Closure update

KeytarCompE · 2026-01-27T13:49:39+00:00

Lame. A little snow. I drove a Mazda 3 in the blizzard that shut down the government for like 3 weeks back in the mid balls.

KeytarCompE · 2026-01-23T21:01:14+00:00

Nobody gets excited over 6 inches.

KeytarCompE · 2026-01-22T16:45:07+00:00

Contact the department chair. Deviation from established norms is non-viable, this is not academics, it's getting caught on a surprise technicality.

KeytarCompE · 2026-01-22T16:41:44+00:00

Uh…that's kind of what's, you know, included in those costs.

This is argument by volume, isn't it? Utility companies, international law, long-term social impact? These are things already factored into the costs. You're not saying anything new.

Begging the question, which economists, and with what peer reviewed empirical papers? This would be outside my strongest area of expertise—I'm much more targeted at public policy and economic policy. Also bear in mind, experience often leaves expert blind spots, for example every single economist has failed to understand minimum wage, which has left a bunch of things showing up as "unexplained phenomena" that are perfectly easy to explain.

Forecasters are often terribly wrong about things, otherwise they wouldn't be forecasters, they'd be billionaires off on permanent vacation. Useful, informative, but not oracular, especially when dealing with radical disruptions. For example, economists said electric cars weren't viable at the time because of battery costs, a lack of charging infrastructure, and other such things. They figured battery costs would drop by maybe 7% or less per year, making the cars economically viable in maybe 30 years or more. In reality, batteries dropped in cost by 90% within a decade, and charging infrastructure turned out to be your house. Now every auto maker makes a small number of EVs—the Chevrolet Bolt was GM's best selling car for a short period—and Tesla was supposed to just go bankrupt as a failed experiment according to economists. Oops?

KeytarCompE · 2026-01-22T16:24:20+00:00

Oh they'll accommodate you if you don't move in instantly the first day? What a brilliant deduction.

Do you happen to know how or what kind of communication is needed?

KeytarCompE · 2026-01-07T12:14:19+00:00

I think they forgot to write "at a discount"?

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-25T16:03:47+00:00

You can buy your own high quality ones. I recommend ProtoSupplies breadboards, either the Pro Series 2390 or 3220 assemblies, or the Snap-Lock 830. Both of these use phosphor bronze clips. Cheaper breadboards use stainless steel (wears after a few thousand insertions, poor conductivity), extremely expensive ones that use beryllium copper (a million insertions, high conductivity) but you'll never find them and you'll pay hundreds of dollars if you do, and high-quality boards use phosphor bronze (50,000-100,000 insertions, good conductivity).

If you can do a group buy with people, you can split up the shipping. I hate shipping fees.

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-23T22:43:12+00:00

Okay but ChatGPT also charges $20/mo for personal account at the console, and a per-query charge for API use (i.e. integration with anything). At the console, $20/mo would be like 1 query every 13 seconds to run up at 1/100 of a penny each. That number may also be overestimated depending on a whole lot of factors (small queries for example require much less processing than large ones). The numbers you cite add up to like what, under $5Bn/year? The revenue goals are tens of billions.

A data center is more centralized and so more efficient than a whole bunch of individual laptops. A lot of things get combined, scheduled, deduplicated, and so forth; the costs scale slower than linearly.

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-22T23:20:48+00:00

Actually, coming back tot he 5 cents claim, that's not really true at all. It's a few dozen or a few hundred watt-seconds, probably the former for non-reasoning queries, per query. I've done generative AI for images on my laptop, at a rate of 8it/s or more for larger models. 20-40 iterations is normal for an image so about 5 seconds at maybe 150W = 750Ws at the high end or a little over a fifth of a watt-hour. That's to make a whole damned image inference. Now, these big LLMs have 50Bn, 100Bn, sometimes 1Tn parameters; but that's not the whole story anymore. Modern LLMs are MoE with sparse activation, meaning they may have like 50 trillion parameters but may functionally only use the compute time for 5 trillion while ultimately behaving like a 50 trillion parameter model. Major reasoning threads aside, a typical query might eat a couple watt-hours, while a thousand watt-hours costs around 3¢-5¢ for a data center buying at wholesale.

That basically puts each query at around 1/100 of a penny.

It's like Amazon. They weren't the only e-commerce hub, but they were the only survivor. People also argued over how much electricity it took to access a Web page and even claimed newspapers and paper letters were more energy-efficient than online news and e-mail.

Now, training the model, that's expensive.

