Spouse and I are trying to get bids from local solar installers and we'd appreciate some crowdsourced knowledge from Tilderinos. Questions first, then some context...

• In the current market, is "no, your equipment can't talk to the Internet" actually an unreasonable demand?
• Is there a term or phrase we should be using to look for, or guide installers towards, solar setups that fully function without Internet access?
• Are there any equipment types -- microinverters, for example -- that definitely will not work due to architecture?
• Are there battery controllers, or central inverters, that are known to play nicely (read: can be expanded later) with batteries from other manufacturers?

For each installer, we start the conversation with "it's essential that the system work entirely offline, without Internet." We're flexible on nearly everything else: system size (probably ~15kW), number of panels, battery, etc. Our first concern is making sure that a 25-year investment is not dependent on some company's cloud servers; secondly, that we're not inverting our dependency graph by making our electric power reliant on the whims of our ISP. There's also the privacy angle. But we're not looking for a totally off-the-grid setup, just trying not to lock ourselves into a bad purchase.

So far, one third of the installers (3/9) have immediately told us we're unreasonable and to just go away. Two others said "sure!" and ghosted us afterwards. One was a little more forthcoming, saying that the equipment requires periodic connections to the manufacturer for monitoring and they couldn't provide a warranty without it. The last two provided bids, but it's difficult to tell if they're telling the truth given the conflicting info we've seen.

Important: This will be a noisy topic. If you do not wish to see it in your feed, please use the Ignore feature to hide it!

Tip: If the large number of comments are cluttering up the topic and you just want to see the main giveaway posts, click Collapse Replies at the top of the comments.

It’s time for annother edition of our biannual Game Giveaway topics! Share games with the community and get rid of those extra bundle keys you have lying around.

Before you participate, please make sure you read the rules below.

Rules

-Gifters

Post your available games, the platform and method of delivery, rules for your giveaways (e.g. first-come first-serve, random draw, etc.), and any additional info or requirements. Feel free to get creative!

-Giftees

Request giveaways. Please make sure you follow the gifter's posted guidelines.

-Guidelines

Anyone can choose to be a gifter, giftee, or both! Giveaway rules are set by individual gifters, but there are handful of guidelines everyone should follow:

1. No grey market keys! Only give away games from reputable sources. If you're not sure what this means, please ask.
2. Requests for games should be done in this topic, but if the gift is a key, those should be delivered by PMs only. Please don't post keys publicly in this topic, even obfuscated ones.

If you're new to these, check out previous giveaway threads to see how these usually go.

I haven't been closely following the releases of new models and the research papers that sometimes go along with them. So I was wondering: is power consumption ever seriously talked about by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others? Do we get some specific numbers of how much power their models actually consume to produce 100 tokens? The cost of training some of these models? Or we're not yet at that stage yet and nobody cares and at best we can just get really rough estimates based on "trust me bro" tweets by their respective CEO's?

Some time ago, I came across this post. GPT-OSS (2OB, 120B) are meager, yet energy efficient models and I was surprised that the power consumption is still larger than what I had estimated before.

For 120B to generate a 1000 tokens (which is really not a lot) it would take up around 83 Wh of electricity. For context my PC consumes ~100Wh when idling. So it's almost equivalent as leaving my PC on for an hour. Considering that proprietary models are TRILLIONS of parameters and probably not as energy efficient the true power consumption of these models is concerning. Of course, these big data centers do a lot of things to maximize the efficiency that this "test" fails to do. But even if you half the energy consumption it's still significant given their size and their pervasiveness in handling everyday, trivial tasks.

I haven't come across similar posts or studies for newer open source models, so if somebody has, please share.

Also, I don't seem to fully understand how does context size fit into all of this. The larger the context size the more power it would take to produce those 100 tokens?

I've been thinking about getting into cast iron cooking. I need a new skillet, and I've seen recommendations for cast iron, but some things seem daunting:

• Seasoning. How bad is it really? Did you purchase a pre-seasoned pan and just cook with it? Do you re-season occasionally? How often? What oil do you use? What is your process?
• Cleaning. How do you clean your skillet? Soap and water? How do you know when you are done cleaning? What materials do you use?
• Unknowns. What did you not know until you started cooking with cast iron? Any surprise benefits/costs?

Have any of you used cast iron, then returned to Teflon or stainless steel after being disappointed in the experience? What are the biggest differences between cooking with cast iron and other materials?

Considering that non-stick manufacturing poses environmental risks, and iron may provide a net positive effect for folks needing more iron in their diet, it seems like this is a natural way to go.

Inspired by the recurring topic every Steam sale over at /r/GameDealsMeta:

• What are some lesser-known or overlooked Steam games that you recommend?

• Are there any genres you’d like hidden gem recommendations for?

If you're interested in previous Hidden Gem topics, you can find them here.

For popular recommendations and general purpose sale discussion, please use the main Steam sale topic.

Optional: Feel free to categorize your recommendations by number of reviews (as a proxy for popularity)

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like steam machine, ipo and fathers. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was alert.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

I recently have been reconnecting with something from my childhood: the Krosmoz universe! Anyone who was a kid in France between 2004 and 2012 or so either grew up on it or is at least a little bit familiar with it. Most people outside of the country, if they know of it, generally only know of Dofus, the first of their three (actually five (actually eight if you count the dead ones)) tactical MMORPGs, or the derived TV animated series Wakfu, which was picked up on Netflix at one point. But it's massive here. Even today, they're still quite popular and perpetually developed.

As a medium, video games are not generally so closely tied to countries; more than half of their history has been during the era of globalization and the Internet. Even in the past, when you could only buy games in person in a store, people's minds everywhere were nonetheless on games from overseas. Today, games made in Sweden or Morocco have lived on the same storefronts as games made in Venezuela and Australia for a good while, and I'd bet most people don't even think about where the people who make the games they play come from.

I personally think this is a great thing! But the fact that there's something like Krosmoz, that's so unusually localized to one place, makes me curious to know if there's more; and if there is, I want to know what's unique about it, and what it says about its players and makers, too.

I've asked this before on reddit, and I remember being told about Metin2, an originally Korean MMO that was so popular in Eastern Europe that even a decade after the original Korean and US servers were shut down, players from those countries are still updating the game and keeping it alive. This is a different situation from Krosmoz but another fascinating one. It's the kind of thing I wanna know about.

This is an invitation to yap, if you'll oblige me. Do you have anything like that where you're from? A game or game franchise that only people of your culture know, and that you want everyone else to know about? I wanna hear about it!

I posted this once and immediately deleted it to make it shorter. I did not really succeed. Please don't sue me!

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?