Cool and damp. Got some rain yesterday, expect we’ll get a bit more today. Wasn’t hot, but wasn’t cool either. I have tried a bunch of things to get my weather station reporting again, but nothing seems to work. I’ve tried changing the outdoor unit 2x, and I have two different indoor units showing different things. A third couldn’t find the outdoor unit either. Something is interfering with the signal is all I can think. Probably a cheap USB charger, but I can’t correlate the malfunction with any particular changes. I’ll have to go on a hunt, so that’s farther down the list for now.
Did some sorting and cleaning up for the return of my bride… got some of it done. Pack is once again united. Girl Scouts had a nice weekend. I got some minor stuff done. Rain put a damper on any outdoor stuff for me. On the other hand, I didn’t have to do any more sprinkler work.
Today I’ve got a couple of pickups I can do, and a couple of things that are weather dependent. We’ll see what we can get to. I’ve got a bunch of stuff to go through for my non-prepping hobby quarterly swapmeet/sale next weekend. Don’t know if any of it will sell, but won’t find out unless I try.
Might have purchased some needful things in an auction. I won, but this auctioneer will often pass items that don’t bring enough money. Since I’m a bottom feeder, and need to get stuff cheap, I might not actually get it at my low bid. They passed on a bunch of other stuff. People waited too long to empty their safes and prices have come back down. No one is buying Del-ton for what they had listed as a starting bid, but consignors haven’t realized that apparently. I’m actually surprised any of my bids held up, let alone three. I’ll have to find some cash somewhere if they DON’T pass on my bids. Winning at a low price hasn’t been an issue for me for some time. I feel a bit like Commander Zero this week.
There are always opportunities during times of trouble for the person with preparations and resources. Keep your eyes open, there are bargains out there.
And you want to add to your stacks.
nick
Another day, another dollar. Time to wake the zombies.
And one will need coffee. Oh, that’s me.
n
Apple got caught in the midst of the mania without the ability to produce the right kind of hardware for AI, and their stock is an important part of many investment strategies in the US, including the Geico Gecko’s.
Some absolutely gorgeous items in this auction. Opportunity. (not for us but for someone…)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12058277/Items-Gettys-Greco-Roman-California-mansion-sale.html
n
The Getty family are part of the money behind Gavin Newsom. Time to clean house.
MOVs have a wear-out mechanism and generally fail open. Of course, the next next surge goes straight to the protected electronics. Adding a second set of MOVs with a fuse between them is a common design technique. When the first MOV set fails, the next surge blows the fuse, indicating it is time to replace the MOVs.
Cheap products do not do this and there is no indication when they wear out.
As an aside, there is a UL standard for surge suppressors but the rating is unclear. They put a 3000 volt surge and the rating is the voltage that comes out of the surge suppressor. IIRC, 330 volts is the best rating. I have seen power strips rated as UL 1449 3KV rated: i.e. there is ZERO surge suppression!
More and more PLT/LSM sites are throwing up the cowboy hat wearing “I was a cop and military” automatic rifle Texas dude interview. I would hate to be that guy. He probably lives in some safe harbor liberal community.
Best comment: “I would have hated to be in this officers command. He’s dumber than a whole humvee of 2nd LT’s.” LOL!
>> If the big companies are begging for regulation, what they are actually begging for is regulatory capture. They’ve realized that basically anyone can enter this field, and they want to lock in their dominance before 1000 startups start competing with them.
Isn’t there some bar to entry based on the hardware requirements for a full-scale AI implementation?
There’s a lot of barely obsolete crypto mining rigs out there…
n
The training takes lots of CPU cycles, but the finished model can run on a high-end graphics card.
No, those won’t cut it for a ChatBot-level model. Nvidia 8-GPU A100 (good) or H100 (better) are required.
FROM SATURDAY
UPDATE
We will be leaving Orange County Sat., June 10 about 8:00 AM and going up the 14 through Palmdale and Lancaster to the 295. We expect to arrive at the Kennedy Meadows General Store about 12:30 – 1:00 PM for some lunch and refreshments. We will leave for Lone Pine about 2:30 PM for Lone Pine, my GD without havirg refreshments will drive . We expect to check into the Best Western Frontier Motel around 4:00 PM and soon go out for some dinner. We anticipate going into Jake’s Saloon about 6:00 PM.
