Author Archives: theusernamewhichismine

Buying a desktop in 2023

A look inside a computer, it's confusing in there.

I bought my last desktop in 2014.  It was a very high end machine at the time, and while I’ve had several new laptops since then, the desktop long remained the workhorse of my gaming setup.  But with the recent AI craze, I found that my desktop didn’t have enough power to run stable-diffusion (the AI art program) or even GPT4All (an open-source version of ChatGPT). 

So I decided to finally get a new desktop, and it was harder than expected.  I bought my 2014 desktop at Fry’s Electronics, which went under during the pandemic.  With them gone, the only computer stores nearby are a fleet of Best Buys.  Best Buy isn’t bad, but I’ll warn you that it won’t come across well in this story.

When I went to Best Buy for a new computer, I only knew I wanted a machine powerful enough to run stable-diffusion.  And I figured that in this day and age, maybe I don’t need a desktop to do the most powerful computing.  Desktops seem like dinosaurs these days, most of my coworkers only have laptops or tablets.  I even know some people whose only computer is their phone.  So maybe I just need a top-end laptop to do what I want? 

But looking for laptops in Best Buy felt like trawling a souk for antiquities.  There was a huge language barrier, and no one seemed like they knew what I wanted.

I did some homework online, and it turns out that AIs don’t just need a powerful graphics card, they need a very special type of card.  They need an NVIDIA card with a lot of VRAM.  NVIDIA is needed because only its cards contain “CUDA” which is can make AIs go.  CUDA is a suite of on-card libraries for complex math and parallel computing.  I know the AMD stans will tell me that there are libraries to run stable-diffusion on AMD, but installing stable-diffusion is already a pain, and trying to install CUDA work-arounds using barely-commented GitHub files is too much work for a simple hobby.

And in addition to an NVIDIA card, you also need the card to have VRAM.  VRAM stands for video RAM, and it’s needed to let graphics cards work their best.  How it was explained to me is that your PC and your graphics card are like 2 major cities connected by a single dirt path.  Each city has their own big highway system, so moving data within them is quick and easy, but moving data between them is slooooooooooooooooow.  So modern cards use VRAM, which is like a data warehouse for GPU-land.  

This is important because GPU-land is the part of the computer specialized for complex math.  In the old days, the demand for math processing was primarily driven by video games, which needed to calculate position and momentum of thousands of characters and particles across 3D space.  This is why GPUs are most associated with video games, but recently crypto-mining and AI have also emerged as major drivers of GPU demand since they have their own high-end math requirements.

Before VRAM, every time the GPU did a calculation it had to store its answer in the main system memory, then ask for that answer back if it needed it for the next calculation. It was sort of like this:

the computer says: “what’s the square root of 2+7 over 77+23?”  

The GPU says “OK 2+7 is 9.  Now what was in the denominator?”

Computer: “77+23”

GPU: “OK 77+23 is 100.  Now what was in the numerator?”

Computer: “well, you just told me 2+7 was 9”

GPU: “OK 9/100 is 0.09.  Is that all you wanted?”

Computer: “you forgot to square-root it”

GPU: “OK, the square root of 0.09 is 0.3”

Computer: “Did you say 0.3000000000000000004?  Sounds right to me”

GPU: “Don’t forget to check for floating point errors.  See you next time!”

That’s a lot of cars going back and forth along the dirt road, and it made for slow computing.  But with VRAM, the GPU can store all its answers locally and only talks to the computer when it’s finished calculating.  This clears a hell of a lot of traffic off the road, and without VRAM most modern AIs just don’t work.

So I knew I wanted a lot of VRAM, and the internet told me 16GB was a good number.  I also knew I needed an NVIDIA graphics card.  But finding all that at Best Buy was an exercise in frustration.  

I would walk up to a computer to check its specs.  The tag says it has an NVIDIA card with 16GB of RAM.  16GB RAM?  That’s way too low for modern storage.  So that 16GB must be the VRAM, right?  It also says it has a 512GB solid state drive, which I assume is the computer’s main RAM storage.  So half a terabyte of memory and 16GB VRAM, that’s exactly what I want, right?  But on closer inspection of the actual computer and not the tag, it says it has an intel graphics card.  It seems this model of laptop can either have an Intel or an NVIDIA, and while the tag says NVIDIA the computer itself says Intel.  So this is not what I want.

The next computer over does say NVIDIA, and it’s got a whole terabyte of memory.  It still says 16GB RAM, so I guess it’s a buy, right?  Well dxdiag is a simple windows command to tell you the computer’s specs, and I run it on this computer just to check.  It turns out that the 16GB RAM is made up of 6GB display memory and 8GB shared memory.  I guess Best Buy uses base 8 math where 6+8=16.  That would explain their prices, but 6+8 isn’t what I’m looking for.

