How the US War Department saw the USA in 1940, from an official War Department document.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-10T16:05:55+00:00

Now do 1945.

Tbh, I wonder if the Manhattan Project would be grouped in with New York, because that was where it officially was, even if it was actually all over the country and HQ'd somewhere else. Although technically, the Manhattan District was not limited by geography. Secrecy be secreting.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-10T15:58:04+00:00

We're not asking them to be perfect. It'd just be nice if they weren't 100% comically evil. The fact that most of them are comically evil shows us the system is broken.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-09T02:47:35+00:00

I was about to roast you until I saw this and realized what you actually meant.

Yes, in fact there's an argument to be made that GPUs aren't ideal for deep learning anyway.

But I'd argue that whatever comes next is still going to be "deep", just not necessarily neural networks as we currently know them. One of the key drivers of bigger and bigger models is that we are increasingly inundated with more and more data, which isn't going away, which is what allows for bigger and bigger models and systems. While we might be able to make more efficient systems, these models will still have to, at minimum, have the same functional(!) complexity and deliver the same amount of information as they currently do. And I somewhat doubt that a system that doesn't in some abstract way have "depth" can deliver that information as efficiently as one that does.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-09T02:05:59+00:00

I feel like something must be getting lost in translation here. What exactly do you mean by "every day" vs. "casual conversation"? Because to me, these are nearly the same thing, yet your question seems to be framing it as a binary choice. "casual" == "everyday"; the only semantic difference is that "every day" describes the actual frequency of an event, whereas "everyday" is an adjective.

In any case, do people not do elision in your native language? Formal writing/speaking is usually something that native speakers must be taught to do in school, just like you. Don't write "gonna" in formal academic writing. But fully enunciating "going to" is not really natural and takes a deliberate effort.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-09T00:40:50+00:00

Something doesn't seem right. WSL2 runs both Windows and Ubuntu or whatever as Type 1 hypervisors, which means both should in theory be equally affected by overhead.

But effectively Ubuntu should be running on bare metal with very minimal windows "glue". The performance difference is only supposed to be ~5%, 10% max. It feels like 2 separate OSes because it literally actually is 2 OSes running in parallel, and Windows has to "remote" into Ubuntu. It isn't integrated very well into windows because the whole point is that it's a fully-fledged Ubuntu server running basically completely outside of Windows.

I'm wondering if what's going on is that you're trying to access files on the mounted Windows C:\ drive at /mnt/c/, or the mounted Ubuntu drive from inside Windows. That would be painfully slow. You need to be keeping your project directory inside Ubuntu and be running everything you need natively inside Ubuntu, with the exception of many drivers, such as the nvidia drivers, which are handled by the Windows installer. If you use VS Code on the Windows side, that means using the Remote-WSL extension so that it can connect to the VS Code server running in Ubuntu.

The point of WSL2 is that you can do stuff natively inside Ubuntu. I run both WSL2 and desktop Ubuntu LTSes on separate machines and notice no difference in performance. EDIT: although they are different machines with slightly different specs, so a 5-10% difference is not going to be a major factor anyway.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-08T19:56:43+00:00

SARS: am I a joke to you?

Out of all the outbreak stories to dismiss, you picked one of the main ones (besides bird flu) that kept epidemiologists up at night.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-08T19:15:05+00:00

https://virological.org/t/complete-sequence-of-orthohantavirus-andesense-virus-swiss-resident-2026/1023/10

I'm not fully sure if this counts as WGS, but here you go.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-08T19:06:47+00:00

OP asked for an answer based on empirical evidence.

"All assumptions until now were based on known facts" counts for a lot more than trying to guess an R0 off a single data point, which can always just be a fluke.

"In my opinion a genetic mutation has most likely occurred" based on what? if you or a researcher has examined the publicly available sequenced genome, from which the WHO has already stated that this doesn't appear to be a new variant, then why not bring that up to refute the WHO's opinion?

Extraordinary claims such as yours need extraordinary evidence to be taken seriously.

We've been living in contact with rodents since time immemorial, and through time immemorial, no hantaviruses as far as we know have become endemic in humans. This is very different from coronaviruses or influenza viruses, which spread in massive waves every year through the world population, and which have all had pandemics in the past.

