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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • A tablet is mostly battery. If you can take it apart, do so and just bend it back in place.

    Inside of most lithium batteries, it is basically a long set of ribbons that form a stack. They are wet like a clay and kinda oily (but still contained) on a ribbon like paper that is the width of the battery case/pocket. Then there are some layers of thin plastic that insulate the lithium ribbon.

    It is not impossible that damage could occur to the center of a cell, but it is less likely unless the dent is sharp. The primary place that a cell gets damaged and where it causes problems is in the ends of the roll. If the end of the roll gets mashed, it is much more likely that layers can shorted out.

    The thing to keep in mind is that something like a gasoline powered car uses a fuel mix of around 14 parts of air to 1 part of fuel. That means the atmosphere of Earth is providing a lot of your fuel requirements and it makes gasoline effectively like a super dense energy source. A lithium battery is proving all of the total energy in a single container. You don’t get to remove oxygen from the equation if things go south. You need a way to contain the situation if things go wrong.

    Over discharging reduces the life and maybe some capacity, but the main issue is if it will charge at all. Most lithium batteries have a specification for charging them from fully discharged, but not all charge controllers implement the circuit block that is required. All lithium chargers (should) have a duel mode where it is current limited then voltage limited. The fully discharged state requires a very low current trickle charge until the cell hits a certain voltage before raising the current.

    The main concern is localized thermal run away. If it starts getting unusually hot or expanding, you’re likely in trouble.

    I’ve built robots and cat toys with lithium batteries and things like battle bots have them too. If you’re always supervising and have a container and a plan if things go wrong, you can be fine. What you can’t do is charge overnight or leave it unsupervised at all.






  • Yeah Florida spans some interesting exceptions. The Southeast is more a reference to the old Plantation South. The panhandle is, or thirty years ago-used to be, dominated by the same demographic. Or rather, dominated by the vacationing youth of the group. The cities of the peninsula are each quite different. Naples and Saint Augustine had something that felt like a segregated whites-only community feel. I’ve heard similar racist stereotypes of Hispanics and Cubans in Miami and Orlando. However all of these do not seem to have the generationally entrenched feel and tension of places like Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Eastern Texas. I’ve only spent a few weeks total in each of those cities within Florida mostly in my childhood and early teens, so my perception is only so deep.

    Personally, I miss the unique black cultural community I grew up with mostly around Chattanooga and Huntsville. There was this collective togetherness that I experienced, with lots of potlucks and lively gregarious people that brought out the best in others, and complemented my introverted nature without feeling intrusive. I felt like the accepted outsider that was welcomed to exist on my terms, and maybe even appreciated.

    The one time I spend a week exploring the Keys, I felt like I was in a really openly accepting area and never encountered racism.

    I traveled with my old man during my summers in highschool and then for a year after. He worked on industrial controls installations where we’d go stay in an area for 2-3 weeks at a time. I’ve actually been to a lot of places and stayed there in unique ways but still hotel life, just not full tourist like experiences. Plus fam vacationed in Florida and I have fam in Orlando.

    E: people that down vote instead of replying–please block me entirely. I do not value you or wish to interact with you at all under any circumstances. I really don’t care who you are or what interactions we have had in the past. I find the rudeness adolescent, incompetent, childish, immoral, destructive, egomaniacal, and toxic. You have an impact on my mental health as someone in social isolation from physical disability, and I despise you for doing that. Being anonymously negative to a stranger in this way is psychotic behavior.


  • Everything is still segregated in the Southeastern USA. I can’t really say how much is done because of actual direct discrimination or otherwise, but there are separate mostly black and mostly white areas in most cities.

    The States of the USA are much more autonomous than it may seem from the outside. The southeastern USA is the Republican stronghold. Republicans have long acted like a criminal organization with gerrymandering that minimizes the votes of black and educated communities. If you look at the map of average credit scores of citizens in the USA, you will see the Republican regions as if looking at the political map. Republicans are toxic misers when funding government. The police in the Southeast are poorly equipped, poorly paid, and poorly trained. It is a job that attracts some of the worst kinds of people, and when they are sent into poorer areas with people that have a slightly different culture than themselves, they tend to act stupidly.

