I've never owned a mechanical watch(did just recently buy an Orient solar watch after I lost my fitbit while traveling and after a couple weeks, realised the only feature I actually missed was having the time on my wrist), but I like watching the channel Wristwatch Revival on youtube. That guy will often repair old watches that most watchmakers won't touch, sent in by viewers, and make content out of it. And he especially loves taking on watches thathave sentimental value for the owner.
He also recently started a watch repair shop specifically catering to cases most watchmakers won't accept, might be worth checking out.
Tempting, but "Services start at $1,750" --- I could buy multiple replacements for that, or make a downpayment on the Seiko Grandmaster or GPS which I want...
That said, I'll keep it in mind and maybe if I come across a windfall will apply thusly....
For a Seiko, I'll also recommend https://www.theseikologist.com/. As his name suggests, he specializes in Seikos and has a large stock of vintage Seiko parts which are hard to source. Though, it's still not cheap. I have a broken Seiko chronograph from the 70s and he quoted $500 to just do the watch equivalent of a tune up. He can't give a better estimate without opening it up, which is understandable.
If it isn't a hardship, I do recommend fixing your dad's watch. Sentimental pieces are always special.
I don't think so, considering a substantial proportion of their comments on this site seems to be fanboying for SpaceX in particular and anything AI in general.
Glad to hear that you found your way out of the psych ward to get properly diagnosed and treated. I've witnessed first hand people getting trapped in the psych system with neurological or endocrinological conditions. It can be almost impossible to get out, especially if the "diagnosis" is a psychotic disorder. Once you have such a diagnosis pinned on you, anything you say can be dismissed as a delusion, and most psychiatrists are woefully bad at considering somatic explanations for symptoms. You definitely got very lucky.
This is the first I'm hearing about anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis; what a strange and scary condition. If you don't mind the prying, I'm curious about some things.
I noticed you said in another comment that you were treated with antipsychotics in the psych ward. Would you say they had any effect in lessening the symptoms? My intuition says no, since I'm not aware of any conventional antipsychotics that interact with NMDA receptors directly(mostly they act on dopamine and serotonin receptors), but psychopharmacology is tricky that way...
And, another thing. Have you ever tried dissociative drugs(like ketamine, PCP, DXM), and if so, how similar would you say your experience was to those drug experiences? Of course, feel free to tell me to fuck off if you don't want to discuss that in a public forum.
> I noticed you said in another comment that you were treated with antipsychotics in the psych ward. Would you say they had any effect in lessening the symptoms?
Your intuition is right. The antipsychotic was actually prescribed by a psychiatrist during my second hospital stay at Brigham and Women's and not at a psych ward. (I would later enter another psych ward where the psychiatrist there prescribed a different antipsychotic and took me off of the old one.) I essentially begged for it because I wanted something that would help me that wasn't Ativan. Ativan helped a lot, but I was so concerned about it being a benzo and getting addicted to it. I wanted it to help me sleep too. The antipsychotic was prescribed in the window of time where they thought it was MS. I hadn't gotten the positive antibody test result back yet.
I'm being a bit vague here in terms of why I wanted it. I don't mind going into more detail personally, but it gets extremely dark and extremely intense very fast. I don't know if that's something I want to publicize yet. As bad as my OP sounds, it was in fact way worse.
> And, another thing. Have you ever tried dissociative drugs(like ketamine, PCP, DXM), and if so, how similar would you say your experience was to those drug experiences? Of course, feel free to tell me to fuck off if you don't want to discuss that in a public forum.
I have not. The hardest drug I've ever done was a few puffs from a vape pen of marijuana about 6 years ago. Otherwise, before the encephalitis, I would say I was a moderate consumer of alcohol and tobacco (via cigars, not cigarettes). Once the encephalitis started (early March) I went cold turkey on both alcohol and tobacco and did not suffer any withdrawal effects AFAIK. (This was a question asked by many doctors, many times, repeatedly. I was always proud to give a consistent, "Zero alcohol since March N. Zero cigars sinces March N.")
Prior to that I had considered trying LSD some day. After this, not a fucking chance.