JimB previously mentioned “Indian Wells Brewery”. Well on out last campout at the Kennedy Meadows FS Campground, we left Sunday morning and intended to stop at the brewery; however, it appeared to have not opened yet, so we continued on. This time we will stop there on the way up and getting the Red and Gold versions.
https://www.facebook.com/KennedyMeadowsGeneralStore
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g32646-d3323055-Reviews-Jake_s_Saloon-Lone_Pine_California.html
Well, I got two things done today. I filed a 65 year year old homestead exemption to freeze the property taxes on our home this year at a value of $493,000. Our house is already in the 10% limit since they adjudged it to be worth $597,000. And I filed for a protest arbitration hearing on our large commercial property since they raised the value from $1,000,000 to $1,275,000. The comparables are not good. I have to bring this up every year with the arbitration board.
@lynn, seems Camp Lejeune water has mostly run its course with new commercials running about Covid-related payroll tax refunds. I presume you’ve seen/heard about this and are/aren’t eligible?
@lynn, seems Camp Lejeune water has mostly run its course with new commercials running about Covid-related payroll tax refunds. I presume you’ve seen/heard about this and are/aren’t eligible?
My son was a Hollywood Marine from 2005 to 2013. East of the Mississippi river go to Camp Lejeune. West of the Mississippi river goes to MCRD (Marine Corps Recruit Depot) in San Diego. Paradise and Hell, I will let you figure which is which.
>> The training takes lots of CPU cycles, but the finished model can run on a high-end graphics card.
Doesn’t the training have to be continually updated as the source, ie, the internet, is constantly changing?
Well, shoot, my customer who moved their company to the new 64 bit Excel is complaining again that we are 32 bit and he has to roll back Excel about three dozen machines. Sigh. I am a year away at best.
Senior Programmer wants to write a 64 to 32 bit thunk library on WOW (64 bit Windows to 32 bit Windows – Windows On Windows). I keep on telling him that process runs as root and we cannot do that. Many of our industrial customers are locked down HARD. This particular customer has about 175,000 employees across the world.
What a long strange trip it has been. When I built our first process simulator to run on Windows 3, we thunked down from 32 bit to 16 bit. Now we are having trouble jumping up to 64 bit from 32 bit. And I used to run our process simulator on a 60 bit CDC 7600 back in the dark ages.
Another day, another dollar. Time to wake the zombies.
I watched Dawn Of The Dead on Netflix yesterday for grins. It is the 2004 movie made in a Mall, kinda fun, very gory. 76% on Rotten Tomatoes. Don’t get bit !
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363547/
If you haven’t seen it, “Anna and the Apocalypse” streams on Tubi for free, which is both good and bad.
That creative team did something truly original with the genre and deserve a lot of money to use for other cool projects.
Tubi is a dumping ground. “Westworld” is headed there IIRC.
UPDATE: Doh, “Anna and the Apocalypse” is listed on Tubi but unavailable right now.
2004? Oh it’s a remake. Did they keep the iconic line?? “Send more cops.”
n
Plugs and ButtPlug this morning: President Joe Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg want to require more generous passenger compensation from airlines who cancel or delay flights, the latest effort by the administration to improve the flying experience ahead of a busy summer travel season.
More governing by fiat.
And then KJP this afternoon: Americans are just as concerned about possible flight delays over the Memorial Day weekend as they are about the coming crises with the Title 42 expiration and with reaching the debt ceiling.
Bologna and processed “American cheese” on Wonder Bread sandwich ‘reparations’ for all. With mustard if you’re from SF and Amish.
>> I watched Dawn Of The Dead on Netflix yesterday for grins. It is the 2004 movie made in a Mall, kinda fun, very gory. 76% on Rotten Tomatoes. Don’t get bit !
And don’t go to malls.
>> If the big companies are begging for regulation, what they are actually begging for is regulatory capture. They’ve realized that basically anyone can enter this field, and they want to lock in their dominance before 1000 startups start competing with them.
