I am fascinated that I got down voted. I mean, isn't what I'm doing here nearly ideal? Or maybe not: why? My solar panels shade my roof under the incessant sun of the Sonoran Desert and turn a fraction of the insolation into electrical power that allows me to do almost SOTA local LLM stuff inside my house for free[1] that the parent commenter thought to be economically infeasible. Of course it's slow! So what! Right now I'm transcribing to text a podcast with whisper.cpp and it will take about as much time as the original podcast duration but I will be able to read it in 1/20th of the time.
Alternative interpretation of a downvote: we should all be enslaved to corporate electrical generation provided to "local" electric utility corporations so that we are economically incentivized to use cloud LLM providers. That's weird, no?
Teach me.
[1] It's a small nice house that cost ~$330K not too far off from my city center.
This isn't rich privilege boasting.
I have rooftop solar and I have been building credit with my electric utility even though the daily high temperature is well over 100F outside and a comfortable 75F inside. That includes running three AMD 12 thread 128GB systems with obsolete GPUs 24x7x365. I'm not a gamer, so 6 years ago I went low-end low-power GPUs. Boy am I dumb. Currently running the qwen3.6:27b, 35b, and gemma4:31b models just fine.
As soon as VRAM prices drop to sanity I'm going to load up and I could care less about the power draw.
Have you ever paid attention to what's on the road in Mexico? I've driven there for 30 years and I've seen it all.
Then, there's the idea that Mexicans might not be able to manufacture a quality vehicle. My 2001 Toyota Tundra was manufactured in Mexico and I will drive it until I die. Basically a grail vehicle.
Places like Monterrey have multistory quite modern BYD dealerships. You might start shopping for monasteries ;-)
For the people who don't believe this, spend some time watching urban traffic in a place like Oaxaca. 4 is a bit of a stretch unless it's a couple of small kids (that happens) and the moto is not really a moped, but not much more powerful. There's occasional bulky cargo. I am also reminded of the multiple times we were riding in a bus in Cairo Egypt and passed a donkey cart in the left lane of a 6 lane-ish "free"way.
One of the first things I thought when I first saw this thing is, oh, there will be mods.
My wife and I were mid '80s chemical engineers. She liked her 15c, but I went on afterward into fundamental numerical analysis and was extremely happy with my 32S. I recently asked qwen3.6:35b|qwen3.6:27b|gemma4:31b (can't remember which one) all about the current state of replacement LR44 batteries for an "HP 32S Scientific Calculator". It was fucking adamant, aggressively so, that the calculator required 1 battery. LOL no, it sits before me and yes it needs 3. A 6 pack cost I dunno $6 off AMZ? Anyway I have now replaced the batteries in my daily tactile basic algebra calculator for the third time. If I don't have it in hand I use Free42. I... regret not remembering how to program these things, it was so intellectually elegant.
I logged on for the first time in a while to actually talk about nerd things. God I loved the 80s-2000.
I'll take your word for it (Man Ray's) because... Picasso. It's interesting to contemplate though because those studies/sketches/whatever are Picasso, they're great, better than just about anybody who ever painted, but pale next to Guernica.
"The difference is that you don't own your EV, it is a computer on wheel. Any firmware update like Tesla has done in the past and features are no longer available."
Yeah, I think that's right.
I only thought in one dimension: reliance on corporate controlled high density existing infiltration of fossil-fuel delivery infrastructure. Which is worthless if the price is occasionally exorbitantly volatile or might even run into zero supply issues.
Another equally important dimension is: that EV car might just be a puppet, and not you running the puppet.
I'm pretty sure the Prius doesn't phone home (2015), but I admit that I've not gone deep into it.
I can't stand this thing I just did in this comment where I tried not to sound like an AI. I might have to give up short comments entirely because I can't generate enough context for authenticity credibility. <= It's a fact, and that right there sounds like AI to me now.
When we visited that room in 2012 or so the walls on the other 3 sides had Picasso's studies for the final painting.
The combination of those in proper size context to the astounding thing on that wall was... I dunno, very hard to bear? Chills and goosebumps. Just being in the presence of such genius. [Edited to add: I forgot! Many of the studies are clearly over complicated and colorful. And then you turn to see what was the final result. IMHO It's the same with genius software, in a different medium. Prose too, but maybe that's more contentious.]
There is no digital screen representation that can remotely approximate the psychic impact physical proximity to genius creates. I've felt this with many other greats as well.
I've sat alone in 3 different Rothko rooms. Damn. It's all I can say. You have to do it yourself. Tip: pan your eyes slowly while sitting in different corners.
1988. On a math TA salary I paid $600 for an 80MB (That's megabytes) hard drive. I had dialup. I also had Turbo Pascal and an 8087 coprocessor. I was a MS student in computational math AKA numerical analysis.
It was goddam glorious.
Took until 1995ish to have a homelab to experiment with FreeBSD and later Linux over a 10-Base-T network with gcc/g++ and dialup access to this thing called "The World Wide Web". The browser had a throbber dinosaur.
It was even more goddam glorious.