I can understand being hesitant about sharing the details of why you wanted the antipsychotics. It sounds like this is your first(hopefully last!) brush with psychotic/dissociative states of mind. Though I can't pretend to know what it was like for you, I can tell you I've been in similar situations. I've had several cases of acute psychosis caused by drugs(sometimes stimulants, sometimes synthetic cannabinoids) and/or sleep deprivation in the past. I also experimented heavily with all manner of psychedelic and hallucinogenic drugs in my early 20s, and I'm a severe hashish addict(currently 2.5 years in remission thanks to a moderation oriented treatment program I designed myself). It can be profoundly and existentially scary. You encounter parts of your psyche that you may never have met before, and reality breaks apart at the seams. You truly learn the extent to which your perceptions, thoughts, and even intentions are at the whims of implementation details in your brain. If you want, I could share some concrete anecdotes from my own experiences. But the main thing I want to say is give it time. These things must be processed, and it takes time, but it will get easier. And in time you will emerge with a better understanding of what it is to be human, and of yourself.
As to your comment on LSD, I support that. Sanity is taken for granted, until you temporarily lose it. If at some point you change your mind on exploring psychedelics, my advice would be to ditch LSD and go with psilocybin mushrooms instead, for a number of reasons.
Psychedelics very rarely cause actual psychosis, but LSD should have a higher risk than most, because unlike psilocin(the active compound in mushrooms, which psilocybin is converted into), LSD has non-trivial activity at dopamine receptors, and importantly the D2 receptors. LSD is in some sense the opposite to an antipsychotic in that it acts on the same receptors as antipsychotics, but with an opposite effect. Drugs that act as agonists on D2 receptors(usually Parkinsons meds) are well documented to cause psychosis in some people, as are stimulants like amphetamine which increase synaptic dopamine levels.
Psilocybin mushrooms are also pretty safe in that as long as you've identified the mushrooms correctly, you know what's in them. LSD on the other hand, more often than not is not actually the "original" LSD these days, but some LSD analogue. Usually it'll be something very similar in structure and effect to LSD, but it'll still be poorly studied compared to LSD. There are also drugs which are substantially different from LSD being sold on blotter paper as LSD, and some of these can be quite toxic(25i-nbome), extremely long lasting(DOB, DOM), or both(bromo-dragonfly).
Psilocybin is also free of course, since it's bound to be growing someplace near you in vast amounts, though the specific species depends on where you live.
And finally, it's much easier to take psilocybin in small doses. I always recommend people do this when trying psychedelics for the first time. Try a sub-threshold dose first, just enough to feel a little "weird". See how it feels, decide whether to do more next time, or stop, etc. It's possible to this with LSD, but it's much trickier, because LSD usually comes on this tiny little blotter paper. You can cut it up into smaller pieces, but there's no guarantee the drug is evenly distributed across the paper, and it's also impossible to be completely sure how much drug is on the blotter in the first place, unless you made them yourself. Mushrooms on the other hand are usually measured in grams; much easier.
But yeah, I'm not recommending you do psychedelics. Especially not any time soon, while you're still healing. It's always good to have a stable baseline before you go stirring the pot, so to speak.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. There isn't a world in which I touch psychedelics voluntarily. Like is it possible if I existed in a vacuum? Maybe. But I couldn't take that risk, no matter how small, and do that to my family.
Thankfully it was only ever a passing curiosity for me. A bucket list kind of thing. I am now very happy to replace with many other amazing experiences I hope to have. :-)
It's very interesting because my 13900K has worked like a dream from day one and still to this day. Never had any of the voltage issues, never had any abnormal crashes in Firefox or any other software. I was undervolting it for a long while, so I wonder if somehow that saved me from the voltage issues before they were fixed?
Undervolting would definitely help, and is the actual fix. The current Intel fixes were mostly just for the symptoms, as the main issue is high voltage+power when pushing high clocks, but they can't actually fix that as it'd downgrade the advertised clocks the cpus were sold with
Sorry, but that understanding is dangerously incomplete. You're describing the first set of issues they uncovered, but there's also:
"Microcode and BIOS code requesting elevated core voltages which can cause Vmin shift especially during periods of idle and/or light activity" (emphasis mine)
Recall also that "Vmin shift" means "the minimum voltage the processor needs to run correctly goes up" so if the issue isn't addressed, that level of undervolt may stop working
Not sure what's supposed to be wrong with that? The clock tree degrades at high voltage. Some theories I've seen were on the CPU requesting significantly higher voltages during alternating clocks when there's a short lull in load from e.g. a pipeline stall. Then there doesn't seem to be a good enough of a sensor net in the correct places for the CPU to react to this, so it just "burns" itself down gradually. Assuming these are true, actual fixes from intel would be relaxing boost clocks to ones that are universally safe and open themselves to a lawsuit from everyone that bought the high end SKUs, or do a new stepping which is extremely expensive for a done design.
