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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • A big part of the reason that Republicans are more able to pass legislation is that smaller states have a larger impact than they should, based on their populations.

    Each state has a number of members in the House of Representatives in proportion to their population - 52 for California. Each state has two members in the Senate, so CA has the same amount of power in the Senate as Wyoming, which has a population of under 600k to CA’s 39 million.

    Beyond the impact on Congress, the sum of those counts determines the number of electoral votes a state has in presidential elections. So California has 54 electoral college votes.

    If California split up into 12 different states, each would end up with 6 electoral votes. The total count in the House would decrease from 52 to 48, and some other state would get the remaining 4 (though even that could be avoided by just having some sub-states be large enough to get 5 Representatives) but the total count of Senators would increase from 2 to 24 and the total electoral vote count would increase from 54 to 72.

    Many of the smallest US states are firmly red, which means Republicans don’t need as much popular support to make policy changes. This would help reverse that. Heck, if California went all the way and split into 65 states, each with the population of Wyoming, they’d end up with 195 electoral college votes.

    I feel like the US would take over California again if that was the case.

    I’m not sure how you think the US would take over CA again, or what the impact would be, if it continued to be part of the US and just split into several different states. Could you elaborate?



  • No offense taken, but thanks for the comment! If someone was offended and they saw your comment, I think it would probably help

    I thought it was like the way one’s brain is wired that causes them to have slightly different perception than the rest.

    I’m no expert, either, but this is a solid explanation IMO. It’s why autistic people are prone to sensory overload; their brains don’t filter out noise (like the hum of the refrigerator, the sounds of people chewing, or background conversations) the way that most allistic people’s brains do. It also definitely could have been the reason, or at least contributed to, why the woman from your post was confused - particularly if she was trying to figure out why allistic people did something.


  • Sorry, that’s incorrect.

    Autism is commonly comorbid with mental health disorders (aka “mental illnesses”) like anxiety, depression, ADHD, etc., as well as with intellectual developmental disorders, but autism is still considered, at worst, a neurodevelopmental disorder, regardless of where an individual falls on the spectrum.

    Both the DSM-V and ICD-11 are in agreement about this, for what that’s worth, but you could also just do a search for “Is autism a mental illness?” on Duckduckgo, Kagi, Searx, Bing, Google, or whatever, if you want to confirm.






  • You can run a NAS with any Linux distro - your limiting factor is having enough drive storage. You might want to consider something that’s great at using virtual machines (e.g., Proxmox) if you don’t like Docker, but I have almost everything I want running in Docker and haven’t needed to spin up a single virtual machine.


  • I think the better question than “Does the experience system sound like it has potential,” then, is “Does the overall concept / system have potential?”

    My gut is probably, but it depends a lot more on what you’re willing to put into it and what you want out of it. What’s your metric for success? If it’s something you want to run yourself and to share online to have a few groups use it, then that’s a lot more achievable than being able to get a publishing deal, for example. And in-between, publishing on drivethrurpg or something similar, at a nominal cost (like $2-$5), would take more effort than the former and less than the latter; and the higher the cost and the higher the number of players you’d want, the higher the effort you need to put in (and a lot of that isn’t just in system building, but in art, community building, marketing, etc.).

    From what you’ve shared, it sounds like an interesting system. I could especially see it working in an academy setting where grinding skills to be able to pass practical exams is one of the players’ goals. I also could see it working well by a loosely GMed play by post system, with the players self-enforcing (or possibly leveraging some tools built into the site to track resource pools, experience, rolling, etc.), though I haven’t played in a forum game myself, so I might be way off-base.

    Did your system have classes or was it completely free-form in terms of gaining access to those skill trees?


  • I run a Monster of the Week game and my players get experience throughout sessions, as well as at the end. The mechanics are basically:

    • It takes 5 experience points to level up.
    • If you fail a roll, you get an experience point.
    • If you level up, you get the benefit immediately.
    • At the end of the session, everyone gets 0-2 experience points.

    I think other PbtA (Powered by the Apocalypse - systems inspired by Apocalypse World) systems do something similar.

    I grew increasingly frustrated with the system of only distributing advancement/experience points at the end of a session.

    Isn’t the simple fix to this to just distribute experience points as soon as they’re earned?

    At some point, I started to divise a play system that relied on a split experience atribution system, with players being able to automatically rack experience points from directly using their skills/habilties, while the DM would keep a tally of points from goals/missions achieved, distributable at session end.