Isn’t there some bar to entry based on the hardware requirements for a full-scale AI implementation?
The hardware requirements are dropping daily with the new custom AI cpus.
In fact, I am reading a documentary about the revolt of the AI things in our near future. It does not go well for the human race.
https://www.amazon.com/Robopocalypse-Contemporaries-Daniel-H-Wilson/dp/0307740803?tag=ttgnet-20/
If you haven’t seen it, “Anna and the Apocalypse” streams on Tubi for free, which is both good and bad.
It was so bad I could not watch it after the first ten minutes or so. I am back to streaming “Stranger Things” between Astros games.
2004? Oh it’s a remake. Did they keep the iconic line?? “Send more cops.”
I did not hear it but it could be in there. “Dawn Of The Dead” 2014 is on Netflix so you can stream it. It is very little like the 1978 version.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363547/
>> I watched Dawn Of The Dead on Netflix yesterday for grins. It is the 2004 movie made in a Mall, kinda fun, very gory. 76% on Rotten Tomatoes. Don’t get bit !
And don’t go to malls.
And stay out of big cities.
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-danger-of-big-cities-how-can-i-put.html
“Such mass shootings appear to be happening more and more often. There appear to be few common factors in them, apart from the alienation, frustration and isolation of the shooter. Most notably, they’re almost all taking place in larger cities. That’s where the levels of tension and social angst are highest, and that seems to affect potential mass murderers more there than elsewhere. If you live in a city . . . take note.”
common factor recently is hispanic murderer
n
The cretin’s name and picture are easily searchable but I decline to justify any attempts he may have had to martyr himself. And as I’ve said here before, any of the LSM CEOs that okayed publishing his name/picture needs to have several fingers removed using bolt-cutters.
As does anyone repeating the ‘neo-nazzi white supremacist’ BS based on nothing.
n
Ha, ha:
Twitter sleuths find MSNBC gun-grabbing Allen shooting eye witness and well well well, whad’ya know
Poseur. Dumbocrat operative.
PLTs are trying to make the subway guy’s death into St. Floyd 2.0. What we know so far is subway guy was a no-good crook just like St. Floyd.
>> And stay out of big cities.
We try to do our part to keep our city from getting bigger – anyone who asks how we like having moved here, we respond that it’s terrible.
One of my gauges is Ikea continues to say we’re too small to warrant a store. Yay!
When plugs’ bullying of the airlines to pay better for cancelled/delayed flights fails, he’ll try an EO since airlines operate in “federal” airspace. The airlines will just double the price of tickets.
One of the more error riddled articles in the DM recently, and this guy has had his 15 minutes…
– yep, not mental illness. The gun went out killing people. “he works around people with mental health issues, and argued that easy access to automatic rifles is the more severe threat to public safety.”
– right. Anyone that believes there is easy access to automatic rifles is too stupid for words. EVEN if you grant him that he’s just ignorant and meant “SEMI” automatic rifles, which should automatically cause someone to discount his expert opinion, it’s still the person holding the gun that is killing the people.
Crazy people with cars and fire and bombs have killed more people than “access to automatic assault rifles”. 7 people were poisoned by the tylenol tampering crazy. Freaking plain old tylenol working PROPERLY killed almost as many people as mass shootings last year (500 vs 672).
Acetaminophen is more dangerous to the average household than mass shooters.
n
>> Also, he wasn’t at the mall when the shooting happened. He heard about the shooting and rushed to the scene. It’s almost like he was looking for some air time.
But, but, his profile says he “likes tacos”
$25.50 for the part and a perhaps a couple of hours of my time and the range seems to have a working clock. It’s only been a couple of hours. All of the buttons work so I expect the delay start and end time timers for the oven work.
The display is vacuum florescent and I don’t know how that works but it looks like the power for the horizontal segments is weaker (dimmer) than for the vertical segments.
On the old clock the MOV is hanging by one wire. I’ll tinker with that later.
I call “win!”.
Arlo and Janis: New Car Controls
https://www.gocomics.com/arloandjanis/2023/05/08
Yup, not having buttons and knobs on the new cars (Tesla, I am looking at you) is complicated for many of us.