Even worse, I do some searching and find that only display memory is “true” VRAM.  The 8GB of shared memory is actually just normal RAM that is “reserved” for the graphics card.  Using the analogy from above, it’s like the GPU city owns a warehouse in the Computer city, so when it has too much data it can offload it there for pickup later.  The problem is that to move that data it still has to go back and forth down the dirt path between the two cities, which means it’s still very slow.  So for my purposes, 6+8=0.

But here’s the thing, I’m not an expert so I don’t know if “display memory” really is the same thing as “VRAM.”  I’m only assuming it is.  But maybe I’m wrong and the VRAM is listed elsewhere?  I flag down a Best Buy employee and ask him what display memory actually is.  He tells me “oh it makes the graphics card go faster, but it doesn’t make it more powerful.”  That’s incredibly generic, I ask him if “display memory” is the same as VRAM.  He says “I think kinda, yeah,” and at that point I realize he doesn’t know any more than I do so I thank him for his time and leave.

I need true VRAM, so now I just start running dxdiag on every computer on the floor.  I find that all of them are set up like the 6+8 laptop and none of them have a lot of “true” VRAM.  Looking online, it also seems like NVIDIA has sneakily given their laptop cards the same names as their desktop cards despite the laptop cards having much lower specs.  I knew a 4070 or 3060 were “good” NVIDIA cards, but the laptop versions are paltry imitations of the real thing and not good enough for AI.  So it turns out I do need a desktop.

OK, well I’m still at Best Buy so I wander over to their desktop area.  I no longer trust tags so I just run dxdiag on anything I see.  And there I seem to strike the motherload: 24GB of display memory, holy crap that’s a lot of VRAM!!  Oh, it’s an AMD card.  Well AMD may be cheaper and have way more VRAM, but it doesn’t have the CUDA so it’s a no-go. 

I finally go over to Geek Squad, Best Buy’s in house specialists, and ask if they do build-a-desktop services.  It turns out no, that’s a service they discontinued a long time ago.  I can buy parts to build it myself, but Best Buy can’t build it for me.  I asked who could build me a computer and every member of Geek Squad plus a randomly patrolling employee all told me to try Micro Center instead.  So I had to head there.

Micro Center was the exact opposite of Best Buy.  As soon as I started looking at graphics cards an employee came up to ask if I had any questions.  I asked him my questions about VRAM and display memory and he was able to point me to a specific card that had plenty of VRAM and which he told me was very good for AI.  He also gave me ideas of other cards I could buy if I wanted to move up or down in power and price, and when I finally settled on which card to buy, he then offered to pick out every part I needed for a computer and put them together for me. 

This was exactly what I needed, a build-a-desktop service with an expert who could actually help me buy something.  We went over all the parts and I made whatever changes I wanted from what he suggested.  Then 2 days later I had a desktop built for just 2000$.  That may seem like a lot, but laptops with way less power were selling for 1800$, and the only laptop that seemed even capable of doing what I wanted had a 2500$ price tag.  I only just got the desktop back to my house, so I still have a few weeks before I find all the things I hate about it, but I’m already liking Micro Center a lot more than Best Buy.

Overall, buying a computer in 2023 is still as overly complicated a mess as it’s always been.  If you just need to write emails to your grandkids, Best Buy has 180$ laptops that will probably do you good.  But if you want the kind of power needed to play modern games and do modern activities, trying to parse all the various GPUs with their CUDAs and VRAMs and so on is way more of a hassle than it should be.  

I wish more computer sellers were knowledgeable in what they were selling, I don’t need all of them to be experts in AI hardware but if they could at least tell me what all the parts mean I’d have been a lot happier.  Shouldn’t a car salesmen be able to explain to you miles-per-gallon and what a hybrid is?  As it stands, I was dumbstruck by how helpless most salesfolks were, and how little the GPU business has changed in decades.  In 2008 the late Shamus Young wrote an article complaining about how confusing it was trying to buy a graphics card, and nothing has gotten better since then.

Maybe someday I can ask an AI what kind of graphics card I need to run it.  Then ask the AI to build it and maybe ask the AI to install itself on there for me.  Some people are scared of AI, but I think if Skynet ever does become self-aware and try to self-replicate, just reading its own hardware requirements will give it enough of an aneurysm to drop it back down to pre-sentience.  Until then, I can’t say I’m looking forward to doing all this again in a few years time.

I’m addicted to rageahol

I don’t like writing this, but I’ll try to do so.

I’ve found that I’m too rageaholic recently. I don’t know if this is weird, but before I actually talk to people I sometimes plan out conversations in my head. What I want to say, how I want to say it, that kind of thing. All too often, conversations in my head turn into me being angry at people, attacking them, making cutting remarks, that sort of thing.

And this is happening in the real world too. I passed a woman as I biked to work recently. It was on a shared walk/bike path in the city and so I felt I had the right to be there. I’ve often noticed that walkers get really scared or heated at bikers, but I always give them a large latitude. I don’t want to hit them any more than they want to get hit.

