• 9 Posts
  • 140 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 15th, 2023

help-circle

  • The most important risk you face is if somehow mains voltage ends up contacting somewhere you get electrocuted and die.

    There are 2 purposes of an earth ground: First it can be used as a reference for certain signals, such as microphones. Second, it can be used to protect against turning yourself into a sparker.

    There is a clear separation between mains voltage and system voltages so it’s typically not going to be a problem, but if a little wire ends up contacting the power supply case it can become energized and things start to get really bad.

    Most of the electrical code where I live focuses on grounding as “Bonding”, which is purely safety related for giving dangerous voltages a safe place to go.


  • It seems to me that the studying is focusing on the extent to which the life of mothers affects the life of children, particularly looking at multiple stages of life including menopause whereupon the mothers of mothers can directly contribute. It isn’t really about K vs. R, but rather understanding that primate mammals are already type K (investing more heavily in fewer offspring) what the effects of self-preservation on the mother are.

    Regarding the comment on “weird conservative ‘women are for breeding’ undertones”

    That seems like a strangely anthropocentric viewpoint. For most primates other than humans, breeding and childrearing are dominated by the females because the successful strategy for males is often to try to impregnate as many females as possible, and the successful strategy for females is often to try to have sex with as many males as possible to help reduce the chances of infanticide.

    It was with the homo sapiens larger brain and the greater negative effect on females that cooperative reproduction strategies became particularly important.


  • I think this speaks to a specific thing that can be transferred to human beings. We often focus on the sacrifice for children which is true and real, but the study shows that parents need to take care of themselves because having your parents alive has an impact on you beyond your weaning stage. I think that even though this study is about primates, that’s a truth that also applies to humans.

    The article looks at females because it’s using datasets from primates, but I also believe this would apply to some degree to both parents in human populations. There is data supporting the fact that the 2-parent household is more ideal than a single parent household (and a household with no surviving parents would be worse than that, even after the weaning period is over for a variety of reasons)

    Primate societies would likely help tribemates who are not direct kin the same as humans do, but both primate societies and human societies see people helping others less than their direct kin. There’s studies showing that stepparents are not the same as parents statistically in this regard.


  • I don’t think that would be useful in the context of what the study was trying to understand, which is the effect of female survival on children of that female.

    The question was about the biological mother, which can be tracked because the mother gives birth. If the biological mother dies but another female continues to behave in such a way to nurture the child, then that is relevant to the analysis only insofar as the primate society took care of the child anyway which would reduce the impact of losing the mother.

    With respect to the father potentially taking on a maternal role, I don’t think the structure of many primate societies is conducive to such research, because primates are typically not monogamous. As a result, neither the researchers nor the primate fathers know who is the father of which baby, and so if a female presenting male were to “take a baby under its wing” after the death of a mother, I would expect that to be similar to a female presenting male who is not the father of the baby and so fit under the data set of death of a mother and just have the effect of flattening out the effects of the measurement.




  • Honestly, This makes a lot of sense. Intuitively it seemed strange to me for us to just happen to be in a universe that’s barely older than the first set of stars out there, when there’s so much matter in the universe that would have needed to have formed over billions of years in the heart of stars, which would then reach the end of their life cycle and nova – that all this happens to line up awfully closely, especially with all the debris from those dead stars would need to scatter over light years of distance.









  • I’ve been using a number of different tools which I interface to my nextcloud.

    My main nextcloud has a llm plugin which was really easy to install, you just install the plug-in, make sure that you are configured properly with python in your path, and then run an OCC command to download one of a few models.

    https://localai.io/

    I also hosted localAI, which was a little bit more involved, but the website did a decent enough job of explaining exactly all the things that you needed to do in order to get all the different types of AI model working. Besides LLMs, it also supports text to speech, speech to text, and image generation.

    Two things that are important: first, if you are server doesn’t have a pretty advanced video card then you’re going to be using the CPU exclusively for AI, and that’ll be pretty slow. Second, I found it very quickly that the amount of RAM you have is critical. My main server is a core i5 4th gen, and so I put AI software on another one of my servers which is a core i5 7th gen. You would think that the latter would work a lot better, but it had half the ram, and it basically wasn’t even able to get started.

