There’s the MTT S80 (First PCIe Gen 5 GPU lol) which is the consumer grade version of Moore Thread’s enterprise GPUs like S4000, but the problem is that they trade off super cheap VRAM and PCIe bandwidth for low compute power compared to even antiquated stuff from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia.

They’re actually a great choice if you want to run AI/LLM stuff for really cheap, and Moore threads has their own CUDA knockoff called MUSA which iirc does have support in the various LLM backends available. Back when they released, it was going for something like $160 in China and ~$200-250 online. Could easily pool the VRAM, though finding a mobo+CPU combo with enough PCIe lanes to spare meant you’d most likely not be taking advantage of more than maybe 2 or 3 cards in one tensor parallel split.

China’s domestic processor production is still catching up, so even though they have access to high speed RAM and all the latest standards, they don’t have the cores to match.

Their last KX7000 x86 CPU was comparable to a skylake i5 or i7, but just with newer standards like DDR5 and PCIe gen 4. So they’re about 7 years behind based on that estimate.

You can still make a CI/CD pipeline that doesn’t self combust every 5 minutes lol.

laziness about having to go through and reinstall everything on a clean install

Package managers make this a breeze to the point that people upload their personal script to github so they can run one command to get all of their software and theming on a new PC lol.

No need to even go that far, just pop open the app “store” (everything is free lol) and just click away at everything you want. Can probably get most of your stuff in 10 minutes tops.

What even are the significant differences with different distros?

It boils down to how effective the user experience & preference is and what the backend is built on (which usually affects user experience & preference lol).

Mint is highly recommended because it cleans up a ton of the random stuff from Ubuntu upstream and maintains a clean and low cost (cpu/ram usage) desktop environment that’s very easy to use. It’s highly recommended for anyone who is new or inexperienced with linux or OSs in general and just wants to get on with life. The single downside is that its packages are not the latest and greatest, so its great for everything except gaming where you want the new stuff like drivers, proton upgrades, new features, etc.

Fedora is what Ubuntu was 15 years ago, which is best all around user experience. It chooses very sensible but cutting edge packages which gives you excellent performance benefits of new tech like BTRFS/XFS without losing out on stability. It’s also the distro Linus himself uses because he finds it easy to just install and again, get on with life lol. Fedora also has excellent user docs and forums which is great if you need help with something. Only downside is I think you have to flick a switch (or run a command) to enable all video codecs because they don’t ship it on their main package repository since H264 & HEVC have weird licensing issues.

Bazzite is a downstream of Fedora Silverblue, which is an atomic distro that makes it really hard to screw something up by using a read only root and rollback-able updates, similar to Android and SteamOS. It was specifically designed to make gaming on handhelds an easy out of box experience so you don’t have to manually set up stuff like touchscreen keyboards or power settings on non PC hardware. You can run it on PC if you’d like the benefit of the rollback image system which can unbork your machine super easy, though it already is quite hard to bork because the root filesystem is read only, so apps are installed in a similar way as Android apps (Flatpak).

Learning Linux is actually quite intuitive (thankfully), and everything from the GUI perspective is mostly the same, if not an outright improvement in several areas. I would highly recommend playing with the live install of whichever distro you pick along with the desktop environment to get a feel for how it looks before you commit to an install.

Desktop Environments are also not tied to distros. You can basically choose any DE on any distro (like Mint’s Cinnamon on Fedora), but the two biggest ones are GNOME (Mac like) and KDE (Windows like). I think KDE is way better than GNOME, but you can play with both & more to see which one you prefer.

Your main issue to figure out when permanently switching is if there is any software or process that you rely on in Windows that would be different in Linux. For me it was switching from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice (there are also more, like OnlyOffice), which was completely painless since it was like 95% the same and could open up docx just fine.

The other possible ones could be:

• Adobe stuff (some stuff like PS works, but it’s a bit involved to setup the first time)
• Games that use kernel level anticheat (big nono in linux because it breaks security)

The second one is really what’s keeping a lot of people from making a permanent change which I’m hoping Valve can change with the upcoming Steam Machine because even for Windows, its like running a rootkit that really should not have that level of access to your PC.

I don’t play any games that utilize it, but you might and it won’t work on linux until the publisher decides to let it: https://areweanticheatyet.com/. The comments are usually outdated back from when the game first released, so as long is it’s green or blue, it should run out of box.

Some publishers (Epic Games mostly) are also just dicks that don’t use kernel level in some games but still choose not to enable linux support when compiling their game, despite all the major anitcheat vendors supporting linux and even mac.

The good news is that for everything else, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll actually see an increase in performance from Windows. The biggest one for me was World of Warships which went from 2 minutes load times down to just 30 seconds on a hard drive, and about 15-20%+ FPS even when on an SSD.

It would be like the 2007 financial/housing crisis.

You could get amazingly huge and quality houses, cars, stores, etc for dirt cheap but that’s because a metric ton of people were layed off and had to sell their assets to make ends meet.

The AI bubble is compounded by the fact that it’s primarily propped up by ~1 trillion USD in private credit, which for all intents and purposes is basically just the same system as CDOs which caused the 2007/8 crash.

If AI blows, all that debt comes back null, and since all other major investments are based on speculation and multiplied debt obligations, the economy collapses (again).

Granted, if you’re lucky enough to not fall to the effects of such a crash, components will be dirt cheap and great time to buy.