A single H100 GPU is $40,000 on EBay if you can find one. ChatBot needs eight.
Then there is the cooling system required.
It will be a while before Moore’s Law catches up.
A single H100 GPU is $40,000 on EBay if you can find one. ChatBot needs eight.
Then there is the cooling system required.
It will be a while before Moore’s Law catches up.
But that is for training. Can’t you take a trained AI program and drop it on a 32 core , 64 thread cpu like an AMD threadripper for $2,900 ?
https://www.amazon.com/AMD-ThreadripperTM-PRO-5975WX-64-Thread/dp/B0B5VH1WPC?tag=ttgnet-20/
Stumbled across this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BM64CGK9?tag=ttgnet-20
I thought catalytic converters cost much more and that’s why folks are stealing them.
From what I understand, no, not at the same output quality level. And a GPU would still be required. Threadripper doesn’t have enough cores or memory bandwidth to handle data on the scale of the models, which is frightening considering that we spec-ed 32 core 32 GB systems at the last job to do intrusion detection on 10 Gbps network streams in real time.
Good thing I already purchased my tickets for Europe. I checked on Delta’s website and the planes are full in coach. A few 1st class seats on a couple of flights, the rest have the plane completely booked.
I have a 36 minute layover in JFK to change planes. I messaged Delta and they said that is fine. The gates are in close proximity and their reservation computers will not allow layovers where connections cannot be made because of time.
There is still the issue of the flight from Atlanta to JFK being delayed. I am leaving Atlanta at 9:30 AM so weather should not be a factor. That huge blimp of a smelly human that requires oiling of the thighs to get squeezed by seats traveling in the aisle may be be a different story.
Something like that happened to me once. The seat next to me was empty, plane full. I saw this huge blob of floppy flesh barely squeezing down the aisle. She planted in the seat next to mine squeezing me against the wall of the plane. It was almost impossible for me to move. A third of her ass was hanging in the aisle making it difficult for the beverage cart to get by without some contortions by the “thing from hell”. Breathing was not pleasant as she really stunk. I tried farting to make the air smell better. Didn’t work.
I complained to the airline when I got off the 1.5 hour flight. They offered me nothing but apologies.
From what I understand, no, not at the same output quality level. And a GPU would still be required. Threadripper doesn’t have enough cores or memory bandwidth.
Enough to run a vacuum cleaner, a lawn mower, or a car.
@Ray
Some people have the gift of, using only written words, evoking a complete sensory experience.
Please don’t use your gift like this any more.
There is that article I linked a few days ago about the low cost chips they are developing specifically for AI and specifically to move AI to the “edge” by which they mean smaller devices connected to the internet.
n
Weaponized flatulence. Oh my.
n
Seems to me that Ray needs to tell the tale of fart bombs again.
Check your privilege! It’s either a white hispanic murderer or else an innocent, hard-working hispanic or black youth who never did anything wrong, driven to desperation by white supremacy.
Yep. I sometimes do that when exiting the plane walking down the aisle. The people behind me have no idea who fouled the air and made their eyes water. They blame the person in front of them who is probably three or four people behind me, the real perpetrator. Ain’t flying fun?
Another good tool is used when furniture shopping. Find a plus couch, lots of foam, preferably close to the front of the store where people are likely to sit. Let one rip as one is getting up from the couch. The foam expands, absorbing the foul brew. The next person to sit down releases the trapped fumes in a wafting swirl of puke inducing molecules.
I had a thought.
I made Beef Stroganoff yesterday with stew meat. Turned out great. Perhaps my best batch ever. I would serve it to anyone I let in my house.
I remembered the sour cream after supper so tonight will be a different meal. It’s slowly heating and after giving a good stir, of course I licked the spoon. Yep, great stuff. Then I washed the spoon.
Anyway. Out of nowhere I wondered if QE2 ever spent time in the kitchen with her kids. Scramble some eggs and make toast for breakfast. Make a batch of cookies. Make some Jello. Help make porcupine meatballs. Bake and frost a cake. Stuff kids (well, my Mom’s kids anyway) liked to do. Yeah. I know she had “staff” to take care of everything.
