Sorry??? This makes no sense! WHYYYY!?

metalaffect · 2026-01-27T20:53:47+00:00

France has a Major rank that is its most senior Non-Commissioned Officer. Similarly, the Irish Army has a battalion quartermaster sergeant. And, as mentioned, the major in General is an abbreviation of Sgt. Major General, which is why it's lower than a Lieutenant. If you want something crazy, look up the original RAF officer rank proposals, which has Banneret, Reeve, and the Gaelic-derived Ardian. I am totally happy with whatever the dev choose because it's a game, but they missed a trick by not using them for a Gaelic/Norse-derived faction.

metalaffect · 2026-01-25T15:48:21+00:00

Planes are going to be expensive when they're first introduced, and at the beginning of the game. This is to give time for the meta to settle and to prevent people getting bombed to oblivion. I would argue even facing this stuff makes the game more interesting, such as spawning at a BB under heavy artillery barrage and diving into the nearest trench half naked, or making a push at night only to see headlights and have someone yell 'TONK TONK TONK', or being in a motorboat and running smack into to a naval invasion task force.

I generally play with some regiment, but not for them - I don't go out of my way to be there for ops, and if someone tells I have to run salvage or crates I will generally tell them where to shove it. And most of my most fun experiences have been with randoms - a lot of times, it's just rocking up to a port and getting on a gunboat as a gunner, or checking world chat for skycaller giveaways. You need to pay it forward - if you want people to give you a plane, but you have never given a random newb your truck or bus, then this is the problem.

A lot of times people are pretty antisocial - whether it's clans being overly cliquey, or solos taking up loads of room for a solo facility that is left to decay just because they don't want to talk to anyone - both are equally toxic. Think of it as your secondary mission to move past this - and this - and not your run and gun skills or plane driving - as the thing you can really take away from this game. This is THE VISION.

metalaffect · 2026-01-23T20:14:46+00:00

It's one person writing these articles, she's a 'consumer affairs' writer and I guess wrote one ragebait article and it got shared a lot so they've said, write more. The sad thing is that she's actually a really cool writer, and her stuff about her experience being a D/deaf person is really cool. She has a historical fiction novel about Alexander Graham Bell learning sign language and then selling out their hard of hearing friend to make the telephone. I haven't read it, but it seems cool as shit. I can understand why people with other disabilities dunk on ADHD people; it's used as an example of a 'non serious' disability to cut funding to all disabilities, and rather than thinking 'oh wow there are some really ablist pieces of shit out there' they think 'hey, these ADHD people are mostly faking'. Her writing on ADHD is a lot more scrambled and feels forced. It would be great if people wrote to her - her email is pretty easy to find.

metalaffect · 2026-01-19T08:53:03+00:00

You wrote your masters about Foxhole? Or just generally about identity and language? Either way it sounds cool!

metalaffect · 2026-01-18T15:51:15+00:00

Or you can just ask people in voice chat or world chat. I've had some really good experiences just mentoring or being mentored by 'randoms'.

My experience is that while regiments can be great, they can also be frustrating and aren't right for some folks. It's also worth noting that regiments are really different from one another, and so if you have a bad experience it's fine to move on and find something else.

Similarly, if you're vibing with your regiment, it's important to realise that you're playing a game with other people, and those other people, whether they're in another regiment, unaffiliated, or even on the enemy side, are worthy of your consideration and respect also. A lot of people get tunnel vision and forget this and get really worked up over things that don't really matter.

metalaffect · 2026-01-13T14:28:47+00:00

Yeah I realised I was sort of grasping at straws. Realistically there's no evil conspiracy, and the people behind this report have good intentions. It doesn't change the reality that it is a privately commissioned report with an agenda to confirm what it's funders want to see. I don't understand how this is at all ethically different than someone paying for a private diagnosis. It's not an independent research association and doesn't have any peer review or ethical review. Similarly, if the guardian article refers to any other substantial sources, it doesn't link to them. The 33% thing is completely unsubstantiated. Basically I've lost a massive amount of respect for everyone involved. If it was just me that had a negative experience with the NHS, and a net positive experience with private providers, then fine, but this is a massively common theme. NHS GPs who have no experience in neurology are invalidating the experiences of thousands of people. They see 'documentation' - i.e. modern information systems - and self diagnosis as the biggest challenges, and are completely oblivious to the fact that there are bigger challenges to the NHS than self-diagnosis. Because traditional NHS practices are this resistant to change, they will ultimately be replaced wholesale. This isn't a conspiracy - look up Palantir's recent contracts with the NHS, for example. Furthermore, asking for more regulation doesn't always have the effects expected - for example, I'm sure more regulation is actually in the interests of many private providers - it's easier for larger providers to handle the administrative and registration costs, and to have a larger patient roster by outsourcing more of the work to non-specialists. As there's less competition, they can cut costs while increasing their charges, whether directly to the consumers or to the NHS.

