CSAs (and community gardens or decentralized gardening) are really great and I do recommend, but there are places where access to these types of resources can still be limited.

Some GMOs are created with pesticide use in mind. Others are simply more drought tolerant or produce more vitamins and minerals (which can be a natural defense against pests in some cases). Which is why GMO =/= bad in every case. Monsanto GMO? Bad. Scientist making a GMO crop to yield more with less pesticides, less water use, less fertilizer use, and higher nutritional content? That’s pretty good.

Vertical grow farms, better more resilient gmos, better farming and land management practices, food forests, subsidizing decentralized food growing. There are lots of things we can do to support lowering pesticide use.

By the way, killing pollinators will also make our vegetables very, very expensive.

I do. I’m more concerned about the ecological effects on pollinators and plant adjacent species (birds, rodents, fish in the watershed)

Edit: I guess I should say in this context, that in places with limited or poor water quality, washing vegetables is not always super accessible either.

Many folks lack access to land (in apartments) or a host of other means necessary to grow vegetables (and it’s harder also to grow them year round).

I’m all for everyone growing vegetables, but for many folks vegetables, especially those grown without pesticides (no problem with GMO, but pesticide use is a real problem in my mind), are not readily accessible (financially, or otherwise).

You can get by surprisingly well on 20b parameter models using a Mac with decent ram or even 8b parameter models that fit on most high end (eg 16gb) model cards. Depends on your use cases but I almost exclusively use smaller local models.

I don’t think it’s actually true that in low spec ranges AMD and Intel are competitive. The Apple a19 pro chip has a tdp of 8w while a Z1 extreme from amd has a 15w envelop that goes up to 30w. The A19 crushes the Z1 in single core and is 90idh percent on multi core. The fp32 performance is double the z1 as some indication of gpu horsepower. So let’s just say near the same performance at less than half the tdp. Or another way, same steam deck performance you’ve had (well better actually, steam deck doesn’t have a z1 extreme) at twice the battery life. The A19 Pro is also in a passively cooled device where a Z1 Extreme is actively cooled. Data sources for this: just looking at geekbench and pass mark scores that I could find. Of course there’s instruction translation overhead, and it’s not as clear cut as this (for one, Valve is not likely to poach chip designers from Apple and they seem reticent to create their own hardware), but still a thought worth considering.

Ultimately I don’t care if it’s arm based, I care about the performance of the machine itself (in totality, which the steam deck excels at even still).

So I guess in a long winded way, I’m agreeing with you that they should maximize the performance up to 15w (I would have said 30w for docked access but the steam machine seems to be their goal for the living room). I guess I am just not super convinced legacy chipmakers have what it takes to be competitive, even with a FEX penalty. I think we won’t see a steam deck 2 for another 2 years, and that’s a long time for FEX to mature, drivers to mature, and Valve to line up a low power, extremely strong device.

Agreed there. The only advantage is if you have more performant silicon for a given power envelope that exceeds the compatibility overhead of running through FEX. This is why in early days, Rosetta occasionally did just as well on M1 Mac’s as the Intel based software, with the leap in performance more than overcoming that translation layer impact.

This is true. But I’m more looking at the work they’re putting in on the Frame as a bellwether. It seems odd they’d support a tiny platform for them with an ARM cpu (that matches typical Android phone hardware). It’s possible they just want to increase the compatibility layers in that space in a general sense.

I guess I’m looking at the M5 chip 2x’ing the performance (single core) vs the M1 variant from 5 years ago almost exactly, and over that same frame the best desktop cpus have seen a 1.5x’ing. A mobile chip does better single core than desktop chips from AMD and Intel (caveats here). The perf per watt is absurd.

To be clear, I don’t think this will happen quickly. I expect another 2 years before the next steam deck arrives. I just think it’s interesting that valve is supporting a non x64/x86 architecture in a product category here and have a hard time believing it’s a total dead end for them.

Just to be fair, the MacBook pros are actually a tremendously good value if you actually need their power. I’d kill for a full Linux machine running on comparable hardware to their M5 processors.

That said, it just reinforces that if they made a screen you needed to be plugged into your MacBook for (and for low power on the go, like watching a movie on a plane, you could have a small battery pack that lasts for a few hours and use your phone for the content), it would be an absolute thoroughbred for sales. You could offer it for 500-1000 dollars and folks buying 2 and 3 thousand dollar MacBook pros, or 1200 plus dollar phones, would tack that on like they do Apple Watches and AirPods. That should be their goal.

