Greg's recent activity
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Comment on Ten years since my last PC build - Help me spec a quiet mATX rig in ~tech
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Comment on Ten years since my last PC build - Help me spec a quiet mATX rig in ~tech
Greg Link ParentThat’s a cool site, I hadn’t come across it before! I will say some of the recommendations look a bit dated to me, which could be tricky to spot if you don’t already know what you’re looking for....That’s a cool site, I hadn’t come across it before!
I will say some of the recommendations look a bit dated to me, which could be tricky to spot if you don’t already know what you’re looking for.
I get the impression maybe they’ve been incrementally updating the individual parts in each tier for a bit too long without actually overhauling the builds as a whole. I see a decent number of fairly slow SSDs, significantly too little RAM at every tier, spinning disks used for capacities that really aren’t worth the trade off anymore, things like that.
The build suggestions in https://pcpartpicker.com/guide/ are a lot closer to the parts lists I’d currently be looking at, in case it’s helpful to have a point of comparison.
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Comment on Ten years since my last PC build - Help me spec a quiet mATX rig in ~tech
Greg Link ParentAt the risk of getting too far into the weeds here, it's kinda-sorta-technically true to say EXPO/XMP are overclocking, but in practice they're the speeds you see printed on the box and the speed...At the risk of getting too far into the weeds here, it's kinda-sorta-technically true to say EXPO/XMP are overclocking, but in practice they're the speeds you see printed on the box and the speed you get if you select the manufacturer's default memory profile in the BIOS. It's less of the old school twiddling around with voltage offsets and clock multipliers, more "this is the speed the memory is designed for, and the one it displays in the menu, but not officially rubber stamped by the standards body".
JEDEC speeds (the "official", definitely-not-overclocking-in-any-sense-of-the-word profiles) do actually go up to 8800 now as well, but I don't think that's actually available to buy. I think there's JEDEC DDR5 7200 available, but I might be misremembering.
I too would prefer to be yelling at clouds sometimes, but my work keeps me very up to date with the minutiae of these things...
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Comment on Ten years since my last PC build - Help me spec a quiet mATX rig in ~tech
Greg Link ParentFor what it’s worth, all the way up to DDR5 8200 is supported on Ryzen 9000. I can’t see a lot of good reasons for it - it’s twice the price and with almost any normal workload the difference...I'd just look at what your processor can support and go from there
For what it’s worth, all the way up to DDR5 8200 is supported on Ryzen 9000. I can’t see a lot of good reasons for it - it’s twice the price and with almost any normal workload the difference between that and 5600 is going to be imperceptible - but it is out there.
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Comment on Ten years since my last PC build - Help me spec a quiet mATX rig in ~tech
Greg (edited )Link ParentFractal Era, maybe? The whole outer shell comes off if you need to get at the internals, which helps a lot compared to digging around in a tiny case that's still closed on three sides. Looks-wise...Fractal Era, maybe? The whole outer shell comes off if you need to get at the internals, which helps a lot compared to digging around in a tiny case that's still closed on three sides.
Looks-wise I prefer the Terra, which does also come apart pretty easily, but that's getting a fair way into practicality tradeoffs kind of small rather than just reasonably compact like the Era.
[Edit] Also yes AMD, yes Noctua (they even have a second iteration of some of their fans now, with minor but hard-won engineering improvements), and RAM speed is pretty well into diminishing returns given that the pricing sweet spot seems to be around 5600-6400 MHz anyway. Just do yourself a favour and get 2x32GB - AM5 boards complain if you try to use four DIMMs, but you will absolutely appreciate having 64GB total and just not having to worry about headroom.
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Comment on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | Official trailer in ~tv
Greg Link ParentYeah, I do know what you mean - if we had the option for a live action show with the same level of storytelling I’d take that in a heartbeat, but I guess animation is what gave them the creative...Yeah, I do know what you mean - if we had the option for a live action show with the same level of storytelling I’d take that in a heartbeat, but I guess animation is what gave them the creative freedom to do interesting things without too much executive meddling or hand wringing about budget. Admittedly animation doesn’t have to be cartoony, but I can also see why they wanted to play with it a bit!
