Approximately 40-45% of _all_ US residents, natural-born or immigrant, receive more public benefits than they pay in taxes. Consider if an immigrant making a below-average wage could actually fit into both categories.
I'm not against immigration, just pointing out the flaw in your argument.
Imho, we should let people experiment as much as they want. Having more examples is better than less. Still, thanks for the link for the course, this is a top-notch one
I'm very sorry, I should have phrased my original post in a kinder, less dismissive way, and kudos to you for not reacting badly to my rudeness. It is a cool repo and a great accomplishment. Implementing autograd is great as a learning exercise, but my opinion is that you're not going to get the performance or functionality of one of the large, mainstream autograd libraries. Karpathy, for example, throws away micrograd after implementing it and uses pytorch in his later exercises. So it's great that you did this, but for others to learn how autograd works, Karpathy is usually a better route, because the concepts are built up one by one and explained thoroughly.
Cleaner, more straightforward, more compact code, and considered complete in its scope (i.e. implement backpropagation with a PyTorch-y API and train a neural network with it). MyTorch appears to be an author's self-experiment without concrete vision/plan. This is better for author but worse for outsiders/readers.
P.S. Course goes far beyond micrograd, to makemore (transfomers), minbpe (tokenization), and nanoGPT (LLM training/loading).
Ironically the reason Karpathy's is better is because he livecoded it and I can be sure it's not some LLM vomit.
Unfortunately, we are now indundated with newbies posting their projects/tutorials/guides in the hopes that doing so will catch the eye of a recuiter and land them a high paying AI job. That's not so bad in itself except for the fact that most of these people are completely clueless and posting AI slop.
my area lost power for about 3 days last week and I ran all of my house's critical systems from my EV. it was great - silent, unlike the old generator, and not counting the sunk cost of the car, extremely cheap. Cost maybe $5 in electricity to keep the furnace, refrigerator/freezer, and internet on for 3 days, contrasted with probably $50 in gasoline for a similar amount of time.
If the outage had been longer, I could have made a half-hour trip to an area that had working EV fast chargers and come back with another 5-6 days of power for the house.
How expensive is the setup to tie in your vehicle into a house grid? Or can it be something as crude as running extension cables to plug into a powerstrip attached to the car?
I did it cheap - I just ran extension cables from my car (previously from a generator). I have a manual transfer switch at my furnace to safely switch between utility power and extension cable power, and just replugged appliances. I think everything drew on average about 800 watts, up to maybe 1500. I split it between 2 1.8 kW 110v outlets in the car.
If your vehicle has V2H (Vehicle to Home) the way it generally works in newer cars is that you have a bidirectional charger that can be used to connect the car battery to an external inverter, which is then tied into your house grid the same way a generator would be, e.g., via a transfer switch on the circuit you want to power.
This isn't cheap--I think it was generally many thousands of dollars for the cars I looked at that had V2H when I was EV shopping--but it generally gives you something something in the 9-20 kW range of power. For most people that gets into the territory of "as long as you remember not to use the electric clothes dryer at the same time you are making a meal that uses the electric oven and all of its burners you can just continue as if power is not out".
I seriously considered it. In the summer I use around 8-10 kWh per day, and in most of winter under 40 kWh per day. With a car with an 85 kWh battery, keeping it in the 20-80% range, and keeping it near 80% when outages are likely, That would give me several days of backup power during a summer outage, and over a day during a winter outage. In 18 years in my current house I think I've only had one outage that went over a day, and never had an outage so widespread that I would not have been able to find a public DC charging station within 10 miles to recharge the car if an outage actually did last long enough to take it down to 20%.
But the cars with V2H were out of my price range, even before adding the cost of the equipment to use V2H.
If your vehicle has V2L (which is what the one I bought has) it is considerably cheaper. The car gives you one or two outlets similar to ordinary household outlets. Mine gives a single outlet, which you get by plugging an adapter into the charge port. With these you generally don't try to tie it into your house grid. You just run an extension cord (or two if your V2L provides two outlets) to where you want power.
Some people get some sort of socket installed on the outside of their house that a cable from the car's outlet can be connected to, with that socket connected to an indoor outlet. Me, I just leave sliding door open enough for an extension cord to go through, and then stuff the gap with some foam strips that I got at Home Depot.
It is surprising how much a single 120V 15A circuit can do. What I need to get through a one day power outage comfortably (which as mentioned would be an unusually long outage here) is: (1) power for the fridge, (2) power for an electric space heater, (3) power for my computer area and cable gateway (if cable is not out), (4) maybe power for some cooking, and (5) water to flush the toilet.
Any time the weather forecast even hints at something that could cause widespread outages I fill a bathtub with water for #5. For the rest I've been monitoring power used for those things with a bunch of energy monitoring smart outlets (Tapo P110M controlled by Home Assistant using Matter).
For #1, my fridge during a normal cycles draws 90-100W. During a defrost cycles it draws 400W. I have wireless thermometers in the fridge and freezer compartments so I can easily coordinate with other uses such as cooking to make sure I cook at a time when the fridge is going to not need to run for a while (which I can ensure by unplugging it).
