Kyrgizion

When we first got our own home 15 years ago, the very first thing we did was adopt two kitties from the same recent litter.

Throughout those 15 years, both sisters have cemented themselves as my personal lares. Think of it as my soul cats if you will.

About two months ago however, we got some horrific news about Terra's health. I had found her collapsed and feared a stroke or spinal injury, but the bloodwork and echo at the vet were clear: cancer, already spread, suspected lymphoma due to the excessive fluid in her lungs. Red blood cell count on the verge of death - highly anemic.

The immediate prognosis was grim. The vet decided that it would be best to drain the fluid on her lungs with a syringe, though she warned us it was a stopgap measure and the fluid would eventually return. We were looking at days to a few weeks at best there.

It probably started in one of her toes because she, well, eventually self amputated that toe. The vets couldn't help with it because she was too weak for anaesthesia. So she got cortisones and painkillers instead. No use worrying about the long term effects.

Remarkably, she has since improved much beyond what we dared hope for. Two months, and she's still eating, grooming, cuddling and stealing food. Her favorite pastime these days is joining me for barbecue. While the meat cooks, she gets all the leftovers as treats. You can imagine how crazy she is about that.

I made a promise to her that if she's ever in more pain, or doesn't want to fight anymore. I would let her go gently. I wouldn't want her to suffer needlessly.

But for now, she is still here, because she still wants to be.

Despite looking a bit rougher than most of its contemporary counterparts, it functions the exact same way as a modern version. Usually came with a handy hole so it could be worn on a keyring.

There were also much smaller keys which were worn like rings on a finger, but those were for smaller locks like ornate lockboxes and the like.

Bought this at a recent small auction for €100. Someone else mentioned it's an "official museum replica" rather than genuine.

Since my expertise is mostly in Romans, I must admit I'm sort of out of my depth with this one. It's not ferromagnetic and the weight checks out at 3.76g, but I am concerned about some of the surface marks.

I hope someone with some more knowledge in these can weigh in and help verify (or not) the authenticity.

Getting old I guess. I can vaguely recall her face, though barely. I didn't think I'd ever forget such a thing. Not suffering from acute memory issues afaik. Just father time gradually erasing the paths travelled in the sands of time.

So apparently there's this online epidemic of "prophets" who are convinced their particular instance of ChatGPT or whatever other LLM they use is actually sentient, sapient, and why not - God.

There's debate about how normal people without explicit delusions get roped into this and effectively join an online cult.

But it's presented as if this happens by accident and that's what I don't buy. Your LLM is just going to parrot whatever you put in there. I've "asked" GPT if it's sentient as well and it answers with a firm "no" and then clarifies why. Although it does wax lyrical about it:

I'm curious where these grifters will lead people in the near future. We have plenty of examples from fiction, but in reality this is the first time we're seeing people worship technology and actually getting an answer.

I dunno man. I'm just a simple guy without high brow credentials or connections, but I can't see how people with actual critical thinking skills can possibly fall for this. Maybe the state of people's minds is just that much worse than even I in my pessimism and misanthropy imagine?___

Left is idle, right is under full gaming load (Helldivers 2). My previous rig (Intel) easily went up to 85-90°C in the same circumstances. Ambient temps are slightly elevated as well since we've been having ~30°C temps daily here for a while now.

To me this is almost ridiculous. I had never dreamed I could get my temps under load under 70. CPU is at stock speed since there is literally no reason to push it any further at this point. Can always choose to up the clocks later if I still want to.

Cooler is a Noctua NH-D15 G2. I don't see myself returning to watercooling any time soon. And Noctua has a new customer for life.

Two of my furry children. Terra is unfortunately very ill. She has terminal lymphoma and there's nothing we can do anymore but make her comfortable.

I just wanted to celebrate them while I can. That little furry creature saved my life on more than one occasion, and she knows it. I owe her a tremendously great deal and my life was immeasurably richer for having her in it.

And all I got was an automated email wishing me "well".

Not even a mention in a Teams chat, let alone any kind of reward. I used to listen to my grandfather and father tell stories of getting gold lapel pins or entire vacations for 5, 10, 15-year anniversaries.

My reward? I got put on a PIP last week. Oh, and our government has just decided that no matter how long you've worked somewhere, you'll only get one year paid out. If I was fired today, they'd have to accumulate 10 years of extra payments. Later this year, just the one. Which is what they're waiting for undoubtedly.

So, happy monday everyone! As a gift to myself I've decided to give extra little fucks about anything today.

EDIT: thanks for all the well-wishes, it's honestly appreciated! Warms my cold, dead heart a mite.

Last weekend I tried to put together a new machine with all new parts except a few SSD's, a soundcard and the case.

Specs:

-AMD 9950X3D

-64GB Corsair 30-6000 RAM

-Samsung 9100 2 TB nvme drive

-Gigabyte Aorus pro X870E mobo

-RTX 5080

Took some doing but eventually we did get it to power on. However, it would only power on and there was no video output. After some searching I've come to conclude it was a memory training issue (apparently DDR5 can take a long time to do this, this was new to me).

Eventually we got into bios and installed win11, which was extremely slow even by MS standards.

Once in Windows though, several issues:

-Task manager shows only 8 of my 16 cores

-Overall performance seemed very slow considering the hardware

So I went back into the bios, disabled all the "performance" options for the cpu, loaded optimized defaults and after that I did have all 32 threads visible in task manager, but this disabled EXPO for the RAM. If I re-enable EXPO, I again only have 8 visible cores in task manager.

On top of that, booting up takes ages. The Aorus splash screen appears almost immediately but remains there for MINUTES before loading windows, which also takes a good minute by itself.

I tried to flash the BIOS but I already have the latest available version installed.

From searching and Chatgpt I've gotten the answers that it's possibly a memory issue (doesn't seem to "remember" the training, having to do it over every boot?) or an issue with connected drives/usb/... being detected slowly, but I've aready set the bios to fast boot, only take SATA drives from last boot, only EFI, etc etc but nothing seems to have any effect.

Edit: after another day of testing and troubleshooting, we're almost good.

-core count fixed, was caused by a "gaming" setting in the bios?? that I had never heard about.

Slow boot remains but is apparently due to the high amount of connected drives (1 optical, 1hdd, 2 sata ssd'd & 4 nvme drives. So something I'll have to live with unless I disconnect the drives.

Been benchmarking & stress testing since the fix and results are looking very hopeful. Temps don't exceed 70°C even under full load (cinebench) and gpu remains at a crisp ~64°C. Framerates are great as hoped/expected and at full blast I still barely hear it because of the Noctua cooler.

All in all a gigantic mess and lots of frustration, but eventually worth it. Thanks again for your thoughts and perspectives, it definitely pushed me in the right direction!

On Monday I have a meeting with my boss and his boss. They wouldn't say what for, only that "I shouldn't worry". Which makes me ABSOLUTELY worry. Don't think I'll be fired but I'll probably be put on a PIP or something.

On top of that one of my cats is actively dying. She's 15 and I'm by no means ready to say goodbye.

Then I decided to upgrade my pc but of course I botched that and now I have a very expensive paperweight, a mountain of frustration, a few thousand € wasted and nothing but misery and shit to look forward to.

Ain't life grand? I'm in my 40's and when I was younger, I kept going thinking "one day surely things will finally be better". But they're not. They always keep getting worse and my ability to cope diminishes instead of growing. I feel every failure separately covering me with their weight, and I've finally racked up enough that the combined stress is starting to crush me completely.