It’s a shame we didn’t get a series that’ll give us another Darmok or In The Pale Moonlight, but for me at least the “bar stories” lens does take the edge off the things you mentioned. Boimler’s always faceplanting into success because Mariner’s the one telling it and she’s never going to let him have too much credit; the bridge crew are out of touch and kinda foolish because that’s how it looked to the guys who were stuck doing holodeck maintenance at the time, that kind of thing.
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Comment on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | Official trailer in ~tv
Greg Link ParentSadly not, although I watched them the other way around so I would have missed it if he did! I’ll be interested to see how (or if) future shows treat the characters/events in general though,...Sadly not, although I watched them the other way around so I would have missed it if he did! I’ll be interested to see how (or if) future shows treat the characters/events in general though, especially given how much of the lower decks was built on callbacks to the classic shows.
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Comment on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | Official trailer in ~tv
Greg Link Parent[Harry Kim wanders in, clearly in his mid-50s, still wearing a single ensign’s pip on his collar] Doc, what’s with the new look? Don’t tell me you let the Daystrom team mess with your emitter...[Harry Kim wanders in, clearly in his mid-50s, still wearing a single ensign’s pip on his collar]
Doc, what’s with the new look? Don’t tell me you let the Daystrom team mess with your emitter again…
Oh, not at all, I spent quite some time working on my appearance after being offered a position at the academy. I think it adds a certain gravitas, wouldn’t you agree?
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Comment on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | Official trailer in ~tv
Greg Link ParentLower Decks is by far the best Star Trek in years - even through the silliness it’s got better writing, more genuine emotion, and far far better character development than Picard (a show that I’d...Lower Decks is by far the best Star Trek in years - even through the silliness it’s got better writing, more genuine emotion, and far far better character development than Picard (a show that I’d been really excited for before it aired, and that I didn’t actually hate, even though I found it disappointing).
I saw a great comment somewhere saying to watch Lower Decks as if you’re hearing the crew tell the stories in a bar 30 years after they happened. I think that gives it the perfect tone for things that really happened and really mattered (in-universe, obviously), but wrapped in a thick layer of humour, bravado, and friendly bullshitting between the characters.
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Comment on US President Donald Trump’s 100% China tariff triggers $20b wipeout, 1.6m crypto traders liquidated in ~finance
Greg Link ParentI’m going to preface this by saying it absolutely is gambling, and anyone still pretending otherwise is bullshitting, so I don’t want it to sound like I’m trying to back those arguments. But I do...I’m going to preface this by saying it absolutely is gambling, and anyone still pretending otherwise is bullshitting, so I don’t want it to sound like I’m trying to back those arguments. But I do think it’s important to understand your opponent’s position if you’re going to refute it well.
“Devaluation” in that context has a very specific meaning of “bank printed a bunch more money, so all the existing money is worth a bit less because it represents the same underlying value”. So this kind of market wide dip isn’t what they’re talking about when they make that point, even though what they’re saying is misleading to the point of being flat out wrong. (And for what it’s worth even most of the crypto bro types seem to have abandoned the currency narrative and just talk about it as an asset now - not that that makes it more legitimate, just a fraction more honest).
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Comment on US President Donald Trump’s 100% China tariff triggers $20b wipeout, 1.6m crypto traders liquidated in ~finance
Greg Link ParentWhether or not it’s fiat is more related to how inflation and monetary policy interact with it, whereas this is more of a broad “economy’s fucked” panic. It’s not about lending or interest rates...Whether or not it’s fiat is more related to how inflation and monetary policy interact with it, whereas this is more of a broad “economy’s fucked” panic. It’s not about lending or interest rates or money supply, it’s about underlying value going up in smoke because of a trade war.