Anyway I passed this woman with a very wide latitude, yet she still yelled out as I passed. Then, I locked up my bike to get into my job, and she came up at me complaining about how I passed her. I had already realized she was going to do this (I could tell when she yelled at me as I passed), so the conversation was heated from the beginning. I brusquely told her that I passed her well to the left, that I pass lots of walkers every day, and that she needs to share the road with bikers just as we share it with her. I didn’t even give her a chance to respond, I just walked away and said I didn’t like that she yelled at me when I didn’t do anything wrong.

But the problem is: what did other onlookers think of me?

To be clear, I really think I was in the right to pass her. It’s a shared space, you can tell by all the bikers on it and the fact that there are bike lock-ups all along the sides of it. One of which I used to lock my bike as she ran after me to complain. I’ve had assholes in cars yell at me when I bike on the road, and I think walkers who think bikers can’t ride on shared spaces are no better. I gave her a lot of space, I didn’t hit her and I wasn’t even near enough to hit her if I tried.

Could I have said something before I passed? On designated bike paths, there’s an “on your left” system to let people know you’re passing. But that’s for places where you pass someone every 5 or 10 minutes, I pass a hundred people in the few minutes it takes to get to my building, if I said something to every single one of them, I’d be hoarse at the end of the week. And besides, I don’t say “on your left” when I walk past slow walkers, I just give them enough space and go right by. I don’t say it to cars that I pass in my car either. If I’m just commuting on a bike, I feel that it should be understood that I’ll pass slow walkers wordlessly just as if I were walking past them.

So that’s me being all defensive about my actions, but still, what did people think about me is the problem. To be honest, it might not have been good. I was very heated at her, which made me act rude. I cut her off and said my piece, then left. That wasn’t the right way to do things.

What was the right way? As I said, a lot of asshole drivers don’t want bikes on the road, and a lot of asshole walkers don’t want bikes on shared walk/ride paths. I don’t want to just give in to those people and say “yes, you’re right, bikers should never exist anywhere near you.” But I needed to find a better way to stand my ground without looking like an asshole. How? How to respond to someone yelling at me without seeming like an asshole myself?

What if just said my piece more calmly? “Hey, I passed you by a wide margin, please don’t yell at me just for using the path.” Would that have been better? She might still have yelled at me, but then she’d be the asshole. Would calmly pointing out “this space is for bikes as well as walkers” been better? Would calmness as a whole have been better, or would I just have seemed snooty and stuck up?

Should I have just not responded at all as she came up to me?

I don’t think I could have improved my interaction with her specifically. Like I said, I’ve dealt with way too many drivers and walkers who are furious that the city allows bikers to exist at all, such that any legal use of a bike will bring a torrent of yelling and profanity. I can’t change their mind, they’re just assholes. But to everyone surrounding her, this could have been an interaction between an asshole lady and me, or it could have been an interaction between two assholes. And I worry it was the latter.

Maybe calmness as a whole would have been better. I need to try that next time. I’ve gamed this conversation out in my head, running through it because I don’t like how I acted and don’t like how I probably came across to other people. It’s not an important conversation, I’m sure no one on that street will even remember me by tomorrow. But it’s a microcosm of a lot of my problems, and if I’m going to fix them I need to become the type of person who would have handled that conversation better.

Nationalization

Nationalization (or rather Nationalisation) was a big part of Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto during the 2017 and 2019 General Elections. If Labour won, it promised that anything and everything would be nationalized, usually at below market price.

I’ve always been skeptical of claims that nationalization leads to any kind of savings. The claim is that since a Government company doesn’t have to worry about profits for shareholders, it can be more efficient than a private company. All the profits that are paid out as dividends are instead re-invested into the company to provide better service at a lower cost.

But there truly isn’t any law saying a company ever has to provide dividends and profits. If Corbyn, McDonnell and co truly thought that companies could run better and more efficiently without profit, they could always just do that themselves without need of the government. Private citizens can always set up a non-profit corporation, they can take money from people (God know’s Corbyn was a fundraising machine) and set up a company that doesn’t pay dividends to shareholders, but instead re-invests everything to provide better service at a lower cost.

If such a non-profit did truly provide better service at a lower cost, then customers would flock to it over the for-profit companies that already exist. And again since this non-profit doesn’t hand out dividends, then Corbyn Co could easily be the fastest growing company in the world as it takes on more and more customers and reinvests into being better and better.

So why did they need nationalization? Why couldn’t they give the British people good services as a low price by just setting up a non-profit company and out-competing the for-profit ones? Why do socialists only ever think they can succeed by taking from someone else?

I think they simply didn’t have enough economic literacy to realize how their whole idea was such a shambles. Non-profit companies haven’t taken over the world because for-profit companies are actually way more efficient. They’re more efficient than non-profits and more efficient than Government companies, but socialists prefer to deny the lessons of history and keep acting like it’s the 1970s.