    Besides hosting ai, if you have a desktop computer or gaming laptop you can run local AI models. There’s a fantastic piece of software called Faraday that works pretty well on my laptop. You can get more and more sophisticated models depending on how much memory you have.

    https://youtu.be/aLy_vVLUHZk

    Krita has AI dal-e support for image generation available as a plug-in. I haven’t used it yet because I just got it started downloading last night before I went to bed, but the installation process has defined in the video seems accurate and was extremely easy and mostly automated.

    https://youtu.be/AU8NDSBIS1U





  • As for the story of the war and some of the characters stories… The age of heroes like Kirk in their prime is over, the federation is losing the war. Younger crews weren’t properly mentored and so lack the knowledge of the aging heroes and so are not doing well at all, and the older crews dont have the vigor to engage in total war. Meanwhile the Klingons seem to be doing just fine, being both vigorous and wise, hence why they decided to start a war sensing a weak federation. Kirk would slowly over the course of the movie learn that it’s not so bad mentoring top people. Bones would struggle after watching the young men come into the sickbay dead realizing in just a few years his final destination would be upon him, and he’d be making mistakes and cracking. Spock would share his struggles with his grandfather dying and would speak logically about death like nimoy did in “I am Spock” and it would help McCoy put death into perspective. Scott would learn he drank because he didn’t think he had anything better in his life until he saw the new batch of engineers trying really hard to keep the ship running but lacking know-how and one of the engineers would come to him with personal problems and he’d realize he had more to offer than just work. Spock would do some brilliant work as a seconded science officer and later would use his skills as a diplomat to help end the war with the Klingons once the Enterprise becomes the focal point of a passing of the torch where the old crews realize they need to build up the new ones which makes the Klingons realize their time has passed to attack (with a little prodding). Uhuras work as a communications officer ends up front and center as she is a second diplomat working with Spock near the end of the movie. Checkov would realize that while he isn’t happy with his past all he can do is move on to his future. Sulu would have a whole b-plot where he talks at desks about strategy and helps see several ambushes by the Klingons in advance which is part of what helps end the war.

    Ok but that’s it…


  • I think the ending needs some work but I like the concept.

    I don’t know if the boomers could write a story about getting old wisely, particularly not way back then. I like the idea of showing different characters managing getting older, both in positive and negative ways, and perhaps some characters having an arc.

    Kirk would definitely be trying to keep living his glory days. He already looked like an idiot wrassling Klingons in Star Trek 3, by 6 he should be seeing the consequences of his insistence on playing hero, a washed up captain with a growing number of failed missions because he keeps trying to go down and fight the bad guy and kiss the lady and he just isn’t capable of it anymore. His arc would be learning to let go of the day to day battles, and leaning into his wisdom earned by a lifetime of work in the field to help raise the next generation of people who will be taking over after him. In the actual canon just as Kirk never faced the Kobayashi maru challenge head on, his character never actually faced aging head-on and died in a battle including 3 old men.

    The idea that McCoy would stop being a doctor is dumb, many doctors practice until they die of old age. His arc would be about coming to grips with the reality that he has a limited amount of time left and what that means.

    Spock would be an investigation of what it means to have more time since he’d be a young man in Vulcan terms, looking at aging from an alien perspective, but hey we introduced a new family member last movie how about we introduce sarek’s dad who is in the final stages of Vulcan decline and the consequences of having people be such reliable pillars for so long and then losing them.

    Scotty’s story of becoming a drunk stays, it’s too interesting to not do something with.

    Uhuras story should be a future reflection on a life for a woman that was much different than the life of a woman in the 60s when TOS first aired, an opportunity to show how different gene’s future was than the present of 40-60 years ago.

    Contrasting to Kirk who was the captain in his prime winning all the fights and getting all the chicks, Checkovs (sorry Koenig) character would be a reflection of a life of regret, of opportunities not taken. His arc would be about making peace with his past self and taking steps to constructively manage his future.

    Sulu could be shown taking an entirely different path, such as a strategic command, and his arc would be about using his wisdom and experience from the enterprise adventures to advise the fleet.

    With all this, I think two huge threats are too much. Galactic war or youth worms, and I think Galactic war makes way more sense for the last hurrah.

    You’d start off with a captains log and the on a routine mission to transport Spock in his role as a diplomat to mediate a dispute on a planet. Smash cut to a battle between Kirk and a klingon. The dialogue would suggest Kirk quickly sniffed him out with his experience, but while he puts up a good fight ultimately he loses the fight. He beams up and a space battle starts with a klingon ship. He issues competent commands and wins the battle but just a beat too late so the ship takes some hits and some people die. Later he’s admonished by Starfleet command and given an ultimatum that he either accepts a role as an admiral commanding fleets or he can retire, and he can make the decision when he gets back to earth but for now his first officer is in command of the ship. Just as they are about to set a course for earth they get a message that war has broken out with the Klingons and the Enterprise is needed immediately to participate in the war effort.

    Anyway better stop here or I’ll write a whole script lol