    Your system sounds like the way that skill-based video game RPGs (Elder Scrolls games and Arcanum come to mind) handle experience.

    In a lot of games I’ve played, I’d rather get experience for in-game accomplishments immediately and to be able to train skills like this during downtime - generally between games.

    To those with more experience in TTRPGs: would this be feaseable? Or enticing? Interesting?

    I could see people being interested in it. You get instant gratification and a bit of extra crunchiness. A lot of players enjoy that.

    With the right skill system I could see this being useful. My main concern is that if you put this on top of a system with relatively few skills, it could encourage people to game it by grinding. There are ways to mitigate that, though.

    In a system with fewer skills, instead of just being experience points, the “currency” you earned this way could be used for temporary power ups related to the skill in question.

    You could also limit it so you only rewarded players for story-related tasks.





  • Wow, there isn’t a single solution in here with the obvious answer?

    You’ll need a domain name. It doesn’t need to be paid - you can use DuckDNS. Note that whoever hosts your DNS needs to support dynamic DNS. I use Cloudflare for this for free (not their other services) even though I bought my domains from Namecheap.

    Then, you can either set up Let’s Encrypt on device and have it generate certs in a location Jellyfin knows about (not sure what this entails exactly, as I don’t use this approach) or you can do what I do:

    1. Set up a reverse proxy - I use Traefik but there are a few other solid options - and configure it to use Let’s Encrypt and your domain name.
    2. Your reverse proxy should have ports 443 and 80 exposed, but should upgrade http requests to https.
    3. Add Jellyfin as a service and route in your reverse proxy’s config.

    On your router, forward port 443 to the outbound secure port from your PI (which for simplicity’s sake should also be port 443). You likely also need to forward port 80 in order to verify Let’s Encrypt.

    If you want to use Jellyfin while on your network and your router doesn’t support NAT loopback requests, then you can use the server’s IP address and expose Jellyfin’s HTTP ports (e.g., 8080) - just make sure to not forward those ports from the router. You’ll have local unencrypted transfers if you do this, though.

    Make sure you have secure passwords in Jellyfin. Note that you are vulnerable to a Jellyfin or Traefik vulnerability if one is found, so make sure to keep your software updated.

    If you use Docker, I can share some config info with you on how to set this all up with Traefik, Jellyfin, and a dynamic dns services all up with docker-compose services.


  • Look up “LLM quantization.” The idea is that each parameter is a number; by default they use 16 bits of precision, but if you scale them into smaller sizes, you use less space and have less precision, but you still have the same parameters. There’s not much quality loss going from 16 bits to 8, but it gets more noticeable as you get lower and lower. (That said, there’s are ternary bit models being trained from scratch that use 1.58 bits per parameter and are allegedly just as good as fp16 models of the same parameter count.)

    If you’re using a 4-bit quantization, then you need about half that number in VRAM. Q4_K_M is better than Q4, but also a bit larger. Ollama generally defaults to Q4_K_M. If you can handle a higher quantization, Q6_K is generally best. If you can’t quite fit it, Q5_K_M is generally better than any other option, followed by Q5_K_S.

    For example, Llama3.3 70B, which has 70.6 billion parameters, has the following sizes for some of its quantizations:

    • q4_K_M (the default): 43 GB
    • fp16: 141 GB
    • q8: 75 GB
    • q6_K: 58 GB
    • q5_k_m: 50 GB
    • q4: 40 GB
    • q3_K_M: 34 GB
    • q2_K: 26 GB

    This is why I run a lot of Q4_K_M 70B models on two 3090s.

    Generally speaking, there’s not a perceptible quality drop going to Q6_K from 8 bit quantization (though I have heard this is less true with MoE models). Below Q6, there’s a bit of a drop between it and 5 and then 4, but the model’s still decent. Below 4-bit quantizations you can generally get better results from a smaller parameter model at a higher quantization.

    TheBloke on Huggingface has a lot of GGUF quantization repos, and most, if not all of them, have a blurb about the different quantization types and which are recommended. When Ollama.com doesn’t have a model I want, I’m generally able to find one there.


  • I recommend a used 3090, as that has 24 GB of VRAM and generally can be found for $800ish or less (at least when I last checked, in February). It’s much cheaper than a 4090 and while admittedly more expensive than the inexpensive 24GB Nvidia Tesla card (the P40?) it also has much better performance and CUDA support.

    I have dual 3090s so my performance won’t translate directly to what a single GPU would get, but it’s pretty easy to find stats on 3090 performance.