Jedd

You're right, and as someone north of that age, and who self-assess as mildly competent with technology, I didn't mean to imply a linear correlated.

I'm aware our (AU) representatives & senate average age is relatively low compared to US / UK, and I think that figure (52 ish) is probably relatively healthy in terms of a spread of younger + experienced minds.

But OTOH, our government has form on this front (of doing as our friends over the pond instruct, and of not really understanding the technology around which they are formulating laws) and I should probably have pointed at that aspect, but it's harder to succinctly convey that track record.

Australia leading the way - our fully informed and highly tech literate (avg age of House of Reps ~=52yo) government banned Deepseek in February last year, including downloadable GGUF's - with some nebulously hand-wavy 'it's just too dangerous' safety claims:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-04/deepseek-banned-from-...

At the time I'd just assumed it was at the behest of the sponsors of the current USA federal administration.

You're conflating - 'Do we understand that Holmes did these things?' - with 'Were those specific charges brought against her and were they successfully prosecuted?'.

Reading John Carreyrou's book, it's pretty clear she was guilty of (lots of bad) things beyond the lone 'defrauding investor' charge that was successfully carried.

The _other_ option is to shift, perhaps in two x half-hour stages over a month or longer, but around the equinoxes - the 'standard operating hours' for services and businesses.

This is often overlooked as an alternative to shifting everyone's timepiece at the same instant -- I've never understood why there's so much much emotion and/or inertia around clock changes.

Sure, but that's quite a fanciful universe you're imagining there - the feasibility of a corporation obtaining insurance to cover that offer of liability ownership has got to be close to zero.

People - usually suit-wearers - have been making this spurious claim for decades, but it doesn't hold water.

The largest of the finest print reminding you that it's 'sold as is' (or more encompassing variants that might continue '... with no warranty for fitness of purpose') means that liability remains in the lap of the purchaser / consumer / operator.

(This has been a source of immense frustration over my career - where such people have assured me that they have 'recourse' (it's always vaguely described) by spending money on proprietary products & services, rather than opting for functionally equivalent or superior free options.)

I think your third paragraph is implying a distinction (or conflating the difference?) between LLMaaS's and self-hosting publicly available models.

If it's just where it's hosted that provides the legal insulation then things like OpenRouter would give you that. (But again, I suggest that it would not.)

Peter Zeihan did a 5m video [1] on this 10 days ago (give or take) - and the history of how they've been used, and why the original design (big draw-downs during major emergencies - perhaps 5 of them, ever) hasn't lent itself well to the way they ended up being used.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5g0Ud8i0C0

A weird target, the author has.

The title is 'for single node local S3' but what they actually mean is 'for minio-compatibility', which is an entirely different question.

When I abandoned minio a year or so ago, I also surveyed the options, and settled on Garage. It lacked the GUI, but felt about the same complexity as minio. Perhaps a smidge more complexity, as I moved to 3-node and 5-node separate instances of garage, running as containers under Nomad.

I don't recall it being onerous, but I was looking for some basic S3-alike capabilities, not just minio-alike.

(How many people set out to build an object storage system with some number of AWS S3 primitives, but primarily try to match a third-party proprietary system's foibles?)

> So, Garage does work, but gosh…it is not just a drop-in replacement in terms of code changes.

I think in terms of actual code that uses local S3, it pretty much was a drop-in replacement. (I have multiple distribution/registry, Grafana Loki / Mimir, influx3 - all backing onto my object storage system, and the config changes there were modest - key+secret, and url - just as you'd expect.)

> collecting different coloured stuff to convert into other different coloured stuff.

You are loosely describing almost every computer and board game ever made.

I say this as someone who has a few hundred hours in NMS, and also appreciates people spelling colour properly.

From TFA

> VMware to Proxmox migrations are not affected ...

Amusingly - and acknowledging tiny scale and modest automation requirements of home lab compared to enterprise - as I started migrating to Proxmox a year or two ago, the process of shuffling VMs off my ESXi servers and onto Proxmox was surprisingly painless. Effectively mount the ESXi as storage systems, and then 'copy to here'.

IIRC the only small challenges were a conservative choice on target VM's CPU type (Proxmox seems to dislike defaulting to 'host' CPU) and the network / SCSI controller defaults. I assume designed to prioritise robustness over performance.

All automatable, I'm sure.