When you degrade the CPU naturally needs higher voltages to be stable, until the point where it just breaks completely and no amount of voltage it help it. But if your CPU doesn't degrade because it hasn't been overdoing it on voltages then there'll be no issues for Vmin to shift.
As an anecdotal experience from someone I know that runs these in prod for game servers, limiting the CPU to 80°C and 1.4V-1.45V, 400A has been keeping them alive for years doing 24/7 loads. Maybe a bit lower on the voltage if one wants to be sure longer term, as they are fine with just mass RMAing these. There's also large amount of differences in the silicon quality between samples that can make one run cool and completely fine even at the old stock settings, and an another sample that'll have to pull say 1.5x the power for the same load and clocks having it degrade.
You're implying that if you don't run the CPU at high power and high heat it won't have problems, and that undervolting or underclocking will prevent damage. This is not correct: while that is helpful, Vmin degradation occurs during idle or light activity as well
Vmin will creep up, and the headroom for undervolting will degrade. It will affect the high clocks first (they demand the highest voltage), which is why dropping the max boost multiplier a step or two can also work around it (at the cost of basically downgrading it to a cheaper processor)
Idle and light load is bad for degradation only because that's the most common scenario where the boosting algorith will actually go to the highest clocks. More loaded cores will have the CPU target lower clocks on all cores so that it actually can get the power for it and have the CPU be coolable, but if you're idle and then some task loads just a single core for a bit the CPU will boost it the highest it can. The voltage spikes from those boosts will cause local hotspots even if the CPU is cool overall
"Even under idle conditions at relatively cool temperatures, sporadic elevated voltages are observed when the processor is resumed from low power states in order to service background operations before entering a low power state again."
My 1360p and 13400 seem fine too. I applied the microcode and firmware updates when they came out... but I'm guessing it didn't affect all skus equally for whatever magical reason.
And which features have been removed, as you claim? Removing code is not necessarily removing features. I use GOS and I honestly can't think of a missing feature compared to the stock OS, other than stuff not in AOSP in the first place, like gemini.
Don't often see the great Dang commenting in a non-moderation capacity, and that's really a shame, because this is one of the most interesting, well-formulated comments I've seen on here for a while. I fully agree with your frustration with the AI zeitgeist, but I won't pretend to have any input to alleviate that frustration. I would love to much less eloquently rant about lisp(and emacs) and other vaguely related things for a bit though, so here goes.
The tendency for the Lisp community to self-segregate into these bubbles is something that's perplexed me for years. You noted that you don't agree with it; I'd in be interested in why. I do agree with it, in the sense that this phenomenon does occur to an extent, and certainly to a larger extent in Lisp compared to other languages. The part I don't agree with is that this is a universal deal-breaker for Lisp. And there's still plenty of cooperation and sharing in the Lisp community. Emacs once again is the prime example. Yes, every .emacs is as unique as a fingerprint. But the reason GNU Emacs refuses to die is precisely its wonderful ecosystem of extensions that have in fact been shared and maintained by a wider community. And this ecosystem is in part possible because GNU Emacs is devoid of any sort of boundary between application code and extension code, which is a philosophy that can be traced back to the LISP machine era.
It's also interesting to tie this in with RMS(the author of GNU emacs, what a coincidence!) and his stance on Free Software really being about every individual user being free to modify the software they run. Of course, the deep implications of this philosophy, and its implementation in Emacs and other Lisp software, are clear to me, because I'm a Lisp programmer, just like RMS. And the Free Software movement originated in a time when most people with access to a computer had at least some amount of familiarity with programming. But as computing has become mainstream, RMS' original vision has morphed, and the focus has been on the importance of the wider community being able to modify software. And that's certainly important. But it's not really free software in the original sense unless you happen to be a programmer. Most software users today are not programmers and likely never will be, so regardless of how the software they're using is licenced, they're not really free in that original sense, are they?