Not only are nationalized companies less efficient, but the act of nationalization creates inefficiencies. The idea that the government can force a sale of a profitable enterprise creates a chilling effect as investors become less likely to invest knowing it can all be taken from them at any moment. People don’t want to be forced to sell to the government, even at a “fair” price. Most eminent domain projects throughout history were done at a “fair” price, with people being paid the market value for their homes and then kicked out to make way for freeways and whatnot. But “fair” price or not, no one likes a forced sale.

And Corbyn Co wanted to take things a step further by paying below market value for the companies they wanted to nationalize. So not only was the government forcing a sale, but they were also committing theft at the same time.

I write all this because nationalization became a big word again during the recent bout of inflation, and I’ve seen way to many people jump on the bandwagon saying we need to nationalize energy companies, housing companies, and everything else to keep prices down. But prices don’t rise because companies are greedy, they rise because of fundamental shortages and inefficiencies. A nationalized company would have just as much trouble with inflation as a for-profit one, only a nationalized company could push its losses onto the taxpayers rather than be forced to raise prices and cut costs.

High prices are a signal that there is a shortage and that alternative avenues should be sought. When the price of gas rose, I decided I couldn’t justify driving to work every day so I tried to bike whenever possible. But would a nationalized American Gas company instead pass that cost onto the taxpayer? Wouldn’t they keep prices low so that I kept using as much gas as I always did? In that case every taxpayer who tries to be a good world citizen and use less carbon would be subsidizing me personally as a drove a distance that I could easily bike instead.

As inflation tapers off, it seems clear that nationalization was not the answer, and we are entering the Era of Corporate Generosity. But I doubt we’ve silenced forever the calls of nationalization, no matter how many times it leads to omnishambles. Still, I hope no serious nationalization proposal is put forward for a long time yet.

Beware of maps that are just population density maps

Sorry for forgetting to post last week. I haven’t kept up with this blog as much as I should be.

XKCD has a well-known comic showing how we too often overanalyze what are really just population density maps. It’s very easy to notice a pattern and extrapolate silly things from it. I recently saw another such example of this on social media I wanted to quickly bring up.

The implications of this map seems obvious, there were way more battles in Europe than anywhere else on earth. People on social media had all sorts of explanations:

Population density: battles mostly happen where people are, see the big stretch of emptiness in the Canadian Arctic, for instance. Europe has been densely populated for most of its history, so of course it had a lot of battles.

Recency bias: Europe fought 2 World Wars within the last century or so. As the largest wars in human history these of course had the most battles in human history, so there’s a lot of data points from that.

Warlike nature: maybe Europeans are just more warlike than the peaceful people in other parts of the world?

But the most obvious explanation seemed to be missing: Wikipedia is edited by the global online community, which is dominated by the the Anglosphere and Europe. Anglospheric and European editors will naturally gravitate towards writing many many articles about Europe and it’s history rather than the history of the world outside of Europe. A battle of 3000 people in the middle ages will have been studied by students in whatever country it happened in, even if it wasn’t important globally. And if that student was European or from the Anglosphere it’s more likely that they’ll grow up to be a Wikipedia editor and so add this unimportant battle into the encyclopedia.

So while there are some trends on this map that do come from the underlying data (ie there are way less battles in places where few people live), most of it is a function of bias. People write what they know. If there was an Indian version of Wikipedia instead, I’m certain the density of dots would be a lot higher there and a lot lower in Europe.

“The Crime of ’73”

Boy, these posts aren’t quite coming out weekly now are they?

I might have posted on this topic before, but I wanted to write something down and this was on my mind. It’s interesting how the controversies of yesteryear always fade away, even though in their day they dominated the news and the mind-space of politically conscious voters.

Take the Silver vs Gold movement. When America was founded, it had a bi-metallic standard, meaning that both silver and gold were legal tender. Congress set down in writing how much weight of silver made a dollar and how much gold made a dollar, and so both could be used to buy and sell. But of course, as commodities the price of silver and gold in the market would fluctuate, but congress didn’t understand or act quickly enough to fix things.

For example, silver mines in Mexico continued to run and depressed the price of silver relative to gold. This created an arbitrage opportunity because the price of gold was higher than that of silver:

  • Take 10 silver dollars and exchange them for 10 gold dollars, as they are equivalent
  • Take the gold dollars to Mexico and melt them down.
  • Take that gold and exchange it for raw silver
  • Bring that silver back to the Mint in America and demand to have it struck into silver dollars. Because of the price difference between silver and gold, the silver you brought back will make more than 10 dollars worth, so you can pocket the extra as your profit.
  • Start back from the beginning, trading 10 silver dollars for 10 gold dollars

This happened because congress set a fixed value for a commodity who’s value changed on the market, and as that value changed there was arbitrage created. Gold flowed out of the country and was replaced with silver. When the California gold rush happened, the price of gold suddenly decreased and the whole process reversed. Congress didn’t understand what was happening, and so simply decided to remove the bimetallic standard to stop this from happening.