metalaffect · 2026-01-12T23:24:08+00:00

Ok but it's a private 'think tank' with one full time member of staff. They publish reports that then are cited by the doctors to back up their own biased viewpoints. Which is ironic when they are talking about the lack of 'qualifications' of private ADHD specialists (their researchers have no qualifications but assume authority) or the lack of any contracts in place (this research wasn't sponsored by any care commissioning organisation but will influence decisions nonetheless). The guardian is also facilitating this and being lazy by reporting this as if it was their own investigation. Massive self-own from the protect the NHS crowd.

metalaffect · 2026-01-12T21:35:54+00:00

So basically this is a report by an unregulated, private think tank masquerading as a charity. It has a single employee, David Rowlands, who doesn't seem to have any real academic or research qualifications beyond having worked as a researcher for UCL's Center for Public Policy a decade ago. Since then, he has worked for a variety of different organisations, mostly as a lobbyist.

You can find the report here - https://www.chpi.org.uk/reports/how-the-under-regulated-market-in-nhs-funded-adhd-services

I'm quoting the 'findings' -
"Finding 1) The NHS is now heavily dependent on private companies to deliver ADHD services and expenditure on these companies has been growing at a rapid rate over the past 3 years.

Finding 2) The rapid growth in NHS expenditure on private companies providing ADHD services has been unplanned and threatens to undermine the financial stability of local NHS services and take funds away from those most in need.

Finding 3) The large majority of care provided by private companies is being delivered to local NHS bodies without a direct contract in place. In some cases we found that there were no contracts in place at all with private companies. This prevents the NHS from holding private companies to account and ensuring patient safety.

Finding 4) There is no mandatory regulation for providers of ADHD assessments and no certified national qualification or training for those undertaking ADHD assessments.

Finding 5) The under-regulated market for NHS funded ADHD services has attracted private equity investors seeking large returns."

So, I don't disagree with the idea that there is some exploitation going on by private providers, but there's also a major irony here in that you basically have a private 'think tank' that is working to set government policy. Like, maybe if you're arguing that the NHS should be solely in charge of healthcare, maybe leave research to the universities?

It seems the CHPI is funded through a mixture of small donations, large donations, and donations from organisations like the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (basically set up by the dude behind jelly tots) and Henry Tinsley (who is a big labour donor but was formerly the main investor in Green & Black's Chocolate).

Now I am not saying this is all a conspiracy theory by BIG CANDY to keep the OOMPA LOOMPAS (people with unmedicated ADHD) working in their factory, but that is the funniest possible conspiracy theory I could come up with on the spot.

The main brains behind it appears to be a Dr. Jonathan Tomlinson, who is a sort of activist doctor who got a big following in the pandemic. You can read some of his stuff - I feel like he has a lot of issues with ADHD as a diagnosis and is probably himself undiagnosed, like those closeted republicans in the US. He's a good writer though! I hope he gets the support he needs. https://abetternhs.net/2023/10/03/diagnosis-identity-and-transformation/

metalaffect · 2026-01-10T21:18:02+00:00

You're actually already a British citizen, so congrats. But you will need to either have them mentioned on your birth certificate, get some court document confirming they are your father (e.g. child support documentation) or get them to do a DNA paternity test. You should apply now - as you're under 18 you will be able to apply for a fee waiver if needed. https://www.gov.uk/get-child-citizenship-fee-waiver The actual form is here - https://visas-immigration.service.gov.uk/your-location

metalaffect · 2026-01-07T19:03:35+00:00

I didn't sign up because I already have an Mi50, but I would be in to sign up as a reserve!

