Hi! I'm Kieran "KG" Bicheno, Discord Moderator and AI specialist

Lounge Introduce Yourself
#1

Hi everyone! I take care of some of the more esoteric tasks on the Discord server and created the Floria bot (go on — check out what she can do!).

I’m currently studying AI with a focus on its use in regional media after ten years spent as the Online News Editor for Australia’s largest network of newspapers. I have sixteen years’ experience in online media and before that worked as an economist and political staffer. If you’re wondering how one gets into any of those careers, my advice would be understand social research and statistics.

My daily driver is currently Obsidian backed up by GitHub and Flameshot. My desktop runs off Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy and my at-home server cluster is made of five Ubuntu 20.04.1 Focal machines all running different data analysis and OSINT projects I’ve built up over the years.

I donate spare compute time on my server cluster to farmers and regional organisations who’ve been hit hard by COVID-19 and the economic crisis, so if you have computing gear you’re throwing out — please consider sending it on over so I can help as many people as possible.

My operating hours are strange; I live in Australia but I have an odd sleeping pattern thanks to modern pharmaceuticals. Even if I’m offline, feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the topics above, need an extra player for Diplomacy, or just want to chat with someone who’s not going to judge.

I look forward to us all honing our productivity procedures to free up time for us to do what we each individually value most. Ci vediamo!

  • KGB
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#2

I have to say I am really loving these full intros. Finally I am getting to know everyone in this community properly! :blush:

I’m very curious what that compute time is used for!

#3

Generally, compute time is just time on a computer that you’re running a program. In most cases this is a script of some sort that you can’t just run on your own computer because you don’t have one, it’s too slow, or needs specific hardware etc.

In my case I have a mix of students, HAM radio enthusiasts, and an astronomer who just can’t afford to use cloud computing and have run out of free options from the big providers. I was hosting a few websites until recently and even had a wiki.js site hosted.

I no longer host people’s websites unless they’re in dire straights because it’s a long-term favour that has been abused before (I lost an entire storage server to someone trying to use my gear as an OpenDirectory for pirated CCNA, A+ etc course videos, would have been fine but the IOPS on an SSD ran up and somehow took the channel between the RAID card and the CPU with it when it graveyarded itself).

#4

Dell R720 gone, replacement Dell R710 not quite as smick.

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#5

Gotcha, very interesting. Still curious even for some more specifics, like what are each of these people running on your servers? The astronomer is doing compute workloads, but of what? Galaxy collision sims? :grinning:

Ouch! I do still host people’s sites, but only on a shared server (Dreamhost) since I don’t have to admin it. Can still be a pain occasionally though.

#6

The Astronomer is running some python scripts to split some truly mammoth datasets down to sizes his old laptop can deal with. He then combines a bunch of them into new sets with the data he needs. His SQL-foo is intimidating.

As it is I had to devote 100ishTB of storage on a friend’s cloud server to host the original datasets. I set him up with his husband though so he owed me a favour. Took us a while to get them all though. One of them was stored in archive, on tape.

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#7

100TB! That’s pretty incredible. Not surprising given what little I know of astronomy data sets, but… I have no idea how you’d even shift that much data around. (you don’t need to answer :smile:)

Thanks for elaborating a bit! Interesting stuff.

#8

Time and having your ISP’s owner on speed-dial.

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#9

Tell me about it , this is so nice !

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#10

I didn’t mention it in my intro but I also studied and have a certification in Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. I try to read a recent paper on the topic as part of my daily schedule.

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#11

:open_mouth::anguished::frowning::hushed::astonished::dizzy_face:
What fields arts and science haven’t you touched , my man ?!

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#12

I can’t draw or paint for the life of me. If someone put a gun to my head and said “sketch or die,” I’d start thinking of how I’ve had a good life and wait for the end to come.

This includes musical composition or comprehension of any sort. I learned the difference between a minor and major key the other night. It only took my wife 19 years to get that one through my skull. Next we’re working on what a note is.

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