But now we get to “The Crime of 1873.” When congress removed the silver standard in 1873, silver miners could no longer have their pure silver struck into coins that could be used as tender. The mint was by far the largest purchaser of silver and so removing silver from the standard removed most of the demand and so killed the price. Congress therefore upended the livelihoods of thousands of miners and mining towns by changing the laws on coinage. And those people never forgave them.

For years this “Crime” was the hottest topic in certain political sections. It was the litmus test for candidates and parties. And it was the entire foundation of the presidential candidacy of William Jennings Bryan. For years, certain voters would never vote for a candidate or party who had supported the “Crime,” and they may not have even kept polite company with voters who supported those candidates. In its time, the “Crime” was seen as the greatest betrayal possible, and plenty of people pointed to it as the reason for national or local economic problems. They blamed the “Crime” and hoped that overturning it would fix things.

Of course, America never regained the silver standard. For a time, the Federal government compromised and declared it would still buy silver from the miners directly, but in time even this subsidy was removed. The people affected by the “Crime” probably never forgave the Republicans (who passed the bill) for what they did. Indeed the “Crime’s” authors had a hard time defending their actions in the face of angry voters. Some authors claimed that the bill didn’t do what critics claimed, and that the US had technically been non-silver since 1853. Others claimed that ending the silver standard was an unintended biproduct. But this had the perverse effect of amplifying conspiracy theorists who believed the bill was passed with malicious intend, and giving ammo to those who wanted to overturn it.

In the 1880s and 1890s, the “Crime of 73” was as much a controversial topic as any political topic today. Friendships could be ended by it. But it too did pass. I think most of the controversies of our day shall also pass, these days even American History students will barely remember the “Crime.”

Choosing your facts based on your beliefs; everyone believes they are the rational one

It’s very common and very well-known that people will, to an extent, choose their facts to fit their beliefs. But for many the facts they choose aren’t necessarily even well-founded.

If you are a conservative, you probably prefer generally lower taxes, and you can find well-heeled economists who generally prefer lower taxes and lower spending over higher taxes and higher spending. Likewise a liberal or leftist can find economists who support higher taxes and higher spending. The issue is not “settled” and as with anything in economics (besides rent control, which is universally known to be bad) there are voices on either side.

But there are some things that are uncontroversially accepted as true by all the experts in their field, and for some reason there are people that argue against it for no reason whatsoever.

When I was in school, I remember a debate about teaching evolution. To cut to the chase, many Christians (not all by a long shot) have thought that evolution undermines their religion, and no matter how much evidence there is for it, these Christians will choose facts to fit their beliefs. That includes denying evolution, but also denying the fossil record (which supports evolution) and the age of the Earth (which supports evolution). This sometimes means denying modern microbiology and cancer biology (which are evolution in action). It’s fairly well-known by anyone who isn’t a Christian that this is a Dumb Thing To Do, and that picking your facts based on your beliefs just leaves you looking stupid.

But then I found that while the Christians do it, the anti-Christians do it too.

Let’s be clear: some atheists are just people who don’t believe in God. That’s fine, everyone has their beliefs. But some atheists are better termed anti-theists, they are people who oppose religion and its existence entirely. And it is these atheists that have constructed their own theories of “Intelligent Design” to support their ideas. Often these theories try to prove that Christianity is not only false, but that is is a complete con from start to finish and that no one truly believes in it anyway.

The Atheist version of Intelligent Design is the “Jesus Myth Theory.” This is the idea that not only was Jesus just a mortal man (not the son of God), but that there was never even a person called Jesus at all, and that this is proof that Christianity was an invented scam. To be blunt, this idea has no more credence than Intelligent Design, but so-called rational atheists who turn up their nose at the stupid Christians with their stupid Intelligent Design will still believe this idea because they have chosen their facts based on their beliefs. I may write a post later about the evidence for Jesus’ existence, but the point I’m trying to make is that even communities which are adamant in their own rationality can wind up being suckered into myths just because those myths agree with what they want to believe.

Let’s get one thing straight: EVERYONE believes that they’re rational. Everyone believes that their opinions are backed by evidence, backed by science, fundamentally true, and that only the dumb and misled would ever believe something different. That’s what makes the self-professed “Rationalist” community so misguided: claiming you’re the only community focused on rational beliefs is just admitting that you’ve never spoken to a community different than your own.

