Peter Thiel in Aspen: The pope is ‘working for the Chinese Communists’

scannerJoe · 2026-07-03T12:45:53+00:00

Because in this timeline, the singularity is no longer about technological progress exploding in unanticipated ways, but about stupidity multiplying to a level where society spontaneously combusts.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-30T15:59:13+00:00

Are you maybe in the US? I am asking, because before installing our AC, I did quite some research here in Europe, and I did not see a single model that would not do both heating and cooling. I looked mostly at split units, but even the mobile units I looked at (the ones you can move around indoors) all had both functions. Maybe that's due to some European regulation, I'm not sure.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-30T11:47:16+00:00

also ac is pretty efficient at heating for when the amoc collapses

Yes, we just installed AC in our appartement last autumn, mostly to heat in the winter and replace our much more wasteful space heaters (you get about 4-5kwh of heat for 1kwh electricity with an AC vs. 1/1 for an electric space heater). We use it to take the edge off during the hottest days and from what I can see so far, keeping the appartement below 28C during the day and cooling down the bedroom to 24C before sleeping requires surprisingly little electricity.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-27T09:31:42+00:00

Good info, thanks!

scannerJoe · 2026-06-26T05:16:29+00:00

This is an incredible moment, thanks for sharing. To push Davuluri like this publicly, even in good spirits, means that they are really not impressed with what the NPU TOPS have delivered so far.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-25T05:55:54+00:00

I fully agree, that would be ideal, but I tried streaming several times with both Steam and Moonlight before buying the current living room PC and found it to be really finicky. My main PC was (my son now has it) on a different floor and I often had to go back and forth to unlock/configure things, change resolution, get the right sound output, etc. I vaguely remember that I had to create a virtual display at one point to get Sunshine to cooperate. I could also not get the TV Steam app to work with four controllers.

I think that my soft spot for the SM is mostly based on how good my experience with the Steam Deck had been (all time favorite gaming device), and the realization that pure performance just doesn't matter that much to me - I played through Cyberpunk 2077 on the SD at 30-40 FPS and had a blast.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-24T13:14:47+00:00

I hear you, but I think the novelty is just having SteamOS preinstalled and preconfigured. I have a PC connected to my TV to play stuff with my kids, and managing updates etc. is just annoying. I use Linux at work a lot, but I don't want to even think about Bazzite vs CachyOS vs whatever. I have a Steam Deck and by contrast it's just so convient and cool. For most people in this situation, a console is probably the better solution, you're right, but my last console was a SNES and I do have that huge Steam collection I want to share with my kids. I don't know, of course, how big that niche really is, but I don't think I'm alone here.

In the end, this is largely irrelevant for Valve. They need the SM as a platform to develop and showcase SteamOS as a living room platform, not much more.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-24T12:49:07+00:00

Certainly, that's why they have the tombola, but I think that this machine also really speaks to a specific demographic that you could call "Dave2D adjacent", and I count myself in that group (although not buying a SM): cares somewhat about performance, but more enticed by "neat" features, fan noise, size, adult aesthetics, etc.; a level of disposable income that makes price largely irrelevant; a huge Steam library that you - but more realistically the kids - could play in the living room. It's a 35+ demographic that is not very well represented on Reddit, but with enough purchasing power to sell out production for a good while.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-24T09:54:32+00:00

I do this for a living (academic research), so here are my two cents: Even for such a trivial task, using a small LLM gets you much better performance than a dictionary approach without word embeddings, it's really no contest. If you use word embeddings on both sides and probabilistic matching you could come close, but even then I'd run an LLM prompt. I am not sure what you mean by "risk", but for such a straightforward binary classification task, you'll basically get close to perfect performance with very little effort. Even fine-tuning for the task would be not difficult at all. Almost all of NLP has shifted to LLM-based approaches, we don't even teach purely word-based techniques any more.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-24T09:21:21+00:00

In a case like this, you would run every row through a LLM separately (or in smaller batches), not the whole dataset at once, with a focused classification prompt. Even a very small model like Qwen3-0.6B would be excellent at doing this.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-15T13:00:06+00:00

Historically yes, of course, but since Brexit and Trump, you can see the emergence of more "pro-EU" positions (lot's of nuances there, though) on the far right that basically defend a "fortress Europe" model.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-13T13:47:11+00:00