Maybe a lot of the oddness the various folks “running countries” is they didn’t spend enough time with Mommy.
Just a random thought.
The inbreeding, of course, has nothing to do with it.
When Ray first described fart bombs, or at least the first time I saw it, I shared it with my daughter, aged maybe 11. She laughed and laughed. And then shared with her friends. The friends called me an evil genius but I was quick to correct them: I was simply relaying someone else’s evil genius idea. At some point after that, my daughter left a few fart bombs. Once was on a chair that a not-really-a-friend was about to sit on. Once was when she was forced to go talk to someone, a counsellor or some such.
Yaknow… I read these things so you don’t have to. It’s my cross to bear as a prepper blogger…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12059415/Im-budgeting-blogger-never-buy-seven-non-food-items-grocery-store.html
There can be tidbits
But seriously, this woman is deranged.
Here are a few actually useful tricks.
Learn your stores. Know who has sales, on what, and when. Buy things when they are on sale, and buy enough to last until the next sale. Some things never go on sale. Buy them whenever. Read the circulars you get in your junk mail. Compare the stores. ON AVERAGE which has lower prices on the stuff you buy? Shop there. Unless it’s something you can’t get at your ‘ normal’ store, it almost never makes sense to go to another store to get the one sale item.
Use coupons.
Compare ingredients and price per serving or use. Consider “store” brands. Try them. Some items I prefer the store brand to a national brand. You might be just fine getting canned green beans with differently sized pieces in the store brand can to save half the cost of uniformly sized pieces in the national brand can. There are often more than one level of “store” or “house” brands, of decreasing quality. Try them. You can save a LOT if the differences don’t bother you. Consider that packaging may be the biggest part of the cost difference. HEB ‘hamburger helper style’ meals are in a box with thinner cardboard and fewer colors in the printing, which saves money. The store brand cereals are in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes, which saves money.
Take advantage of club cards, member discounts, and cash back plans.
Use a vacuum sealer and freezer to portion out bulk purchases. Bulk cuts of meat or “family pack” bulk packages are usually cheaper because of the reduced labor and packaging costs.
The cookbook “Joy of Cooking” has lots of info about cuts of meat, reducing bulk cuts, and using less expensive cuts. There is also lots of info about COOKING stuff properly. Make sure you are cooking what you eat in the best way to get good value from it.
Cook more from basic ingredients. “Joy of Cooking” will teach you to cook (I prefer any pre-1980 version because they don’t nag you about butter, cream, and salt). “A Man A Can and A Plan” is full of easy to execute recipes using pre-packaged and canned food, and should be in every prepper’s library. “The Simple Fools Handbook to Cooking” is a great starter cookbook for anyone, but especially a college student. Most of the recipes start “brown the meat and drain”. It’s out of print but copies aren’t rare. The cookbook “Best Recipes from the Backs of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Jars” will help you get the best out of any prepared or canned product- who has a better understanding of how to use it than the manufacturer? Avoid single cuisine focused cookbooks, and anything from WilliamsSonoma until you already know how to cook.
I collect “church lady” cookbooks- the ones put out by civic groups, churches, etc that use recipes from their members. They are typically simple recipes, they are someone’s “best” dish, and the older ones make extensive use of simple ingredients, canned or bottled ingredients, or locally available foods. Just what a prepper needs. Not gonna be fresh cilantro or papaya come the day…. The best books have extensive food stains, marked pages, and annotated pages. Find them at used book stores, goodwill, estate sales, church rummage sales, or similar places.
These tips should save some money. Remember, the food in the ziplok is worth more than the bag, use a bag that will keep the food fit to eat. THAT is the real way to save money at the grocery store, buy what you eat, eat all that you buy.
n
NB- there are times when spending more on something is a better value. If you get more usable food from the fruit at the ‘nice’ store than the dirty beat up fruit at the discount store, it’s better to spend more and get more. I found that bags of potatoes and onions from my HEB lasted a lot longer than bags from the Fiesta (lower end chain) or the hispanic store. Perfect example of false economy. Food you can’t eat is entirely an expense.
n
Palate cleanser for Mr. Ray:
Shocking moment Tennessee high school student pepper sprays teacher TWICE after he confiscated her phone in class
He should have got up and knocked her teeth down her throat. She better get jail time. Will probably get a “day” named after her.