But yeah, I do agree that crypto has very little in common with a currency - it’s become a tradable commodity like gold rather than a medium of exchange.
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Comment on The Oatmeal: A cartoonist's review of AI art in ~comics
Greg Link ParentThis does actually help me a lot, thanks for that! I think I interpret the idea of originality quite strongly on its difference from what’s come before, and what you’re saying is that you focus...This does actually help me a lot, thanks for that! I think I interpret the idea of originality quite strongly on its difference from what’s come before, and what you’re saying is that you focus more on its coherence or personality within the body of work.
I was going to say something about distinctiveness but I realised that actually has both connotations too: distinct (different from previous), and distinct (identifiable to a particular style or origin). Even in the vocabulary itself, the concepts are clearly very closely intertwined!
I’ve definitely got a clearer handle on where you’re coming from now, and in some ways I do agree. I think all I’d say is you might be surprised at what AI (as a broad term for neural net technology) can do, far beyond what you see from AI (commercially driven content generation products from major tech companies).
A model with a style truly its own, derived from an incentive function very different to “make something that a human will, on average, approve of for this text prompt”, is entirely possible. I’m not suggesting organic creativity or thought, but if you step beyond just prompting and actually dive into the way systems are trained and the degrees of freedom available there, I think that originality and distinctiveness are absolutely on the table. But probably not alongside profitability, and certainly not big tech levels of profitability, even if it could maybe make for an interesting PhD project or arts foundation grant.
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Comment on The Oatmeal: A cartoonist's review of AI art in ~comics
Greg Link ParentAre you assuming only pretrained, commercial models are in play here? That would make more sense to me, because those are pretty limited and pretty middle-of-the-road in a lot of ways, but I think...Are you assuming only pretrained, commercial models are in play here? That would make more sense to me, because those are pretty limited and pretty middle-of-the-road in a lot of ways, but I think it's a shame to tar the entire field of "AI" (I'll spare you the whole post I've written a few times before about why I dislike the terminology) with blanket statements about what it's capable of based on something that's essentially the McDonalds version of the technology.
You can absolutely create a loss function that'd simultaneously maximise the distance from the training images (i.e. minimise the similarity) while keeping a term that enforces recognisable outputs as defined by a classification model to stop it just returning random noise, for example. I'm not sure what the results would look like, or how much tuning it'd take to create that function in a way that gives a decent output, but it's absolutely within the capabilities of "AI" as most people define it. I might even give it a go if I get the free time, it'd be a fun little experiment!
But, even putting aside the very technical side, I'm still not getting it... Looking at these:
the end result is just a remix of what it knows
you'll always be able to tell that it's borrowing from those without really adding any new style of its own
It seems like you have a very strong idea of where the line is between "remix" and "original"... but I don't have that kind of confidence in the distinction at all. I couldn't tell you what proportion of my own thoughts and ideas are original vs. coming from half seen and half remembered snippets of what I've experienced in my life.
If I can't say with certainty what "original" means in the context of a human mind - my own human mind, no less, the only one I can experience from the inside - I just really struggle with the idea that there's a definitive line of where a machine is or isn't making something original. Does it become original when it passes the point you can't tell it's borrowing? Because I think we're already there in the very best outputs, even though there are by definition 100 or 1000 or 10,000 mediocre outputs for every one of those exceptional ones.
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Comment on The Oatmeal: A cartoonist's review of AI art in ~comics
Greg Link Parent[citation needed] I’m half joking there, but I am genuinely interested to know what you mean, because I hear this refrain a lot and I really struggle to understand what people are getting at with...AI as it is cannot add this element of uniqueness to its output, it can only rehash or remix what's been provided to it
[citation needed]
I’m half joking there, but I am genuinely interested to know what you mean, because I hear this refrain a lot and I really struggle to understand what people are getting at with it.