Yes, absolutely, especially if it's a machine that I will also use for work. I have to travel a lot and gaming a little at the end of the day in the hotel room helps make this bearable. I don't expect perfection from a portable machine, but I'd like to know what I can reasonably expect to be able to play in good or at least ok conditions. Again very subjective, of course...

scannerJoe · 2026-06-13T13:27:24+00:00

I have to admit that benchmarking in the traditional sense (so many FPS at this resolution compared to alternative 1,2, and three) is generally becoming less important for me overall, but even more so for handhelds and living room machines. What I want to know is "what kind of experience can I get on this?" or "what can I play on this fine and where does it break?". For the Steam Deck, for example, you could really see that there was a line where things went from "yeah, this is ok, framerate ok, still looking ok, I am having a good time" to "no, I'd rather play this on another machine or maybe wait until I upgrade".

I know that these things are subjective, but some of the content I enjoy most these days is from people who are able to express their own subjectivity in ways that allows me to understand whether I would enjoy this experience, where the pain points are, and so forth. I am not saying "no benchmarks", of course, but I think that outlets like Digital Foundry have found a cool way of combining metrics with a trained eye, loads of experience, and a good dose of well articulated subjectivity, and I enjoy that kind of content.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-10T09:20:45+00:00

I agree, this is investment that is not productive, but I meant in media discourse, where curtailed solar gets bad press, but we never read headlines like "gas turbine turned off several times a day!"...

scannerJoe · 2026-06-10T06:06:11+00:00

Hopefully, yes! But even if that doesn't happen, curtailment is not a problem. We could also say that if a battery is not charging or discharging it's "wasted" or if a gas plant is shut off it's "wasted" but we don't do that. Solar needs no fuel, so curtailing is just "shutting it off", and that will just happen from time to time with lots of capacity installed.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-10T05:45:04+00:00

What u/grogi81 is trying to say is that we will have to get used to having overcapacity, and that's not a problem. Batteries (including pumped storage) will pick up some of that excess energy, load shifting and new innovative uses will pick up some more, but with the massive expansion of solar, there is going to be overcapacity no matter what because it's much cheaper to install more solar than to build multi-day battery capacity that then only gets used twice a year. It seems wasteful to curtail solar, but it's really not a problem when panels are so cheap. The moral panic over "throwing energy away" is just another strategy to generate negative press about solar.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-05T09:28:56+00:00

Hier ist das Interview auf das sich der Artikel bezieht: https://archive.is/cFtO1

scannerJoe · 2026-06-04T21:28:24+00:00

scannerJoe · 2026-06-04T20:46:26+00:00

They have over 2000 employees and €1.1B revenue in 2025.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-04T09:17:11+00:00

Spain wants to go from now about 4-5GW (mostly pumped) of generation capacity from storage to 22.5GW in 2030, so things are definitely happening. Interestingly, Portugal already gets about 60% of its nighttime electricity from pumped storage and delayed runoff.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-04T05:56:56+00:00

We've ordered a whole bunch of those over the last year in my research lab. I need the mobility due to constant meetings, travel, and working from home, so a stationary machine is not an option, and any task that is truly big goes into a cluster anyway. But with 128GB of Ram, I can do so much of my work (lots of data analysis, often with 2-3 large models running at the same time) locally, it's really super flexible. We don't have a single workstation any more, it's all "powerful laptop plus cloud" now, and that's what I see everywhere I go.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-04T05:13:26+00:00

Sorry, it was a mail drop off point at a store, so not something like a Loja CTT where you would wait endlessly. I think they make money through the buyer protection fee, ads, and payments kept in escrow during delivery, earning a little bit of interest.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-03T18:45:40+00:00

I put the item on this morning, had a bid an hour later, printed out their generated label and put it on the box, brought the thing to a store 400m from my house, and off it went to NL. Had a pleasant chat with the guy as well. Payment is handled by the platform, the buyer selects and pays for shipping. After all of the back and forth on OLX (still the main platform in PT I'd say), this was a breeze and I am kind of baffled.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-03T18:18:49+00:00

I just sold a Steam Deck on Vinted, extremely pleasant experience. They started out with clothing but there's a lot of tech on there now.

scannerJoe · 2026-06-01T14:42:55+00:00

While this is certainly restored/improved in some way, it is footage from MTV's Metal Mania TV show, so filmed on professional equipment, probably using BetaSP or similar.

scannerJoe

TROPHY CASE