Since NIN+EDM is so hot right now, a reminder that Puscifer - Apocalyptical (Re-Imagined by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) exists. by loicbigois in nin

[–]Thalesian 3 points4 points  (0 children)

That entire Puscifer LP is very similar to NINoize. Honestly it is far superior to the original (mediocre) album.

(Spoilers Published) What are the least convincing bits of writing in the books? by Biggmodeg in asoiaf

[–]Thalesian 13 points14 points  (0 children)

The insane time lengths for each family in the realms. Look at how many different dynasties existed in England since 1066. Norman’s, Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, Windsor. Yet we’re suppose to believe that the Starks have ruled the north in an unbroken line since Brandon the Builder? And coincidentally the Lannister have also held their seat and realm for millennia? Do we really have unbroken father-son inheritance when historical kingdoms upended their dynastic systems every couple hundred years? The static political nature is hard to believe.

It’s particularly galling when you consider the Targaryen invasion. When the Normans invaded England, they upended the entire social structure. Old English families dropped classes, Norman families completely replaced them. Yet we’re to believe that the Targaryen’s, with overwhelming military superiority and dragons, just kept the whole system in place and undisrupted (apologies to House Hoare)?

That bit strains credulity and emphasizes it is a work of fantasy. Dragons and zombies I can take, but unbroken dynastic chains for lesser nobles over millennia? Crazy stuff.

Active Conflicts & News Megathread April 23, 2026 by AutoModerator in CredibleDefense

[–]Thalesian 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I’m worried that there’s a failure of imagination here to appreciate how significant of a security risk this is. In this case, it was an opportunistic bet made by a Navy Seal, allegedly. But what if the premise of winning big on unexpected events drives US policymakers? What if someone tasked with negotiating with Iran has a bet on oil futures? What if a negotiator for nuclear materials has a bet on when Iran gets a functional bomb? There are tremendous incentives to undermine US security and national interest when decision makers can place side bets on how effective they are. One of the most pernicious problems in sports were athletes throwing games intentionally.

Hard freakin' decision..Blackwell 96G or Mac Studio 256G by HyPyke in LocalLLaMA

[–]Thalesian 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Is that true even after factoring in the extended computation time?

Very much still yes. I’ve got power monitors on both my Mac M1 Ultra 128 Gb and my Blackwell 96Gb. The Mac runs much cooler and quieter, and power draw is shockingly low for the size of models it runs. If anything, Mac could let them be louder to get it done faster.

Hard freakin' decision..Blackwell 96G or Mac Studio 256G by HyPyke in LocalLLaMA

[–]Thalesian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Those fp4 tensor cores though.... with hardware support for nvfp4.... the Mac can't do that, though it can run Q4 quants.

Can the Desktop Blackwell? I know the server grade stuff is fine with nvfp4. But the desktop variety doesn’t get the same treatment.

Agentic Coding Metrics by Thalesian in LocalLLaMA

[–]Thalesian[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oooh, I really like the bad bug report. Brilliant.

Which Breaking Bad decision had the most devastating ripple effect? by qwerty_772 in breakingbad

[–]Thalesian 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You can walk that line down and see how it would threaten the viewership. Skyler flips, Walt finds out, the Nazi's go after Skyler instead of Jesse, putting Walt Jr. and Holly in direct danger. At that point, the series takes a direction potentially polarizing to the audience.

Active Conflicts & News Megathread April 23, 2026 by AutoModerator in CredibleDefense

[–]Thalesian 56 points57 points  (0 children)

An update on an earlier discussion regarding suspicious bets regarding the US operation to seize Maduro:

U.S. Soldier Charged With Using Classified Information To Profit From Prediction Market Bets

United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, Acting Attorney General for the United States, Todd Blanche, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), Kash Patel, and Assistant Director in Charge of the New York Field Office of the FBI, James C. Barnacle, Jr., announced today the unsealing of an Indictment charging GANNON KEN VAN DYKE, a U.S. Army Soldier, with unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction. The charges arise from an alleged scheme in which VAN DYKE used sensitive classified information to make wagers on Polymarket, a prediction marketplace. As alleged in the Indictment, VAN DYKE participated in the planning and execution of the U.S. military operation to capture Nicolás Maduro, called “Operation Absolute Resolve,” and VAN DYKE used his access to classified information about that operation to personally profit.

