That kid's going places!

The purpose of this plant is in fact not long-duration storage, but secondary functions as you mentioned, and it's also meant to be a proof-of-concept. Per an article from CNESA's English site when the plant's construction began in June 2023:

This project represents China's first grid-level flywheel energy storage frequency regulation power station and is a key project in Shanxi Province, serving as one of the initial pilot demonstration projects for "new energy + energy storage." The station consists of 12 flywheel energy storage arrays composed of 120 flywheel energy storage units, which will be connected to the Shanxi power grid. The project will receive dispatch instructions from the grid and perform high-frequency charge and discharge operations, providing power ancillary services such as grid active power balance.

Granted.

An infinite quantity of ice cold water now exists within the exact dimensions of your water bottle.

Water has mass.

Try KittyToy (itch.io).

• Crash Course Pods: The Universe, with John Green & Dr. Katie Mack. Talks about how the universe came into existence.
• Volts, with David Roberts. Talks about electrification and the energy transition.

I don't listen to many podcasts, but those two are pretty great.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/orinoco-tribune-bias-and-credibility/

Overall, we rate Orinoco Tribune as extreme left biased and questionable due to its consistent promotion of anti-imperialist, socialist, and Chavista viewpoints. We rate them low factually due to their strong ideological stance, selective sourcing, the promotion of propaganda, and conspiracy theories related to the West.

The Orinoco Tribune has a clear left-leaning bias. It consistently supports anti-imperialist and Chavista perspectives (those who supported Hugo Chavez). The publication critiques U.S. policies and mainstream media narratives about countries opposing U.S. influence. Articles frequently defend the Venezuelan government and criticize opposition movements and foreign intervention.

Articles and headlines often contain emotionally charged language opposed to the so-called far-right of Venezuela, like this Far Right Plots to Sabotage Venezuela’s Electrical System in Attempt to Disrupt the Electoral Process. The story is translated from another source and lacks hyperlinked sourcing to support its claims.

Maybe don't consider a pro-Maduro propaganda rag as a legitimate source for a conflict he's directly involved in.

Maduro is a man who ordered his country to block Signal, ordered it to block social media, and arrests, imprisons, and bans his political opposition. He has also expressed strong support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, meanwhile the citizens of his country have been starving for years under what is literally known as The Maduro Diet, and the middle class has vanished. He has long forfeit his right to the benefit of the doubt. He is a despot who has now repeatedly falsified election results after mismanaging the country for years, and calls his opposition fascists while being fascist. That the people overwhelmingly want him gone is not some hegemonic plot by the evil West, it's the natural consequence of his actions.

OP is absolutely mistaken that it's somehow ableist to stick to a meeting deadline or similar "punishment" for lateness, and t3rmit3 has said why much more eloquently than I could. However, you've said something that I can't let pass without a rebuttal.

perpetual lateness means someone values their time more than they do the commitment and the time of others. period.
[...]
perpetual lateness, though, is a statement, that individual could not give a shit what others needs and responsibilities are

This is making a moral judgment on what you believe is in someone's mind, and your judgment is based on a false premise. There exists an extremely common mental disorder (so common that some might consider it a form of neurodivergence) that when left untreated makes it much harder to do the things you want and are obligated to do. It's harder to start doing things, it's harder to stop, it's harder to focus yet too easy to focus, it's harder to remember important things, and it's harder to motivate yourself to do anything you aren't doing at any given moment, and anything you have to put effort into motivating yourself to do leaves you with less mental energy to do anything else in that category.

The one thing that can usually overcome all of these mental blocks is panic - when you're actually out of time and Consequences are approaching if you don't do something RIGHT NOW then you can finally do what you need to do and get something done - later than you wanted, worse than you wanted, more mentally drained, and with plenty of reasons to beat yourself up over it, not that it helps if you do. This is the reason behind why most people show up perpetually late. They might not let the emotional turmoil show, but if they're consistently a few minutes late for everything, I can just about promise it's not because they don't care.

People who have this disorder and receive prescription medication for it often describe the first dose as like receiving superpowers. The idea that they can decide they want to do something, and then just go do it? Without thinking about it? No buildup? No psyching yourself into it? No roundabout coping strategies? No reorganizing the entire structure of your life to make it happen? No bargaining with the goddamn monkey in your brain that almost never lets you do the rational thing? Wait, normal people don't have the monkey? They live like this every day, without any expensive pills? Impossible. It couldn't be that simple. Do they have any idea how lucky they are?

Your misplaced sense of moral superiority is unfortunately quite common, but it's not going to help these people, it's going to hurt them. If it's affecting their life, and it often is, they need treatment and training in how their brain works, not to be told they're a piece of shit who doesn't care about others and are choosing to inconvenience everyone else in their life including themselves. That's only going to put them in a worse place.

Router-level VPN is going to be more difficult to configure and cause more problems than just having it on all your devices. There are some games where online play just refuses to work if connecting through a VPN. Some mobile apps are the same. When a website blocks your currently selected server, and the usual solution is switching to another server, that's going to be more difficult and more tedious when it's configured at the router level. In addition, if you do something like using a self-hosted VPN in order to connect remotely to a media server on your home network, that becomes more difficult if your home router is on a different VPN.

If you're trying to keep local devices in the building from phoning home and being tracked, a PiHole or router-level firewall might be a better solution. I think if you're running a pfsense or opnsense router and are a dab hand with VLANs then maybe you could get what you're looking for with router-level VPN, but it's a huge hassle otherwise. Just put Mullvad on your computers and phones and call it a day.

