They/Them, agender-leaning scalie.

ADHD software developer with far too many hobbies/trades: AI, gamedev, webdev, programming language design, audio/video/data compression, software 3D, mass spectrometry, genomics.

Learning German (B2), Chinese (HSK 3-4ish), French (A2).

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Western companies no longer operating in the Russian market, but still producing desirable content. … Western companies have ‘legalized’ piracy in Russia.

    100% this.

    Media is culture, and IMO people have a right to participate in culture. If it’s excessively difficult or impossible to legitimately access culture, one has the moral right to illegitimately access culture, and share it so others also have access.

    It’s inexcusable to refuse to directly sell media. The internet has made it easier than ever to trade access to media for money. Geo-restricted subscription services should be a nice add-on option for power-consumers, not the only way to get access to something.



  • The website does a bad job explaining what its current state actually is. Here’s the GitHub repo’s explanation:

    Memory Cache is a project that allows you to save a webpage while you’re browsing in Firefox as a PDF, and save it to a synchronized folder that can be used in conjunction with privateGPT to augment a local language model.

    So it’s just a way to get data from browser into privateGPT, which is:

    PrivateGPT is a production-ready AI project that allows you to ask questions about your documents using the power of Large Language Models (LLMs), even in scenarios without an Internet connection. The project provides an API offering all the primitives required to build private, context-aware AI applications.

    So basically something you can ask questions like “how much butter is needed for that recipe I saw last week?” and “what are the big trends across the news sites I’ve looked at recently?”. But eventually it’ll automatically summarize and data mine everything you look at to help you learn/explore.

    Neat.


  • I agree that older commercialized battery types aren’t so interesting, but my point was about all the battery types that haven’t had enough R&D yet to be commercially mass-produced.

    Power grids don’t care much about density - they can build batteries where land is cheap, and for fire control they need to artificially space out higher-density batteries anyway. There are heaps of known chemistries that might be cheaper per unit stored (molten salt batteries, flow batteries, and solid state batteries based on cheaper metals), but many only make sense for energy grid applications because they’re too big/heavy for anything portable.

    I’m saying it’s nuts that lithium ion is being used for cases where energy density isn’t important. It’s a bit like using bottled water on a farm because you don’t want to pay to get the nearby river water tested. It’s great that sodium ion could bring new economics to grid energy storage, but weird that the only reason it got developed in the first place was for a completely different industry.