Some people posted video of “unknown light in the sky” a few times, which happens regularly, but somehow it caught enough attention that everyone started looking at the sky.

It turns out that many people do not recognize a plane, or Venus, or a SpaceX launch, or a Chinese lantern, or whatever because now they’ve been led to expect to see something mysterious.

Debunker Mick West posted on YouTube showing how one famous video actually showed lights on a hillside, by lining up the image with Google Street view.

A few sightings do seem unusual, but many are just flashing lights moving over cities that happen to have busy airports.

Before even getting to documentation, I see so many projects that don’t have a short summary of what they do (and maybe what to not expect them to do).

As an example, Home Assistant. I can tell that it involves home automation, so can I replace Google Home with it? It seems like it doesn’t do voice recognition without add-ons and it can work with Google Assistant. Do I still need accounts with the providers of smart appliances, or can it control my bulbs directly?

None of that is very clear from the website.

I’ve seen plenty of other projects where it’s assumed there’s no need to explain it’s overall purpose.

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My first example was “a cup of frozen chicken strips”.

I know I can make a guess how much they mean, but I could easily be off by a factor of 2.

It really wouldn’t be hard to have the weight listed.

This sounds like a catch-22 problem.

Maybe scales could be improvised, with a stick, some cups, and awkward-shaped chunks of chicken in one of the cups.

True, but that’s just replacing a cup with a length, and rules out using an existing tub.

Why not use weight, which is easy to measure and tolerant of different forms/shapes?

https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/

(Yes, the “bird poop” one is correct, it does talk about fuel consumption too).

A similar chart could be made for the US, proving that it does use metric: soda and wine bottles, medicine doses, eye-glasses measurements (in fact most medical things).

I think that both systems are used in schools now.

But then I see cooking instructions for a “cup of chicken strips” and a recipe having 1/4 cup of butter, and I wonder why anyone thought that volume was a good idea there.

• “Avocado?”
• “Don’t mind if I do!”

There an app for that now.

At least, there is on the Flipper Zero.

These?

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:4,5V-AA-battery.jpg

I’d forgotten that they existed. I used to use them for something, maybe powering a Lego or meccano motor.

A tone dialer. Like this

https://images.app.goo.gl/fbdmckv44BY7fdWw9

Not for phone phreaking, just for speed-dialling.

I would make international calls frequently. I would buy calling cards. The process was: dial the 800 number on the card. Enter the id number on the card to use some of its credit. Dial the number to call. Their service would then connect me at a low rate to another country(probably making a voip call).

So I’d set up the 3 speed dial buttons with those. For each new card I’d only have to change the card’s unique number.

Pylon appreciation

https://pylons.org/

Taxonomy of bread fasteners

https://www.horg.com/horg

Pathetic motorways

https://pathetic.org.uk/

Due to a typo, I ended up with “The Cod War”

https://www.icelandreview.com/travel/the-cod-wars-in-iceland/

I have one of the earliest mp3 players, with a 32Mb expansion memory card.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300

And going back further: a Sharp PC1211 BASIC-programmable pocket computer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_PC-1211

That was covered pretty well already!

Or maybe it’s using Fluidic logic.

It’s on the list somewhere I think

https://github.com/hakluke/how-to-exit-vim

Well that’s of the same order of magnitude as the quoted figure. I was suggesting that it sounded vastly larger than it should be.

It’s true, I don’t know how large the models are that are being accessed in data centers. Although if the article’s estimate is correct, it’s sad that such excessively-demanding models are always being used for use-cases that could often be handled with much lower power usage.

140Wh seems off.

It’s possible to run an LLM on a moderately-powered gaming PC (even a Steam Deck).

Those consume power in the range of a few hundred watts and they can generate replies in a seconds, or maybe a minute or so. Power use throttles down when not actually working.

That means a home pc could generate dozens of email-sized texts an hour using a few hundred watt-hours.

I think that the article is missing some factor, such as how many parallel users the racks they’re discussing can support.