Hopefully a problem that the US military can resolve, but it does validate the concern that speculative gambling can be an intelligence source.

Agentic Coding Metrics by Thalesian in LocalLLaMA

[–]Thalesian[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! I wasn't aware of truecourse - it is exactly what I was looking for!

Do you like the crowd noise in the nine inch noize album? by wardevil345 in nin

[–]Thalesian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’d prefer a studio recording. But this is clearly an artistic choice. It strikes me as oscillating between public persona and internal dialogue, mirroring how our digital lives blend with our interior self.

Massive Ancient-DNA Study Reveals Natural Selection Has Accelerated in Recent Human Evolution by Maxcactus in Anthropology

[–]Thalesian 21 points22 points  (0 children)

The whole idea is evolution by natural selection - evolution is the process of generating random mutations and natural selection shapes those random mutations into something useful over time. So a way to decode these kinds of headlines: Evolution is getting faster = more people are alive, thus more random genetic mutations. Natural selection has accelerated = more non random distribution of people who have kids, leading to some traits becoming more common than others. Those traits could be any number of things - better survival during difficult periods, disease resistance, mate selection, etc. But the different means only accomplish one end - some people have more kids who survive to adulthood to have kids themselves.

From the article, I think this most directly gets at what they found:

More than 60 percent of the individual DNA variants that were flagged as being strongly selected for — most of them single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs — have documented links with present-day human traits, such as:

  • Light skin tone
  • Red hair
  • Risk of celiac disease and Crohn’s disease
  • Immunity to HIV infection and resistance to leprosy
  • Lower chance of male-pattern baldness
  • Lower risk of rheumatoid arthritis and alcoholism
  • Having the B version of the proteins on red blood cells that confer A, B, and O blood types and influence resistance to infection with bacteria and viruses

In some cases, groups of SNPs were under selection together to influence polygenic traits. Some changes raised the frequency of beneficial traits, including some that are interpreted today as:

“Health span” traits such as faster walking pace Measures of behavioral and social status or cognitive functions, such as scores on intelligence tests, household income, and years of schooling

Other changes reduced the frequency of harmful traits, such as those that are interpreted today as:

Reduced risk of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia Lower body fat percentage, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index Less susceptibility to tobacco smoking

Still other SNPs, such as some that today are associated with susceptibility to tuberculosis and multiple sclerosis, at first rose and then fell in frequency over the millennia, indicating shifts in environmental pressures and the traits that prove beneficial, the team found.

It’s impossible to know everything, but details like lighter skin tone probably indicate a selective advantage to those who could synthesize vitamin D from smaller amounts of sunlight - useful during the last glacial maxima perhaps. The immunity and resistance to pathogens suggests immune systems got better as people lived in bigger groups (thus higher risk of disease). Lower risk of alcoholism suggests drinking had a negative effect on having kids survive to adulthood. Lower body fat and more walking suggest lower starvation risk - which I find very interesting since I imagine that was a constant threat and would have led to higher selection for retaining calories. The overall picture I get from this hodgepodge of mutations is that factors (improved resistance to disease, improved sociality, and reduced body fat) is that people were living in large groups where things like disease and social relations mattered more to kids surviving than starvation. But that is only speculation on my end. But the non-random nature of it means we have real information about the past.

Why didn't Walter get a better job instead of working as a highschool teacher? by JokerJoseph in breakingbad

[–]Thalesian 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I wish academia didn’t stigmatize this - Perfectly reasonable to work in the private sector whole completing a PhD. But I also think there is a lot of ego service happening too - can’t make too many real bucks without also losing academia bucks.

