Welp, there goes the neighborhood. If they want to do an IPO they’ll probably enshittify the hell out of the platform and jettison all remotely raunchy communities. Because nothing says “good investment” than a service that just drove out a fair chunk of its user base.

That undersells them slightly.

LLMs are powerful tools for generating text that looks like something. Need something rephrased in a different style? They’re good at that. Need something summarized? They can do that, too. Need a question answered? No can do.

LLMs can’t generate answers to questions. They can only generate text that looks like answers to questions. Often enough that answer is even correct, though usually suboptimal. But they’ll also happily generate complete bullshit answers and to them there’s no difference to a real answer.

They’re text transformers marketed as general problem solvers because a) the market for text transformers isn’t that big and b) general problem solvers is what AI researchers are always trying to create. They have their use cases but certainly not ones worth the kind of spending they get.

I know I sorted by feed by Top 6 Hours but that doesn’t mean I expect six hours worth of text in a single image. Did they copy and paste three different job postings together? Did they use a LLM that had its stop token configured incorrectly? Is it an attempt at weeding out people who object to having their time wasted by corporate bullshit?

We may never know. What we do know is that this wall of text has more red flags than a Chinese military parade.

Given that prisons are an industry in the States and that inmates are one of their main sources of cheap labor, the high recidivism rate is there to maximize profits.

Because giving answers is not a LLM’s job. A LLM’s job is to generate text that looks like an answer. And we then try to coax framework that into generating correct answers as often as possible, with mixed results.

I remember talking to someone about where LLMs are and aren’t useful. I pointed out that LLMs would be absolutely worthless for me as my work mostly consists of interacting with company-internal APIs, which the LLM obviously hasn’t been trained on.

The other person insisted that that is exactly what LLMs are great at. They wouldn’t explain how exactly the LLM was supposed to know how my company’s internal software, which is a trade secret, is structured.

But hey, I figured I’d give it a go. So I fired up a local Llama 3.1 instance and asked it how to set up a local copy of ASDIS, one such internal system (name and details changed to protect the innocent). And Llama did give me instructions… on how to write the American States Data Information System, a Python frontend for a single MySQL table containing basic information about the member states of the USA.

Oddly enough, that’s not what my company’s ASDIS is. It’s almost as if the LLM had no idea what I was talking about. Words fail to express my surprise at this turn of events.

I can appreciate guns from a technical design standpoint. Some of them can look good. I’d even consider owning an inert USFA Zip .22 as an example of spectacularly bad product design. (I’m a UI/UX guy and the total lack of consideration for ergonomics is fascinating to me.)

I have no desire to own a functioning gun, though. Very few people really need one.

That does make encryption was less appealing to me. On one of my machines / and /home are on different drives and parts of ~ are on yet another one.

I consider the ability to mount file systems in random folders or to replace directories with symlinks at will to be absolutely core features of unixoid systems. If the current encryption toolset can’t easily facilitate that then it’s not quite RTM for my use case.

If you use a .local domain, your device MUST ask the mDNS address (224.0.0.251 or FF02::FB) and MAY ask another DNS provider. Successful resolution without mDNS is not an intended feature but something that just happens to work sometimes. There’s a reason why the user interfaces of devices like Ubiquiti gateways warn against assigning a name ending in .local to any device.

I personally have all of my locally-assigned names end with .lan, although I’m considering switching to a sub-subdomain of a domain I own (so instead of mycomputer.lan I’d have mycomputer.home.mydomain.tld). That would make the names much longer but would protect me against some asshat buying .lan as a new gTLD.

No, there is no punctuation missing, the headline writing style is just hurting comprehensibility. I’ll expand it a bit.

“A startup, which is set to brick an $800 kids’ robot, is trying to open-source it first”

It is a well-designed system font. Say what you will about Microsoft but they do know how to make a good font or two.

I remember a friend of mine once ordering a Double Triple Whopper and being annoyed that Burger King’s definition of “double” is “with one extra patty”. So he had to order a Double Double Double Triple Whopper to get the desired result.

They delivered the thing to our table together with a knife and fork. I guess ordering an unholy totem pole of meat like that gets you table service at a BK.

The other thing that was notable about it was that the three "Double"s only added three patties to the burger and nothing else. As a result this caricature of a burger was now 80% overcooked ground beef and extremely dry.

He ate half of it. We took the other half home, put it in the microwave and drowned it in ketchup, which greatly increased it’s edibility. It still sucked, though.

But it’s still not a backup strategy. You should always have a second partition on the server that you sync your data over to. For performance reasons this partition should be on the same RAID 0 array.

There is one metric where Intel is better and that’s Thunderbolt. You typically get more full-featured Thunderbolt ports with an Intel CPU. Of course whether that point is relevant is highly dependent on your use case.

Ah, so they actually got that implemented. Nice.

Garuda for me. The reasons are similar; just replace some optimization with some convenience. It’s a bit garish by default but pleasant to use.

Flatpak has its benefits, but there are tradeoffs as well. I think it makes a lot of sense for proprietary software.

For everything else I do prefer native packages since they have fewer issues with interop. The space efficiency isn’t even that important to me; even if space issues should arise, those are relatively easy to work around. But if your password manager can’t talk to your browser because the security model has no solution for safe arbitrary IPC, you’re SOL.

Hoo boy, you weren’t kidding. I find it amazing how quickly this went from “the kernel team is enforcing sanctions” to an an unfriendly abstract debate about the definition of liberalism. I shouldn’t, really, but I still am.

Aw, c’mon! Who doesn’t enjoy piping ten megabytes of JavaScript through Webpack to achieve those crucial on-scroll effects on an otherwise static page?

Oh yeah, the equation completely changes for the cloud. I’m only familiar with local usage where you can’t easily scale out of your resource constraints (and into budgetary ones). It’s certainly easier to pivot to a different vendor/ecosystem locally.

By the way, AMD does have one additional edge locally: They tend to put more RAM into consumer GPUs at a comparable price point – for example, the 7900 XTX competes with the 4080 on price but has as much memory as a 4090. In systems with one or few GPUs (like a hobbyist mixed-use machine) those few extra gigabytes can make a real difference. Of course this leads to a trade-off between Nvidia’s superior speed and AMD’s superior capacity.