This is a King Kong vs Godzilla battle for energy.

looks dubious

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked?country=USA~CHN

The US’s largest source of energy is natural gas, of which it is the largest producer in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_natural_gas_production

The US also — though it’s been closing down production — has the largest known coal reserves in the world.

China’s largest source of energy is coal, of which it is the largest producer in the world. China does not use much natural gas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_production

I doubt that either is going to abruptly blow up over this.

ext step is put the drive in your freezer for an hour or so then pull it

I’ve read that that doesn’t work on drives these days, though I can’t speak from personal knowledge.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/419677/that-old-freezer-trick-to-save-a-hard-drive-doesnt-work-anymore.html

What is the freezer trick?

At one time, a hard drive might suddenly lock up for any number of reasons, succumbing to the “click of death” or other failures. One of them could be what drive vendors called “stiction,” a fancy name for a drive whose lubrication failed. The drive’s platters essentially “stuck,” and the drive wouldn’t read data. That meant, of course, that any data stored on it was potentially lost forever.

The “freezer trick” involved sticking the drive in a waterproof plastic bag, and then into the freezer. If you left it alone for a few hours, the cold would cool the metal down enough to constrict it, and, in some cases, free up the disks to spin. The idea behind the freezer trick was to save the data by then quickly copying it to another device before another lockup occurred, Moyer said.

Stiction, though, is largely a thing of the past. Modern and more complex drives have improved lubrication systems and “off-platter parking” (where the drive stores its head off the surface of the disk, like a phonograph, when not in use), to prevent this problem from occurring, Moyer explained. “As a result, stiction rarely happens with today’s technology,” he said.

If the drive’s mechanism has indeed failed, there are data recovery places that can probably deal with it, as long as the platters aren’t damaged. They’ll put it in a cleanroom, physically open the drive, very carefully take the platters out, stick its platters into a known-good drive of the same version and revision, pull the data off and send it to you.

I don’t know what the going rate for this is, but last I looked, it was hundreds to thousands.

kagis

Sounds like that’s still accurate.

https://www.handyrecovery.com/how-much-does-data-recovery-cost/

Mechanical Failure (Expensive)

• Cost: $500–$3,000

Whenever your hard drive starts making strange noises, experiences an unfortunate encounter with water, or simply dies without any warning, you have a big problem because mechanical issues can be very expensive to repair, requiring replacement components, advanced techniques and equipment, and controlled cleanroom environment.

Failure of a rotational drive mechanism can cause a drive not to be visible. Does the drive come up on other machines?

That says that there is less pub-going recently. And I do see some articles saying that many pubs aren’t using up their allotted time because traffic has fallen off. So that may be an effect in addition to this.

This one, though, describes the legal mandates as a much-longer-running phenomenon, legislation dating all the way back to World War I:

https://londonlhr.online/why-do-london-pubs-close-early/

The World War I Defense of the Realm Act (DORA) of 1916 is where the practice of early shutting originated.

The goal of the ordinance was to prevent excessive drinking and maintain sobriety among those employed in weapons plants and other wartime industries.

Despite DORA’s long-standing repeal, its effects on pub closing times have persisted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_of_the_Realm_Act_1914

Alcoholic drinks were watered down and pub opening times were restricted to 12 noon–3pm and 6:30pm–9:30pm. (The requirement for an afternoon gap in permitted hours lasted in England until the Licensing Act 1988.)

An article from 1987 talking about the Licensing Act 1988:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-06-25-mn-10623-story.html

The current law that affects about 50,000 pubs dates back to 1915. In that year, the Defense of the Realm Act was introduced to restrict the nation’s 18-hour drinking day so that production of munitions would not be impaired. The government promised that normal service would be resumed at the end of the war, but the promise was never kept.

Hurd said that under the new bill, public houses will be allowed to stay open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. six days a week. He did not specify what the Sunday hours will be.

Licensing laws have already been liberalized in Scotland. But elsewhere in Britain, pubs can open only nine hours a day (9 1/2 hours in London) Monday through Saturday and only five hours on Sunday. Basically, pubs can open only at lunchtime and in the evening until 11 p.m.

The government will allow pubs in England and Wales to close at 1am on 9 May to allow drinkers to continue celebrating into the early hours.

Wait…pubs over all of England and Wales can’t stay open until 1 normally?

kagis

Hmmm.

Apparently, pubs in the UK typically stop serving alcohol earlier than in the US. TIL.