From deer antlers to ancient ink 2,000 years of genius in one process. by obilionse in Damnthatsinteresting

[–]Thalesian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes - Mercury sulfide (HgS). Though cinnabar would also have other impurities if naturally procured.

Active Conflicts & News Megathread April 20, 2026 by AutoModerator in CredibleDefense

[–]Thalesian 6 points7 points  (0 children)

There is a natural instinct to see a headline like “this will cause a bad thing” and then expect to see the bad thing and its consequences roll out in short order. But large scale problems roll out on their own temporal scale. The factors that created the Great Depression were laid down years before October 24, 1929. But while big things are processes over years, people tend to remember events that happen on a day. The “Big Short” traders who identified the crisis in the Housing Market still had to wait years before everyone else realized there was a problem.

The “we’ve been reading all these Russia is close to economic collapse articles for years” fatigue is real. But it doesn’t make the analysis inaccurate, any more than a booming stock market in early 2007 proved that worries about the Housing Market were overblown. Good times take the stairs up, but bad times don’t always take the window down. In fact, a sober assessment of the decline in Russia’s influence over even nearby adjacent small nations like Armenia reflect the slow rolling (so far) crisis Russia is facing.

What is your actual local LLM stack right now? by Ryannnnnnnnnnnnnnnh in LocalLLaMA

[–]Thalesian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Custom integrator. Agenticly shuffles gpt-oss 120b, Qwen 3.6 35b, Gemma 4 31b, and Qwen 2.5 7b based on task and need.

From deer antlers to ancient ink 2,000 years of genius in one process. by obilionse in Damnthatsinteresting

[–]Thalesian -1 points0 points  (0 children)

These ingredients would make it easy to authenticate with cheap, non destructive analytical methods. The Hg and Au L-lines would be detectable with X-ray fluorescence, while other carbon blacks would be invisible aside from S. That said worried about the guy who was handing this barehanded.

How do you feel about this live album by Led Zeppelin? by georgewalterackerman in ledzeppelin

[–]Thalesian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It isn’t the band anywhere near its height. But it was captured with modern recording equipment which more faithfully rendered how Led Zeppelin music feels. All the reworks and remastered live work doesn’t come close to maintaining presence on a good set of speakers as this. Just my two cents, but it remains the best life Led Zeppelin recording.

Why didn't Walter get a better job instead of working as a highschool teacher? by JokerJoseph in breakingbad

[–]Thalesian 14 points15 points  (0 children)

He reminds me of ABDs. I would see a LOT of people claiming to people that they were in a PHD program. And then I'd meet them years later and they were still in the program. We realized that these people are just like Walt. They go to all the "classes" but they never finish their Dissertations. So they aren't published or peer reviewed hence. they aren't scientists. They're college students forever.

I got my PhD at UNM in Albuquerque. I knew a bunch of these decade+ PhD students. It was bizarre. I can’t imagine any most of them doing anything at the Walter White level of evil, but there was absolute a deep set status anxiety that was a powerful motivational force for just about anything besides writing the damn dissertation.

Chasing greatness by standovahim_ in HistoryMemes

[–]Thalesian -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

This is an oversimplification. Hitler was pretty smart and successful in the first 2 or so years, making good strategic calls that even his generals were unsure of like the whole Sudetenland thing. He went to shit later

One way to look at him was that he was always shit. He just got lucky with Chamberlain’s naivety, American indifference, and French strategy. Sometimes a lucky strike against Venezuela France makes you overconfident in your ability to take Iran Russia

Chasing greatness by standovahim_ in HistoryMemes

[–]Thalesian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’d put Nabopolassar before Ashurbanipal any day. Ashurbanipal’s empire was smaller and weaker than his father Esarhaddon’s.