EVERY community believes they are the rational ones, believes they are driven by facts and not emotions, believes that the others are ignoring facts to suit their opinions. And the Rationalist community has it’s own Intelligent Design theories just as the Atheist and the Christian communities do. A good Rationalist, Atheist, or Christian should of course never believe something just because their compatriots believe it, or just because it would support some of their ideology, but a good Rationalist, Atheist, or Christian must also recognize that they probably have biases themselves and that their own community probably harbors an “Intelligent Design” theory all its own.

In the hallowed halls of Twitter and social media it’s widely believed that only the Left of the political spectrum knows and respects science, all right-wing beliefs are obviously false and dis-proven by data. The the exact inverse is believed on the right. I know both communities are havens of their own misinformation. I have seen too many on the Left tell me that supply and demand don’t exist, that building more housing doesn’t lower rent and cost and that inflation is driven only by corporate greed and not supply or demand. I have likewise seen the misinformation on the right over gun deaths, drug crime, vaccines and the like. I’m sure some of my own beliefs are misinformation, but we are all the heroes in our own stories and so self-reflection is very hard.

But I just wrote this post because even if I’m only screaming into the void I wanted to remind people that everyone thinks they are rational. Your political enemies who you consider irrational and emotional idiots are human just like you, and they arrived at their beliefs through the exact same human mechanisms you did. Are you sure anything and everything you believe is true? Are you sure there could never be any evidence that supports your opponents? Don’t dismiss people are idiots just because they believe something else, most humans are just as rational as you.

Tariffs are taxes, I’m tired of pretending otherwise

Every politician says they’re lowering taxes. Or if they raise taxes, it’s only on the rich, poor people definitely deserve lower taxes. So do middle class people (where “middle class” equals “everyone less than rich” and “rich” equals “everyone richer than my current audience and me”). Taxes are unpopular and taxes shouldn’t be raised.

But tariffs are fine apparently. In a new wave of protectionism, Biden and Trump have jacked up tariffs on everything from solar panels to lumbar. And despite claims of “national security” and “containing China” these tariffs have most strongly hit America’s allies such as Canada and Germany. The national security claims are bunk, these tariffs hit allies far more than they hit enemies.

But still Biden doesn’t get pushback for raising taxes because “tariffs” aren’t seen as taxes. Wrongly, most people don’t realize that slapping a tax on imported goods raises the price of all of those goods, even the locally made ones. Think of it like this: if Biden slapped a tax on Pepsi such that every Pepsi now costed 5$, would Coca-Cola sit back and keep their prices? Of course not, as a greedy company Coca-Cola knows that customers will flock to its lower-priced products, and this will give it the ammunition to raise prices to juuuuuuuust under what Pepsi has. So now 4$ Cokes will become the norm.

So too does it happen with tariffs. When you raise the price of Canadian lumbar, American lumbar companies also raise their prices because they know the consumer has no choice but to take it. When you raise the price of German steel, American steel raises its prices. These taxes on foreign goods have raised the price on all goods. They then raise the price of what those goods are used for, for example lumbar tariffs are raising house prices. And what do you call it when the price of goods rises over time? Inflation.

Biden’s tariffs are adding to inflation. Trump’s tariffs are adding to inflation. Tariffs are nothing more than a tax on goods, a tax that the poor and middle class pay most as they are the ones most damaged by inflation. I’m tired of house prices soaring in part because of these new taxes. I’m tired of solar panel prices soaring as well. It’s all very two-faced of the Biden admin to claim global warming is an existential threat and then do everything in their power to kill the solar industry with new tariffs. Taxing it into the ground only makes global warming worse.

So I’m tired of these tariffs, they’re nothing more than a tax. And I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

Have IPOs become more speculative?

This post is very late because I didn’t feel good about my conclusions, but here it is.

I’ve been wondering if IPOs have become more speculative of late. Rumors abound that OpenAI (makers of ChatGPT) may IPO soon and they’ve been quoted as having a billion dollars in revenue and a valuation of 80 billion. 80 times profit is already a pricey valuation, 80 times revenue is even moreso. And other even more speculative IPOs have happened in recent memory. Companies like CRISPR Therapeutics and Beam Therapeutics IPO’d when they have essentially no revenue, just patents.

It was once said to me that IPOs are “supposed” to be for a company that is profitable. The company shows the world that it is profitable and can thus afford to pay a dividend. The investors of the world will then pay for stock in the company in order to grow their money. So the company gets a big pile of cash by selling shares, and the investors get shares which pay a dividend and may grow in value also.

The above is a very 20th century view of investing, these days dividends aren’t all that popular to begin with. So too does it seem that many companies will IPO long before they can afford a dividend, and long before they are profitable at all, so why are investors investing and buying these stocks?

It isn’t necessarily a bad move for investors to buy stock in OpenAI if it does IPO. The investors are speculating that while it’s not profitable now, it will be in 10 or 20 years. In essence, an IPO like this lets investors play the role that venture capitalist play. Venture capitalists invest in many startups long before they see revenue or profit, and they bank on the fact that while 10 startups may fail, the 1 that succeeds will let them see more than 10x gains. With companies IPOing early, normal investors can now also play this game. Beam Therepeutics, CRIPSR Therapeutics, and OpenAI may all fail, but if you invest in them and 10 other speculative companies, then maybe 1 will succeed which will give you gains that wipe away all your loses.

