Triggered a great lost memory: When I was on a dev team testing the graphing systems for a scientific data presentation software back in the early 90s I would try to come up with "fictional data sets" that would make interesting graphs. I tried to make them pretty, or weird, or just break the systems. Occasionally, it was so interesting I'd end up looking at the data / formulae that lead to the graph / design. Great creative space to be in for jumping back and forth between math and art.
Seriously: (local) LLMs may be helpful for therapy and/or self-enhancement (though I struggle to label these 2 "benefits" at the current level of tech, still too dependent on the user's (objective?) skill level :)
I'm lucky that (1) there is one place that offers therapy in my town in 2026 (all the rest of them went out of business in in the pandemic), (2) my insurance will pay for it, and (3) my therapist endorses foxwork.
Just recently, to the great relief of my wife, I developed a "cover story" that explains it all rationally and it's a lot easier to get help from humans like personal trainers, hairdressers, voice coaches, etc. Still I have good discussions with Copilot that help me refine character adjustments and such.
I suppose one perspective can be that it's cheaper to pay $20/mo than +$150 for a 45min session. So, "advice" and "opinions" become cheap and accessible. But, does it translate into quality?
I still find it hard to accept boilerplate psychological advice from an LLM.
I think that part of the reason why we gravitate towards other humans is because we assume they've gone through similar experiences. That's why I don't take relationship advice from someone that has never dated someone. An LLM lacks... humanity... it can tell me what the textbook says but life's more nuanced than just tokens.
From my point of view an LLM has access to all the knowledge in the world but lacks the nuance that makes advice valuable in these scenarios.
Since we're of a certain level of interest and openness, I'll throw a pop fiction title into the mix: Dan Brown's /Secret of Secrets/ for a tip toe through the non-local mind and soul topic. It's a 4 index card book for me - meaning I have 4 index cards of notes, references, and words worthy of reflection or research. Pretty good for a fiction best seller.
Somewhere in the late 90s, I worked on the IETF IP over TV broadcast. I mostly observed and tried to ask smart questions, but it was really fun to be a part of the group. I learned a lot about both the technical side of radio frequencies, how to contribute to a group when I only had one area of expertise (TCP/IP) of many required for success, and how to manage and be managed remotely by a decntralized group. To this day I use AM for pushing packets around the property. There's no doubt standard radio broadcasters are an awesome way to pick up where the usual networks fall down.
When we lost power for 10 days a few winters back we attempted to use the fire place for heat. It was a fail. Post and beam house (large wide open floor plan) with a large transfer from 1st to 2nd floor, and apprently my lack of skill for optimizing heat over beauty in the fireplace, left us without much of a thermal bump. To this day I swear we were pulling heat out of the chimney faster than we were heating the house; I cooled the house with fire.
An open fire is not a particularly warm thing to have unless you’re directly in front of it. Most of the heat goes straight up the flue, and it uses an enormous amount of air to keep burning - it will pull huge volumes from rvertwhere it can. This is why these old buildings didn’t suffer from damp issues - the open fires burning were ventilating them.
It's the same problem as those portable AC units: the exhaust (chimney in this case) draws large amounts of air in from outside which is at the wrong temperature (cold in this case).
If it has a flue or chimney, it isnt really an open fire. Look at an ancient long house, or farmer's thatched cottage from say 400 years ago. They had a fire on a stone circle on the floor in the middle of the room, and a high roof sometimes with a hole but often not. It was smoky, but kept everyone warm.
I think before heating without smoke, it was perfectly sensible to smoke tobacco because it was the least bad thing you were inhaling on a daily basis, and you were likely going to die of lung cancer regardless. Makes sense we didn’t really discover the risk until after we stopped using wood burning stoves (or burning coal, like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s mother would to in Little House when it was available)
Sorry, it’s not a topic I know an awful lot about. I was talking about an exposed hearth with a chimney like in the article, as opposed to a cast iron unit that recirculates the air like a stove
There have been times, with various crises, where I only half considered if indoor plumbing was such a great thing. But that's probably a very old-fashioned New England thing.
Yeah, if you actually want to heat the house with fire you’ll want an insert or a wood stove. Otherwise most fireplaces in most houses are decorative, and one pays for that decoration with heat loss.
And even those will require draft from outside the insert / stove, so either you build them with an inlet from outside, you pull cold air from badly sealed doors / windows, or the chimney draft will be insufficient.
They will require breathing but much less than an open fireplace and a lot more of the heat will be kept inside and not sent through the chimney. So overall they’re way on the positive side. If you can get a cold air inlet it’s better, but it’s far from necessary.
As a kid I lived in homes with both - and a home with a barrel stove - and as an adult with a pellet stove and I don’t remember that being a problem. Net, it was fine?
That’s not uncommon, but having grown up in a house heated by wood fires I knew that when building our current house. The main fireplace is on a central wall and has enormous thermal mass. Beauty and utility can be combined.
My grandparents' house was this way - the chimney was in the center of the house (built sometime in the late 1800s and rebuilt in the 1950s).
The fireplace had a stone chimney - and the kitchen was built in an 'L' shape around the first floor of the fireplace. The (master) bedroom (an additional bedroom was built in the 1950s), the stone of the chimney was a good quarter of one of the walls.
