nickwitha_k (he/him)

  • 4 Posts
  • 631 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Originally from the PNW as well! I have chosen “fancy beer” most of my life. When I was younger and looking to get trashed, the higher ABV and better flavor made due a good bargain. Now that I don’t really tend to get trashed, I like to drink “fancy beer” because I enjoy the flavor still.

    A little tip, if you still live in the area:

    If you homebrew and have soda kegs, February is about the optimal time for “no-chill” brewing. Just rack the hot wort into a corney keg, seal, and flip it to ensure pasteurization. After letting it sit for a few mins to become sterile, flip back upright and put outside in the cold (ideally in a bit of snow if available) and you get a bit of a cold crash while still not needing to use a chiller.


  • American here: American Light Lagers, like those of the BMC brands, are both one of the hardest styles to brew well and one of the worst crimes ever committed against brewery. They’re hard to brew because there is so little flavor that the slightest off-taste can ruin a batch. That’s also the reason that they are so terrible; they are little more than ethanol delivery systems that have enough malt proteins to sometimes have a head.

    Want to get fucked up without tasting much? They’re probably the next best choice after a very neutral vodka. If you have interest in anything beyond intoxication, like actually enjoying the beverage, then, pretty much any other American or European style is a better choice.




  • Yes, my edit was a bit hyperbolic. The point being that current AI/LLM companies have been, at best, encoding data that they do not have permission to use into their models.

    It’s like baking a cake, you mix in flour, butter, eggs, and bake it. Once mixed and baked you can’t get the flour, butter and eggs back to their original form and the final product is completely different

    It’s more like baking a cake with flour, butter, and eggs that you snagged from other people’s grocery baskets after they paid for them. Then, started selling the cakes made from said ingredients.

    Ideally, none of that would matter because knowledge and data want to be free and everyone would benefit. However, we don’t live in such a world. Instead, the technology is being used almost exclusively to extract wealth from people and make the average human being’s life worse, both in the short-term by reducing their ability to support themselves and in the long-term by drastically increasing consumption of fossil fuels and potable water, putting more pressure on the biosphere.





  • The velocity that RISC-V development is seeing is remarkable. The first commercial ARM processor (ARM1) started design in 1983 and was released in 1985. The first Linux-capable ARM processor was the ARM2, released in 1986. The first 64-bit variant was Armv8-A, released in 2011, with Armv9.6-A in 2024.

    RISC-V was first released in 2014 and the stable privileged and unprivileged ISAs were released 2021 and 2019 (including the first stable rv64I), respectively. The first Linux-capable RISC-V processor released was the SiFive Freedom U540, which came out in 2018. The current rv64I variant of RISC-V is at 2.1, released in 2022.

    I’m optimistic that RISC-V can and will compete, given its compressed development timeframe and mass adoption in MCUs and coprocessors. The big hurdles really are getting rid of the hardware implementation bugs (ex. failure to correctly implement IEEE754 floats in THead C906 and C910 CPUs), and getting software support and optimizations.

    There are several HPC companies iterating towards commercial datacenter deployment, of special note being Tenstorrent, which both has an interesting, novel architecture and Jim Keller (know for AMD K8, AMD64, and Apple M-series) as CTO. They may be able to displace NVIDIA a bit in the DC AI/ML space, which could help to force GPU prices to get more reasonable, which would be nice.

    Overall, yeah, rv64 has a good deal of catching up to do but, with the ISA not requiring special, exorbitant licensing, hardware development is moving much faster that expected and may be competitive with ARM in more spaces soon, if they don’t succeed in using governments as an anti-competitive bludgeon.







  • I’ve tried different wrist wrests over the years but I’ve found that having them floating is the most comfortable for me.

    With a more “traditional” layout like this, most wrist rests do more harm than good. Raised (in relation to the keys) palm rests like the Kinesis Advantage boards tend to be better. I’ve also got kinda fucky wrists (injury and starting PT level of fucky) so, small keyboards without finger splay can be quite painful. I ended up needing to change to a Svalboard in order to minimize pain.

    I’m thinking about building a split board but I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with that, more research is needed. For some reason I think I want to build a fully wireless corne with Choc switches but I see that the newest corne PCB is not really setup for wireless.

    Corne is a fun one. If the PCB has a Pro Micro pin layout, you can swap that with something like a NiceNano (use Mill Max sockets) for “free” wireless.