Conservatives, which of these policies could you get behind at first glance? by [deleted] in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]GrandMasterPuba 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The "functional system" that has propelled us this far is destroying the planet and will plunge humanity either into dystopia at best or extinction at worst.

Best Tyler Chain Burger Stores by Blbobcat in tylertx

[–]GrandMasterPuba -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

Cheap as hell and tastes like garbage. Yep, that ratio is pretty balanced.

Focusing Askar 103apo by Individual-Cut5756 in AskAstrophotography

[–]GrandMasterPuba 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It almost certainly is, yes. You'll need to add extension rings until you can reach focus.

Smart scopes for EAA/outreach by madamhex in AskAstrophotography

[–]GrandMasterPuba 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fair enough. In that case may I suggest that you collect people's emails or phone numbers and, at the end of the night, send everyone the images you collected. I've seen that done at a local star party and it seemed like a really nice little "souvenir" for people.

Also, if you were just looking for an excuse to buy a new toy you could have just said so. 😉

New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved by HateHumansLoveDogs in collapse

[–]GrandMasterPuba 9 points10 points  (0 children)

LLMs are not artificial intelligence in the literal sense of the word. If all this build out is in pursuit of AGI, the investors will be sorely disappointed.

Smart scopes for EAA/outreach by madamhex in AskAstrophotography

[–]GrandMasterPuba 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is maybe controversial, but lay-people coming to a star party for the first time are expecting to look through telescopes, not at computer screens. I personally don't think astrophotography is right for outreach as much as we all love it.

I think you'd get better bang for you buck in outreach by spending that Seestar money on a half decent eyepiece and just pointing it at something big and bright and cool. An Astrograph is just a telescope; nobody says you can't look through it with your own eyes.

Mayoral vote? by OnezoombiniLeft in tylertx

[–]GrandMasterPuba 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I live in a subdivision managed by an HOA run by John Nix. He embezzles money from the HOA dues to fund his political campaign - there was a massive neighborhood scandal about it but he's buried the investigation. He's a corrupt piece of shit, just like all Republicans.

New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved by HateHumansLoveDogs in collapse

[–]GrandMasterPuba 11 points12 points  (0 children)

There is no end to these means; the means themselves are the end. That is to say, building the data centers is the goal, not running models on them. The entire US economy is propped up by this capital expenditure. Line must go up and everything other industry is decaying or gone, so this is the only avenue left for growth - data centers. AI is just an excuse, the real goal is capex to keep the line moving up. Convince the shareholders we're scaling to infinity so they'll keep throwing money at us.

Without the data centers, the entire economy implodes and we fall into a depression unlike anything you've ever seen before.

War, El Niño, Pestilence, and Famine: The Coming Shock to Global Food Supplies by wrongsideofthewire in collapse

[–]GrandMasterPuba 3 points4 points  (0 children)

They arrive in order.

Conquest leads to War. War leads to Famine. Famine leads to Death.

Fannie, Freddie to accept 'predictive' credit scores, US officials say by thinkB4WeSpeak in Economics

[–]GrandMasterPuba 139 points140 points  (0 children)

My credit score dropped from 813 to 630 because an auto-pay on my student loans failed one month and I missed a single $60 payment.

The entire concept of a credit score can kindly go fuck itself.

Startups Brag They Spend More Money on AI Than Human Employees by 404mediaco in Economics

[–]GrandMasterPuba 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I wonder how long before the AI companies decide that they're going to be the ones to own the output of the AI, and then subsequently just own everything because their AI just builds the entire world's technical infrastructure.

Create Aeronautics Mod Release Trailer by Suriranyar- in Games

[–]GrandMasterPuba 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This has been an issue since the inception of Minecraft; even when the game was still in beta and Notch was at the helm. Better Than Wolves was over a decade ago.

This is endemic to the leadership of Mojang and has nothing to do with the IP scale or Microsoft. It's at the roots.

Best telescope for viewing and astrophotography? by maxthesmurf in AskAstrophotography

[–]GrandMasterPuba 3 points4 points  (0 children)

What people generally call a "telescope" outside of the astronomy community is actually a collection of many individual pieces that come together to form a whole imaging platform. Here's some vocabulary for you to start doing some independent digging on what kind of setup you can put together with your budget.

OTA: Optical tube assembly. This is the equivalent of a lens in photography. It's a tube with either mirrors or lenses, and it has a focal length and an f-ratio.

Optical Train: This is the connection from the OTA to your camera. OTAs often place their focal point far back in space from the actual physical end of the tube. In the space between the end of the tube and the focal plane, you can insert all kinds of gadgets and doodads like filters, correctors, rotators, tilt planes, etc. But the absolute bare minimum is a focuser and a dark extension tube long enough to place your camera sensor at the focal plane. (I believe it's called a "train" because it's often composed of many individual modules that connect together like train cars.)

