tal

All of that said, consider replacing your central ducted unit with a multi-head mini-split system in the long run.

Mini splits don't provide ventilation, whereas ducted systems do. In general, if one can have a ducted system, I'd rather have that. The major problem with ducted systems is that ductwork takes up a lot of space, so it's hard to stick into an existing house; much less of an issue if you can build it in during construction. A mini split is less invasive to an existing structure.

Just don’t get a portable unit. They suck and are just a waste of money most of the times.

Get a dual-hose unit if you get one. There are a lot of companies selling single-hose units. Those are a lot less efficient and aren't much cheaper. I would guess that in a situation where they get any kind of meaningful use, a dual-hose unit pays for itself quickly.

I don't think I'd agree that they suck, but if you can use a window unit

not all rooms and windows are amenable to this

you normally want a window unit instead of a portable unit, unless you must take down the AC unit on a regular basis. Less noise inside, more energy efficiency.

Yes.

The Threadiverse has multiple intercompatible "Reddit-alike" software packages.

• Lemmy (the biggest). Example: https://lemmy.world/ Written in the Rust programming language.

• PieFed. Example: https://piefed.social/ Written in the Python programming language.

• Mbin (the successor of the defunct Kbin project). Example: https://fedia.io/ Written in the PHP programming language.

There's also Sublinks, written in Java, but I don't know for sure whether that's going to actually get the ball rolling. https://demo.sublinks.org/ Think they need more developers contributing.

EDIT: Note that while this approach is unusual for the centralized Web-oriented social media era, where typically one company controls the whole shebang and has one codebase, it is common for federated systems. There are many different NNTP server implementations for Usenet, many different XMPP server implementations for instant messaging, many different IRC server implementations for chat, many different SMTP server implementations for email, many different FidoNet implementations.

dull...fixed my washing machine

I mean, an incorrectly-operating washing machine can make things quite exciting indeed.

https://www.worldeconomics.com/Thoughts/Frances-Retirement-Risk.aspx?ThoughtID=274

France’s Unsustainable Retiree Burden on its Shrinking Workforce

Decades of low fertility are causing the French working-age population to fall. Simultaneously, retirees are living longer and forming an ever-larger part of the population. These factors are causing an extraordinary decline in the number of working-age people available to support the expanding number of retirees.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yvq1jy2xgo

Fall in fertility rate becomes big challenge for provincial France

https://www.france24.com/en/france/20240620-how-france-s-far-right-changed-the-debate-on-immigration

How France’s far right changed the debate on immigration

For the first time since its founding, France’s anti-immigration National Rally (RN) party has clawed its way to within arm’s reach of governing.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2024/09/28/french-public-debt-hits-new-high_6727571_19.html

French public debt hits new high

France's debt has reached a record €3.228 trillion, amounting to 112% of GDP, well above the 60% cap set by EU regulations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France

This is why France continues to be among the OECD countries whose tax rate is the highest. Taxes account for 46,1% of GDP against 34% on average in OECD countries.

https://www.politico.eu/article/markets-hold-their-breaths-as-frances-pensions-debate-faces-make-or-break-moment/

French pension ‘conclave’ faces make-or-break moment

The prime minister’s effort to find common ground on retirement reform has a Monday deadline.

Several powerful unions left the table early in the conclave in opposition to Bayrou's refusal to go back on the legislation's most contentious aspect, the retirement age increase from 62 to 64 years for most workers — which a significant number of lawmakers and large swathes of the public still oppose.

Most agencies have already slapped France's credit rating with a negative outlook due to its public finances and the political instability crippling the country, which has worsened since President Emmanuel Macron's decision to call snap elections last summer, leading to a hung parliament.

I mean, given that combination of factors, something has to give at some point. Declining fertility means that there are fewer workers entering the workforce to support retirees. People angry about immigration make it hard to fill in gaps in the workforce created via low fertility via immigration. Already-high taxation means that it's hard to raise taxes to fill revenue shortfalls and keep the French economy competitive. The debt being already high from COVID-19-related costs limits how much further the can can be kicked down the road by running a higher deficit. Opposition to a higher retirement age means that one can't cover the costs by decreasing the amount of time that people spend in retirement relative to in the workforce.