So I can’t say that companies IPOing earlier and earlier is a bad thing. As long as they don’t lie on any of their forms, then investors know exactly what they’re getting into. Investors know that they’re buying into a very speculative, pre-profit, maybe even pre-revenue company. But if it works out, they can make big gains. And remember that “investors” here isn’t just faceless, deep pocketed billionaires. Investors is also every person with a 401k or IRA. They too can buy into these companies using their own money and play at being venture capitalists. And if its so profitable for venture capitalists to do this, then why shouldn’t the rest of us do the same?

But while I cannot say this is a bad thing, I also cannot say if this trend is even happening. Remember I started this story by asking if IPOs are happening earlier and earlier. Is it true that in the 20th century, most IPOs were of profitable companies, and in the 21st century most IPOs are of unprofitable ones? Or is that simply recency bias at work? I tried and tried but couldn’t find hard numbers on this kind of thing, which is why it took me so long to write this post.

Either way, if OpenAI does IPO I might toss a few dollars their way. Intellectually I know I probably can’t beat the market, but emotionally it’s fun to pretend I can. And where’s the harm in that?

I don’t normally play ironman games

I’m not sure if everyone calls it this, but to me “ironman” games are those that don’t let you save and reload whenever you want. 30 years ago these games were the norm because most gaming was done either at arcades (which demanded quarters, so letting you save and reload anywhere hurt their business) or on rather weak computers (which didn’t have the memory for dedicated save slots). But for the most part, “ironman” seemed like a quaint 20th century style of gaming that was thrown own when computers got stronger and arcades died. Recently there’s been a resurgance of games that don’t let you save and reload, not for technical reasons, but for the personal reasons that the devs or power-gamers think it’s “cheating.” I normally don’t play ironman games, my time is worth more than that, but I received For the King as a gift and so decided to give it a go.

I decided to try For The King single player.  It was going ok, until I tried to fight my first battle 1 level higher than me (level 5 vs my level 4). First turn, the boss enemy confused my whole party.  Confusion rarely “wears off” in this game, so from then on the battle was auto-piloted into a total party kill.   And a total party kill would have been game over, 3 lost lives.

I don’t like ironman because it heavily discourages experimentation.  I decided to try this fight because my friend had told me that For the King doesn’t have the Divinity 2 problem of “battles at a higher level are impossible.”  And yet the way this battle went heavily teaches the player “never ever fight enemies higher level than you” because I barely scratched the enemies and the entire battle was decided on a single move from the first turn of the boss.

Of course, I said to hell with that and End-Task’d the game instead of letting it end in defeat.  And since the autosave was right before I tried the battle… I just went and tried again.

The battle went a hell of a lot better the second time.  The total-party-confuse still happened, but this time it didn’t occur until the enemy’s 3rd turn.  And also one of my characters switched to his gun, fired, and then snapped out of confusion (as I said, a rare occurrence).  I was actually able to reload and fire to kill the enemy myself.

This single battle teaches the player 2 entirely different lessons based on a single dice roll.  If the confusion comes out first turn, the lesson is “gtfo, high level enemies will kill you.”  If confusion comes out later, the lesson is simply that some enemies are powerful and have party-wide attacks.  In a normal game, the player can reload when killed and try again.  They can  see how the game “really” works, ie “are higher level enemies impossible or was I just unlucky?”  In ironman games, the player cannot learn how the game works in game.  It heavily encourages meta-gaming (looking everything up online) and discourages experimentation.

When you load up the game, it starts immediately with what feels like a developer having a hissy-fit over people complaining about randomness.  When I loaded the game for the first time, it forced me to accept what was essentially an in-game EULA saying “don’t think you’ll defeat the evil your first try, more powerful heroes than you have tried and failed.”  That same sentence loads up every time you start the game.  It REEKS of a dev being very angry at people complaining about the randomness and lost runs, and so trying to force the players to accept the “correct” way of thinking, ie that the game will happily waste your time with a bad roll. 

I on the other hand will continue to think my time is far more important than any game.  This is the kind of game I will never buy for myself, I’m a busy man and don’t want to spend hours on a game only to get kicked back to the beginning by a single bad roll.

But I can still see the appeal.  The systems are quite good, the focus is fun, and I’m loving my little cross-classing that I’ve been able to do.  I got a Goblin Bow in this game and handed it to both my Bard and Scholar at different points because it was stronger than their normal attacks and had pierce.  I handed the Bard a Magic Book weapon later because I hadn’t found good bard weapons and she had decent intelligence.  There’s a lot to like here, but the game would definitely be improved by having a non-ironman game mode.  It doesn’t hurt the ironman people’s fun and lets folks like me enjoy it too. 