Then LLMs showed up. And suddenly, I can see on the horizon a revival of free software in the original sense. And yet it feels quite far away. For this to become reality, we need a lot more than what we have currently, which is a pretty damn good search engine/meme generator for the "normies", and a pretty damn good boilerplate generator for the coders. I think we probably need an entirely new concept of what software even is. I think we probably need new foundational research. I don't necessarily see a role for current LLM architectures in this. I feel more like current SOTA is scratching at the surface of the real deal, and it may take a few years to understand how to make foundational progress. Maybe we even need another AI winter to force the capital expenditure into other avenues. Certainly we need foundation models that are open in all possible senses of the word. Being tied to proprietary, heavily censored blob running in a giant datacenter is a non-starter.
It seems like the majority of people in the field have some intense tunnel vision about LLMs and transformer architectures. I'd love to see more variation there. I know Lecunn is doing some unique stuff. I can't pretend to understand whether it has legs, but I applaud the effort. Certainly we need to address the issue of energy expenditure, the absurd amount of data and training iterations required, and the lack of online learning. Human brains are vastly superior at all 3 of those metrics. So like, how about addressing that instead of just building ever larger sandcastles filled with nvidia chips? Anyone?
Those are some of the thoughts percolating through my head. I can't really figure out what to so with them. Maybe someone else can. Please? Thank you.
It doesn't have to be, but that's not really an argument for claiming it isn't. Considering how deeply embedded privacy violation is in Meta's corporate DNA, is there any reason other than hilariously naïve and inexplicably charitable, hypothetical speculation to believe this is not motivated by more privacy violation for profit, just like literally every single thing Meta has done in the entire history of the company? No? Didn't think so.
not if it is one of the companies famous for going the extra mile of being "evil" / a corporate shit hole stealing every thought you ever have to better sell you stuff you don't need
As an avid Spelunky player(still trying to complete the Cosmic Ocean...), I recently decided to explore some of Spelunky's roots, and set out to learn Nethack, and fell in love with the game. After a few weeks of dying repeatedly, perusing the wiki, and watching the Ascending in Nethack Overexplained series on youtube(highly recommended), I managed to ascend a valkyrie. Planning on trying a harder role soon. It's amazing how tense it can be despite the turn based nature of the game.
I do like the nerfs in this release. Making excalibur harder to get for Valkyries is a good one, as well as nerfing the unicorn horn. The run where I ascended felt a bit too easy at times. But of course valkyrie will still be by far the easiest role, I think. I bet I'll be stuck for quite a while trying to ascend anything else.
Although I agree INTC is overbought currently(as is the entire sector, and good news are pretty much universally overbought anyway, that's just how the stock market works), I'm having a hard time taking this analysis seriously.
Yes, it's true that some(specifically 18A) of the successes Intel have had since the CEO switch were essentially part of the plan under Gelsinger. But to say that nothing has changed seems simply uninformed, and that's me being charitable.
LBT has done lots of things, including securing significant investment, cutting costs, made some good deals in the DC segment, and most importantly, started making real progress(still early days though) in finding actual foundry customers willing to commit to 14A. Intel under Gelsinger was approaching its foundry business in a "build it and they will come" sort of way, hemhorrhaging huge piles of cash and merely crossing their fingers that customers would show up at this point. One of the first things LBT did as CEO was make future development of 14A contingent on finding customers for it, which is precisely ehat he's been trying to do.
This quarterly report was the first during his tenure that showed some real financial progress: the quarter was profitable when analysts expected breakeven, sequential foundry revenue grew, 18A yields are up, guidance looked good. This, to you, is practically nothing? It seems to me that going from bleeding cash at an accelerating rate, to turning a profit, is about very much something.
And again, I agree that hype is a bit overzealous right now, but arguably the fact that there's market optimism about INTC again is a huge victory on LBT's part. Because how exactly is IFS supposed to attract customers willing to make multiyear commitments to their services if the company is universally seen as a sinking ship? To state the obvious, market sentiment can make or break a public company, no matter how disconnected that sentiment is from the fundamentals.
And to say Intel has no AI strategy seems disingenuous. LBT has addressed AI strategy quite explicitly in public, and you can look it up if you want.
I'm cautiously bullish on INTC in the long term. I do expect a correction at some point, just like I would for any stock that goes up more than 20% in one day, but to me that's just market swings. The daily machinations of the stock market are like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
> LBT has done lots of things, including securing significant investment, cutting costs, made some good deals in the DC segment
The only significant cost cutting is via layoffs, and that wasn't particularly different from Pat's strategy - LBT just added more layoffs.
