I’m beautiful and tough like a diamond…or beef jerky in a ball gown.

– Titus Andromedon

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2025

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  • Basically, yeah, if you include all of their memories and experiences. The EMHs in the dilithium mines were EMH copies but weren’t The Doctor. I’ve also wondered if they were sentient or just good facsimiles. Part of The Doctor’s story arc was growing beyond his original EMH programming (plus B’Elanna expanding his matrix in some pretty hacky ways). So that leads me to believe that they weren’t sentient, though they had the potential to become so.

    Anyway…

    That said, the Doctor from “Living Witness” was, if I recall, the Backup EMH and had all of the The Doctor’s memories and was fully sentient as a result.

    Essentially it would be the Will / Thomas Riker transporter accident equivalent for holographic beings.

    But then what happens if you Ctrl+Z?

    VOY S5E11: Latent Image





  • If it’s a relatively recent laptop, it should be fine.

    Many of them will let you set custom charge limits. If yours supports that, limit it to like 60% or thereabouts. Long enough that you can get some UPS use out of it but not full enough it’s ever gonna go spicy pillow on you.

    If it won’t let you set a charge limit, they’ll still kind of float around full charge but not stay at 100% all the time. Even plugged in, mine will drop down from 100% to eventually 92% before it will start charging back to 100 again. That’s over the course of several days to a week.

    If the laptop is older than about 2017 or so, or still has a removable battery, you might want to just take the battery out and use an external UPS as those typically don’t have the extra charge management features newer ones do.

    To run them full time, you either want to remove the screen or “tent” them because a lot of heat is dissipated through the keyboard, and it’s normally expected to be open while running because of that. By “tent”, I mean open it halfway and put the screen facing down so it’s standing up and shaped like a tent.




  • Not sure about the buildings themselves, but I’m pretty confident at least their contents will flood the secondhand market with cheap secondhand gear. I won’t say the crypto bubble has burst, but a lot of the mining rigs are being parted out and sold fairly cheap, and one specific crypto mining board has become popular as a DIY gaming system. (Currently doing a BC-250 “DIY SteamMachine” build myself).

    As for the buildings, maybe we’ll see some creative uses like indoor farms or something. Or, perhaps, it’ll just be a mundane “AI datacenter becomes a generic data center”.

    I’d guess they’d be repurposed into business centers or office space like we’ve seen with old malls, but malls were usually in populated areas where datacenters aren’t.



  • IMO, peak internet experience was when you had to make an effort to log on. i.e. dialing-up and tying up the phone line. Yeah, the speeds sucked and sometimes you got the dreaded “all circuits are busy now” message during peak hours, but everything else about the experience was better.

    When you logged into AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo, etc, you did so with a purpose. You never worried about bothering someone by messaging them at a bad time because if it was a bad time to do so, they wouldn’t be online in the first place.

    “Back in my day” (lol), the internet wasn’t always on, it wasn’t demanding your attention, it wasn’t pestering you with constant notifications, it wasn’t in your face all the time, it wasn’t constantly recommending or suggesting things at you (not “to” you, at you) etc, etc. It was there when you needed it but didn’t butt into your life every second when you weren’t.

    You could disconnect.

    I honestly don’t know what we can really do about it. Personally, I turn off pretty much anything that can send a notification except SMS/MMS and check manually when I want to. Some people hate that and get annoyed that I rarely respond instantly to IMs and such, but I hate being constantly “on” as well as the expectation to be.










  • A few years ago I decided to try the lithium-ion UPSs. I’m on my 3rd year with them, and I will never go back to lead acid. I’ve got one “classic” UPS that is still in good shape as long as you don’t try to run more than 100w from it, but when it goes, it goes.

    These use the LiFePO4 batteries, and I get close to twice the runtime as my old ones, and they don’t drop from 80% to 10% like lead acids do. The battery chemistry is also good for about 10 years of daily cycling, so assuming the electronics hold out, they seem like they’ll last.

    The only hiccup with the model I got is it doesn’t have a serial monitor connection, but you can probably fine plenty that have it.