Profile pic is from Jason Box, depicting a projection of Arctic warming to the year 2100 based on current trends.

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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • Whenever I see the 1% or 99% numbers when discussing wealth inequality, this fact is the first thing that comes to mind. We need to use decimal points to get to the real ones in power. 1% contains a lot of people who have money, but are still out of the loop as the rest of us, or as Carlin said, “not in the Club”. They are millionaires, but like they say, the difference between a million and a billion is about a billion.

    And that’s US - many Americans are in the 1% in worldwide numbers, with rough income numbers being around half a million income. Again, they may or may not be comfortable depending on their expenses, but having money doesn’t mean you have power. It’s the .1 that is the beginning of that, and the .01 is moving the pieces for everyone.

    (The numbers are just estimates, there’s gray areas everywhere, the point is the top people want us to be yelling at the top middle and ignore what they do.)



  • for what it’s worth, Mbin can see and interact with both Lemmy type communities as well as the Mastodon type of broadcasts. They are still two different parts, but within a single interface. Often I see things on the sidebar from them, usually dropped into “Random” as the algorithm doesn’t know what to put it in, and have the same thoughts as you. That it seems like it’s shouting out into nothingness. But…I could respond to the commentary, and it would bounce back to them. It’s just a different way to communicate, not as “permanent” as a discussion board format.






  • At one point years ago my work finally caught up with the 21st century and allowed creation of passwords longer than the fixed 8 characters it had always been. So I said great, made up something that was around 12 or so that I could remember. Until I logged into some terminal legacy programs we were still using and wouldn’t take that length. So yeah, I went back to 8 characters that wouldn’t break things. They eventually migrated away from such old programs and longer passwords became mandatory since they’d work everywhere, but I thought it was funny that briefly I tried to do the right thing but IT hadn’t thought out the whole picture yet.







  • Ollama.com is another method of self hosting. Figuring out which model type and size for what equipment you have is key, but it’s easy to swap out. That’s just an LLM, where you go from there depends on how deep you want to get into the code. An LLM by itself can work, it’s just limited. Most of the addons you see are extra things to give memory, speech, avatars, and other extras to improve the experience and abilities. Or you can program a lot of that yourself if you know Python. But as others have said, the more you try to get out, the more robust a system you’ll need, which is why you find the best ones online in cloud format. But if you’re okay with slower responses and lower features, self hosting is totally doable, and you can do what you want, especially if you get one of the “Jailbroke” models that has had some of the safety limits modified out of them to some degree.

    Also as mentioned, be careful not to get sucked in. Even a local model can be convincing enough sometimes to fool someone wanting to see things. Lots of people recognize that danger, but then belittle people who are looking for help in that direction (while marketing realizes the potential profits and tries very hard to sell it to the same people).


  • Your point is valid legally. And in many cases you’re right, your options are limited if someone isn’t driving correctly near you. However I still disagree on the idea that there’s not much you can do to avoid situations if you stay aware of potential problems. That’s where defensive driving comes in - if I see someone is following too close in traffic or isn’t slowing even though I’m signalling a turn, I’m not going to take a position of “well, I’ve done all my legal required actions, it’s out of my hands.” I’m going to use the outs that I’ve already got in my head to avoid them hitting me, whether that be changing my speed to space out the reaction time for them, abandoning the turn or move, or going off the road.