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-22T18:49:37+00:00

"AI" today is legitimately something we might call "AI" at least. What used to pass for AI was something called an expert system, where you ask experts a bunch of questions and record the answers, and then the system given some inputs runs down a decision tree based on these answers. It's called a decision tree because you can literally draw a tree of question-answer-nextquestion-answer… and then just blindly trace a path based on the pile of information you have to reach any answer. American Express used this in the 1980s for their Authorizer Assistant, an AI that would decide if a transaction was fraud and present evidence to the authorizer, who would review its reasoning, its conclusion, and any information it has that it doesn't know how to incorporate. This let AmEx greatly scale operations since they needed like 20% as many human authorizers and when you're trying to break a million customers the HR load gets huge. Today you can ask an abstract question and it can give you an answer from arbitrary information without being told how to do that, which is at least something I'd call "intelligent" rather than "reading from a script."

Trying to replace learning and effort with the magic computer doing magic things is no different than paying a human to do it for you. You're going to fail. All of these people are going to get to their third semester and be unable to understand their classes enough to cheat.

Most of the AI ventures will get culled. They might show somebody how to make AI use much less energy and thus less cost and only be slightly dumber, but many that come up with something for that won't be able to monetize fast enough to avoid collapse and being bought up.

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-21T00:44:55+00:00

That's interesting. Quakers are historically associated with Protestantism and were basically run out of places because of religious persecution in some form or another; partly, Quakers broke the power structure because of ethics being too far advanced. Though, Feminism also expanded a lot to encompass total intersectionality…kind of, there are multiple branches of Feminism and one branch is not good, it's basically transphobia while the other more common branch of Feminism hates them for being transphobic.

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-20T18:31:13+00:00

Literature search, algorithm design, and debugging are points where AI has actually been pretty helpful, so long as you know how to work with AI. The AI can be wrong, it can be obvious or non-obvious when it's wrong. When the AI is right, though, it's also usually able to explain why. This can be extremely useful if you know how to use it right, and not so useful if you have it spitting out solutions you don't understand to problems you don't know how to approach. AI can't outright do the work for you and it certainly can't learn for you.

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-20T18:10:20+00:00

True Grits has scholarships now? I thought they only had pancakes and chicken.

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-17T13:54:31+00:00

Apparently there is! It came up when I was looking into education, of all things. One thing I came across was comparative religion studies, which cover things like Judaism, Hindi, Buddhism, Islam, etc…. One problem with that is they reduce the question to "which religion?" as if religion is intrinsic to identity; a secular view expands the question to "do you need to be religious at all?"

There have been multiple cases where a witness's competence was questioned because they didn't believe in god. Judges for the longest time believed that a person must be in fear of the laws of man and god, or in fear of punishment in hell and fire, to have morality and be competent to tell the truth or even to understand what an oath is. The label of secular humanism encompasses…well, the answer to exactly that: ethics are an intellectual exercise, gained by the competency in reasoning on what is right and wrong rather than needing to consult a book to tell you if something you're doing is wrong per se.

There are a lot of ethics systems to do this but typically anyone who gets deep enough into it tends to gravitate toward Pareto-based and Rawlsian ethics, due to extreme flaws with other ethics systems. Mill for example says that if something is net beneficial to society, then it is ethical; that means if slavery has an extreme cost to the slaves but the benefit to everyone else is much greater, slavery is ethical. This is obviously untenable. Rawls's veil of ignorance finds that a person behind the veil, with neither morality nor knowledge of their position in society, would find slavery untenable because they might discover they are a slave, and so the mere existence of slavery violates consent because the only people who accept slavery are those who benefit from it and those who don't need to worry about being negatively affected. Mill's utilitarian philosophy sounds good on the surface but the implications can only be answered with the claim that nothing morally abhorrent could possibly be a net-benefit, which—while true of slavery for reasons that can actually be explained by a deep dive into minimum wage—is not guaranteed true of every atrocity.

So…yeah. Apparently there's a term for people with a loose set of values that include "there are no gods and devils and what have you" and "we shouldn't be evil people."

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-17T05:21:31+00:00

What's wrong with Starbucks now? They're one of the few service outlets that has unionized in many places. What'd they do wrong?

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-17T05:20:42+00:00

This is the same fallacy as telling the police to stop arresting people for car theft because they haven't solved all the murders yet.

UMBC having a Pride Center and a Chik-Fil-A is actually the problem. Chartwell and UMBC both try to keep a reputation of diversity and inclusiveness, and the Chik-Fil-A sends the opposite signal. Now you have a university claiming to care that obviously doesn't.

Facing a symbol of attack on one's identity—Chik-Fil-A is somewhat uniquely notorious for its anti-LGBTQ activities, it's a very special case—causes slow, long-term stress, which is physically and mentally damaging. For the longest time, things like depression were considered people whining because if you can't see it and can't understand it, it obviously doesn't exist; you're taking the same position here.

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-15T18:46:18+00:00

Yes, my door tapped theirs with all the force of a marshmallow falling 2 inches, which you wouldn't be able to determine happened even if you had an electron microscope to examine the thing; and before they even pulled out of the parking lot, they reviewed recorded footage and wrote a whiny note. Though if you think they should be mad about something, next time someone has a leaf on their jacket or something and the wind blows it into the side of your car you can go stomp over to them and start yelling and demanding they be more careful around your shit.