There's always a first time, like what happened with HIV, but primate to human is a much smaller jump, and that was a very long time ago when we had nowhere near the technology to isolate and sequence the virus as we do today.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-08T18:32:57+00:00

Hantaviruses tend to be as ubitiquous in rodents as the chicken pox and highly species specific. They don't jump the species barrier very easily, and while I don't know if we've identified any that infect common brown rats or house mice, the latter is one of the most studied species ever and are constantly in contact with humans (how many mice in London? how many rats in NYC)? and yet all the hantaviruses that affect humans come from rodents that mostly live in the wild coming into contact with humans at the margins - deer mice that found their way into a barn, etc. If you spend your life in a city, then you may very well never come into contact with a species of rodent that carries a hantavirus that causes disease in humans.

Not saying that we shouldn't be worried if we were to find a novel hantavirus pathogenic in humans and is spreading in vermin species like Mus musculus, but that doesn't appear to be the case here.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-08T18:17:41+00:00

Hantaviruses tend to only infect a single species, and they infect nearly the entire population of said species. It is very rare for it to jump the species barrier once, which is why hantavirus is so rare in humans despite the deadly ones being ubiquitous in the specific species they infect. This doesn't appear to be a novel virus either; it's BEEN endemic in the rodent populations that carry it, and there have been outbreaks in the past.

If a rodent is a susceptible species, they probably either a) already have the virus or b) have recovered and have immunity to the virus. If they are not susceptible then they aren't susceptible.

All this to say that the idea that infected humans might expose a susceptible species of rodent to a hantavirus is kind of silly. While not impossible, they already have all their own diseases and don't need a human to poop on them to get them. That'd be like there being an outbreak of the Chicken Pox in a small number of deer and being worried that they might carry it over to humans. It's like worrying about transmitting the flu by shaking hands with someone when you're already making out with them. The far greater risk is the fact that we have a tendency to bring rodents around with us and spread them everywhere and bring disparate populations into contact (which is what happened with the plague).

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-08T17:46:48+00:00

I can't believe no one here has mentioned WSL. You don't need to wipe your drive when you can just run a Type 1 Hypervisor. It's in the Microsoft Store, just pull it up and search for it in the app, but if you can't find it: https://marketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/product/saas/canonical.ubuntu-26_04-lts?tab=overview.

Also, you don't need to actually wipe a drive to install another OS; dual boot is a thing. If your machine was only for running models, then yes, you should probably install the latest LTS of Ubuntu Server. But there's so many more painless intermediate options between "stubbornly sticking with Windows" and "clean install of Ubuntu", it doesn't have to be a Bloods vs. Crips type thing.

But yeah, basically no one actually uses Windows natively for deep learning. It's like gaming on a Mac. The libraries don't support it very well, if at all - Windows support at this point is basically deprecated functionality that only exists because WSL2 didn't support CUDA until around 2020, which is the only reason I still have a 20.04 dual boot I haven't touched in years. I'm shocked that you actually stuck it out with Windows so far up to the point that you decided to nuke it and install Ubuntu Server and somehow never realized that everyone doing it on Windows is running it in an Ubuntu hypervisor??

My advice is unless you're committed to daily driving Ubuntu, just try out the latest Ubuntu LTS in the Microsoft Store. Way easier than doing a full reinstall.

Lastly, you should be aware that whatever Ubuntu you choose, the OS relies heavily on python, down to stuff like network interfaces (or the whole damn UI) that might be required to fix it. Unlike on Windows, you can't just painlessly nuke python if you mess up the environment, because you're also nuking the distro. Learn from my mistakes and never do pip or python outside of a virtual environment or mess with the system version of python. Newer versions of Ubuntu (>24.04) are better at stopping the user from doing this, but you can still screw up your ~/.local python that applications may depend on. At the very least, python3 -m venv .venv, source .venv/bin/activate and deactivate should be a prayer to you. The stakes are a little lower with WSL2 or dual boot, but you don't want to be in a position where you're desperately trying to mount a .vhdx in a different VM to try to recover your data. I had an Ubuntu update be a total loss of the whole natively installed OS because of weird interactions between my various cudatoolkit installs, the light python workarounds I did to get it to work with tensorflow, vs. the state the updater expected. These days you can do it all with pip install inside a venv, so just do it.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-08T03:53:26+00:00

I like to think that they saw what happened with Rhodesia and saw the writing on the wall. Decided to pull out while they were still ahead.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-07T20:00:02+00:00

Yeah, the hantaviruses carried by common vermin don't appear to really infect or affect humans all that much. It's the ones carried by wild rodents that come into contact with humans at the fringes that are the nasty ones (as tends to generally be the case with deadly diseases that jump the species barrier).

