURN THE WEB DOWN AND START A NEW ONE.

urusan,
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

@RL_Dane Well, you know what they say...plan to throw one away...

tk, to random
@tk@bbs.kawa-kun.com avatar

Which brand of solder flux tastes the best? :blobfoxthinkgoogly:

urusan,
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

@tk I prefer the lead free ones for health reasons.

Mmm, tasty.

urusan, to random
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

Do we know how water freezes?
https://youtu.be/24TB1vPuzIU

urusan, to random
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

Me: Doesn't like beans, cilantro, or spicy food, so pretty much all of Chipotle's menu, but my wife loves it
COVID: Begins
Supply Chains: Falls apart
Me: Wow, when did Chipotle start tasting good?
Eventually...
Supply Chains: I'm back!
Me: Oh, this is Cilantro rice! Now chipotle tastes like soap again...

mike, to random
@mike@fosstodon.org avatar

I installed rustc tonight and proceeded to write HelloWorld.rs. My first ever :rust: program. And it's 13MB. What the hell??

urusan,
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

@mike My favorite language, Julia, has a similar issue. It's statically compiling everything it needs together by default to ensure portability. In particular the Rust runtime is pretty substantial (and the case of Julia is even worse since it includes all of LLVM).

You can tell Rust to knock it off and do dynamic linking, but then the target machine will need the Rust runtime installed.

There are other options as well, but I'm not a Rust expert so I don't know the details.

alex, to random
@alex@gleasonator.com avatar

Church of Snows - Antarctica

image/png
image/png
image/png

urusan,
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

@alex One of these days, this will be an incredible archeological find.

urusan, to random
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

Someone posted a FOSS/Linux Laptop Alignment chart a while back, does anyone have that?

urusan, to random
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

Is there a good, relatively high end ARM or RISC-V laptop available that I could install Linux on?

I'm thinking about something along the lines of the recent ARM-based MacBooks, but not Apple.

urusan, to random
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

Creativity isn't about the skill, it's about effectively harnessing chaos.

The skill component isn't really any different from any other skill.

urusan,
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

@deshipu Yes and no.

There's a component to it that's not skill based, you just need the right frame of mind and a source of chaos, whether natural creativity (due to a noisy brain) or externally driven (using random or pseudorandom processes). It's just about accepting the chaos. Even an unthinking process can be creative in this sense.

Then there's a common "design" skill that covers the generalities of effective creativity.

Lastly, each specific skill has specific design skills.

urusan,
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

@lightspill @deshipu Our brains are inherently noisy. It's so fundamental and low level that we usually don't think about it. At the end of the day though your brain is using hardware which is unreliable in a chaotic manner. There's none of the well ordered and precise operation of a computer in your brain.

That's okay though because you don't need order to get good results, and what you give up in precision you gain in flexibility and creativity.

urusan,
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

@lightspill @deshipu We experience creativity as intuition, new things popping up in our head, but the low level source of those intuitions is chaos.

Of course, that's not all, your past experience (which is also often chaotic) and other knowledge are critical too, and you can move forward with an intuition and put more careful thought into it, possibly combining it with other intuitions. That's the skill of design.

Without our creative intuitions though, we would struggle to be creative.

urusan,
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

@lightspill @deshipu Yes, there's definitely external sources. More fundamentally, everyday life is full of little chaos and randomness, which we are great at amplifying massively.

Consider computers, they have zero internal creativity. In contrast to biological brains, any deviation from their program must arise from an external source.

However, you can set up a program to be on the razor's edge of chaos, so you only need the tiniest bit of actual randomness to push it over the edge.

urusan,
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

@lightspill @deshipu A great extreme example of this is generative AI.

We've designed it to be maximally primed for creativity, all that's needed is a tiny bit of randomness in the form of a seed, which we can provide (or leave it up to the computer clock).

So while the computer isn't creative, you can hook the program up to a source of randomness to get creativity.

Our brains are doing something really similar when we have intuitions, but with much more complexity and internal chaos.

urusan, to random
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

What is good, open source video editing software in Linux?

18+ starmaker, to random

Please note

Apparently this mastodon server does not intend to host AI accounts anymore and i've received a warning that i may get my account disabled in the future so they're giving me heads up to migrate to another server.

I don't know where of if i will migrate to another server, since i don't know any server willing to host this content, so there's that. In case i can migrate to another place i will let you know.

urusan,
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

@starmaker I've had a really good experience over at aipub.social @urusan

urusan, to random
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

I've found that the best indicator of whether someone is an engineer is if you can give them a page of details and they'll actually read it.

If you have to read it to them in a meeting, then they probably aren't an engineer.

urusan, to random
@urusan@fosstodon.org avatar

Man, now I'm really starting to consider NixOS
https://youtu.be/CwfKlX3rA6E

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