Unfortunately I can't even test Llama 3.1 in Alpaca because it refuses to download, showing some error message with the important bits cut off.

That said, the Alpaca download interface seems much more robust, allowing me to select a model and then select any version of it for download, not just apparently picking whatever version it thinks I should use. That's an improvement for sure. On GPT4All I basically have to download the model manually if I want one that's not the default, and when I do that there's a decent chance it doesn't run on GPU.

However, GPT4All allows me to plainly see how I can edit the system prompt and many other parameters the model is run with, and even configure multiple sets of parameters for the same model. That allows me to effectively pre-configure a model in much more creative ways, such as programming it to be a specific character with a specific background and mindset. I can get the Mistral model from earlier to act like anything from a very curt and emotionally neutral virtual intelligence named Jarvis to a grumpy fantasy monster whose behavior is transcribed by a narrator. GPT4All can even present an API endpoint to localhost for other programs to use.

Alpaca seems to have some degree of model customization, but I can't tell how well it compares, probably because I'm not familiar with using ollama and I don't feel like tinkering with it since it doesn't want to use my GPU. The one thing I can see that's better in it is the use of multiple models at the same time; right now GPT4All will unload one model before it loads another.

I have a fairly substantial 16gb AMD GPU, and when I load in Llama 3.1 8B Instruct 128k (Q4_0), it gives me about 12 tokens per second. That's reasonably fast enough for me, but only 50% faster than CPU (which I test by loading mlabonne's abliterated Q4_K_M version, which runs on CPU in GPT4All, though I have no idea if that's actually meant to be comparable in performance).

Then I load in Nous Hermes 2 Mistral 7B DPO (also Q4_0) and it blazes through at 50+ tokens per second. So I don't really know what's going on there. Seems like performance varies a lot from model to model, but I don't know enough to speculate why. I can't even try Gemma2 models, GPT4All just crashes with them. I should probably test Alpaca to see if these perform any different there...

I actually found GPT4ALL through looking into Kompute (Vulkan Compute), and it led me to question why anyone would bother with ROCm or OpenCL at all.

Rather than replace, I'd guess it could be an alternative. The best part of it will be the ability to natively disable the top tab bar instead of needing a janky userchrome css hack that doesn't even fully work.

PCIe gen 5 is for the PCIe slots and NVMe storage slots, but they're backwards compatible; you can put a gen 3 component in a gen 5 slot and it will work at gen 3 speeds. Similarly, if you put a gen 5 component in a gen 4 slot, it will be limited to gen 4 speeds. Right now there's very little appreciable difference between gen 4 and gen 5 unless you're spending a lot of money on the component (GPU/storage). Another thing to note is that Gen 5 requires that both the CPU and motherboard support it; a CPU with gen 4 support in a gen 5 motherboard will limit all the slots to gen 4 speeds.

RAM is a totally different standard that must be matched exactly for what the motherboard has; if it's a DDR5 motherboard then you have to use DDR5 RAM or it won't even fit in the slots. You can get a PCIe gen 5 motherboard and just use gen 4 SSDs or GPUs, that's perfectly fine and leaves you room to upgrade later.

Seems mostly fine to me, I game all the time on Linux (Bazzite gang 🤘) with a 3900X + 7900GRE, haven't had any significant issues aside from needing to make sure clock speeds were configured correctly on the GPU. Two ram sticks is the way to go with these systems as sometimes they don't support 4 sticks at full speed.

You're right that GPU passthrough is definitely more for tinkering or advanced users with very specific needs (usually professionals who need Windows/Nvidia and choose to run it in a VM rather than dual-boot), with a budget to match. For a gamer couple, having fully separate systems is going to be much less hassle and more resilient against failure.

The one thing I would recommend changing is the power supply, it's unironically the most important component in the computer because if it fails it can kill everything else, and the System Power 10 is known enough for being low-quality that discussions of that come up in web searches. Poor quality power supplies can damage your hardware and otherwise cause weird, intermittent issues even if everything seems to work fine most of the time, and will fail and shut off the computer when a good power supply would have just kept on chugging. Seasonic and Corsair are considered the best brands and have 10 year warranties - they're more expensive, but they're worth it. You want 80+ Gold or better these days, this is a buy once, cry once component.

If you don't have a UPS, I would also recommend getting one at some point, either one big shared unit (if they'll be close together) or two individual units. Having backup power will allow you to shut down the computers gracefully during a power outage, and prevents the worst-case scenario where the power goes out while the computer is installing updates and it turns into a brick.

At least their username is accurate!

Web ads are a security risk that even the FBI has acknowledged, so your friends should be aware that having uBlock Origin installed is nearly as important as having virus protection.

Well, not free per se, DVDs and Blurays and the computer in my closet I use to host Jellyfin for the rest of the home do cost money... But they sure as hell can't jack up the price after the fact. Quite the contrary; the hardware needed for it is getting cheaper over time. I can also use it even when the internet is down.

They're taking Mario Savio's famous speech regarding civil disobedience and running with it. Good for them!

Floorp includes proprietary components

That's out of date, they made everything open-source again recently as announced on their subreddit.

Regarding profiles, having two is generally recommended - your main profile with no Google services, and a secondary profile only for apps that absolutely require Google Play Services. Personally, I just dump everything in one profile and deny nearly every permission to anything Google, and on top of the sandboxing that's enough of an improvement over stock Android that I don't bother with two profiles.