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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I also forgot to answer your actual question! :)

    Trigging the overdraw protection on a PSU is generally not a horrible thing, but it really depends on how the PSU does it. I would generally assume that that Corsair uses a proper current monitoring circuit with my best guess being a resisor shunt of some kind in combination with a proper monitoring chip that triggers a solid state switch to cut power extremely fast. Cheapers PSUs may just use a resettable fuse, which is also “solid state” but may actually fully blow (ie: esplode) or become less effective over time. Absolute worst case, a capacitor may blow its top. (If you have an old PSU you can destroy, flip the switch to 115V and plug it into a 220V circuit. You will get a loud bang and some smoke, but generally, nothing extremely dangerous. Its worth it to see and understand how PSUs may fail catastrophically if you never have blown up a large capacitor.)

    The biggest warning sign of overloading a PSU is heat. PSUs get warm naturally and will get hot under heavy load. If the PSU has a fan, just occasionally feel the air and if it’s getting uncomfortably hot, you might be getting in the danger zone. Heat will naturally change resistive properties of different materials, leading to variations in current flow. This is normal. However, heat can trigger “thermal runaway” conditions where a component gets hot, starts to draw more current, gets hotter, draws even more current and will eventually melt or explode. Not good, but also normal. Hence: Heat is a good indicator of a device that is about to fail or shut off. (Current overdraw circuits may also use thermal sensors to shut off the device as well.)

    If the device gets overly warm, point a fan at it as a temporary solution. It’ll give you just a hair more wiggle room during overdraw conditions. Not much wiggle room, but wiggle room nonetheless.

    In short: High current loads/pushing components over rated limits is never ideal, but it’s not extremely bad either. It shortens the total life of the device itself and its safety circuitry, but it’s ok for short periods if you aren’t stupid about it.

    (Sorry for the TED talk, but it’s my way of walking through the different scenarios of what you are trying to accomplish. FWIW, I have a ton of experience blowing up electronics so I am probably more familiar with pushing safety limits than most casual users.)

    Bonus: Overclocking/Overvolting is not always going to shorten the life of equipment. Damage is caused by poor and ineffective cooling, but that does take proper planning and testing. Factory overclocked devices are usually still waaaay under their actual (and usually undocumented) thermal/voltage limits. However, you are usually getting really beefy heatsinks and additional fans for those kinds of cards. If you run a “factory overclocked” card at normal load, its additional cooling will theoretically extend the life of the card beyond its actual useful lifespan since it it’s being run far below it’s rated thermal limits. (This paragraph sounds like a contradiction in itself, but makes sense when taking the total useful life of the card into account, before it actually is completely outdated and is only good for scrap.)


  • You should be ok, even if you touch 750W every now and then. Corsair PSUs are generally decent and can likely hold over 750W for short periods. What you are sacrificing is PSU efficiency, but if it’s temporary, whatevers. Don’t overclock the CPU and under volt the GPU and don’t run heavy and continuous compute loads for long periods of time.

    While the power management is likely a hair different with my flavor of 7900XTX, it has always behaved well under heavy load and benchmarking and it rarely spikes to max power unless all the OC knobs are pushed to max.

    Unfortunately, I can’t speak to how the 7900XTX is managed under Linux. If I am not mistaken, unless you are purposely overriding power profiles, you should be fine with whatever the stock settings are on the card itself. (7900XTX’s do come in non-OC and OC variants or have a switch for a dual bios for either configuration. Manufacturer OC settings can still be quite timid, IMHO.)

    Depending on your specific components, the system may crash before it hits a power limit in some cases. If the PSU can’t handle the power draw requirements, the power rails might sag a little during a burst and crash the system. I have only seen this a couple of times, but it’s still worth mentioning.

    Ignoring all of the above, just run some tests under different power loads, and in this case, aim for the lowest power settings you can, just to be on the safe side. While not perfect, invest $20 in a kill-a-watt power draw monitor for system testing. At a minimum, you will get a rough idea of total system power draw, which is good enough here. (I have seen ~+/-5% skew between different kill-a-watts, which isn’t an issue unless you are seriously working against a strict draw limit.)


  • That’s basically a tunafish sandwich without the sandwich. Add a bit of lemon juice and it’ll knock down the fishy taste. Add a bit more lemon juice for a bit more citrus excitement.

    I accidentally added too much mayo to my tunafish the other day and fixed it with a bit of Panko, of all things. The extra crunch was super neat and was better than celery that some people add. (Panko, for those who don’t know, is a Japanese breadcrumb that is super close in texture to rice crispies. I thought it would help absorb the extra mayo, and it kinda did, but also kinda didn’t.)


  • May 19, 2026 3:00 PM _Meta Employees Are Scrambling to Use Up Benefits Ahead of Ahead of Meta’s latest round of mass layoffs tomorrow, some employees are deserting offices, abandoning their work, and loading up on perks they might soon lose, several people at the company tell WIRED.