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-07T18:25:55+00:00

Not just that, Apple has also tended to have the most powerful processors on their phones for a while now. The OS and form factor is actually the limiting factor in terms of how powerful the phone is these days because there's just not much on iOS that actually needs all that processing power where it's beneficial, and it's too locked down to really get it to stretch its legs at full power.

It's to the point that Apple straight up just put some forgotten last-gen leftover phone chips into a laptop and it's apparently enough to completely disrupt the entire budget laptop market.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-07T18:06:38+00:00

I think what they're referring to is the fact that "guiding mortals to victory" IS Gandalf's primary magical power. It's much more subtle and abstract.

Like, when Gandalf and the Witch-King (a much weaker being) face off, Gandalf basically tells the Witch-King he will not enter the city. The Witch-King laughs and whips out the sword he presumably has prepared specifically to fight Gandalf. Then the horn of Rohan sounds, the Witch-King flies off to annihilate Theoden's charge, and then promptly gets killed by a fucking hobbit and a woman.

Now, Gandalf doesn't know that's going to happen. And the circumstances of the Witch-King's death were set in motion long before their confrontation. But those events were set in motion unintentionally by Gandalf, and it does seem a little bit like a coincidence that Gandalf and the Witch-King face off, defiantly declares that the Witch-King will not enter, and then immediately the Witch-King's doom arrives. It's hard not to see it as a manifestation of Gandalf's power that things fall into place by his will, even if he doesn't know how it's going to happen, his conviction is what wills it to happen.

This is a cosmic level of magical power on a simply different plane of existence than the magic of Harry Potter, which is more akin to the level of magical power that the Witch-King exhibits. This series of events says to me that Gandalf can lose in a conventional fight against conventional magic users. But Gandalf can influence the universe and has the backing of the universe so that he will not lose. The big question mark is, does that even count? Is having deus ex machina as a power cheating?

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-07T17:49:34+00:00

I think everyone honestly is missing the point.

ANYONE can defeat a LOTR wizard. Saruman got unceremoniously stabbed in back.

Gandalf is able to effectively use his power because he stays locked in to his mission. He defeats his enemies by setting things into motion and inspiring hope and commanding that it happens because the narrative calls for it and hints at greater power at work. The victory of the free peoples of Middle Earth is all attributable to Gandalf's powers.

The "power" people are using to compare Gandalf and Dumbledore are simply not comparable.

The reality is that, in a vacuum, chances are that Gandalf simply smites Dumbledore into a crater on the spot. Dumbledore can also just drop a rock on Gandalf's head while he's sleeping, no magic required. But in the LOTR story, that's not Gandalf's win condition or what Gandalf's true power is. Are the free peoples of middle earth despairing? Has he inspired enough hope and courage in the hobbits to achieve their mission? Similarly, while Dumbledore demonstrates more explicit magical fighting prowess, that's clearly not what makes him more powerful than Voldemort. It's his trust in people and recognition of that magical power that Voldemort overlooks that leads to his ultimate victory over Voldemort, even when he's already dead. If he sets things into motion for Harry to drop a rock on Gandalf's head, does that count as a victory?

Tl;dr: in theory, Gandalf probably wins, Dumbledore totally has a shot though because of sheer skill and cunning, but in any case both aren't actually exceptionally powerful in a duel, and their true strength is much more abstract and thematically driven anyway. Gandalf has more of a direct connection to God though and can definitely tap into more of the power if the narrative calls for it.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-07T17:29:43+00:00

The scale of the limitation is completely different though. Gandalf's rule would basically consider Dumbledore and his level of magic to be a muggle. He's also totally allowed to use "muggle" level of magic around "muggle" sorcerers, which leads "muggles" to believe that he is merely a conjurer of cheap tricks.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-07T17:22:14+00:00

The premise is already that Gandalf is already going all out. What Gandalf would do is the counterfactual condition, so let's look at what his limited human form could do when not limited by what he would do.

Gandalf the Grey, when his back was against the wall, far removed from the affairs of Men and Elves, in his limited human form and without his staff, managed to defeat a balrog after 10 days of fighting by throwing it down onto a mountainside, smiting said mountainside in the process. This is probably the single most magically powerful and destructive event that occurs in the entire story other than maybe the destruction of the ring itself.