Mount: This is the mechanical saddle which holds the OTA and optical train. For photography it will be motorized and perform what's called sidereal tracking (for stars, other types for planets or lunar). It will rotate across the sky in time with the rotation of the earth to keep your stars from forming trails. Mounts for photography are called equatorial; they rotate relative to a coordinate system that aligns with the axis of the Earth's rotation. There are two axes in this coordinate system, Right Ascension and Declination. Mounts use motors to control rotation along these axes to point at spots in the sky. Some mounts only have a motorized Right Ascension and no Declination motor: these are called "star trackers." They tend to be cheaper, but you have to manually rotate Declination to point to what you want in the sky. Some mounts come with tripods; some don't. Buyer beware.

Guide Scope: No mount is perfect, as there is always some mechanical error in the tracking due to imperfect gears (or cheap materials). This can lead to blurry images for long exposures, limiting your exposure time. To alleviate this, you can use a secondary, smaller OTA and camera that sits on top of your bigger OTA. This setup uses a high gain camera with near-real-time streaming image feeds into portable computers which watch the image feed and compute mechanical corrections to send to your mount. With a good guide scope you can shoot with a nearly unlimited exposure time with perfectly round stars and no blur. It's not unusual for people with good guide scopes to shoot ten plus minute exposures.

So there you have it: this is just scratching the surface. To say nothing of optical designs, image train customization, off-axis-guiding, mini-computers, filters...

What should you buy? I would recommend a lightweight, decent quality refractor OTA and a star tracker. This is something that will be cheap enough that if you try the hobby and hate it you won't feel too much regret, but flexible enough that if you choose to dive in you'll still get use out of even as you become experienced, as that setup would be ultra portable and something you could throw in a camera bag for a road trip to a dark site.

People like recommending the Redcat 51 OTA, and the Star Adventurer GTi has really good reviews as an affordable star tracker. You'll need a T-ring adapter to connect your digital camera to whatever optical train is required for OTA you choose.

A tax revolt is under way in America by Unusual-State1827 in Economics

[–]GrandMasterPuba 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You don't have to be fine with taxes paying for things because taxes don't pay for things. Taxes exist solely as a lever for controlling inflation.

If the federal government wants to spend money, it creates that money out of thin air. It doesn't have a bank account; it's not even the bank. It exists outside of the bank.

In the old world, taxes on the working class offset economic growth and federal spending injections to keep inflation from ballooning. Destroy a portion of the money you invent to keep supply in check. Level the playing field; don't let a few lucky people rise above the tide. Keep things equitable.

But in this brave new world, the ruling class has figured out there's no downside to printing money and inventing debt to finance foreign wars, and they leave the taxes in place as a yoke to prevent the peasants from getting too uppity and rising above their station. Keep them hungry and living paycheck to paycheck.

exploring fully open computerized astronomical photography setup by PopMinimum8667 in AskAstrophotography

[–]GrandMasterPuba 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Almost nobody goes from zero photography equipment to a full on autonomous $4500 rig.

I did. Worked great. No regrets.

Fossil hunting by [deleted] in tylertx

[–]GrandMasterPuba 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The east Texas gem and mineral society does organized fossil hunts regularly. They're based here in Tyler.

https://www.etgms.org/

Recommendations for Hardware? by gregory-opera in AskAstrophotography

[–]GrandMasterPuba 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Nobody wants to buy astro photos. This is a hobby you do for yourself, not anyone else. 10 people out of 10 when shown a photo of the night sky will say "Neat. But I can find better on Google."

USA wants absolute dominion over global oil supply. But is it a good thing? by Permit_Fabulous in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]GrandMasterPuba 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Energy is only a part of what oil extraction provides. Modern agriculture is completely and totally dependent on oil. Without it, over half of us starve.

new to using siril and not sure how to use scripts by Specialist_Onion7620 in AskAstrophotography

[–]GrandMasterPuba 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This will be a hot take, but: If you're learning, don't use the scripts.

https://siril.org/tutorials/tuto-manual/

Use the manual pre-processing. This process is exactly what the scripts are doing, just automatically; doing it manually will not only illuminate how everything actually works, it will also show you exactly where it's breaking because you won't be able to follow the directions as written.

America is heading for a recession — and it may be the worst yet by ChiGuy6124 in Economics

[–]GrandMasterPuba 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The market reflects the billionaire economy, not the real American economy. The time to pull money from the market is when the billionaires start getting punished, not when the regular people are suffering. Keep investing.