What’s the meaningful bar for uniqueness that matters in your mind? Because you can trivially get a unique style just by randomising some parameters, or you can get a unique image by using a photo of yourself as the basis for a generated output and asking for a situation you’ve never been in, or you can get into much more interesting (in my opinion) experimental territory by letting adversarial models optimise towards goals like “create things that don’t look like your training data, but that are still interpretable by an image classification model”.
I understand the basis for most of what people say in these conversations, even if I might disagree with it, but the specific idea that AI can’t create something unique is one I see repeated often, almost verbatim, with the assumption that we all accept it as an axiom - and maybe I’m just being excessively literal, but I just don’t get it! That doesn’t seem to line up with what I see at all?
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Comment on We’re seniors. It’s not our responsibility to fix the housing supply. in ~society
Greg Link ParentDown payments and taxes both depend on the price ratio, not the monthly payment, and the interest rates in the link that flipped the monthly payment were only in play for six out of the last 60...- Exemplary
When you're buying a home, it's not necessarily the ratio of income to house price. It's really the ratio of income to monthly payment.
Down payments and taxes both depend on the price ratio, not the monthly payment, and the interest rates in the link that flipped the monthly payment were only in play for six out of the last 60 years. I think it's still fair to characterise as harder for most people, in most places, most of the time.
But sure, I take your point, there are a lot of variables at play - honestly, the one thing that's usually on my mind in these conversations is this graph, it neatly sums up what I see as the overall problem.
It seems like they value permanent housing a little less than prior generations.
Or see it as less attainable, that's my point. To take a deliberately absurd example, it's not that I necessarily value eating out more than a yacht or a private jet, it's that I know I would never attain either so they don't even factor into my spending calculations.
But in terms of blame, I see it as too nihilistic to not let Gen Z take some of the blame themselves. We can do more as a society to make things better, but a person should always focus on what they can and just not using Uber Eats is not that hard to do.
I dunno, I just see the entire social contract as broken. It's not hard to forego Uber Eats, but why bother? Where's it going to get you? There is no "put in the work and you'll be rewarded", if there ever even really was. And I'm saying all this from the perspective of a relatively high earner - I work far less hard than plenty of my peers, yet I'm rewarded far more; the highest paid jobs I've ever had brought the least positive impact to society; the trappings of "middle class" in my parents' and grandparents' generations are just barely within reach at a very-much-not-middle income nowadays.
The "every little helps" attitude genuinely bothers me because I feel like it obscures the fact that often those little numbers add up to... a medium sized number that doesn't close the gap. But even more, I think it bothers me because it's imposing a sense of fairness on a wider economic situation that's just so utterly nonsensical to me that I feel like surely we can't be collectively pretending that any of this is actually how we want the world to work.
I've gone pretty off the rails here, I know, but for me at least we've long since lost any semblance of economic sanity. I can't bring myself to blame people for not being sensible when the system as a whole feels like a cross between a casino, a Kafka novel, and a piece of absurdist postmodern art.
...I guess I probably fall squarely into your "too nihilistic" bucket, and you probably wouldn't even be wrong to say that.
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Comment on We’re seniors. It’s not our responsibility to fix the housing supply. in ~society
Greg Link ParentYeah, on that first part I do actually mostly agree with you. I’m not saying it’s a great idea to go all in on luxuries, just that it’s an understandable one given the circumstances. The bit I’m...Yeah, on that first part I do actually mostly agree with you. I’m not saying it’s a great idea to go all in on luxuries, just that it’s an understandable one given the circumstances.
The bit I’m struggling with in the second half, and in your first couple of posts, is that it feels like the elephant in the room isn’t being acknowledged: it is much harder than it used to be to buy a house. Affordability has gone backwards while the rich have become exponentially richer. Focusing on people’s spending habits rather than on that widening chasm between housing costs and income seems like it’s badly misplacing the blame, and it seems odd to say “we just hope that those who come after will do better” when the opposite is what’s actually happening at a societal level.