Pavers for $40-45 - are going to be pretty unattractive grey concrete (well, cement) ones, right?

Even Bunnings (albeit marketplace) has 100mm geogrid for $20 / square metre.

Most local vendors have 'call us for pricing', but I've found a few others in the $10-20 range. Obviously, yes, in-fill on top of that - say $250 a cube depending on your tastes, so add $12-25 per square metre.

As per sibling comment - with some fabric underneath, and a modest amount of ground prep, installation of this stuff sounds fast and easy.

I saw some examples of this while travelling in Japan last year, and am keen to replicate. I suspect, like a lot of things, the local product there is superior to what I could find back home here in AU.

At some castle courtyard, we were walking around on a smooth-white-gravel surface, and I didn't immediately register how different it felt.

Stare at the ground for a few moments, and notice some of the small (15-20mm) off-white pebbles are perfectly aligned on a grid pattern.

Squat down to investigate, and they've got these corners of the plastic mesh geogrid topped off with little white caps that are almost indiscernible from the rounded white aggregate they're using as infill. It was almost like seeing a random dot stereogram, except completely regular (and no dinosaurs) of course.

The math is pretty interesting, and TFA didn't touch on this aspect I don't think. I'm looking to use 10-20mm irregular shaped scoria on a large-ish area, and the heuristic evidently is that your maximum aggregate size should not exceed one third of the geocell depth - so I'd want 50mm depth at most there, sitting on solid-ish sub-layer.

(I believe that heuristic goes out the window if you've got regular shaped gravel.)

The other ratio to consider is aggregate size to cell size, and that, in turn, is dependent on load and slope. Then there's the mechanical attributes of your in-fill (will it slowly crush over time, with expected loads - for softer rocks you'll definitely need a geotextile above your sub-base and below your geo-cell.) All tremendously more complicated than the 'few wheelbarrows of blue metal' I grew up with.

I don't use gcc directly - not in a long while - but almost everything I rely on uses it, and it's hugely encouraging to have the stewards of this project contemplate, and then determine to have this policy.

Meanwhile, I don't know who quotemstr is, but they don't sound sane in any of the exchanges in this thread.

I was sure that pre-2020 - going back 40y or so prior - VLP's were also generally regarded as coming under the umbrella term 'vaccine'.

In what way are they not a vaccine?

Yeah, there's a claim I've seen about 'every third mouthful of food' that humans eat needs honeybees, and that may well be true.

I'm in Australia, and we only got Varroa in 2022, and it was suppressed for about a year before a regrettable 'oh well' attitude overwhelmed us. The last couple of years has seen a breathtaking impact.

Anecdata - one of my five hives is still struggling on.

Australia's experience since 2022 had (I thought) laid to rest a lot of the 'It's not varroa that's the problem' claims from armchair analysts.

But yes, per my earlier point, lots of our tree crops require honeybees to be shipped in - just because of broadacre / monoculture style farming. Well, along with honey production being its own industry - so they need to follow the nectar, and change up the flavours a bit, but also some trees just don't produce useful amounts of nectar but absolutely require a lot of pollinators for a few weeks only (almonds / peaches I think fit this category).

Amusingly, propagate has a horticultural, and non-horticultural meaning, and it's not obvious which one you're using there, because the bee's role is long over by the time the seed is ready to go out into the world.

Pollen can be carried (as noted by sibling and you) by lots of different insects, and there's myriad solitary and other (by conventional standards) weird bee species around, plus lots of plants are happy to pollinate themselves (tomato is a good example) or rely on wind (corn/maize is the famous example there).

When the common honeybee landed in the continental USA, about four centuries ago, the same people also brought in lots of (other) european plant species that had co-existed with Apis mellifera for millennia.

What do you mean 'what about' ?

Is your suggestion this case is somehow spurious because there aren't equal cases against everyone else clearly guilty of this manipulation?

In any case, as per TFA, the claim is:

> [intent to] addict young users

100% agree with the sentiment here, but a small nitpick - MS SQL originated as a port of Sybase onto (IIRC) OS/2.

Okay, so not to detract too much from this tiny handful of refurbs - where the assessment, design, build etc were already done, and target state was well understood (it was to get back to whatever parameters and specs they had previously built at the same location), are there any contra-examples of Canadian hubris around budget and schedule on large projects where things might go wrong?