    Two employees describe a widespread rush to use up an annual $2,000 flexible benefit, which can cover a variety of expenses including health and wellness activities. A separate triennial credit of $200 toward the purchase of audio gear has led to a scramble to purchase Apple AirPods and other headphones. Another source says Meta offices have been largely empty this week, as people prioritize polishing their résumés and gather offsite to commiserate with friends for what may be their final time as colleagues. Employees are variously “paralyzed,” “coasting,” and “panicked,” sources say.

    Meta plans to lay off about 10 percent of its nearly 80,000 employees on Wednesday, with notices going out to affected workers’ personal and corporate email addresses at 4 am Singapore, London, or San Francisco time depending on their location, according to a company-wide memo sent on Monday. The cuts are coming at a time when the social media giant behind Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook is enjoying record-high profits.

    But CEO Mark Zuckerberg insists that the company must free up cash to invest in AI data centers, and that Meta can perform just as well with fewer employees because of AI technologies that augment human labor.

    Are you a current or former Meta employee who wants to talk about what’s happening? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at peard33.24 and ChaoticGoode.12. Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment for this story. The company has undergone three previous large rounds of layoffs since 2022, including as part of Meta’s one-time “year of efficiency” drive in 2023. But even though the latest round is smaller than a couple of those, it is drawing widespread scrutiny because it comes at a time of societal anxiety about AI’s impact on jobs.

    Inside Meta, the imminent cuts are among several concerns that have sunk morale to unprecedented depths, according to 16 current and former employees who recently spoke to WIRED. Employees also have been frustrated by being “drafted” onto a new AI team without any choice and the rollout of surveillance software that tracks US workers’ laptop use to train AI models.

    Meta also plans to internally restructure as it conducts sweeping layoffs, transferring 7,000 remaining staff to “AI initiatives” and converting more managers into individual contributors. That would bring the total number of those affected—either laid off or placed in a new role—to 20 percent of the current workforce, Reuters reported on Monday. WIRED independently confirmed this reporting. Some parts of the company have been told they won’t be affected at all.

    But in recent days, employees who are bracing for changes have shared checklists internally about benefits to take advantage of, and are saving documents such as performance reviews and pay stubs, according to one worker. Some teams are meeting up at bars and restaurants near Meta offices in New York and Menlo Park on Tuesday and Wednesday to eat and drink away their sorrows, several employees said. Management has encouraged employees not to come into offices on Wednesday.

    Update, May 19, 11:40 PM EDT: WIRED corrected the time zones when layoff notices will be emailed. _


  • Most of TNG painted a picture of a perfect utopian Starfleet and how humans had grown up, like you say . (Obviously, humanity is never perfect but the messaging is fairly clear: They try.)

    I can chime in more about VOY and ENT though…

    VOY is my favorite and also when you start to see a little more of humanity in Starfleet. We learned a few things like: The Prime Directive/Temporal Prime Directives were always just suggestions, murder could actually be justified, you will never get promoted past ensign if you play the clarinet and chemical addiction is still a key driver in human decisions and behavior.

    ENT is just the human transition out of a military focused race to a race focused on exploration. (I am not sure why Archer always seems to have serious case of constipation, but it is what it is.)


  • Most of this is just marketing crap from Anthropic.

    Finding vulnerabilities in code and generating complex, multistep exploits with publicly available models is possible now. This biggest hurdles now is setting correct context and actually knowing what to look for. Any “guardrails” for this behavior are easily bypassed by framing the detection and exploit generation as a valid dev style question in the most difficult of situations.

    They likely just trained a model without guardrails in this case.

    What they are doing here is over-hyping a problem and framing it like they are the only ones with a solution. LLM security issues are more in-focus now that companies have dumped a ton of resources into building AI systems they don’t really understand.




  • I am making a slightly different point and have a bias to this perspective: https://www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/publications/SD/19230.pdf

    I am saying that an SSN can be part of a larger validation scheme, not the only key to the castle. Specifically for government sites, SSNs can be linked to IRS data to verify places of last residence. A person generally needs to verify multiple items that are referenced by the SSN before basic authentication can be established and set by the user. (This is part of the full Authentication, Authorization and Access Control triad.)

    An SSN is just a broad level identifier. If you look at many laws around the release of SSNs, the redaction is usually in place to prevent the linking of different documents and other data points.

    If I released my SSN in this chat, I could be fully doxxed in a matter of seconds. It’s mainly because there are many legal systems in place that use an SSN as a primary key, of sorts. (It’s a bit more than that, as SSNs can be duplicated in some circumstances.)

    So to say, at a high level, an SSN is considered private is absolutely correct. However, it’s so easily referenced and obtainable it really isn’t fully private either.

    If I was to generate a full list of every possible SSN in the US (which I have done, multiple times), that list is effectively useless to anyone who obtains a copy of it. So, by itself, an SSN is effectively public.






  • They still probably need a ton of customization and tuning at the driver level and beyond, which open source allows for.

    I am sure there is plenty of existing “super computer”-grade software in the wild already, but a majority of it probably needs quite a bit of hacking to get running smoothly on newer hardware configurations.

    As a matter of speculation, the engineers and scientists that build these things are probably hyper-picky about how some processes execute and need extreme flexibility.

    So, I would say it’s a combination of factors that make Linux a good choice.