I have no reason to believe those deals would not have been made under Pat. They were made because the state of 14A/18A was better. And they were better not because of anything LBT did, but just the progression that was ongoing under Pat.
The government investment is identical to the amount they had promised Intel under the CHIPS Act, except that now instead of a grant it's equity (a worse deal for Intel). There is an ongoing shareholder lawsuit that alleges the deal was made to stop Trump's online bullying, and wasn't made with the interests of the shareholders in mind.
The other big difference is, frankly, Trump. I don't think some of the investments (e.g. Nvidia) would have occurred had Trump not been in the office.
> Intel under Gelsinger was approaching its foundry business in a "build it and they will come" sort of way, hemhorrhaging huge piles of cash and merely crossing their fingers that customers would show up at this point.
That is naive. Are you seriously suggesting Intel wasn't actively courting potential customers? I know from inside knowledge in multiple companies that wasn't the case. And you don't need to take my word for it - potential deals were reported multiple times in the press.
As for hemorrhaging huge piles of cash, have you compared the financials with Pat vs now? As I mentioned before, the amount they're losing to Foundry hasn't changed - and that's precisely the complaint they had about Pat. In fact, the (valid) complaint was that all the funds were being routed to the Foundry, and thus Intel's products suffered (internally I know several teams complained they had to cut competitive features because they didn't have funding).
> 18A yields are up, guidance looked good.
They are no higher than was projected under Pat. As I said, Foundry-wise, everything is falling under the same trajectory as he had outlined - except the financials. They are worse than projected.
As for the actual yields, I can assure you from sources in multiple potential customers that based on the data they've seen, it's still "Not good enough to commit to a deal." Improved? Yes. Good enough for a top tier company to rely on them? No.
Yes, the revenue was a bit higher than projected, but that's because they projected low. And the reasons the projections were low is because, unlike Pat, LBT is not transparent. He gives little details, and so people make guesses. It's a classic example of transparency being punished.
On an absolute level, the revenues are still low, compared to what Intel was achieving just a few years ago. Back then, this amount of revenue would have been viewed as a really bad quarter.
> LBT has addressed AI strategy quite explicitly in public, and you can look it up if you want.
Yes, I did. He came to Intel with a vision to position Intel strongly in the AI space. Then less than 6 months later, he announced he has more or less given up on catching up with Nvidia. What changed? He wanted to acquire an AI company, but the Board couldn't agree on it and while they were bickering, another company acquired them. And then LBT declared his surrender.
I have strong connections within Intel - both Foundry and Products. I speak to them regularly. I always get 3 responses:
- Things are as bad - no clear direction on what's going on (the layoffs never stopped, and they're still scrambling to keep their jobs)
- Things are as OK - they're as they have always been - no changes.
- Things are great! When pressed on what has changed, the answer is "Oh, nothing. But we're happy the stock is up!"
I've yet to hear from a single personal contact there that the changes that have been made has improved anything.
Pat had a rotation with all Intel Fellows. Each Intel Fellow met with Pat on a regular cadence. The one Fellow I'm routinely in touch with says he hasn't met with LBT, and nor has most Fellows he knows. No indication that LBT even cares what they have to say. The lack of transparency within Intel is quite notable. He gives no details during the quarterly company meetings, and has instructed the business leaders not to be transparent. The phrase "Oh, LBT is laser focused on results!" is heard often from them.
I'm not saying Intel is a sinking ship (well, Foundry might be). $20 was clearly undervalued. But $80 is clearly overvalued, as we all agree. And Pat was the sacrificial lamb.
At least here, there are randomly triggered checks by shop staff where they have to manually rescan anything before they let you leave. And possibly, those checks are more easily triggered if you do certain very strange things like buying nothing but many separate instances of "bananas' with widely varying weights. Wouldn't be too hard to program a set of rules for the most obvious red flags.
And of course, the area is wide open and well covered by cameras, and usually self-checkout means paying by card or google pay or something, which will tie your identity to the purchase.
He also recently started a watch repair shop specifically catering to cases most watchmakers won't accept, might be worth checking out.
https://www.youtube.com/c/WristwatchRevival/
https://restoration.sutcliffehansen.com/
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