Cosine Thoughts

So I pulled the trigger and bought a Steam Deck (256GB LCD) while it was on sale for the Black Friday sale. Then I grabbed a 1TB nvme drive and a USB hub. General thoughts? It is a great device. It isn't without issues, but it is definitely a good value buy. Almost too good a value, made all the better by recent hardware price increases. This is no silver bullet. The battery life isn't going to make waves, especially on the LCD model and there are going to be games that you can't play or which don't play well. I also hit a few times where the Deck froze on me for seemingly no reason, though always when launching a game so it never impacted game play. Oh, and I've yet to successfully get the thing to install Docker, but that is not a problem most people care about and there are VM related solutions to that particular issue (I just happen to want it running natively on the device). And that is really the extent of the "bad". And I put bad in quotes because t...

If there is one thing which I think is characteristic of Kyudo, it is that it is a lifelong pursuit. Moreso than perhaps a lot of martial arts. And this is maybe more true abroad than in Japan. I don't know. I certainly don't think it is unique to Kyudo to think "it will take a lifetime to master this". That, I think is common to most martial arts. Rather, I think Kyudo lets that sink in a lot quicker and is almost a core philosophy. I don't think you'll find many beyond shodan or nidan who haven't accepted or internalized this. Growing up, I knew people my age who had black belts in Karate while I was still in high school. I met people with 7th, 8th and 9th-dan in various martial arts, and they are effectively everywhere. Most dojos, for most martial arts have at least one really high ranking member. And many have multiple. It isn't absurd, in most martial arts, to be able to set practical timeframes for achieving certain high ranks or even to be qual...

I'm impressed with Valve. I think they do a good job of not simply releasing a product to meet some arbitrary release cycle. And I think everything unveiled here is interesting, with one notable exception. And it may or may not be the item you're expecting. Though, I will dive into rationale as I go through this. I want to go from my least liked item to my most. So without further ado: #3 - Steam Machine This, for me, is the least exciting announcement. Yes. Valve did wait for more than an incremental improvement over the original Steam Machine and succeeded across numerous categories in this respect. And, I do believe that there is a market for this product. Frankly, this is what I was expected Microsoft to do with XBox; just converge Windows and XBox OS and deliver some standardized PC hardware. Valve's problem here is twofold: This is just a computer. Pricing it as a entry level gaming PC. Being a computer isn't a problem in the traditional sense, but it clashes with...

This past Tuesday I completed my first attempt at Shodan via Video Shinsa. It will still be weeks to months before I hear back on the results. The process, regardless of the outcome, has been enlightening. A few major points: Anxiety is apparently something I struggle with. Practice helps overcome anxiety, to a degree. I'm glad I had this experience, but I think I would prefer to do in person Shinsas in the future. The anxiety may seem like nothing worth pointing out. And for many it may not be. For me, I haven't really experienced it since around grade 10. There was a point where I was stressed about a test, I told myself that stressing wouldn't improve my grade and might actually make it worse. That stuck, and I haven't really been stressed or anxious about anything since. Until now. On top of that, I can't seem to shake it. Even if I identify that I'm panicking in the moment. Even if I know it is no big deal and that the panic isn't helping. I'm not s...

My take on generative AI is really not any different than my take on the current AI landscape in general; people (even otherwise smart ones) are missing the bigger picture. Current high-quality AI models have 2 very important direct factors and one important indirect factor: They are "expensive" They are trained on existing data-sets There are very few top-tier models available at any given point in time 1 - "Expensive" Models To start, I put "expensive" in quotes because they are not only costly in terms of compute power, but also still quite specialized in terms of skill in coming up with new approaches, knowing how best to select training and test data. This is the direct cause of point #3 which is more indirect, but I'll cover why that is important in a bit. The key thing being that training a top-tier model is not something most companies can afford today. Beyond stating that, there isn't much else to cover here. 2 - Trained on Existing Data T...

The latest talking point in the anti-EV world seems to be tire pollution and tire wear. I hate idiots. I really do. I hate people who throw "facts" in my face without researching themselves, refuse to understand the counter arguments or even attempt to understand the premises the arguments they are making are built upon. So, to start. The are 2 premises for this argument. The first is the tire compounds and the second is the combination of the weight and acceleration leading to increased wear. On the topic of tire compounds, this is simultaneously the more legit and the more derpy of the two. Legit because automakers are likely to slap these tires on the cars because they generally make the car perform better. But then derpy because most people just replace their EV tires with whatever is cheapest. People are shit at maintaining vehicles and tires are expensive.  The second argument is bad for a different reason; it assumes all EV drivers will drive like shit heads just becau...

Last week I repaired an LED TV that broke on me after about 7 years. The experience was... confusing. In a good way. First, some context; the TV in question is a Sony Bravia. Sony, in my experience, is really good a making things proprietary and not wanting people to tinker with them. Secondly, people (at least in my experience) do NOT have a tendency to repair TVs. So, there doesn't seem like there should be much resistance to going proprietary in this area and making TVs super difficult to repair. Thirdly, while the landscape has certainly changed, CRT TVs were historically also very dangerous to repair.  Not that the past need necessarily dictate the future. Though it sets a precedent which, once again, should seem appealing for TV manufacturers to continue.  Given all this, I was surprised at how easy the process was. First, there was the broken TV itself. When it broke an LED in the IR sensor bar flashed a certain number of times indicating the rough nature of the problem...