    Republicans have played the long game of ignorance. Americans are poorly educated across the board, and especially in the Southeastern USA. Uneducated people are more easily manipulated into populism or by platonic sophistry. There is not a lot of social mobility in the South. I’m from Alabama originally, and live in California now. These two may as well be completely different countries. Their access to information is different, as are the culture, and opportunities for the average person. The average Californian is making over double what the average is in the Southeast. I’ve never been, but from what I do know, the difference between CA and the Southeast is maybe like Germany and Hungary. The base GDP numbers of CA are skewed a bit by how much rural area there is and how population is distributed. In Southern California, life in the suburbs requires around $120k per year to own a low end home and pay the bills. In the same class of suburbs in Atlanta Georgia (largest Southeastern city), you need between $60k-$75k for the same home and lifestyle. The primary driver of this cost is simply employment opportunities.

    The Southeastern USA is our primary backwards ignorant backwater region where people cling to radicalized religion and are deeply conservative due to isolationist ideologies. These people hate everything unfamiliar and different both regionally and abroad. They can barely read as a skill, never read for recreation or self growth, and only ever work and watch whatever garbage is on Fox on the TV.

    The African American community can be just as bad about harboring racism too. I went to a University prep highschool that was 90% black and was a special institution designed to help uplift the black community. Of course it was a largely privately funded “magnet school” because Republicans never fund such programs. I experienced many racists in school as one of the few white students. Most of my friends were black. I dated a black girl too, not that it mattered to me. It is complicated, but in general the black community is deeply traumatized. It is largely due to ongoing incompetent mismanagement. Incompetent government is good business for the ultra rich, and so they fund it, while the uneducated elements of society are not smart enough to see the big picture and vote for change.

    The USA is actually a pretty shitty place for anyone of lower class. Things like immigration are harped on because it perpetuates the delusion that everyone wants to be here when that is not really the case unless you’re in a hell hole like Venezuela.





  • Life is largely about networking. In other words, it is about tribalism. Shape yourself into the person people want in their tribe. Work your way into the tribe you want to belong within.

    Meritocracy is the only form of governance that is capable of real growth. This applies everywhere. If the tribe only has role models that are dead, or some excuses as to why they do not look up to people like Nobel laureates, they are stagnant.

    There are a lot of people and businesses in the world that are funded as a loss. People that inherit wealth are usually the cause. Never trust such people more than you are forced to. People that inherit wealth are usually incompetent and make poor financial and business decisions. Most are either barely breaking even, or hemorrhaging money but still have more than they can burn. These will go through phases or whims of stupidity where they mistreat those that rely on them. Look for merit.

    Never trust anyone that tells you what kind of money they make when they are self employed. They are telling you an exaggeration of what they made on their best single job or day. That is totally irrelevant to their average or worst month.

    Never run your own business as a job. If all you can do is live paycheck to paycheck with a business, you’ve already failed. You will not weather the ups and downs and you have no ability to adapt to a changing world. You absolutely must be able to bank 10%+ above and beyond all overhead and taxes or you will not survive for more than a few years.

    Never think about starting a business outright. Do the thing on the side as a hobby while you work at another job. When you are turning down lots of work because you don’t have the time, that is when you quit your job and start a business.

    Money is cruel. It is the fundamental means of survival, but unfortunately it is also the primary form of human social hierarchical display. This is barbaric, inhumane, primitive behavior. A more socially advanced species will use awards, accolades, and reputation, or performative merit to establish social hierarchy. We all exist in a caste system regardless of how culturally forward or hidden the class divide may seem at first. Keeping these elements of society in mind will help you understand how and why a lot of things happen the way they do, and the kinds of people that may help you.

    What ever you do, DO NOT take chances that might get you disabled.




  • j4k3@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldWhat was the "last good day"?
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    4 days ago

    For me, Tuesday, 2/25/14 was a pretty good day. Normal day at the bike shop, receiving some preseason stuff, arguing with the boss over some BMC bikes I didn’t think were a good deal for the shops. Ate my usual dry salad at the local joint with the pretty girl I enjoyed talking with a little bit each day. I had just started a cut phase for my push to get under 190 lbs to get much more competitive for crit racing in 2014. I wanted to actually win a race or two. That was going to be my big finish for 5 years going from 350 lbs in 2009 to 7% body fat. I felt like that was a good tradeoff for having worked for peanuts in a bike shop. Then I would get a real job at the end of summer when I turned 30… Instead I got a broken neck and back 2/26/14 from a terrible driver.