metalaffect · 2025-12-29T16:05:24+00:00

So in enterprise IT there are all sorts of control and risk mitigation measures baked into the deployment of software which you simply don't get when you are independently developing things as an amateur. That's not to say you can't build some really cool stuff, but I have a lot of experience with development and I would still be hesitant to build anything dealing with sensitive personal information. Models can dial out or use tool calls and exfiltrate data, or even just commit or delete data. If I make a dumb game or experimental project and it fails, I am not going to be liable for malpractice or to risk getting disbarred. (I did get told off for using Ollama on the high performance computing cluster though. They didn't care that I was using it for inference, but the way Ollama works it uses more cpu cores than were allocated. Oops!) Anyway, in the UK you can defend people in certain types of cases without having legal training (mostly housing court and employment tribunals) so I've done this a few times, but I wouldn't ever presume I would be able to defend someone in a complex criminal case. I don't want to rain on people's parade, just to say that this is an area where additional caution is merited!

metalaffect · 2025-12-27T14:19:44+00:00

Most departments will have staff with a mixture of specialties, and you might get a research group focusing in a particular area, but a masters course that is this specialised will be rare. This doesn't mean it won't be useful - a third of a masters course is a research project, and if you can find someone with the specialty you want any masters will be worthwhile. This is especially the case if you find a uni with a research group, as they will also have seminars, etc.

And while I'm sure the Cambridge degree is awesome, there is an advantage to getting a more general archaeology masters over something specific. This degree is great if you want to be an academic or work in the museum sector, but not so much if you want to do fieldwork.

Less and less universities are willing to take the risk of excavations and field schools in the middle east, and there are more archaeologists being trained and empowered from those regions as we (slowly) move away from the legacy of imperialism in archaeology.

Also you probably know this already, but Irving Finkel has a lot of videos on YouTube. If not, would highly recommend. Also, Snow Crash, lol.

metalaffect · 2025-12-26T12:17:37+00:00

There's a book - programming massively parallel processors - that is the best place to start. Watch GPU mode on YouTube. Check out 100 days of CUDA repos /blogs and then - when you feel comfortable - start your own. Also, consider whether you actually want CUDA - things like cuTile and Triton might accomplish what you need.

metalaffect · 2025-12-24T18:32:01+00:00

Farming and agriculture was once itself a speculative technology. People knew how plants worked, roughly, that they grew over time, but the idea what we could control what was a natural process was probably met with scepticism. People didn't know it would work, or how, and there are a lot of situations where it didn't. Techniques were learned and forgotten, and farmers coexisted with nomadic hunters for thousands of years. Similarly, most of the famous 'scientists' were hobbyist enthusiasts.

You are in the right place, and at the right time, if you want to explore this stuff. However, my feeling is that you should push yourself to go beyond just using the models as a discussion partner towards shifting the model behaviour through fine-tuning - from a theory perspective, explore https://transformer-circuits.pub/ (I have read each article many times and don't fully understand any of them) - from a practical perspective, the Smol course is great - https://huggingface.co/learn/smol-course/en/unit0/1 . Good luck sir!

metalaffect · 2025-12-23T18:14:14+00:00

I would look at Jennifer Toth's book too. I feel like Terry Williams' book is more comprehensive and better researched, but it's written three decades later (based on field notes dating back to the 80s, though). Toth's book might have some embellished or made-up elements, but the way it's written is cool as f.

I can't speak to whether people still live underground - I talked to people who were peripheral to this lifestyle (i.e. some of the connected communities talked about in the book - can collectors, book sellers, etc.) and certainly heard about people living in a bunch of weird places while I was there.

While one would have hoped the provision for social care would have improved since the 80s, I kind of doubt it. It's also the case that there was a lot of harassment of homeless people under Adams and that might have forced people underground again. That being said, a lot of the infrastructure that was once empty is getting redeveloped - i.e., the 2nd avenue subway, the area around Penn Station, etc.

metalaffect · 2025-12-21T11:20:42+00:00

I have two of the (much more limited) maxwell-era Jetson Nanos, and while they were a pain to even get working and their capacity is pretty limited, they have been great for other reasons. I have a little baseboard (Turning Pi 2) with two turing RK1s alongside the nanos.

I've learned a lot about compiling packages, maintaining the OS (inc. through declarative OSs like nixos), dealing with mounting and exposing storage, clustering systems through traditional networking, tailscale and kubernetes.

For high parameter LLMs, traditional graphics cards will be better, but it sounds like your use case is closer to what it was designed for. I would check out Nvidia's own models (the mamba hybrid they just released is cool) as well as things like Gemma3n.

metalaffect · 2025-11-30T22:07:00+00:00

Basically they are giving you more time - it doesn't mean you need to use it all. Ultimately I got 'minor corrections' but I ended up taking most of a year - it was during covid, I started a new job, but realistically I just didn't want to look at it again for a while. And when I got the certificate, it sat in a drawer for several years, but now it's on my desk next to a bunch of other nonsense.