Right now I've got three main systems with decent CPUs and 128GB of memory, and several emphemeral satellite systems. With 8GB of NVIDIA VRAM I'm running gemma4:31b just fine on my media system. Which curiously enough has, ah... media on it.
I feel like I have a good idea how EV owners feel right now. (We have a Prius.)
The protocol we have always implicitly used in this case is 'no news is good news'. I.e., participants in the meetup understand that they only have to communicate 'I won't/can't be there.' The reason is optional. Could be lots of things.
But socially this has gotten inverted.
I have several very long relationships with people (>30 years) who are overwhelmed by this. Living their lives immersed in constantly buzzing irrelevant social noise.
In 1989 I wrote and posted a paper letter to a college friend of ours in Northern England, asking, hey, around [June date I forget] we will be in London, want to meetup? A while later I get a reply letter saying sure, how about we meet at Piccadilly Circus on this date at this time. I posted an affirmative reply and there was no further communication. We were in Arizona at the time.
On the agreed-to date and time we were there, and so was she.
If we were talk about paper maps, it would blow people's minds. If we were to get further in the weeds and describe how we traveled around communist Czechoslovakia w/o a map, only a phrasebook entitled "Travelers Czech", well...
Ah I forgot! We, without being specific about the date, knew that other college friends of ours, originally from Czechoslovakia, had told us they were going to be in their home town of Olomouc. We got the barest help in Prague with my wife's bad German on how to get there by train. Arrived, got a room, and called them up. For the next week they showed us around the country and visited family and friends.
Other than lousy waiters in Prague we had a terrific adventure. Different times.
But you sure had to able to demonstrate you had integrity in your agreements and were open to changes of plans.
Might be a translation issue here with the commenter, maybe?
Handwritten notes help to remind yourself when studying about what the instructor thought important. You write down the emphasis. I sure made it clear to my classes that my emphasis was on this, this and that. The instructor is writing and grading the tests. Or was, back in the ancient times when we made chalk dust, as a pedagogical tool.
This is hilarious. This comment would imply that the people who got multiple degrees and were very successful through their careers (that would be everybody in my generation: we started in 1980) learning from lecturers scribbling with chalk on a blackboard, writing it all down with pen on paper, somehow had a less effective education than modern students using modern tools. Yeah, looks all around, remembers training youngs, no, I don't think so... Actually sometimes it was bad because people, but sometimes it was fucking awesome. I lectured undergrad mathematics at UF and ASU using chalk and a blackboard and to this day that was some of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. Especially for the upper division classes, my students paid attention. They asked questions. It was glorious.
LC 200: 381HP V8 lol! Holy shit they are expensive used. It kinda looks like the updated version of the FJ-80 public "Mall Cruiser" actual knower "Land Crusher" concept, where the thing that looks like yer regular suburban kid hauler has got some serious off road chops. Used "Mall Cruiser" FJ-80s were considered a steal for many years.
So is mine (2001TRD bought new). Searched all over AZ looking for manual everything and I got it, except for the trans. It replaced an fj60 Landcruiser. Beautiful machine I worked on a lot (5spd trans, lift, exhaust, gas tank) but it needed more power. The FJ-60 replaced an absolutely bottom basic 4cyl 4wd 5spd manual Toy "Pickup", better than a jeep 'cause you could carry shit off road, that the child outgrew sitting in the middle behind the stick.
The only thing I dislike about the Tundra is the gas mileage. I thought I would hate the auto trans but then I did some largish sandy-ish steps uphill and fuck me that was easy. Ah, there is another annoying thing: anti-lock brakes make sandy steep downhills with exposure much more interesting than they should be.
When I die I want to be buried in it.
God the new gigantic Tundras look awful. I think I'm seeing a lot more newish Tacomas these days, and they still look decent. They definitely look easier to park.
I hardly want to run windows apps at all, but I have a garmin etrex 32x and I can't for the life of me get garmin windows software to run on wine or linux crossover (something to do with USB) and there is nothing available on linux that can talk to the device. I'd run Windows 10 in a VM but I looked (I think?) pretty carefully and valid Windows licenses seem to be well over $100, cheaper to use a refurbed office desktop.
Someone stomp me down and tell me I'm wrong, please.
"Shop"? Ok, well, have you ever been in there? Because it might be the best market in Atlanta, right now.
We just spent a 3 year sojourn in the Atlanta metro area and the Dekalb Farmers Market is one of the only things we will miss. Still the best reasonably priced beautiful cheese/dairy/seafood/charcuterie + a whole bunch of other stuff in N. Georgia.
Now we're back West again and there is Lee Lee Oriental Market. No interesting cheese, but a lot of other things. Including charcuterie!
If you go to the Dekalb Farmer's Market definitely look for nettle cheese.
Alternative interpretation of a downvote: we should all be enslaved to corporate electrical generation provided to "local" electric utility corporations so that we are economically incentivized to use cloud LLM providers. That's weird, no?
Teach me.
[1] It's a small nice house that cost ~$330K not too far off from my city center. This isn't rich privilege boasting.