But if you’re layed off, you’re looking at potentially a year+ of unemployment, in which case it won’t matter if you can get a 5090 for $300 because you’ll be more concerned with surviving without an income.

Like… what exactly lol?

Most discussions about Linux here devolve into distro sledging lol.

Even the joke stuff like Nvidia is from a bygone era.

My personal recommendation is Fedora, but any competent distro is miles more user friendly than current windows 11.

If they had tried at least we’d get a 1/5 chance that the windows market stranglehold dies lol.

People thinking this isn’t a monopoly enforcement action in disguise are the same people who think banning Huawei was justified.

Google’s one mistake was that they sold Motorolla to Lenovo, who ran it as low cost shovelware to make the mobile phone market in the US not look like a complete oligopoly. They kept their cost low by using complete stock Google ROMs while every other OEM exited the market.

Until recently when Lenovo properly built up their hardware lineup and started jumping ship to GrapheneOS the moment Google started clamping down.

Wireguard.

Dunno if Cloudflare does effective auth for the tunnel or if you have to set that up yourself, but I don’t bother trying to expose services to the internet in any way because some of this stuff was just never designed for proper web security (cough Jellyfin).

It’s still worth setting up a wildcard cert with ACME so you get nice https and a real domain.

If it weren’t for the massive silicon supply lockdown, I feel like we could easily see local models making it into consumer tech in the coming years and effectively replace all those casual users since you no longer have to pay a subscription to do regular/low effort tasks on whatever device you own. A lot of it has gotten really good, especially with lots of quantization techniques getting superseded by new ones each year.

Actually I guess it could probably go the same way as cable and streaming. Eventually they’ll keep amping up the ante with the billing (because they always do), and people will just get turned off into a bunch of “cheaper” 3rd parties that have lower costs with some niche tricks, which will fragment the userbase too much.

Also I haven’t looked into it, but do they advertise those $50 users separately from enterprise? I don’t really know anyone outside of “power” users that aren’t just using the $20 a month basic plans that give you enough tokens to get by (for now).

I feel like they’re inflating their numbers from enterprise estimates because that’s where they can bait with cheap API prices and then hook with vendor lock in.

I wonder what exactly they screwed up to bork it like this. It would seem like a no brainer to leave all the git stuff alone and add all the random fancy AI stuff in a separated manner.

Got smacked with the pull request incident banner yesterday and now I’m actually considering to just move all my random personal repos to GitLab lol.

I’ve been putting off spinning up Forgejo at home because I really need to clean up my homelab design (really abusing quadlets to the point where it would be easier to just do K8s), and I already know I’m gonna immediately waste all my time setting up a dumb CI/CD pipeline that looks really cool but just makes a big mess every time I commit a mistake because I am not in the mood of setting up a monkeychain of pre-commit hooks at home lmao.

I didn’t mean for FOSS projects actually, I meant the bug bounties run by silicon valley giants lol.

FOSS bug reports are done either out of love or spite lmao.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrFmKvX3LmQ

I don’t want to shame the user, but there was a recent discussion thread on npmplus where someone was using a compose file generated by an LLM and was confused why the hallucinated env variables weren’t working.

The kicker is that npmplus literally gives you a comprehensive and complete compose file with every optional setting commented out with a brief description, so you can just copy and edit to your desire.

Which of course the LLM decided to ignore anyway and come up with its own config options lol.

On a somewhat related note, I feel like bug bounties these days have become sort of under subsidized for well developed applications. All the medium and lower findings payouts are pretty fair, but lots of the high/critical bounties seem a lot less than what I would expect, especially compared to some of the huge prize pools I’ve seen at some conventions (upwards of 50k USD).

I have no idea how much they fetch on the black market, but it seems weird to me that something like an RCE receives less than 10k, which could easily be utilized by some APT to net millions in a more sophisticated ransomware attack.

Ask IT to make their DCs public facing /s

Really holding out on Motorolla to add their announced GrapheneOS support because I want my funni flip phone lol

It depends whether or not they left the DNS setting unlocked, which is actually highly likely.

Would have to use a public server, but it should in theory work.

I’ve been trialing Vaultwarden for a while and while I do like the server sync setup and clean web access, the Bitwarden browser plugin is just okay despite being an “enterprise” solution. It misses probably about 20% of websites when creating a new account, forcing you to grab the password from the generator history and make a new entry manually.

KeepassXC is much better in that regard, and it’s almost as good as the default credential handler of Firefox, and it lets you set up a bunch of custom stuff to extend the functionality if you want. Plus it has some neat kbdx options aside from AES256.

Only downside is syncing, which I’m debating how I’ll deal with something better than syncthing on android (protocol is great, android makes it a PITA to have a background process if its not Google spyware).

I still haven’t figured out if Google’s flight search forwards view data similar to checking on the actual airline’s website because I’ve definitely seen price hikes occur in realtime, but I can’t tell if that’s because of constant rechecks close to the flight date, or just the static algorithm increasing the price as the flight date approaches.

Otherwise I’m kind of skeptical of how they allow Google to use such data and present it for free.

Right? I was like dang you’re already half way there lol.

The reason though is that they probably don’t want to discourage payments because I have seen businesses refuse to use Monero in ransomware attacks because their insurance agreement complicates payout on a fundamentally untraceable currency. Even if Bitcoin is technically decentralized, they can report the transaction and specific currency blocks to whatever federal agency is responsible for fraud.

Still, why not offer both and put a 5% discount on Monero.