Crying over Cryo-EM

OK so the title is hyperbole, but I’ve definitely struggled recently with my cryo-electron microscopy. I guess here I’ll give an overview of what exactly electron microscopy is and why I’ve struggled.

Professor Jensen of CalTech has a great series of videos on Cryo-EM. Why we use it, how we use it, and what it is. Anyone interested in the technology should watch it, but for my own purposes:

  • Cryo-electron microscopy consists of freezing a sample and then shooting electrons at it to see the 3d structure of it at the smallest atomic scales.
  • We’re using it to study a number of proteins that cause diseases. In particular we want to know how the 3d shape of a certain protein creates that protein’s function. And how that function can then go on to cause a disease.
  • So we purify a specific protein, make a cryo-grid from that purified protein, and then look at that cryo-grid under electron microscopy hoping to get a good 3d structure.

But that’s where the problems start. First of all, purifying a protein to 99.9% purity is no small feat, especially when you’re taking proteins out of actual patient samples. I’ve dearly struggled to get the required purity that would be needed to make good grids for imaging.

But once I have some “pure” protein, I need to add it to a grid to image it. A cryo-grid is a 1 millimeter by 1 millimeter circle about 1 micrometer thick. On that grid are cut out many 1 micrometer by 1 micrometer squares. And in each square are a mesh of 100 nanometer by 100 nanometer holes. When I add a tiny drop of my protein sample (which is in water) onto the grid, the hope is that the proteins will settle down into the holes. I will then “blot” the sample by pressing some paper onto both sides of the sample, which wicks away all the water not in the holes. I then instantly plunge the sample into liquid ethane, freezing all the liquid in the holes in an instant.

What you get is supposed to be a grid covered in a tiny thin layer of ice, and in each hole the ice contains your proteins of interest. Since they were flash frozen in ethane, the ice here is “vitreous,” which means glass-like. It’s see-through just like glass. And so a beam of electrons can pass into the ice to create an image of the proteins inside the ice.

But there’s problems. Let’s get back to making the grid: most proteins are hydrophilic which means water-loving. The opposite of hydrophilic is hydrophobic which mean water hating, like oil. Oil and water don’t mix, and neither do hydrophobic and hydrophilic things. Our grids are made of copper covered in a layer of carbon, and that stuff is naturally hydrophobic, meaning it doesn’t interact well with the hydrophilic proteins (and the water they are in).

So before adding proteins we have to glow discharge our grids. This means putting them in a machine that shoots broken-up water molecules at them. Those broken-up water molecules have oxygen in them, and some of them will bind to the grid creating oxygen-containing compounds. Those compounds are very hydrophilic, so the whole grid becomes hydrophilic enough for the proteins to interact with it.

At some point we got a new glow discharger, and I swear that it started destroying my grids. Like I said the grids are tiny and fragile, 1 millimeter across, 1 micrometer thick! This glow discharger shoots water at them, and the new one shot the water so hard that it was punching through my grids and destroying them completely at the microscopic level. I couldn’t see the damage because it’s microscopic, but after adding the protein to my grids and flash-freezing them, I’d look at them under a microscope and see nothing but a completely destroyed grid. I finally just stopped trusting it completely and moved on to using a new glow discharger that’s a bit weaker.

So OK I solved the glow discharge problem, but now here comes the ice problem. Like I said above, you want the proteins to be encased in glass-like vitreous ice. If you have no ice, well you have no proteins. And if the ice is too thick, it’s no longer glass-like and you can’t see through it. I kept being on both sides of those extremes, first I had ice so thick I couldn’t see anything, then I had no ice at all. You are supposed to manage this problem by configuring your blotting time, which is how long you wick away the water before plunging the grid into the liquid ethane. Shorter blot time, thicker ice, longer blot time, thinner ice or no ice at all. Try long and short times to get the ice just right.

And yet I was using ultra-short blot times and still getting thick and thin ice sometimes at random. On the balance I got more grids with no ice at all, so I kept thinking I needed to drop the blot time more and more. My adviser said that there is a minimum blot time of about 2 seconds and you never want to go lower than that, but I tried 2 seconds and the ice was still way to thin or non-existence. That seems to say that my blot time is still too long, yet 2 seconds is as short as I can go.

I finally asked an expert in the chemistry department who suggested I used their facilities instead. He also suggested that 1 second of blot time is perfectly fine, and so that was what I did. I FINALLY seemed to start getting good grids, so let’s hope it hold out.

So I’ve struggled with glow discharging, and then blot times, as well as protein purity. I’ve finally got some good grids, and I hope I can collect a lot of data on them. If I do that, I may be able to get 3d structural information using AI and a whole bunch of analysis. We’ll see though, we’ll see.