ToaKraka
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User ID: 108
If you're interested in running LLMs locally, but you don't care about playing ultra-graphics-heavy games, then you can buy a special AI-focused graphics card that has gigantic VRAM but a weaker processor. According to PassMark and Newegg:
| GPU | 3D graphics rating | Computation rating | VRAM (GiB) | Price (k$) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 Ti | 23 | 11 | 16 | 0.6 |
| Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 | 39 | 25 | 32 | 3.7 |
| AMD Radeon RX 9070 | 25 | 15 | 16 | 0.6 |
| AMD Radeon AI Pro R9700 | 27 | 15 | 32 | 1.3 |
The R9700 is just an RX 9070 with extra VRAM stapled on! (Alternatively, if your computer has a full-size motherboard, you can combine two RTX 5060 Ti cards. This cannot be done with two RX 9070 cards.)
The World Wide Web Consortium has just published a very interesting note on how text-to-speech programs should deal with ruby/furigana text (tiny kana/pinyin/bopomofo characters that sometimes are written alongside kanji/hanzi as pronunciation aids; 1 2 3).
Premise: You want to make a personal copy of an online story that you're enjoying reading.
Problem: Story-hosting websites are likely to have anti-bot measures—or you just don't want to spend time figuring out the intricacies of automatic downloading tools.
Solution: Just manually smash that Ctrl-S key combination in your Web browser before reading every chapter! Once the story has ended (or has become boring), manually opening your several dozen HTML files in your favorite plaintext editor, deleting all the irrelevant cruft (Javascript, website infrastructure, reader comments) above and below the text of each chapter, adding proper heading elements, and assembling the results into a single unified file (and optionally compressing the HTML file into an EPUB file; note that this does require XML compliance, which can be a mild hassle for certain websites that disgustingly fail to properly close their p and hr elements) is the work of less than an hour.
(RoyalRoad does insert into each chapter an anti-piracy warning ("Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.", "Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.", "Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.", et cetera) that is hidden by the site's CSS and therefore is revealed in your CSS-free local copy. But, since you aren't a bot, this warning is fairly easy to remove with a simple Ctrl-F for the warning's telltale HTML pattern (e. g., </p><span or </p><p), which appears nowhere else in the files. And, if you're so extremely lazy that you don't care about seeing an immersion-breaking sentence or two in every chapter, then there's really no need to remove the warning at all, since you aren't uploading this file to Amazon (whose own automated systems presumably would see the warning and reject the upload) for the purpose of the industrial copyright infringement that I've seen authors complain about.)
ToaKraka
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12hr ago
Why is every named person in this article Muslim? Is it really that bad?
Statistics page: In 2021, Birmingham was 31 percent Asian. This is up from 27 percent in 2011 and 20 percent in 2001, so presumably the figure is even higher among working-age people.
Logistically how do garbage men strike for a year? How are they paying their bills?
BBC article: The union pays them 70 pounds per day, and some have gotten second jobs.
ToaKraka
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20hr ago
ToaKraka
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1d ago
The Guardian: The garbagemen of Birmingham, center of England's third-largest urban area, have been on strike for almost an entire year—since March 2025. The contractors hired to replace them joined the strike in December.
I am sure tourists and legal foreign students do not count, right, right??
The Constitution doesn't explicitly address this topic. But an initial draft of the Constitution used the word "inhabitant", and the first Census-related law passed by Congress used "inhabitant", "usual residence", and "usual place of abode". So the Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that the government is allowed (but not required) to include temporary absentees (federal employees, such as soldiers, who are living abroad for their jobs) in the population of a state. The same logic presumably applies to the exclusion of temporary residents (such as tourists and foreign college students).
The Biden executive order linked above reflects this practice, explicitly using the words "usual place of residence", though Congress has not bothered to put similar language into the currently-applicable law.
ToaKraka
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1d ago
ToaKraka
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1d ago
Astral Codex Ten article on the topic
Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?
Fine, the title is an exaggeration. But only a small one. GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they’re also effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, alcoholism, and drug addiction.
ToaKraka
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1d ago
I recommend typing "& mdash;" and "& ndash;" without the spaces.
ToaKraka
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1d ago
*All em-dashes artisanally crafted by hand.
You placed this footnote on an en dash, not on an em dash. The difference between the two characters was recently discussed here.
And then you used an em dash later in the same comment. Such a blatant inconsistency gives your detractors a lot of ammo…
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
He seems to regard the protesting as mostly a harmless social activity that he groups together with going to record stores and restaurants. I get the sense his wife is basically dragging him to this ("I am not as brave as my wife, who acts from a strain of moral clarity that can sometimes be daunting") and he is playing the role of an agreeable husband that regards this like his wife dragging him to a museum or board game night, so he is happy to go there and shout obscenities for a few hours in between other tourist activities. I know it sounds cliche, but there is just such beta energy radiating off the entire post.