You can, to some degree, trade off one of those for another, but if all of them are an issue at the same time, there's limited room for the government to act. And a lot of those start creating positive feedback situations if one starts to get near trouble, which one doesn't want.

Not what you asked, but you might check that:

• The central AC doesn't need to be recharged. If it has leaked coolant and is low, it will drop in effectiveness.

• Or, even more simply, that the air filters don't need to be replaced.

• You can't improve insulation. Doing so is a one-off cost, as opposed to the ongoing cost of throwing more air conditioning muscle at the problem. Weatherstrip leaks, replace any single-pane windows with double-pane, etc.

Webster tried to reform English, and was a reason for a number of the American English changes from British English. Some of his changes caught on, like "public" for "publick" or "jail" for "gaol".

But others did not.

I think that some of those ones that didn't catch on would be good candidates.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/53723/26-noah-webster%E2%80%99s-spelling-changes-didn%E2%80%99t-catch

E.g. "Island" to "Iland".

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/noah-websters-spelling-wins-and-fails

Or "is" to "iz".

with a passion. It just doesn't do what its supposed to, its not searching anything at all. Ive literally tried and written every word of the video title plus the channel name and it didnt show up bc I put onen word in the wrong spot.

If you want to just treat each search term independently, that works for me. Searching for battle of the solomons eastern has a top hit of "Battle of the Eastern Solomons".

I'm sorry, you are correct. The syntax and interface mirrors docker, and one can run ollama in Docker, so I'd thought that it was a thin wrapper around Docker, but I just went to check, and you are right

it's not running in Docker by default. Sorry, folks! Guess now I've got one more thing to look into getting inside a container myself.

While I don't think that llama.cpp is specifically a special risk, I think that running generative AI software in a container is probably a good idea. It's a rapidly-moving field with a lot of people contributing a lot of code that very quickly gets run on a lot of systems by a lot of people. There's been malware that's shown up in extensions for (for example) ComfyUI. And the software really doesn't need to poke around at outside data.

Also, because the software has to touch the GPU, it needs a certain amount of outside access. Containerizing that takes some extra effort.

https://old.reddit.com/r/comfyui/comments/1hjnf8s/psa_please_secure_your_comfyui_instance/

ComfyUI users has been hit time and time again with malware from custom nodes or their dependencies. If you're just using the vanilla nodes, or nodes you've personally developed yourself or vet yourself every update, then you're fine. But you're probably using custom nodes. They're the great thing about ComfyUI, but also its great security weakness.

Half a year ago the LLMVISION node was found to contain an info stealer. Just this month the ultralytics library, used in custom nodes like the Impact nodes, was compromised, and a cryptominer was shipped to thousands of users.

Granted, the developers have been doing their best to try to help all involved by spreading awareness of the malware and by setting up an automated scanner to inform users if they've been affected, but what's better than knowing how to get rid of the malware is not getting the malware at all. '

Why Containerization is a solution

So what can you do to secure ComfyUI, which has a main selling point of being able to use nodes with arbitrary code in them? I propose a band-aid solution that, I think, isn't horribly difficult to implement that significantly reduces your attack surface for malicious nodes or their dependencies: containerization.

Ollama means sticking llama.cpp in a Docker container, and that is, I think, a positive thing.

If there were a close analog to ollama, like some software package that could take a given LLM model and run in podman or Docker or something, I think that that'd be great. But I think that putting the software in a container is probably a good move relative to running it uncontainerized.

Double the Speed Limit, Hits Speed Bumps at Full Speed...Excellent

I remember a computer science professor telling us that he was once somewhere like New York City and was about to miss his flight and wasn't going to reasonably make it to the airport.

He decides to do a Hollywood-style "if you can get me to the airport in the next twenty minutes, there's X hundred dollars in it for you" to the first cab that pulled up. The prof says "The cabbie said okay and he got me there in time, and we didn't die, but I am never, ever doing that again."

Sometimes people might approve of that speed, though.

Parallel compute accelerator.

Nobody is gonna say that in full, just like "graphics processing unit" becomes "GPU", so maybe "PCA".