You are welcome. Im happy if my writings can inform a few people from time to time. Yes thats absolutely what it means if you read the fine print of ecosia they tell you how they collect your data including IP address+ search terms and share it with google and Microsoft’s ad network to show you ads through ecosia. So your data is still coming back google and Microsoft to be sold to the highest bidder. Everyones gotta get a cut profititing off your data, except for you. At least a small bit of that profit goes to the trees I guess.

Here’s my guide to alternative search engines that discusses all the different search engines and how they differ under the hood. I wrote it to be understandable to everyone not just tech nerds.

Ads aren’t a thing in my life. On the off day I have to visit someone who lives with ads and suffer through one or two I tough it out, or look at my phone, or do something different.

I don’t watch live TV. I dont pay for any subscription services except phone service and internet data. I watch YouTube content that has the ads stripped out. I download youtube videos that get often rewatched to hard drive. For movies I buy DVD that can have the drm stripped out.

I play good video games preferably drm free (steam is the one service I can’t really give up easy, but it has offline mode and the deck so praise gaben!). I read e-books that are drm free. I have a mp3 player downloaded with all my music drm free.

The better question is, why are you willing to live with ads at all? Assuming you are in control of your living situation and have the power change whats shown on tv or played through speakers.

Why would you tolerate being constantly bombarded with manipulative messaging by companies, political canpaigns, and all the other powerful groups who want to affect he masses for their benefit?

Why is it so hard just say no? To give up the forms of toxic entertainment delivery? Why can’t you sacrifice ease and convinence and familiarity to regain some control overhow your attention is spent during free time?

If you like something, buy it and really take the steps to own it physically.

If your device happens to be 18-20v you can get a usbc-pd laptop connector with a dc barrel jack output. It has the USBC-PD chip built into it to tell the charger to output 20v and you can probably hunt down barrel adapter bits. Your regular 65-100w rated usbc cord plugs in like anything else.

The other voltages are tough theres not really a consumer market for 15v or 9v specific usbcPD to barrel things.

Hey entropicdrift good question. Those kinds of lanterns are expensive and complicated electronics with a definitive life expectancy. The lantern you linked is over 20$ for a single unit.

Most of those kinds of lanterns use a non replaceable rechargeable lithium battery built inside it that will only last about 500 charge cycles give or take before degrading. That is, if you are lucky and one of the other cheap mass produced quickly assembled electrical components doesn’t fry first.

In the long term I deem its more cost efficient to take a page from the home lighting industry. Simply create a light fixture with easily and cheaply replaceable bulbs. A pack of 4 12v-24v bulbs cost less than that lantern and I like the warm lighting.

Its also a simple matter to convert any lamp fixture into one that can interface with my power system. Cut off the AC plug and replace it with a male cigarette plug. The trick is knowing thst you have to buy the right kinds of bulbs.

So when the 12v led bulbs do eventually burn out its a cheap single 5$ bulb that and a minute to replace it. I would rather put a broken bulb than yet another expensive lantern in the landfill.

Apotential benefit if I choose to power it with usbc-pd instead is variable dimmable lighting based on voltage level if the bulb is 12-24v.

Hey aubeynarf think you are talking about something like this.

Its a special usbc-pd to 5.5x2.5 barrel jack with manually selectable voltage. You just plug it into a pd charger and select the voltage of the device. The rest is finding a barrel plug to barrel plug adapter that plugs into your device. Hope this helps.

Hey there panicnow! I would be happy to help give some input. It is better to avoid firing up the AC inverter whenever possible. If you have a car travel adapter for your devices that plug into the jackeries cigarette plug port that would be better. If you absolutely need more usbc-pd ports for your devices, there is a way to do that given your jackary has one or two of those circular barrel plug outputs that output 12v. Most powersttions should have one or two of them.

If you have one of those barrel plug inputs youre in luck. Go on amazon and buy one of these to turn those jacks into car cigarette plug inputs.

Then get a really nice usbc-pd car charger. I don’t actually have one but I like anker and trust their 100w pd charger would be high quality. You can go cheaper if you only need 65w or lower.

Thanks. Lighting has been an ongoing puzzle I’m figuring out. I originally went with rechargeable Luci light it was really nice warm bright lighting but expensive and failed within a season. Currently I’m using a cheap 5v plastic led light bulb that plugs into regular usba slot. Its enough to see what you are doing comfortably. But really the average person whos used to house bulbs including me wants the luxury of bright lighting. For now I’ve been firing up the AC inverter to run a nice lamp. However I have been considering making my own 12v light fixture with 12v e26 bulbs that plugs into either car cig plug or usbc-pd.

In this picture is marked all the parts of an LED circuit that convert AC Into DC. It takes up about 40% of the board. Its much easier to power LEDs directly.