Apparently the standard deadline is 11 PM, but licenses can be granted that run longer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_licensing_laws_of_the_United_Kingdom

Until the 2003 Act came into force on 24 November 2005,[27] permitted hours were a standard legal constraint: for example, serving alcohol after 23:00 meant that a licensing extension had to exist—either permanent (as for nightclubs, for example), or by special application from the licensee concerned for a particular occasion. There was also a customary general derogation permitting a modest extension on particular dates, such as New Year’s Eve and some other Public Holidays. Licensees did not need to apply for these and could take advantage of them if they wished without any formality. Now, permitted hours are theoretically continuous: it is possible for a premises licence to be held which allows 24-hour opening, and indeed some do exist.

Most licensed premises do not go this far, but many applied for licences in 2005 that allowed them longer opening hours than before. However, as in the past, there is no obligation for licensees to use all the time permitted to them. Premises that still close (for commercial reasons) at 23:00 during most of the week may well have licences permitting them to remain open longer, perhaps for several hours. Staying open after 23:00 on the spur of the moment is therefore legal at such premises if the licensee decides to do so. The service of alcohol must still cease when the licence closing time arrives. Only the holder of the comparatively rare true “24-hour” licence has complete freedom in this respect.

https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/on-the-line/last-call-for-alcohol-by-state

According to this, the earliest average last call time in the US is in Georgia, at 11:45 PM.

Most states are 1 AM or 2 AM.

Alaska runs until 5 AM.

I don’t know how you’re viewing these posts (native client? Web browser?), but as long as you can share the URL, which I can in Eternity or the Lemmy Web UI, you can hand it off to NewPipe.

On Android, you’re looking for a menu item or button that looks like this:

The first time you share something with NewPipe, you may need to scroll through the list a bit, but Android has a least-recently-used sort on the list, so it’ll be at the top next time.

I’d include video games.

You can get a small roguelike that’ll provide a ton of playtime.

I use mpv, but VLC has GUI config stuff that is a lot more approachable.

Audacity: free, robust audio editing/effects tool. Not a proper DAW but so feature rich some people treat it like one. Another peak FLOSS.

If you need what I understand to be considered a full-on DAW, there’s Ardour, which is also FLOSS.

deleted by creator

The EV maker on Jan. 2 reported its first decline in annual deliveries last year, and analysts expect sales to fall again this year for several reasons, including damage to the brand reputation by Chief Executive Elon Musk’s close work with U.S. President Donald Trump and support of far-right European politicians.

https://electrek.co/2025/03/28/most-americans-would-not-consider-buying-tesla-new-poll/

A new poll shows that 67% of Americans would not consider buying or leasing a Tesla vehicle – with most of them citing Elon Musk as the reason why.

The results from this survey clearly point toward Tesla having an Elon Musk problem.

If he were removed from the equation, Tesla would have much better chances in the US market.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-delay-us-launch-affordable-ev-lower-cost-model-y-sources-say-2025-04-18/

Link to article rather than lemmy.ml post.

https://archive.ph/bFbVi

no matter how much you “love” your AI girlfriend she will never truly love you back because she can’t think or feel, and fundamentally isn’t real.

On one hand, yeah, current generative AIs don’t have anything that approximates that as a mechanism. I would expect that to start being built in the future, though.

Of course, even then, one could always assert that any feelings in any mental model, no matter how sophisticated, aren’t “real”. I think that Dijkstra had a point as to the pointlessness of our arguments about the semantics of mechanisms of the mind, that it’s more-interesting to focus on the outcomes:

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”

— Edsger Dijkstra

Will more VRAM solve the problem of not retaining context?

IIRC — I ran KoboldAI with 24GB of VRAM, so wasn’t super-constrained – there are some limits on the number of tokens that can be sent as a prompt imposed by VRAM, which I did not hit. However, there are also some imposed by the software; you can only increase the number of tokens that get fed in so far, regardless of VRAM. More VRAM does let you use larger, more “knowledgeable” models, as well as putting more layers on a given GPU.

I’m not sure whether those are purely-arbitrary, to try to keep performance reasonable, or if there are other technical issues with very large prompts.

It definitely isn’t capable of keeping the entire previous conversation (once you get one of any length) as an input to generating a new response, though.

EDIT: I think that last I looked at KoboldAI — I haven’t run it recently — the highest token count per prompt one could use was 2048, and this seems to mesh with that:

https://www.reddit.com/r/KoboldAI/comments/yo31hj/can_i_get_some_clarification_on_some_things_that/

The 2048 token limit of KoboldAI is set by pyTorch, and not system memory or vram or the model itself

So basically, each response is being generated looking at a maximum of 2048 words for knowledge about the conversation and your characters and world. Other knowledge has to come from the model, which can be trained on a ton of — for sex chatbots — erotic text and literature, but that’s unchanging; it doesn’t bring any more knowledge as regards your particular conversation or environment or characters that you’ve created.