  • j4k3@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world[Deleted]
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    4 days ago

    Radio is light at a different frequency, because transparency is weird.

    It breaks everything if an electron can’t change levels and release a photon. Randomly picking one fixated target… fusing hydrogen into helium no longer emits photons and without light pressure to counteract gravity the Sun goes straight to something like a tiny white dwarf.

    You can’t really say photons only go pow at X frequency and not Y or Z. Photon don’t care how you spank it into action. High energy, low energy; photon just wants to fly at the speed of causality.


  • I wholeheartedly agree about proprietary models. My perspective is as someone who saw the initial momentum of AI and only run models on my hardware. What you are seeing with your work is not possible from a base model in practice. There are too many holes that need to align in the swiss cheese to make that possible, especially with softmax settings for general use. Even with deterministic softmax settings this doesn’t happen. I’ve even tried overtraining with a fine tune, and it won’t reproduce verbatim. What you are seeing is only possible with an agenetic RAG architecture. RAG is augmented retrieval with a database. The common open source libraries are LangChain and ChromaDB for the agent and database. The agent is just a group of models running at the same time with a central model capable of functions calling in the model loader code.

    I can coax stuff out of a base model that is not supposed to be there, but it is so extreme and unreliable that it is not at all something useful. If I give a model something like 10k tokens (words/fragments) of lead-in then I can start a sentence of the reply and the model might get a sentence or two correct before it goes off on some tangent. Those kinds of paths through the tensor layers are like walking on a knife edge. There is absolutely no way to get that kind of result at random or without extreme efforts. The first few words of a model’s reply are very important too, and with open source models I can control every aspect. Indeed, I run models from a text editor interface where I see and control every aspect of generation.

    I tried to create a RAG for learning Operating Systems Principles and Practice, Computer Systems A Programmer’s Perspective, and Linux Kernel Development as the next step in learning CS on my own. I learned a lot of the limits of present AI systems. They have a lot of promise, but progress mostly involves peripheral model loader code more than it does with the base model IMO.

    I don’t know the answer to the stagnation and corruption of academia in so many areas. I figure there must be a group somewhere that has figured out civilization is going to collapse soon so why bother.



  • I see the issue as more like thought policing is the inevitable outcome of calling training copyright infringement because there is no difference between a person that recalls information and talks about it with others and the intended use of published information for training. If training an AI with all the knowledge a person learns in a similar manner is somehow wrong, then the inevitable long term way this plays out is a Minority Report like dystopia. It sets the precedent for prosecution of people for their thoughts or intentions and not their actions. This kind of thought policing existed in the darkest depths of the medieval era, or even into more recent eras of witch hunts or McCarthyism. Perhaps we are on the brink of another such dark era.

    As far as I am aware:

    • Copyright is intended to protect someone from another person copying their work for for financial gain, or to be much more specific–copying work for direct gain using any form of complex social hierarchy such as awards, reputation, or monetary gain.

    • What copyright does not protect is the dissemination of knowledge as it relates to publicly published works.

    • One has the choice to remain the sole proprietor of one’s knowledge, but to publish publicly is to relinquish ownership of the information contained within.

    • Principally, copyright protects that you were the first to write it, and the way in which you wrote it, but it does nothing to protect the knowledge contained within. If a person recalls that knowledge, they are not required to state a citation when speaking aloud, or in some way making use of that knowledge.

    • Copyright also has a scope of intent, and that primarily involves competitive works from ones peers and excludes the scope of general knowledge and usefulness to society at large.

    I’m not trying to mock you, or say you are right or wrong. Quite frankly, I don’t think in these terms, or care about the kinds of people who do. I’m heavily abstracted and intuitively driven to understand. I believe everything that is not intuitive is simple not fully understood yet. However naïve that may be is irrelevant here. I’m of the bias that those with something to gain often lack objective thinking and show a measure of envy when unexpected changes occur in society. I’m not accusing you, but only sharing the most minor of biases I am aware of while trying to say I want to understand. I would like to know if there is anything in the framework I just laid out that is overlooked. I would like to better understand why you find this issue upsetting. I’m one of the most flawed and openly human people on Lemmy. Look at my history if in doubt. I have no skin in this game, just curiosity.