I’m sorry to hear you’re going through this qt, it can be really tough. I found myself in a similar spot when I transitioned and moved to a rural area. It’s been two years since then and i’m extremely happy in a T4T relationship.

On “feeling like a freak,” yeah, I get that. It sucks to feel that way. Part of that perception changes with time as hormones do their thing and you fit more into a feminine role… part of it doesn’t go away. I think it’s important to realize that if people are around you and being friendly they likely don’t think you’re a freak, and acting as if they do will just make it awkward. You’re not a pervert for being trans and liking cis women. Be confident and love yourself.

Feel free to reach out if you need someone to talk to <3 all will be alright.

I’m a little more optimistic; like yeah, all of that is definitely happening, but there is lots of genuinely helpful research being done in the US. Not everything here is rotten. China’s research output is just an order of magnitude greater. See https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/generate/all/global/academic for a cool list of research outputs by institution.

China dominated the Top500 list by 2017, with 202 machines compared to 143 from the U.S. Then the U.S. restricted Chinese access to Intel processors and other U.S. hardware in 2015, followed by broader export restrictions under the Trump administration in 2019, which have been tightened further by the Biden administration in 2022. As a result, Chinese participation in the Top500 list dwindled, to some degree because access of Chinese entities to the latest hardware got harder and to some degree because Chinese scientists no longer want to share details about their machines with anyone.

Why is anyone surprised that the country with the highest research output, that has historically dominated the Top500 list, has the fastest supercomputers?

I find that rogerebert.com ’s reviews are pretty solid. I use that for a quick tool to decide if I want to watch something - I don’t think i’ve ever been disappointed by a film they rated 3.5-4 stars.

The full size model barely runs on 160 GB VRAM and something like 200 GB CPU buffer. I’m trying to scale it across many GPUs but haven’t had much luck yet.

I am BEGGING for any editor other than VSCode to have decent remote development. I want to go open source but everything I’ve tried (remote-nvim, distant, tramp, vscodium, etc.) just doesn’t cut it.