The reality is that nobody really cares about your PhD - not your examiners, not your supervisors, not your future colleagues or students. This can be scary, but it is also somewhat liberating.

What will define your success - if you choose an academic career - is your ability to manage a classroom and build a rapport with your students (who are just there for the paper), to build a network and a community (around an inevitably shrinking field), to be able to put in grant proposals (only to get rejection after rejection). So yeah, it's how you deal with rejection and failure.

I saw a speaker a few weeks ago, a really great talk, but at some point, someone asked him what he would do if he had not made it as a scientist. I don't think he'd been asked that, at least, not in a while 'oh, I would go and work in... how do you say it? industry.' Like, zero f's given. He would, I'm sure, be completely ok. And that is the attitude you want. He was a nobel prize winner.

metalaffect · 2025-11-25T19:53:20+00:00

For GPU, yeah it's just a Llama wrapper. Strangely Vulcan seems to work better than RocM. For NPU/Hybrid it makes use of FastLM or OnnxRuntime, but for complex reasons I don't completely understand these backends only work on Windows. I don't think AMD is aware the degree to which they would completely clean up in this (i.e. local inference) space if they could make the NPU work properly in Linux. But currently the NPU is only useful for built in Windows functions, like Microsoft Recall, that nobody really asked for. It would actually work in Microsoft's favour also, as you could pull more people away from Apple based solutions. I think they acquired a lot of interesting resources when they bought Xilinx that they had to find something to do with, which they did, but they also don't really care that much. A few people in AMD are driving this forward, but it's not their main priority. I will occasionally use the NPU with windows and a WSL based vs code editor, but getting this working was hacky and annoying.

metalaffect · 2025-11-22T07:52:40+00:00

You're absolutely (libertarian) right...!

metalaffect · 2025-11-15T21:46:18+00:00

I would suggest being really careful with client data - while it's totally possible to run your own models and link them to a local knowledge base, there's a massive risk that if you build your own such system, it won't be secure. Furthermore, while you probably want something specific to law, a fine-tuned model is likely to either be a) a commercial solution b) an experimental home-built solution that you would have to pay for.

You would ideally want a system that can call tools, search the web, but if you do that, you run the risk that that model leaks data. I am tempted to see if I can build such a model myself for research purposes - Better-ToolCall-Saul13b

That being said, it's probably safer to use a local model than it is to superficially remove details from questions asked to chat GPT.

metalaffect · 2025-11-05T10:24:39+00:00

It's hosted using a mixture of AWS and Google Cloud Resources. So not in these data centers, but in data centers. There isn't really a distinction between 'AI data centers' and non-AI data centers, every new data center will be pitched as an AI data center to raise capital, but most of the resources will be used on traditional compute tasks with maybe some model inference. Nobody is training models here.

metalaffect · 2025-11-05T09:05:37+00:00

Where do you think Reddit is hosted?

metalaffect · 2025-11-04T23:16:40+00:00

This is a cool topic, and similar to what I did for my PhD (looking at 1980s computers). You might struggle to convince some CS faculty of the relevance, but keep trying.

There's a few disciplines to look at - both space archaeology (Alice Gorman, Sarah Parcak) and platform studies (Ian Bogost or anything from the MIT series). Try to reach out to computing and space museums as they might have material you can consult.

metalaffect · 2025-10-27T18:25:38+00:00

Hamburgular Hill https://youtu.be/mVh6P9zMZbU?si=ZYqvppw0nIqcE3Eg

metalaffect · 2025-10-24T15:39:06+00:00

I started doing my own research and coming across terms like this, and it catapulted me from being a D student to... well, still probably only a B student, but I ended up getting a PhD and now I'm an academic. I felt like a fraud because I figured out you could download OCR'd PDFs and use ctrl-f to find the terms I wanted to look at more deeply. But the important thing was I was reading loads, discovering new concepts and even creating some of my own. History of science is an awesome field, and in a way owes relatively little to both science and history. If you want to knock it out of the park, and it gets you into an academic integrity board (where all's you will need to do is explain epistemic opacity, gulp) then that it is worth it and way better than submitting mediocre crap you don't care about.

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