This comment excerpt gave me a fun idea: The Chad harem/offspring-maxxxing doctors and lawyers explain to the autist incel programmers and engineers their personal understandings of how friendship and romance work!
Even before I realized that familiarity inevitably breeds contempt and stopped making attempts at pseudo-friendship, I absolutely hated the idea of obtaining an actual friend or a romantic partner only to be constantly forced by that person to do random things in which I had no interest. It seemed like a continuation of how my parents would torture me by making me join after-school clubs and dragging me to museums, concerts, and weddings.
I assumed that any friend or romantic partner would require me to do such things. But now @daguerrean says that only an inferior, weak-willed "beta" man allows his romantic partner to lead him around by the nose to random events. So, is it normal friendship/romance behavior to drag the other party to an event in which he is not interested, or not? Has my entire life been a lie?
The 14th Amendment seems unambiguous at first glance.
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.
Trump did attempt to exclude illegal aliens from the apportionment base in his first term, but before any illegal-free numbers could be published (which was necessary for adjudication of the legal issue) he left office and Biden returned to the old policy.
ToaKraka
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2d ago
Anecdote:
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GURPS Vehicles First Edition and Second Edition, for GURPS Third Edition, are sharply divisive books, with their complexity alienating some but appreciated by others.
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When GURPS Fourth Edition is published, fans clamor for GURPS Vehicles Third Edition.
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After twenty years of radio silence, the editor of GURPS finally explains that (1) GURPS Vehicles Third Edition is basically complete, but (2) the publisher has decided that the final editing of such a complicated book with such a shaky audience would not be worth the expense, so (3) the publisher has canceled the contract and returned the rights to the author, so that if he wants to he can excise the GURPS-specific material and publish it himself as a systemless vehicle-design supplement.
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GURPS Vehicles fans ask the author about crowdfunding. He responds that he probably could get the book edited and published for 6 k$.
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Astonished at the lowness of the price tag, various fans quickly offer a few kilodollars to the author. He responds that he is busy with another project at the moment, but in a few months he will put together a concrete plan for accepting money and finishing Definitely Not GURPS Vehicles Third Edition.
The point of this anecdote is, it would be pretty funny if this website contained enough fans of your commenting and moderation style that you could milk them for a few hundred dollars (not as months of Patreon/SubscribeStar donations, but as a lump sum) on the promise of a book from you.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
ToaKraka
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3d ago
You can't blame this on the Democrats. New Jersey eliminated its sales tax on coins and bullion by unanimous vote while having an all-Democrat government.
Back then it was about half
What I think is the actual quote, so that people don't have to dig:
In 2013, the SSA Office of the Chief Actuary (OCACT) estimated that about 3.1 million unauthorized aliens were working and paying Social Security taxes in 2010. Of those 3.1 million unauthorized foreign national workers, SSA estimated that 0.6 million had temporary work authorized at some point in the past and overstayed their terms of admittance (e.g., visas); 0.7 million obtained fraudulent birth certificates at some point and used these birth certificates to obtain an SSN; and 1.8 million used an SSN that did not match their name (i.e., fraudulently used another person's SSN). OCACT estimated that $13 billion in payroll taxes were from unauthorized immigrant workers and their employers in 2010.[10]
[10]In addition, OCACT estimated that 3.9 million unauthorized workers worked in the "underground economy," for an estimated total 7.0 million unauthorized workers in 2010.
ToaKraka
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3d ago
There are at least two incel communities of non-negligible popularity: incels.is (discussion) and 4chan's /r9k/ board.
ToaKraka
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4d ago
ToaKraka
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4d ago
Someone more creative than I am, please make the condom joke that obviously is crying out to be made here!
Here is a slow motion video purporting to show him reaching for his missing weapon
I personally can't see any reaching in this video. But the uploader claims to see Pretti reaching at the 27-second mark, which is well after he was first shot by the officer at the 21-second mark. So your items 6 and 7 need to be corrected:
(6) An officer draws his gun and shoots Pretti.
(7) All the officers disperse and stop holding Pretti down. Pretti partially rises from the compressed kneeling/dogeza position in which the officers were holding him, but soon falls back to the ground. Pretti allegedly (observer opinions vary) reaches for his empty holster as he rises.
(8) The aforementioned officer shoots Pretti several more times.
ToaKraka
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5d ago
Users on /r/conservative and Kiwi Farms seem to be fairly split.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to get paper that's 1/30 of normal thickness. Some cursory searching indicates that normal paper weighs around 20 pounds per ream or 80 g/m2, and flimsy "onionskin" paper (often found in Bibles) weighs around 10 pounds or 40 grams, so ultra-thin 0.7-pound or 3-gram paper probably does not exist, and a book with 1/30 horizontal scale would have extremely unwieldy thickness.
(I feel like there's a condom joke to be made here somewhere.)
ToaKraka
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6d ago
The linked page does clarify that it's 17 % Pakistani, 6 % Indian, 4 % Bangladeshi, 1 % Chinese, and 3 % "other Asian".
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