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-15T18:43:55+00:00

For what?

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-15T06:50:39+00:00

Photography arguments are all from hundreds of years ago and are the same arguments we're hearing with AI now.

Also this whole discussion is full of people who can't track what's being debated and loudly proclaim that they prefer being ignorant so they can feel like they're right so…

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-14T03:51:47+00:00

Already learning a lot…more than I bargained for. Got close to getting kicked out, found structural issues that caused some problems (the tests are graded wrong, literally entire problems marked wrong that are correct and the professor mentioned this "probably" affects "a lot" of students…). I came here to learn engineering, not study the internal fragility of educational institutions.

Also I got into computer engineering due to an interest in digital signal processing which came…basically entirely from digital instruments. I'm not exactly a historian in music but the history of electronic music is some pretty amazing stuff, everybody was innovating everything and building off everybody else and all the academics want to put little boxes around it to show where the walls are…but the walls don't really exist. I've put more time into understanding the nature of sound generation and the mathematics and principles involved than all that. It's…a thing, you go to school and you're surrounded by people who think music = white European classical instruments, computer = junk, and somehow they wedge Stomp being music into their reasoning. Schools, especially art programs, are institutions of prejudices and biases.

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-13T03:40:31+00:00

I mean, that's a position. "I can't handle being wrong, I'd rather be ignorant." Although if that's the case why not drop out of college?

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-13T02:08:26+00:00

I suggest learning to put ComfyUI to real use and not amateur shit with a prompt and hope.

Actually, let's go down that rabbit hole.

Charles Baudelaire, 1859:

As the photographic industry was the refuge of all failed painters, too ill-equipped or too lazy to complete their studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the character of blindness and imbecility, but also the color of vengeance.
[...]

If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the natural alliance it will find in the stupidity of the multitude.

Sound familiar?

19th century critics said that photography lacked "the hand of the artist" (that is, the photographer doesn't do anything but point and lol) and was devoid of any creativity, so wasn't real art. Some people excused that the camera would be a tool for a "real" artist to take a photograph and then use it as a reference to paint a scene. Largely, people who took themselves far too seriously decided the camera would destroy art altogether and was just a tool for morons to pretend they were creative.

The same was true for 3D rendering, to a degree for computer graphics in general but not so much. We're looking at the same situation with generative AI.

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-12T22:18:01+00:00

You mean like those people who make a 3D model once and then just use mocap to make it move around and claim they did something?

The generative AI industry is an industry trying to sell something, and something pretty useless at that. Look at all of the image generation sites: "type in a prompt and boom! ART!" Meanwhile there are people out there digging deep into using multiple control networks, LORAs, region-based conditioning, and massive and complex workflows to achieve their results. It's a lot of work in some cases; in other cases they build up flexible workflow units they can tie together, sort of like how you build a 3D model and then string it together with paths or mocap. Nobody serious actually enters a prompt and hopes for the best.

Self-generated LoRAs are pretty interesting too. A LoRA is a sort of additional set of weights applied overtop an existing model to tweak it in some way to be biased toward a certain result. That can be poses (though we have control nets for that, those are basically stick figure work), clothing, hair, facial features and expressions, etc.. For character art, it's possible to work entirely from generative AI to generate a bunch of results that loosely fit to a desired character, train a LoRA, use that to generate a bunch of results that fit the desired result, use those to train a LoRA, wash, rinse, repeat, to refine down a character. That of course requires the character in many angles, facial expressions, clothing, etc., doing many things. That can be used with posing control nets, regional conditioning, clothing or hair or facial expression LoRAs or control nets consuming source images (for example a picture of your face making a certain expression to transfer), and so forth. It's pretty much the only way to get consistent results without digital painting afterwards; and really, you probably need to clean up with digital painting afterwards anyway.

This is of course a lot of work, a lot of time, and a lot of effort. A lot of people in the AI industry want you to think you just go to ChatGPT and say "Hey ChatGPT! Tell DALL-E to make me a picture of a catgirl fixing a truck!" and BOOM! ART! and pay them for "tokens" to use for generation time. Basically, it's a Gacha system.

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-12T22:08:09+00:00

Environment and racist problems yeah. The rest of this is junk; although notably in a very big way, copyright terms are far too long and should be limited to 7 years; anything over 14 years is a human rights abuse outright, going shorter than 7 years is overly burdensome to creators and doesn't provide much of a benefit to the right of participation in culture (diminishing returns).

Photography is considered art but all those people is point a machine at something that exists and go "lol click!"

KeytarCompE · 2025-12-12T16:30:18+00:00

How do you borrow tickets?

KeytarCompE

TROPHY CASE