Their mistake was trying to make a standalone product. They should’ve made a companion piece that was more affordable.

It looks and feels a bit like windows with the theming it has out of the box. So it’s probably an easier on ramp and possibly recommended in “what Linux is most like windows” google searches and the like.

More like, large corporations not at all invested in local communities are now empowered to completely run rough shod over local governance processes. They’re actually more likely to pay for folks to stall out slow approval processes so that they can take advantage of this law and start building, especially when the permit would have likely been denied because it didn’t consider easements, fire or flood risks, building and local regulatory standards, or any other manner of things. So this actually increases the likelihood of bribes, and ensuring that corporations actually pay less to your local government and more to personal pockets of those being bribed, while simultaneously making the buildouts less safe and compliant with greater risks to the local community. Basically a lose lose for local folks, and a win win for a giant corporation.

A better version of these flawed tactics would’ve been that failure to meet timelines would open the project to public vote and also that every project would require a public option (eg government supplied bid on the infrastructure) to compete. That way if timeline expires, it’s not automatically awarded to people who have a vested interest in it expiring at the expense of a community. It could be awarded to a local municipal project instead.

I think it’s okay, I made a comment about the license first! It’s good discussion. I certainly like everything being copyleft, but I also get why people who make a contribution (an extension or otherwise) might want to license it differently. Ultimately whoever does the work gets to decide on the license — closed source I’ll never touch, extension or otherwise, but I’m lenient on open source.

Oh I’m fine with copyleft, even preferred. I just see any open source license, even MIT, and am pleased. Perhaps my bar is too low, but at this point anyone posting anything with open source protection to the creation is cool to me.

Hey some folks responded here which is great! For me, I think wiki and tracker are perfect like someone else mentioned, because a lot of folks without accounts can still access the knowledge created. The hard part is moderating of course. I’m not sure there is a perfect solution.

Ultimately, you’re producing something cool for the community and you get to set the terms for that; if discord is easy and sustainable, I prefer that to you doing anything else that isn’t sustainable to see the project through as long and vibrantly as you can. So in that sense just choose what makes sense.

So in short: do what makes sense for you and if one of the alternatives listed (maybe wiki it seems? That would be cool with me) works then that’s great!

I guess I’ll also plug forgejo or codeberg at this time haha

Edit: I’ll also say, more folks here for discussion is cool too, and good to have you posting and hope to see more discussion around it in the future here!

MIT license, cool! I’ll check this out. Any chance to migrate from discord to a more open platform for community engagement?

When a cell senses the damage, one of the substances it produces is a protein called c-GAS. That plays several roles, but what was of interest to these scientists is that in humans, it interferes with and hampers the process by which DNA is knitted back together.

Scientists think that this interference could promote cancer and shorten our lifespan.

In naked mole rats though, the researchers found that the exact same protein does the opposite. It helps the body mend strands of DNA and keeps the genetic code in each cell intact.

They don’t know why or how yet for the mole rat using the same pathway in a different way.

Yeah this is mostly fud. People read how folks on farms have fewer infections and have better health outcomes and take things way too far.

People on farms have greater and more diverse gut microflora (commensals as they’re called sometimes). This is in part because of exposure to animals and nature, and also possibly in part due to lower levels of pro inflammatory things you might find in cities (think, air pollution, microplastics [they of course have them too now]).

Good bacteria is good for you. Bad bacteria is bad for you. Viruses will mess you up and the best protection is not infection but vaccines. People truly believe that infections make their immune system stronger. That’s almost surely not true. The only thing that really makes you stronger are vaccines and getting a huge amount and diversity of good microflora.

If we can solve the probiotic space really well (which is difficult, really fecal transfer seems to be the only reliable method at this point), then really there is zero concern about over sanitation. Even as it is. There shouldn’t be that much concern about it.

I’m not sure. Either they’re unable to completely remove all noise (meaning the rest wasn’t done in absolute 0 photon space, only that when we pulse a photon a person can detect that there was a photon in an otherwise very low photon environment; that is, there may be some 10s of photons, but when the researchers release their control photon from the crystal, it is perceptible above that background), or perhaps they’re talking about neurological noise in the biological circuits that fire. My guess is the former.

This. More of this action.

It supports the thesis that Lumo is not open source in many common sense ways that most people would expect when a model claims it is open source. So in that sense, it does though.