For #2 my space heater is usually 1500W, but I've got another one that is supposed to be 1500W but due to age is only 1300W, and I've got year another one which is 1500W on high but has a medium setting that is 1000W. On all but the coldest days 1300W and probably 1000W would keep it warm enough as long as I'm warmly dressed.
For #3 my entire computer setup (Mac Studio, 27" 5K monitor, 24" 1920x1200 monitor, speakers, external Thunderbolt drive bay with 4 SSDs), a network switch, and a Hue hub is about 130W with short spikes to around 170W. If I turn off the second monitor that drops about 25W from that. The cable gateway is 15W.
For #4 I've got a microwave, a toaster oven, and a couple George Foreman grills. The microwave draws over 1900W for the first minute or so on high, but I can set it lower and it is an inverter microwave so on lower settings it actually reduces the amps drawn rather than just cycling between full and off. The toaster oven is 1000W and the biggest GF grill is 1200W.
I should be able to run all of these, as long as I take some care to not run too many at once. Some observations:
1. If I'm not going to use the computer for a while, such as when sleeping, I can run the 1500W space heater, turning it off when the fridge needs to run. I could actually then turn it back on once the fridge has started and gotten past its inrush current (20A, which my V2L has no trouble with). It would then be 1600W total unless the fridge is doing a defrost cycle than it would be 1900W. That's fine because the 400W defrost phase only lasts about 10 minutes and the non-defrost cycle only a bit over an hour, and it is around 3 to 8 hours (depending on how often I open the fridge I assume) after a cycle ends that it needs to run again. That counts as an intermittent load and so should be OK with my extension cords (rated 15A intermittent, 12A continuous).
2. If I'm using the computer I can switch to the 1300W space heater. That plus the computer both in continuous used would be under the 12A continuous rating of my extension cord. When the fridge needs to run I'd have to switch to a lower setting on the space heater until the fridge is done.
3. When I need to cook I'd just need to time it so it happens when the fridge won't need to run, and turn off the space heater while cooking. Nothing I'd be cooking in the toaster over or the GF grill takes more than 20 minutes. The computer stuff could remain powered during this.
4. If I don't have a bathtub full of toilet flushing water, I might be able to run my well pump from V2L. It's 120V with a 1/2 HP motor which would be under 1000W, but the inrush current may be too high. The specs say maximum of 44A, but from what I've read many people have had success with motors with that kind of inrush current, and the way the V2L system works it is safe to try it--worst case is the V2L safety systems shut it down. I just haven't gotten around to trying it yet.
Overall then it seems like that single 120V 15A from V2L will actually be enough to get me comfortably through most power outages. I had not expected that when I got the car.
I got into audiobooks this year and so have “read” a lot more than usual. Here are some of the most memorable:
Outlive by Attia - wouldn’t take everything he says as gospel but he helped me focus on what is really important in health and fitness and why
I am a Strange Loop by Hofstadter - trying to get a grasp on Gödels incompleteness theorem, but this book is a lot more. I particularly enjoyed the bits about Albert Schweitzer, and the chapter on his late wife, how we host the souls of others crudely on our own hardware. Helpful book in the age of AI.
The Man from the Future by Bhattacharya, a Von Neumann biography. Really helped understand the context of this great man’s achievements.
On the Edge by Silver. The signal and the noise was a lot better (which I read last year)
Benjamin Franklin by Isaacson. Fascinating renaissance man, interesting tour through US history
Can’t Hurt Me by Goggins. This book helped me through some emotionally difficult times and has some really great life advice (mixed with some really self-destructive behavior)
The Misbehavior of Markets by Mandelbrot, Hudson. Currently reading this, so far pretty fascinating
What about PVs and power electronics? My understanding is that TOPCon PVs use substantially more silver per watt than previous generations. China decided to stop exporting silver and there is currently a substantial premium for physical delivery in Shanghai vs cash settlement in COMEX..
Unfortunately, LEGO has decided that they want to make mostly high-margin co-branded sets with Nintendo, Pokémon, Minecraft, Star Wars, Monster Jam, F1, etc rather than cool engineering sets with a lot of flexible pieces that can be built into lots of different things. Luckily Chinese vendors like Uncle Brick and Mould King have stepped in to offer huge sets of Technics compatible parts, including simple motors that LEGO simply does not make anymore, for not much money. It’s really too bad that Lego abandoned that market. I would certainly pay a premium for the original stuff but a lot of what I would like is just not available. Now, I still buy a lot of the branded LEGO stuff, but the Chinese stuff has also entered the rotation for the older kids who are interested in engineering.
You have to be so careful with that stuff though. Some of those knockoff legos are absolutely infuriating to assemble and don’t fit together right—not just with actual LEGO but even with themselves.
There is a definite element of “you get what you pay for” when it comes to that stuff. Unfortunately… because some of those knockoff kits look super cool.
We have some magnet tiles that have tubes and ramps for building marble mazes with - they are probably the most popular toy in the house. The thing about magnet tiles is there are several brands but they’re incompatible so it’s best to buy multiple sets from a single brand.
Connetix and magnatiles are pretty much fully compatible. Connetix is the only knock off I found that is higher quality than the original (and has great marble run)
I'm not against immigration, just pointing out the flaw in your argument.
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