“Fort Hood is set to officially be renamed Fort Cavazos on Tuesday”
https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/fort-hood-name-change-18086121.php
“Starting on Tuesday, Fort Hood, Texas will officially be a thing of the past. The sprawling Central Texas Army base located halfway between Austin and Waco and named for Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood, will officially be reintroduced to the world as Fort Cavazos.”
“The long-awaited name change for “The Great Place” follows the passage of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which mandated the removal of names commemorating the Confederate States of America or Confederate soldiers from federal properties. The Army decided to rename the post in honor of Gen. Richard Edward Cavazos, a highly decorated Korean War and Vietnam War veteran who was the first Hispanic to reach the rank of four-star general in the Army’s history and the first Latino brigadier general.”
And there goes a little more of our history.
isn’t replacement great?
n
Judeas Priest. Count me among those Veterans who are ashamed they served. I wonder if a President could change the name back? We can no longer win our next war. We can’t even exit a combat zone without getting our ass handed to us.
Fort Hood has a lot of bigger problems than the name, most of which are not getting addressed.
Ah, but for lefties words have magic power. So changing the name will change everything.
The assaults and murder will vanish.
n
NB they will be harder to track historically with the name change.
Well spank my bottom and call me a b!tch…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12060611/Texas-gunman-staked-massacre-mall-monitor-peak-times-three-weeks-killing-eight.html
That’s either some world class retconning or the HISPANIC guy was a white supremacist…
n
>> All of the buttons work so I expect the delay start and end time timers for the oven work.
@paul, might want to be home when you test the end time timer… just sayin…
First kill all the lawyers,
Then hang all the liars…
UPDATED:
First kill all the AI’s,
Then hang all the programmers…
>> We can no longer win our next war.
Especially since we’ve given (wait, does this count against the IRS lifetime gift tax exemption?) a good deal of our ‘splody stuff to folks that are having trouble getting their war out of the red zone.
Good summary of the “fake homicides”:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/homicide_is_the_wrong_cause_of_death_for_subway_assailant_jordan_neely.html
I killed either a four foot long water moccasin or water snake on the office front porch tonight. If a water snake, then oh well.
stunning photo:
Manmade: Studies Suggest That Wind Parks Cause Climate Change, Even Regional Drought
Plastering the landscape with wind turbines for producing renewable energy may lead to regional drought.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/05/07/manmade-studies-suggest-that-wind-parks-cause-climate-change-even-regional-drought/
“Bigger = better” isn’t working out for wind
“GCube, a renewable-energy insurer… found that component failures in turbines with 8-megawatt capacity or greater occur on average after just over a year. That compares with over five years for turbines of 4-to-8 megawatts.”
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2023/05/08/bigger-better-isnt-working-out-for-wind-n549389
Consider a fill-in-the-blank problem: “____ AI”
Can anyone imagine an upside described in one word
that would counterbalance the downside of: “woke AI”?
I thought all programmers were hung. At least based on my personal observation. But that is only one data point.
“well hung and snow white tan…”
n
@Nick But where were the spiders?
I did say I learned a lot from this community, but I learned a little too much from Ray today. I’m really glad they never implemented the olfactory outputs on modern communication devices. OTOH, we now have 2 corresponding data points…
Which, in a round about way, reminds me: I highly recommend “To Sleep in a Sea of Stars” by Christopher Paolini (yeah, the Eragon guy. This is not a Young Adult book.) It takes place just over two centuries from now, and I suppose assumes we somehow get through the current world-wide CF without returning to medieval technology. I don’t want to spoil the book, so I won’t provide a synopsis. I found it thought-provoking along the lines of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos, without being a full-blown space opera. The second book in that series should be at my door next week.
I did say I learned a lot from this community, but I learned a little too much from Ray today. I’m really glad they never implemented the olfactory outputs on modern communication devices. OTOH, we now have 2 corresponding data points…
Smellovision did not make it commercially …
I understand the CIA has some of the prototypes down in Guantanamo …