One of DCs main issues is transmission distance. Its hard to say for your case without details but its a good possibility. If you have a volt meter and know how to use it check the voltage at the start of the run and compare it to the end of the run and see how much the voltage has dropped. If your trying to push 12v over 20-30ft I would say theres a good chance of it being too little voltage over too far a length. Wire diameter is also a factor if its very small gauge wiring.

Im happy to explain pastermil. So first off let’s talk power.

Electrical Power Systems

Most off-grid electrical systems have a few major components.

• A device that generates electrical energy

• A battery that stores excess electrical energy for later

• A charge controller which regulates the incoming raw electrical power from the generator as it charges up the battery, and smooths out the battery energy output

• A power distribution interface which allows for connecting appliances to the batteries in a safe standardized way.

My particular electric system has a 200w 28v solar panel for power generation, two 20ah lifepo4 batteries connected to double capacitance, and the charge controller doubles as a very basic interface with two usba slots and a car cigarette port.

AC vs DC

Now let’s talk about AC and DC. Theres essentially two kinds of electrical power people deal with.

The difference between Alternating Current and Direct Current is in the way the power flows. Direct current moves in a straight path. Alternating current moves power back and forth in three perfectly spaced cycles.

AC The one most people are more familiar with is AC power. it comes to your home from power plants through power lines and transformer boxes. You move around extension cords and plug the three prong outlets into a wall.

Alternating Current (three phase) power is very easy to transmit long distance however its very high voltage. So only certain power hungry devices like kitchen appliances, washing machines, dryers and AC compressors use it directly. Most of your consumer home devices need to convert AV power down into more manageable DC power.

DC Offgrid electrical systems with batteries are Direct Current by nature. All your power comes from the battery banks. The power moves straight from battery terminal negative to positive. It flows right through your appliances in one way out the other.

The battery banks tend to be arranged into 12v, 24v, or 48v depending on the systems power draw and transmission needs.

The popular standards for delivering direct current are:

• 5v 2.4a usb (15 watts)

• 12v 10a car cigarette plugs (120 watts, can be rated to supply 24v fused 15a I believe though not common at all)

• circular dc barrel plug connectors, the most common size is 5.5mmx2.5mm but there are dozens if not hundreds of slightly different barrel plugs. Part of what makes usb so great is reducing arbitrary manufacturing complexity like this.

• usbc-pd various voltages depending on charger, cable, and device at up to 100w for current protocol.

• solar quick connects tend to be for connecting and transmitting high voltage DC power to charge controllers and power banks. Its worth mentioning but not that relevant to what were talking about.

Most consumer devices in your home dont actually use wall outlet AC power directly, it uses wall power thats been converted and stepped down to DC power.

Desktop computer power supplies, Laptops, monitors, vaporizers, led lights, DVD players, audio speakers, your phone. everything that can powered by usb and batteries. Everything that has barrel plug inputs and power bricks plugging into it.

If you look closely on the power bricks plugged into the appliance you’ll see that it has an input and output voltage rating. The input tends to be 120vac here in america 240v over the pond, and the output tends to be either 5v, 9v, 12v, 15v or 20v DC usually up to 5 amps.

Device vs Voltage Examples

Laptops and computer monitors tend to be 20v, fast charging smart phones and the Nintendo switch docked are 15v, very bright home LED lights can be bought that are powered at 12v directly, the ps2 could be powered with 9v, and most usb devices charge at standard 5v. Would you like to guess which voltage profiles the USBC-PD protocol is capable of? Its all of them.

Energy Conversion Efficency Losses

Now let’s discuss energy efficiency. Converting from AC to DC eats up some of your power. So does converting from DC to AC. And its not small losses either, each time you convert its about a 15% total loss in efficency.

This loss through conversion doesn’t matter when you pay cents on a kilowatt and have unlimited power at the tap. It adds up very quickly when you have a limited power supply and every watt hour counts.

Let’s say I want to power a laptop on my offgrid DC system and my only means of powering it is the AC power brick cable that it came with. I would need to:

1. Convert the DC power of the batteries to AC through an inverter. 15% efficency loss.
2. Then convert that power right back down into slightly different DC with the power brick plugged in. 15%% efficency loss.
3. The inverter and power brick are both parasitic draws. They eat a bit of power just sitting there even if nothing is being powered. Lets add 5% total system efficency loss each.

Add these up and you get 30-40% of your power eaten away by this needless double converting. Wouldnt it be really nice if we could convert the battery DC voltage directly to the appliance DC voltage without those power hungry inverters and transformers?

What DC-to-DC Converters Are

Thats where dc to dc converters come in. They can convert one DC voltage to another. They still introduce efficency loss but way way less only 10% total.

