I spent 25+ years in the precision optics industry, a large portion of which was building machines and instruments for fabricating and testing aspheric lenses and mirrors. Designing, performing, and validating null tests is technically terrifying. Not only is the clock ticking, but every operation on the artifact carries a risk of destroying it, or making it unusable.
It's not life-and-death, but it's pretty satisfying nerd work.
Twice bitten, three times shy.
After the Slotin incident, prompt critical assemblies by hand were prohibited.
Los Alamos then built a series of remotely operated critical assembly machines.
There is a fair amount of open source literature on them, especially the "Godiva" series. Some of these machines have experienced criticality excursions that damaged the machine, but spared the biological organisms operating them by remote control.
Probably because EU/national governments have regulations with respect to the safety and privacy of the users, and the purveyors must evaluate the performance of their products against the regulatory standards.
I've wanted to play games since Atari Pong came out. But I've never owned a console, and haven't owned a computer with a discrete GPU since 2005. Twenty years ago, I satisfied my urge to game by playing Unreal Tournament, Quake, etc. demos. More recently, I'd spend an hour a week watching other people play games on YouTube, to see if I was missing anything.
This year, the snake has entered my garden in the form of an RTX 3060 that I bought for AI and media production applications.
My wife has bought me a flight stick for Christmas, so I can play DCS myself, instead of watching other people's videos.
I worked so hard avoiding escapist leisure in favor of physical exercise and 'maker' hobbies that it's difficult to switch off the discipline, and go have some escapist fun.
I'm retired and have all the resources needed to indulge in pure fun. I'm gonna take advantage of the opportunity.
I periodically check out YouTube while not signed in, to see what YouTube is pushing to the unidentified. It's just like TV used to be, aimed at a pretty low target. And that's nearly all American TV had. At least YouTube still has a longer tail of genuinely good work.
I did just that, including signing up for discord. Despite never having used discord before, I was able to find the link to the beta AppImage in a pinned message and downloaded it. Made it executable with chmod +x LM...... Ran it. Searched for some of the models referenced in this discussion. Downloaded one and ran it. It just worked on Linux Mint 21.2.
Well we have the Canaveral National Seashore to enjoy today, which was constituted from the undeveloped portion of the space program reservation. Otherwise, that area today might be a wall of hirise condos instead of a pristine coastal barrier island.
I've been following this project for the past couple of years. The process of learning to manufacture enormous Nixie tubes as a product is a testament to Dalibor Farný's incredible dedication and skill. Who wouldn't like this succeed as a viable business? It's so niche, yet so cool.
One hopes that others who see this art work are inspired to use these incredible display tubes.
My wife and I agree that eating well is one of the most affordable luxuries. Eating in ordinary restaurants and ordering takeout becomes less attractive once you hit a threshold of kitchen competence. Our experience is home prepared meals costs 1/3 as much as purchased meals, and rarely results in a disappointing experience.
I like the term "confabulation". A hallucination is an artifact of an intoxicated or malfunctioning brain. In my experience, confabulation is a common occurrence in normal brains, and can occur without intention. It's why humans make such poor witnesses. It's how the brain fills in the blanks in its senses and experience.
I was defeated in my first couple of attempts to reach page 100 in _GR_, so I picked up _The Crying of Lot 49_ to get a handle on pynchonism. That confirmed for me that reading _GR_ would pay off, if I could get past the early world building. Pynchon replaced Vonnegut as a central voice in my worldview, as I felt Vonnegut had settled into self-plagiarism. Thirty years later, Vonnegut is restored to his rightful place in my worldview, along with Pynchon (who has since become the self-plagiarizer). There is plenty of redeeming value.
What worries me about interacting with any cloud LLM or other AI is that the provider will record/analyze/sell my inputs, as is done with search queries today. I bet models can be trained to elicit personal info from the users. Users will be happy to comply, as long as they think it will give them a better answer.
I occasionally watch "let's play" videos as a harm reduced alternative to actually playing games. A half hour spent watching someone play a game/sim totally relieves my FOMO. It also dissipates my urge to build a gaming PC. As a maker and musician, there's tons of inspiring and informative content on YT. I feel that I'm quite net positive on my use of YT to enrich my life.
I used an Alesis Quadraverb GT with an ART X-11 midi foot switch since 1991. I love great sounding pedals as much as the next guitarist, but I really didn't enjoy the care and feeding of a pedal board (those were pretty much all DIY in that era). The Alesis is still working 100% at age 32.
Same thing happened to me. Then I decided to start reading ahead every 5 pages, scanning for something that engaged me. I finally found it in the chapter "Un Perm' au Casino Hermann Goering". I read a while more, and determined it was good enough to go back 80 pages and keep slogging. Pynchon's bricks sometimes require that cheat.
It's not life-and-death, but it's pretty satisfying nerd work.