• 1 Post
  • 392 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle



  • If you’re willing to pay money for it, you can get your own domain for $2-$15 per year, then use it with pretty much any commercial email service. That way you can change email providers without changing your address.

    This is my plan going forward. I’m going to suffer the inconvenience of changing my address, but only one more time, not every time I want to change providers.




  • If you think this isn’t related to human rights, then you’ve missed the point.

    People have the right to use technology, and indeed we effectively need technology to exercise our right to free speech. You cannot have one without the other. Not anymore.

    The right way to think about this that they are arbitrarily banning a topic of discussion simply because it is not dead-center average. This isn’t even a legal issue, and the justification is utter nonsense (Facebook itself runs on Linux, like >90% of the internet). No government has officially asked them to do this, though the timing suggests that it is unofficially from the Trump administration.

    This is about exerting control, establishing precedent, and applying a chilling effect to anything not directly aligned with their interests. This obviously extends to human rights issues. This is a test run.


  • But any 50 watt chip will get absolutely destroyed by a 500 watt gpu

    If you are memory-bound (and since OP’s talking about 192GB, it’s pretty safe to assume they are), then it’s hard to make a direct comparison here.

    You’d need 8 high-end consumer GPUs to get 192GB. Not only is that insanely expensive to buy and run, but you won’t even be able to support it on a standard residential electrical circuit, or any consumer-level motherboard. Even 4 GPUs (which would be great for 70B models) would cost more than a Mac.

    The speed advantage you get from discrete GPUs rapidly disappears as your memory requirements exceed VRAM capacity. Partial offloading to GPU is better than nothing, but if we’re talking about standard PC hardware, it’s not going to be as fast as Apple Silicon for anything that requires a lot of memory.

    This might change in the near future as AMD and Intel catch up to Apple Silicon in terms of memory bandwidth and integrated NPU performance. Then you can sidestep the Apple tax, and perhaps you will be able to pair a discrete GPU and get a meaningful performance boost even with larger models.


  • This will be highly platform-dependent, and also dependent on your threat model.

    On PC laptops, you should probably enable Secure Boot (if it’s not enabled by default), and password-protect your BIOS. On Macs you can disable booting from external media (I think that’s even the default now, but not totally sure). You should definitely enable full-disk encryption – that’s FileVault on Mac and Bitlocker on Windows.

    On Apple devices, you can enable USB Restricted Mode, which will protect against some attacks with USB cables or devices.

    Apple devices also have lockdown mode, which restricts or disables a whole bunch of functionality in an effort to reduce your attack surface against a variety of sophisticated attacks.

    If you’re worried about hardware hacks, then on a laptop you’d want to apply some tamper-evident stickers or something similar, so if an evil maid opens it up and tampers with the hardware, at least you’ll know something fishy happened, so you can go drop your laptop in an active volcano or something.

    If you use any external devices, like a keyboard, mouse, hard drive, whatever…well…how paranoid are you? I’m going to be honest: there is a near 0% chance I would even notice if someone replaced my charging cables or peripheral cables with malicious ones. I wouldn’t even notice if someone plugged in a USB keylogger between my desktop PC and my keyboard, because I only look at the back of my PC once in a blue moon. Digital security begins with physical security.

    On the software side, make sure you’re the only one with admin rights, and ideally you shouldn’t even log into admin accounts on a day-to-day basis.



  • vd (VisiData) is a wonderful TUI spreadsheet program. It can read lots of formats, like csv, sqlite, and even nested formats like json. It supports Python expressions and replayable commands.

    I find it most useful for large CSV files from various sources. Logs and reports from a lot of the tools I use can easily be tens of thousands of rows, and it can take many minutes just to open them in GUI apps like Excel or LibreOffice.

    I frequently need to re-export fresh data, so I find myself needing to re-process and re-arrange it every time, which visidata makes easy (well, easier) with its replayable command files. So e.g. I can write a script to open a raw csv, add a formula column, resize all columns to fit their content, set the column types as appropriate, and sort it the way I need it. So I can do direct from exporting the data to reading it with no preprocessing in between.


  • My experience might be a bit outdated, but I remember finding the default Mac OS X Terminal extremely slow. A few years back I ran an output-heavy command, and the speed difference between displaying the output in terminal vs outputting it to a file was orders of magnitude. The same thing on my Linux system was much, much faster. I’m not sure how much of that was due specifically to rendering, vs memory management or something else, though.

    I might see if I can still reproduce this in Sequoia and if Ghostty is faster on Mac.




  • I guess the idea is that the models themselves are not infringing copyright, but the training process DID. Some of the big players have admitted to using pirated material in training data. The rest obviously did even if they haven’t admitted it.

    While language models have the capacity to produce infringing output, I don’t think the models themselves are infringing (though there are probably exceptions). I mean, gzip can reproduce infringing material too with the correct input. If producing infringing work requires both the algorithm AND specific, intentional user input, then I don’t think you should put the blame solely on the algorithm.

    Either way, I don’t think existing legal frameworks are suitable to answer these questions, so I think it’s more important to think about what the law should be rather than what it currently is.

    I remember stories about the RIAA suing individuals for many thousands of dollars per mp3 they downloaded. If you applied that logic to OpenAI — maximum fine for every individual work used — it’d instantly bankrupt them. Honestly, I’d love to see it. But I don’t think any copyright holder has the balls to try that against someone who can afford lawyers. They’re just bullies.


  • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.orgtoLinux@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    Laptops are a crapshoot, so I’d recommend sticking with distros that are known to support your specific model.

    Desktops should, in general, just work.

    That said, I’ve never personally had a seamless experience. There’s always something I need to struggle to configure. Usually it’s because I’m very picky and I like things to work MY way. The alternative on Widows would not be that it works my way; it would be that there’d be no way to do that so I’d just have to deal with it. If you’re willing to just roll with the defaults, then yeah, most basic things should just work.

    The biggest gotcha is GPU drivers. Not all distros ship with recent kernel versions with modern drivers. You should be pretty safe with Fedora and derivatives.




  • Thanks for the info. I was not aware that Bluesky had public, shareable block lists. That is indeed a great feature.

    For anyone else like me who was not aware, I found this site with an index of a lot of public block lists: https://blueskydirectory.com/lists . I was not able to load some of them, but others did load successfully. Maybe some were deleted or are not public? I’m not sure.

    I’ve never been heavily invested in microblogging, so my first-hand experience is limited and mostly academic. I have accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, though. I would not have realized this feature was available in Bluesky if you hadn’t mentioned it and I didn’t find that index site in a web search. It doesn’t seem easily discoverable within Bluesky’s own UI.

    Edit: I agree, of course, that there is a larger systemic problem at the society level. I recently read this excellent piece (very long but worth it!) that talks a bit about how that relates to social media: https://www.wrecka.ge/against-the-dark-forest/ . Here’s a relevant excerpt:

    If this truly is the case—if the only way to improve our public internet is to convert all humans one by one to a state of greater enlightenment—then a full retreat into the bushes is the only reasonable course.

    But it isn’t the case. Because yes, the existence of dipshits is indeed unfixable, but building arrays of Dipshit Accelerators that allow a small number of bad actors to build destructive empires defended by Dipshit Armies is a choice. The refusal to genuinely remodel that machinery when its harms first appear is another choice. Mega-platform executives, themselves frequently dipshits, who make these choices, lie about them to governments and ordinary people, and refuse to materially alter them.