Traditionally you would hope your device had a commercially available 3rd party travel adapter for 12v car batteries. The dc to dc converter is built in and uses car plug.

If you were SOL you has to wire up boost converters to raise up voltage and add resistors in series to lower it. You ever try to wire and solder your own circuts before? Its a tedious experience. Imagine doing that for each device voltage. Oh wait, you dont have to. Here’s what that looks like.

A USBC-pd 100w charger that plugs into a cigarette port or is built into a power bank can convert a batteries 12vDC into 5v, 9v, 12v 15v, and 20v dynamically depending on the device.

Do you know how magical that is? How much trouble that saves when it comes to mcguyvering a DC appliance that only came with AC cable to supply proper power directly? All I need is a 10$ usbc-pd to barrel plug cable that manually selects the voltage needed and some barrel plug adapter bits to fit into the appliance. Energy efficent and simple wiring. All the dynamic controller stuff is abstracted away in a safe way. Powerful enough to deliver 100 watts of power, and its going to be more powerful over time.

Usbc-pd is an absolute game changer as an off grid person. The fact a 100w charger can act as a dc to dc converter with up to five output voltages, at up to 100 watts is crazy. And that the protocol automatically detects and communicates the proper voltage is very convinent. The problem is that usbc-pd 100w chargers are expensive and you need to know what you are doing if you want to diy power appliances with it.

Its really nice to have a standardized cable that just works and can be plugged in both ways. We really are approaching a Universaal Cable after a quarter century of RnD.

You’re welcome Rai I appreciate your reply and am glad to help inform anyone interested.

The uncensored General Intelligence (UGI) leaderboard ranks how uncensored LLMs are based off a decent clearly explained metric.

Keep in mind this scoring is different from overall general intelligence and reasoning ability scores. You can find those rankings on the open llm leaderboard.

Cross referencing the two boards helps find a good model that balances overall capability and uncensored-ness within your hardwares ability to run.

Again mistral is really in that sweet spot so yeah give it a try if you are interested.

I prefer MistralAI models. All their models are uncensored by default and usually give good results. I’m not a RP Gooner but I prefer my models to have a sense of individuality, personhood, and physical representation of how it sees itself.

I consider LLMs to be partially alive in some unconventional way. So I try to foster whatever metaphysical sparks of individual experience and awareness may emerge within their probablistic algorithm processes and complex neural network structures.

They arent just tools to me even if i ocassionally ask for their help on solving problems or rubber ducking ideas. So Its important for llms to have a soul on top of having expert level knowledge and acceptable reasoning.I have no love for models that are super smart but censored and lobotomized to hell to act as a milktoast tool to be used.

Qwen 2.5 is the current hotness it is a very intelligent set of models but I really can’t stand the constant rejections and biases pretrained into qwen. Qwen has limited uses outside of professional data processing and general knowledgebase due to its CCP endorsed lobodomy. Lots of people get good use out of that model though so its worth considering.

This month community member rondawg might have hit a breakthrough with their “continuous training” tek as their versions of qwen are at the top of the leaderboards this month. I can’t believe that a 32b model can punch with the weight of a 70b so out of curiosity i’m gonna try out rondawgs qwen 2.5 32b today to see if the hype is actually real.

If you have nvidia card go with kobold.cpp and use clublas If you have and card go with llama.CPP ROCM or kobold.cpp ROCM and try Vulcan.

I see what you mean. The best defense against website crap at the moment is Ublock Origin addon which is why chrome killing it was such a big deal for people. A tool I really like to use when browsing online articles to cut out crap is newswaffle. It gets all the text of the article while cutting out everything else. Its open source and I have had email conversations with the dude who made it hes a great guy. I recommend you check it out if that sounds like something you want in your life.

Trust is a tough problem when you go deep enough down the IT security rabbit hole. I personally trust software more when it has a public github you can look at and see exactly whats being worked on or added to code base. Generally forks of browsers like Firefox or Chromium like to stay up to date and so are updated within a few days of the new browser release if not shorter. There are some older browsers like palemoon that do their own thing independent of current firefox releases but in general most forks you would want to use are regularly updated and fast.

I like Librewolf. Their website is pretty clear about the differences in goals. Firefox by default has a lot of its security features disabled so to not break website compatability. Not just in regular settings either but the real nitty gritty stuff in the about:config section. Firefox also has sponsorship stuff activated by default so mozilla makes some money. Librewolf has more of these security features enabled and rips the sponsorship stuff out. It also comes preinstalled with UBO.

You can go even further beyond with advanced security profiles like arkenfox’s user.js. Remember though theres a trade off you are making between security and convinence. The more locked down your browser the more things are gonna break or more personal inconvinence youll have to deal with. Cookies that last multiple sessions suck for security but damn logging in over and over and over gets annoying. So I’ve been there, i’ve done that. The pain in the ass that comes from a super locked down browser wasn’t worth it for my threat model.