It’s not how it’s always worked. There were a solid few generations in the 20th century where large numbers of people had the ability to live comfortably on a below-median income, and often even on a single below-median income for an entire household. That has now been taken away directly in the service of making the rich richer. Why focus on the behaviour of the victims rather than the perpetrators?
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Comment on We’re seniors. It’s not our responsibility to fix the housing supply. in ~society
Greg Link ParentLet’s put aside “are eating rice and beans for every meal and still unable to buy a home”, plenty of people are in the position of “could eat rice and beans for every meal and still be unable to...Let’s put aside “are eating rice and beans for every meal and still unable to buy a home”, plenty of people are in the position of “could eat rice and beans for every meal and still be unable to buy a home”. So what incentive is there for them to do so?
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Comment on We’re seniors. It’s not our responsibility to fix the housing supply. in ~society
Greg Link ParentEqually, if the numbers just won’t add up either way, I find it hard to blame people for spending on small luxuries rather than saving. Short term enjoyment now over stability later is justifiably...Equally, if the numbers just won’t add up either way, I find it hard to blame people for spending on small luxuries rather than saving.
Short term enjoyment now over stability later is justifiably seen as short sighted. Short term enjoyment now because the money wasn’t going to be enough for stability anyway so why make sacrifices you’ll see no payoff from? Yeah, I can understand that.
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Comment on We’re seniors. It’s not our responsibility to fix the housing supply. in ~society
Greg Link ParentThis is very, very reasonable - a home is a whole lot more than bricks and mortar, it’s a whole lot more than just money, and it’s totally fair to want that taken into account as a genuinely...we put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into making it our home. We love the area and our neighbors. We don’t want to move
This is very, very reasonable - a home is a whole lot more than bricks and mortar, it’s a whole lot more than just money, and it’s totally fair to want that taken into account as a genuinely important part of the conversation. Just because the invisible middle finger of the market treats housing as nothing more than a commodity doesn’t mean we necessarily need to do the same when we’re discussing solutions.
we don’t feel guilty that young families can’t find their perfect homes
Ehhh… I can give this one a charitable reading, but it’s tone deaf at best. The choice to say “we don’t feel guilty” (and talking about “perfect homes”, instead of just “homes”, for that matter) rather than acknowledging the difficulties people face nowadays reads as antagonistic and dismissive rather than being a justified call for empathy about wanting to stay where they are.
We were in the same boat when we were young and had little kids.
At this point I invite the author to fuck the absolute fuck off and go stare at the numbers until they feel sufficiently motivated to rewrite the article in a way that makes their legitimate points about wanting to stay somewhere they love and acknowledges that it is a very different world to the one they bought in, that the people complaining about that have very legitimate reasons to do so, and that the author is exacerbating a genuine problem that exists - even if it’s perhaps justified for them to be doing so, and actually pretty reasonable to point that out.
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Comment on What common misunderstanding do you want to clear up? in ~talk
Greg Link ParentI was going for laymen's perspective - I replied in more detail just above before I refreshed the page and saw your comment, but as it happens it covers this nicely too! Only thing I'd add...I was going for laymen's perspective - I replied in more detail just above before I refreshed the page and saw your comment, but as it happens it covers this nicely too! Only thing I'd add specifically here is that the way the various copyright offices say copyright functions, vs what they actually enforce, vs what the court opinions and precedents say do not necessarily match up well at all.
But yeah, you can absolutely substitute in "expressions of ideas" and it wouldn't meaningfully change what I had in mind, even though I was also talking about the broader public conversation rather than the legally precise one.
Yeah, it’s good to point out they’re ITX specifically. From what I see the mATX space doesn’t seem to get as much love as either ITX or full size ATX - I was thinking something like the Era with a shell that comes off entirely might actually be easier to work with than a bigger mATX case that only opens on one side.
Silverstone, Lian Li, and Jonsbo do some solid mATX options, but I’m not sure if they’d be easier to build in than what OP currently has.