I’ve run Kobold AI on local hardware, and it has some erotic models. From my fairly quick skim of character.ai’s syntax, I think that KoboldAI has more-powerful options for creating worlds and triggers. KoboldAI can split layers across all available GPUs and your CPU, so if you’ve got the electricity and the power supply and the room cooling and are willing to blow the requisite money on multiple GPUs, you can probably make it respond about as arbitrarily-quickly as you want.

But more-broadly, I’m not particularly impressed with what I’ve seen of sex chatbots in 2025. They have limited ability to use conversation tokens from earlier in the conversation in generating each new message, which means that as a conversation progresses, it increasingly doesn’t take into account content earlier in the conversation. It’s possible to get into loops, or forget facts about characters or the environment that were present earlier in a conversation.

Maybe someone could make some kind of system to try to summarize and condense material from earlier in the conversation or something, but…meh.

As generating pornography goes, I think that image generation is a lot more viable.

EDIT:

KoboldAI has the ability to prefix the current prompt with a given sentence if the prompt contains a prompt term that matches, which permits dumping information about a character into each prompt. For example, one could have a trigger such that “I asked Jessica to go to the store”, one could have a trigger that matches on “Jessica” and contains “Jessica is a 35-year-old policewoman”. That’d permit providing static context about the world. I think that maybe what would need to happen is to have a second automated process trying in the background to summarize and condense information from earlier in the conversation about important prompt words, and then writing new triggers attached to important prompt terms, so that each prompt is sent with a bunch of relevant information. Manually-writing static data to add context faces some fundamental limits.

I can’t imagine running a non-local sex chatbot unless you’ve got a private off-site server somewhere that you’re using. I mean, forget governments, the company operating the thing is going to be harvesting what it can. Do you really want to be sending a log of your sex chats to some company to make whatever money they can with the thing?

EDIT: Well, maybe if they had some kind of subscription service, so an alternate way to make money, and a no-log, no-profile policy.

I’d love to have and collect DRM free titles that last even after a platform is gone,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

M-DISC (Millennial Disc) is a write-once optical disc technology introduced in 2009 by Millenniata, Inc.[1] and available as DVD and Blu-ray discs.[2]

M-DISC’s design is intended to provide archival media longevity.[3][4] M-Disc claims that properly stored M-DISC DVD recordings will last up to 1000 years.[5] The M-DISC DVD looks like a standard disc, except it is almost transparent with later DVD and BD-R M-Disks having standard and inkjet printable labels.

Those will outlive you.

You can get an M-DISC-capable burner on Amazon for $35, and M-DISC media for about $3/pop, each of which will store 100GB.

GOG is probably more-suited than Steam for this, since it’s aimed around letting you download the installers, and they make a game being DRM-free a selling point and clearly indicate it in their store.

But you can just install a DRM-free Steam game — there are some games that don’t have any form of DRM on Steam, and don’t tie themselves to Steam running or anything, if you’re worried about Steam dying — and then archive and save the directory off somewhere. Might need a bit more effort if you’re on Linux and trying to save copies of Proton-using games, since there’s also a WINEPREFIX directory that needs to be saved. And then you can stuff that on whatever archival media you want.

I’ve copied Caves of Qud to my laptop, which doesn’t have Steam installed, for example. Just requires copying the directory.

Now, that’s not going to work if a game makes use of some kind of DRM, but you specified that you were looking for DRM-free titles, so should be okay on that front.

Fair enough. All that’s contingent on whether you’re up for multiple runs through a game.

So do I go back to end of now or never and change the answer? Do I go back further and leave novigrad when it was in chaos? Even further before the questline began?

If you think that you’d like to play The Witcher 3 more than once, one suggestion:

• The first pass through a game is the only time that you can play the game without foreknowledge. You can never experience that again. If you’re going to play without guidance from a wiki or anything like that, really sit in the main character’s shoes, I’d do it that time. Just don’t worry that much about getting your ideal outcome, because you can do another run. Maybe it’ll give some interesting variety, have you experience something you wouldn’t normally have done, with foreknowledge of the consequences of decisions.

• Then in subsequent runs, you’ve already experienced a number of “spoilers” from your prior runs, and you can try to use that knowledge (as well as knowledge from wikis or forums or whatever) to guide the plot to your desired outcome.