I do, however, think that the rough hewn stone and mortar of the chimney with the insets around it had a certain rustic beauty... aside from the "that got warm" in the winter and could keep the kitchen, living room, and bedroom warm.
To use it effectively you want one with water jacket and just use that hot water with your normal house heating system. You don't need much power to run circulation pump so UPS + some solar panels should be enough even in deep winter. There are also systems that get it out of the exhaust but that doesn't get you much heat storage, just instant heat and generally less efficient.
Old school version of that were masonry stoves that come with ton+ of mass for the bricks and smoke being routed all over (often including a place to sleep) to take as much heat as possible from it.
If I had money for that I'd put a big hot water tank for buffer, heat it normally with heat pump, and just had emergency water-sheathed fireplate, with big buffer you can just fire it up once and have tank slowly give the heat back to the building. Or fire it up at the coldest days to save some heat pump power in days where there is barely any solar.
I know someone who gets through the winter off their fireplace. Really old timber house with riverrock chimney. Their fireplace looks nothing like what you think of a fire place looking. You can’t see the fire, there is like this big iron door in front of it. They go through a huge pile of wood every winter, along with a couple electric heaters for rooms or office.
I assume most decorative fireplaces on the other hand are not built to heat the house.
There are a bunch of these on our island. The fireplaces are in the middle of the house, small doors, and once they get that brick warm the houses are 80 all winter long. They were built by Russian families in the 1940s, maybe a couple dozen homes on about 300 acres. The rest of the home's construction was typical; except for a few innovative walkways between main house and garage. I'm guessing it's what they knew from their homeland, even though temperatures here rarely drop below 20, and then, only for a short time.
Yeah fireplaces don’t make sense to me. Hot air rises and it sucks the existing heated air in the house which all flows out. The only way to heat the space is you need something with a lot of thermal mass that heats up in the process and then radiates heat. So a lot of bricks around the fire, some sort of baffle to enable the heat transfer and a system that sucks in air from the outside.
We saw stoves/fireplaces like this in a bunch of taverns in Slovenia. Huge hulking tiled cubes around the center of the building that just radiated a pleasant heat from every square inch of the surface. I imagine it was quite efficient, with just a very low fire burning to keep it in equilibrium.
If it was a rocket stove, it was a very small very hot fire. I've had a bit of a love affair with rocket stoves lately (even replaced my BBQ/grill with one).
I like the idea of an outside vent, and unfortunately, I think an insert of some kind. I can't help but first think of the goofy look of a wood fired stove sitting half in and half out of the fireplace. Surrounded by a few tons of river rock. That said, after a couple days of a couple degrees, it's either that or the tent in the basement.
Did you use a fire grate with a big space underneath and keep it swept clean? Or did you build up a big bed of ash under the grate? On the advice of a chimney sweep I put a perimeter of bricks under the grate to form walls and we're currently filling it with more and more ash (it really takes a while). It's starting to make a difference in how much heat comes back into the room. Without that void underneath, the fire doesn't burn so hot and cold air doesn't get pulled through so quickly.
(It feels like it's getting warmer - may all be wishful thinking though, I haven't taken any measurements!)
the fresh air inlet should be piped along the chimney walls, this would also recover the condensation heat of the water produced during combustion, but its not trivial to design while keeping in mind things like maintenance, different chimney column temperature (and thus different convective forces), capturing and effluence of the condensed water, ... the heated fresh air should not directly go to the fire but piped into the room.
Neuromodulation tools and systems that allow for a user to reverse normal reaction to stimuli is going to be a huge market soon. When I erg and just stare at the stats on the computer or phone, I struggle. In a good and not so good way. But when I put John Wick or Speed Racer (the movie) on a screen and pump up the volume, I can erg WAY past my normal break point. It's hard to stop, rather than hard to keep going. The new tools coming soon for focus, work, pain, and more.
I've been restoring my old daily driver, a 1985 Mercedes 300TD (the model has appeared in over 1000 films) for the past year. It's a funny questions to ask what is fully restored, is it all original, or OEM. One day I'm flexible about a piece of plate steel used for the fuel pedal mounting bracket and then the next day I'm feeling like a fraud for replacing the floor mats with after market. Either way, it's a rewarding process to bring anything back to a useful state. My Fixit shelf in the basement is a huge draw for my free time.
Since it's a societal problem, but solved on the microlevel of one person at a time, it seems the way to have a broader effect is to show the value of having connection with other people over the value of not.
Overcome any addictions (scrolling, gaming, etc.) that stand in the way would be easier if the goal was clear.
Overcoming attitudes and defensive beliefs (too many cliques, they won't talk to me...) go away when you can either recall a time when you had friends or know others who do.
Convince people it's better (in their own value system) to be social, have friends of all kinds, and let them know their value and meaning increase by being a friend, I think you'd have a hard time stopping people from becoming social.
I have to replicate the little shoes on the cassette mechanics of a Becker Grand Prix car stereo from 1985. The plastic shoes are brittle from age, heat, and wear. I've spent the last couple weeks finding about two dozen ways that almost work. Their tiny and need to fit on three even tinier feet that ride rails for loading the cassette. This morning, I found out that I can probably make several possible plans work - good enough. Which is to say, I found out I was delaying the project with hopes for the perfect solution when good enough was already there.
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