• 4 Posts
  • 177 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 18th, 2023

help-circle
  • A lot of fascists don’t realize they’re fascist.

    Mussolini once said “Fascism can be better described as corporatism, the combination of state and corporate power”. Under fascism, everything and everyone is socialized under the state, and everything becomes a tool of the state. For this reason, some historians call fascism “State Socialism”, contrasting Hitler’s “Racial Socialism” or Marxism’s “Class Socialism”, each of which use a totalizing state to socialize everyone into one group. So a government official putting pressure on a corporation to silence speech the state doesn’t like is openly fascist, and many people think they want that sort of fascism.

    In my book The Graysonian Ethic, I talk about why people think they want fascism(though they might call their fascism something different because they want to pretend they’re not calling for fascism) but they actually don’t:

    “The truth is, everybody thinks that they want fascism because they imagine that fascism will do exactly what they want and nothing more. They look at all the groups of people that they do not like and they imagine that the fascists will go and clamp down on those people and then just stop. Reality is not so kind. Yes, the evil empire did go out and do reprehensible things to the group that they identified as causing the problem. Of course, you do not need to make any kind of choices to whether someone of that particular group caused any problems to realize that most people within any given group are not responsible for the actions of the few. Within any given group there are lots of people who are just trying to sit back and live their lives without hurting anyone. Despite that, this great evil empire went out and exterminated a people. They did not stop there though. To them, even amongst the people that they claimed to protect and try to save there were two sorts of people: those who supported the regime and those who did not. For many of those who supported the regime, they were given the means to gain tremendous wealth and power in a very short period of time. For those who did not, they had their livelihood stripped away, they were shunned, in some cases they joined the groups who faced extermination.”



  • The most important risk you face is if somehow mains voltage ends up contacting somewhere you get electrocuted and die.

    There are 2 purposes of an earth ground: First it can be used as a reference for certain signals, such as microphones. Second, it can be used to protect against turning yourself into a sparker.

    There is a clear separation between mains voltage and system voltages so it’s typically not going to be a problem, but if a little wire ends up contacting the power supply case it can become energized and things start to get really bad.

    Most of the electrical code where I live focuses on grounding as “Bonding”, which is purely safety related for giving dangerous voltages a safe place to go.


















  • I’ve been using a number of different tools which I interface to my nextcloud.

    My main nextcloud has a llm plugin which was really easy to install, you just install the plug-in, make sure that you are configured properly with python in your path, and then run an OCC command to download one of a few models.

    https://localai.io/

    I also hosted localAI, which was a little bit more involved, but the website did a decent enough job of explaining exactly all the things that you needed to do in order to get all the different types of AI model working. Besides LLMs, it also supports text to speech, speech to text, and image generation.

    Two things that are important: first, if you are server doesn’t have a pretty advanced video card then you’re going to be using the CPU exclusively for AI, and that’ll be pretty slow. Second, I found it very quickly that the amount of RAM you have is critical. My main server is a core i5 4th gen, and so I put AI software on another one of my servers which is a core i5 7th gen. You would think that the latter would work a lot better, but it had half the ram, and it basically wasn’t even able to get started.

    Besides hosting ai, if you have a desktop computer or gaming laptop you can run local AI models. There’s a fantastic piece of software called Faraday that works pretty well on my laptop. You can get more and more sophisticated models depending on how much memory you have.

    https://youtu.be/aLy_vVLUHZk

    Krita has AI dal-e support for image generation available as a plug-in. I haven’t used it yet because I just got it started downloading last night before I went to bed, but the installation process has defined in the video seems accurate and was extremely easy and mostly automated.

    https://youtu.be/AU8NDSBIS1U