Eglington Crossing light rail - 6 year delay (to 15 year total) with a tripling in cost to $15B - so about $1b per kilometre of light rail.

Peace River hydroelectric - costing double ($16B) original budget.

Vancouver wastewater - a 4x budget creep (to $4B) and a 10y delay so far - it hasn't opened yet.

My point is that it's not only nuclear fission power plants that are grossly underestimated in terms of cost and complexity, but rather, all large infrastructure projects.

Just happens that on top of all that, the estimated numbers for LCoE, payback, clean-up, opex, etc for nuclear fission are also misrepresented (or misunderstood, depending how cynical you are).

Your first link to OPG - suggests, when looking at https://www.opg.com/about-us/ - that they have TWO nuclear power stations in their fold, and it's not clear how many of them were refurbished over what time period.

Your second link suggests a refurbishment of ONE power station.

When you say 'all' - is that five?

Since 1999?

Perhaps relevant.

2005 ish - UK government release energy strategy and declares fission power plant intent.

2010 ish - UK government formally announces Hinkley Point site. It's declared the first reactor will come online 2019.

2019 - it does not.

2026 - best estimate is now 'around 2030'.

Historical cost estimates are an utter quagmire - but roughly estimated at £18 billion a decade ago, back when it was estimated to be online last year.

Current estimates - bring your own hubris - are roughly £46 billion.

This story has been beaten to death, I know - but recall, this is a country with some history of building and operating nuclear fission power plants, with convenient (2h by rail) access to a lot of expertise from France, and it's a joint-venture with China General Nuclear Power Group so presumably plenty of expertise to draw upon there.

Ubuntu offered a slightly prettier installation experience.

Sure, no matter which distro you were installing you still had to provide a hostname, a domain name, some IP info (maybe), and an opinion on partitioning - there's only so many ways to ask the user these questions - but the ubuntu installer was prettier.

Around the time it was gaining popularity, almost every 'reviewer' (blogger) seemed to waste about 85% of their distro reviews talking about the installer - as though this was somehow important. The big sell of Debian, and Debian-derivatives, is that you install once, and then it's just in-place upgrades forever. The distro-hoppers, Microsoft evacuees, content-creators, etc - didn't really get that.

Anyway, once Ubuntu was installed it was much the same to operate as a Debian box. Obviously there were some surprising differences. Unity. Mir. One Cloud. Wubi. Upstart. Bazaar.

Does that '100s of billions' come from a big bucket somewhere called 'spare cash', or does it correlate to a commensurate reduction in the 'around $500 billion in ad revenue' that Google and Meta are extracting?

Do your assumptions - " if you look at the trajectory " - factor in a slowing economy, a slowing growth in quality improvements in the tech, and/or the asymptote of market saturation for punters happy to stump up more than $50 a month?

Generally speaking the local crowd is anti-hype, and so it's easy to get the manifestation of that conflated with with what you're describing.

(I fit your literal description, but primarily from a nomenclature perspective - I'll call them generative models and LLMs - and I appreciate this puts me in the minority. BUT I do believe part of the hype feedback loop was the intentional mislabelling of these technologies from the outset. AND I understand why the marketers did that.)

I suspect the older crowd has lived through the hype playbook enough to recognise it early, and that the pattern this time around is becoming a bit a bit more obvious now, so I expect increasing levelling out of expectations & understanding.

Couple of Australians have been doing this since the 90's - I think they coined the term 'pooktre' to describe the form - https://www.pooktre.com/

Searching `Peter Cook Becky Northey tree furniture` gets you some nice pictures of their work, as they don't just 'do chair' -- though I suspect plenty of people have been doing this in various forms for centuries.

> I truly believe

I read through TFA and was impressed at the number of citations they offered. I had assumed (but not strongly) that there'd be a correlation, so this was enlightening.

Do you have any citations apart from your own experience?

Are you referring to parent's or TFA's 'argument' here?

I had to look up black grass, as we don't have that particular weed in AU. I don't have any answers, of course, but a search on 'permaculture response in europe to black grass' gives some fairly unsurprising responses.

Broadscale monoculture invites its own range of problems, and herbicide-resistant highly-competitive (when in a single-other-species ecosystem) weeds are one such.

If the starting position is 'we must grow the same variety of wheat in the same field every year', then indeed, you're going to have some challenges.