DefederateLemmyMl

  • Gen𝕏
  • Engineer ⚙
  • Techie 💻
  • Self hoster 🖧
  • Linux user 🐧
  • Ukraine supporter 🇺🇦
  • Pro science 💉
  • Dutch speaker
  • 1 Post
  • 271 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 8th, 2023

help-circle

  • There is a much more obvious country that has a vested interest in dividing western democracies, and weakening organizations that unite them, such as NATO and the EU, a country that’s currently in a proxy and hybrid war with Europe, and a country that has long understood the importance of information warfare: Russia.

    Of course with the Trump administration, you never know, but then you could also ask yourself: if Trump was a Russian agent, how different would his actions be? Not very different I think.



  • Why would I throw it away, when I can give it to someone who needs it more, or sell it?

    Because selling is always a hassle, dealing with choosing beggars and scammers, and it may not be worth much anymore for general use.

    For example, my old PC is a i7 4770k… it can’t run Windows 11 or play remotely recent games. I don’t know anyone who could use this thing, so to save a few watts I took out the GPU, put it in eco mode and have been using it as my Linux server.

    My NUC uses 6-7W idle.

    I have played around with some mini PC’s (minisforum and beelink brand), they’re neat but they turned out to be not very reliable, two have already died prematurely, and unfortunately they are not end-user serviceable. Lack of storage expansion options is an issue as well, if you don’t just want to stack a bunch of external USB drives on top of each other.





  • It’s also why Belgium is relatively low compared to the Netherlands.

    I’m sure that in Flanders the English proficiency is on par with the Netherlands, and certainly better than in Germany, but the French speaking parts pull the average down.

    I think part of the reason is that francophone regions overdub all media in French, so when growing up, children never consume media in any other language than French, except maybe some music. You could literally watch French TV for an entire day and not hear a single word in another language than French.










  • I think the problem stems from how LLMs are marketed to, and perceived by the public. They are not marketed as: this is a specific application of this-or-that AI or ML technology. They are marketed as “WE HAVE AI NOW!”, and the general public who is not familiar with AI/ML technologies equates this to AGI, because that’s what they know from the movies. The promotional imagery that some of these companies put out, with humanoid robots that look like they came straight out of Ex Machina doesn’t help either.

    And sure enough, upon first contact, an LLM looks like a duck and quacks like a duck … so people assume it is a duck, but they don’t realize that it’s a cardboard model of a duck with a taperecorder inside that plays back quacking sounds.


  • LLMs are decent with coding tasks if you know what you’re doing

    Only if the thing you are trying to do is commonly used and well documented, but in that case you could just read the documentation instead and learn a thing yourself, right?

    The other day I tried to get some instructions on how to do something specific in a rather obscure and rather opaquely documented cli tool that I need for work. I couldn’t quite make sense of the documentation, and I found the program’s behavior a bit erratic, so that’s why I turned to AI. It cheerfully and confidently told me (I’m paraphrasing): oh to do “this specific thing” you have to use the --something-specific switch, and then it gave some command line examples using that switch that looked like they made complete sense.

    So I thought: oh, did I overlook that switch? Could it be that easy? So I looked in the documentation and sure enough… the AI had been bullshitting me and that switch didn’t exist.

    Then there was the time when I asked it to generate an ARM template (again, poorly documented bullshit) to create some service in Azure with some specific parameters. It gave me something that looked like an ARM template, but sure as hell wasn’t a valid one. This one wasn’t completely useless though, at least I was able to cross reference with an existing template and with some trial-and-error, I was able to copy over some of the elements that I needed.


  • That’s another option, but it’s a bit more cumbersome having to cherrypick which exact backports you need for your specific hardware. Also, if you then for some reason don’t upgrade to the next stable release when it comes out, backports get abandoned after 1 year instead of the customary 3 years for the rest of the oldstable release.

    From my experience, running trixie/testing the past year or so on a minipc with hardware that was a bit too recent for bookworm, I can say that the cadence of security patches has been about the same between bookworm and testing.

    And let’s be honest, on a desktop system your main attack surface is going to be the software you go online with, i.e. the browser. So if you make sure that is kept up to date (flatpak, vendor repo, …) that already goes a long way.


  • the ctrl-super-alt is completely different

    It’s not “completely different” … and that’s the problem. Completely different I can handle. I can manage knowing vim keybindings, readline keybindings and standard windows keybindings at the same time. What I can’t handle is: having to use command + C on one Mac and control + C on Windows to copy, but then in some cases you do use “control” on both OS-es, and sometimes control and alt are switched … It’s because they are similar but different that it’s such a mess trying to get proficient in both at the same time.