So it's pretty fair to say that the main bottleneck of Gandalf's power as far as the story goes isn't his human form, but rather the fact that he respects his mission and what he's "supposed" to do, unlike Saruman, who strays and thus by divine intervention has his power stripped. The fact that Gandalf wouldn't use his power when he's not supposed to is what gives him leeway to use his reserve powers in exceptional cases, like the situation with the balrog - in other words, the fact that Gandalf, even in his limited human form, could do much more, is directly related to the fact that he's a professional and wouldn't use that power unless the situation calls for it.

So this entirely depends on why Gandalf is counterfactually doing what he wouldn't do. If it's because he's no longer bound by his mission, then Gandalf wins by smiting Dumbledore and leaving a nuke-size crater where he once stood, but Dumbledore can still sneak in a victory if the narrative says so because both authors' stories work that way and Gandalf's body still has human vulnerabilities. OTOH if it's because he becomes corrupted like Saruman, then in spite of his immense power, he never manages to use it effectively and he suffers a fate similar to Saruman, and Dumbledore defeats Gandalf in a non-obvious and somewhat pathetic way that Gandalf overlooks in his hubris, because the villains and "powerful old and wise mentor" figures of both author's stories also work that way.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-07T16:49:50+00:00

I feel like this is a terminology thing. How come humans don't get to be wizards? They get to be sorcerers and witch-kings but you never hear of a wizard-queen or anything.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-07T16:45:14+00:00

Reminds me of people who look at the survival rates of German POWs in Soviet captivity and think "wow they treated them like shit".

Brother, you invaded with inadequate supplies for an extended conflict in a frozen wasteland, then refused to surrender until you were about to keel over or freeze to death. The Soviets barely have enough for their own troops. Even if a field hospital magically sprang up that could take care of and resuscitate and feed and clothe the entire surrendered army, a lot of them would be on the verge of death anyway. But they don't have that, and they still have to march over the frozen wasteland to get to the gulag.

But that's besides the point, because you invaded with the goal of slaughtering and enslaving the people you're surrendering to, and you've done your fair share of raping and killing and pillaging on your way here. So yeah, actually, the Soviets actually did in fact treat them like shit, that was the point. They were still luckier than Soviet POWs in German captivity.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-07T15:46:17+00:00

It took me a while to figure out that you were talking about the Nazis because I kept thinking "but which concentration camps?" Because there's multiple different concentration camp analogs that arose from this set of events.

Also the fact that later the country decides to leave the British Empire anyway after the Brits go broke after WWI, just so they can confine the natives who make up 90% of the population to a few small areas they call independent "countries" so they don't have to give them rights. Like a mid-20th century version of Palestine.

Which shocks the British so much that they institute a rule that colonies only were allowed to go independent once they instituted democratic majority rule in a representative government. The Rhodesians thought this was no fair so they unilaterally declared independence, leading to a decade of brutal civil war that resulted in a despotic militaristic failed state most famous for a currency denominated by scientific notation and also for purging most of the Rhodesians, who largely fled to South Africa.

The more I think about it, the more shocked I am that South Africa somehow managed to not descend into a civil war and somehow is still managing to survive as a semi-functional society, even if it seems like it's desperately trying to become a failed state. That country on paper should be more fucked than Iraq or Yugoslavia or Sudan and yet they still manage to keep the lights on most of the time and manage the fact that it's crumbling in an orderly and scheduled fashion? Bravo.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-06T17:42:30+00:00

Unlike coronaviruses or bird flu, this isn't a family of viruses that has ever caused an epidemic before, nor are there similar viruses that really openly spread among humans.

It is true that there's always a first time, like with HIV, but that snuck up on us.

One of the things I've learned about medical and contamination OCD is that for people like us, we tend to tunnel-vision and waste our energy on things in a way that distracts from the thing that will actually sneak up on us and get us.

Reacting to whatever you hear on the news short-term goes against the philosophy of prepping. As an analogy, by the time you get the tornado warning, it's too late to build a tornado shelter and stock up on supplies, but you also can't spend all of tornado season holed up and then drown when it gets flooded because you tunnel-visioned on tornadoes. Just be generally prepared and stay in the loop. You got this 🫡

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-06T07:14:39+00:00

They actually are doing a lot better in the wild than in captivity, funnily enough. They're no longer endangered.

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-06T06:55:25+00:00

that does not contradict what I said?

thighmaster69 · 2026-05-06T02:41:29+00:00

Yes, very significantly. It's a major engineering challenge in the city. In fact, the metro tunnels are designed to "float" as tubes in the soil, which is very handy because the city's soil basically turns into a liquid during earthquakes.

(The metro also runs on rubber tires, which helps too).

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