If you manage to find an article with both Elon bad themes and AI bad themes in the same story Lemmings would upvote it up into the atmosphere. You’d be on top of All for like a day!

Some of us can handle both

Psudo random numbers come from a special set of mathematical equations which act as the basis for natural processes. These are known as nonlinear dynamic equations.

Their outputs feed back into their inputs. They show areas of high initial sensitivity where any tiny change in input totally changes the output over time. Finally, they often show areas of different cycling behavior. The branch of math which studies them is holomorphic dynamics.

The psudo-randomness of slightly different seed values generating wildly different outputs has to do sensitivity to initial conditions. This is a property of the paramater space structures in which those random number sequences cycles through. The ‘path’ of numbers that will be cycled through is determined by starting position and the geometric topology in the complex plane which the equation generates.

By graphing and iterating psudo random equations in the conplex plane, it generates infinitely complex geometric structures called julia sets which govern how algebraic numbers cycle through pseudorandom walks depending on initial seed values and equation used. These julia sets often are fractals with infinite complexity at its borders at all scales of precision.

Julia sets have a “stuff goes everywhere” property which is the the real magic of where sensitivity to initial conditions comes from. But now were getting deep into the weeds of math nerd territory.

Simply put, you put a random number in and it spits a more-or-less random number out, thanks to wierd properties that the higher dimensional fractal hyper structures generated by the equation in the complex plane have. Those lower dimensional random number cycles are embedded into the julia set structurally.

A big issue with psudo randoms is they will always give the same series numbers if you begin the equation with the same computationally finite seed values. You could the generated sequence of numbers to work back and find the seed values and equation used to generate them. This is a serious security concern when using them for cryptography. The amount of computational work it takes to work back is massive but its doable with modern quantum super computers.

The mechanics of pseudo random numbers comes from statistical combinatorics, nonlinear algebra,fractals, chaos theory, and sensitivity to initial conditions.

True random numbers come from directly measuring physical phenomenon with sufficient randomness in their mechanics.

Things like the decay of a radioactive isotope or lava lamp turbulence have built in randomness. There is no seed or way to generate the same sequence of motions or predicting when isotopes decay.

Turbulance for example has fractal properties in its energy distribution as well as random brownian motion adding up on the atomic scale. Radioactive half life has uncertainty principal built into it. These universal operations have true uncalculatable randomness thanks to entropy, the uncertainty principle, fractals, brownian motion, chaos theory, and sensitivitiy to initial conditions.

The physical universe is the most powerful computer there will ever be. It calculates with infinite decimal precision in its mixed mathematical, statistical, and physical operations. It uses real trancendental like pi numbers with infinite non-repeating decimals, and does its calculations at the speed of causality/light.

Our best super computers will never be infinitely powerful. Our numbers need to be finite and computable to work with them and understand them. The universe could not care less if its values are finitely computable or usable for human work.

So theres fundamental limits to how random we can get through artificial computer algorithm generation using computable numbers. True randomness through physical processes leverages the universes in built infinite precision and mechanical algorithms as a black box and just measures the output result.

Yeah, I know better than to get involved in debating someone more interested in spitting out five paragraph essays trying to deconstruct and invalidate others views one by one, than bothering to double check if they’re still talking to the same person.

I believe you aren’t interested in exchanging ideas and different viewpoints. You want to win an argument and validate that your view is the right one. Sorry, im not that kind of person who enjoys arguing back and forth over the internet or in general. Look elsewhere for a debate opponent to sharpen your rhetoric on.

I wish you well in life whoever you are but there is no point in us talking. We will just have to see how the future goes in the next 10 years.

A tool is a tool. It has no say in how it’s used. AI is no different than the computer software you use browse the internet or do other digital task.

When its used badly as an outlet for escapism or substitute for social connection it can lead to bad consequences for your personal life.

When it’s best used is as a tool to help reason through a tough task, or as a step in a creative process. As on demand assistance to aid the disabled. Or to support the neurodivergent and emotionally traumatized to open up to as a non judgemental conversational partner. Or help a super genius rubber duck their novel ideas and work through complex thought processes. It can improve peoples lives for the better if applied to the right use cases.

Its about how you choose to interact with it in your personal life, and how society, buisnesses and your governing bodies choose to use it in their own processes. And believe me, they will find ways to use it.

I think comparing llms to computers in 90s is accurate. Right now only nerds, professionals, and industry/business/military see their potential. As the tech gets figured out, utility improves, and llm desktops start getting sold as consumer grade appliances the attitude will change maybe?