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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I know a few people though work who are interested in self-hosting LLMs. There are people in real life who are some amount of pro-LLM.

    Most people here are somewhere between neutral and very opposed, so I wouldn’t say the community is split, but there are certainly a range of perspectives, and I can understand where a large chunk of them are coming from, even beyond those I agree with.







  • My household is down to one old MacBook not running Linux, I use firefox for most browsing, lemmy obviously, I’ve replaced a bunch of nonfree tools with things like krita, and host a number of things on docker.

    But I also have an old Plex lifetime pass, and haven’t moved to jellyfin, functionally need an Android (or iOS) phone for work purposes, and fully abandoning corporate software like social media is hard, because so much communication happens there. I’ve used my own domain for email since college, so I have the option to move, but self hosting email is a very big step, and I don’t have the time to do it right. It’s small in some ways, but I try to run proprietary things in-browser rather than native builds when practical.






  • I just upgraded from Win10 to Debian on my primary/gaming desktop; every game I’ve played in the last 4 years in my Steam library is listed as compatible, most things I do on my computer are either a website, a game, or an application with a native Linux version or good wine compatibility.

    As a personal user who does a wide variety of things on my computer, I don’t really need Windows anymore. I’m dual booting for the time being as I configure things, but I’m quickly running out of reasons to use the old Win10 partition. And all the weird slowdowns it was exhibiting? Totally absent in Linux. I expected performance to be a wash, but it’s noticeably improved.



  • This is one of many examples of a class of problem where the technology is the easy part. There’s room to improve the tech certainly, but the technology sufficient to solve the problem is already well understood.

    The hard part is how to get people to actually do the necessary changes. To consume less, get fewer gas cars on the road, increase the amount of nuclear, hydro, solar, geothermal, and wind in the grid, and minimize coal and gas use. To reduce land use by cows, and increase land use by trees and native plants.

    But maybe AI is the secret here. We have tools that are in the hype moment whose training data already contains several reasonable solutions to climate change. Maybe if AI “finds” the solution to climate change, people will finally listen



  • The thing is business is more booming than it’s ever been, but making the line go up forever is a fool’s errand, at some point you’ll hit a peak. Hitting that peak is immensely punished in our economic system.

    If you make a hammer that’ll last 100 years, you’ll sell as many as you can reach customers who need one, before hammer sales plummet. Instead of being rewarded for making a great product, you’ll be punished when sales fall because you’ve solved a problem for most people.

    Advertising is kind of neutral in abstract in my head. Make a great product for a fair price, and let people know about it, and that’s actually probably a benefit to both parties. Make a terrible product, and tell a bunch of people it’s great, and you’ve spent resources doing them a disservice. But if you can convince them it’s good enough to spend money on it, and keep your revenue per customer above the cost to acquire them, it’s profitable. And that’s all they care about. It’s basically the same pattern as a scam, but profit is the only thing they’re told they’re allowed to care about.



  • Certainly, some interesting developments have happened, and we’ve realized our old models/thinking about progress towards AGI needed improvement… and that’s real. I think there’s a serious conversation to be had about what AGI would be, and how we can know we’re approaching it, and when it has arrived.

    But anybody telling you it is close either has something to sell you, or has themselves bought it.