I never thought about it that way, but yeah. Spot-on.

I don’t hate it in Enterprise to be honest, because there is the context of “humanity not yet at its best”.

Weight & Diet Trackers

I’m not going to be detailed with this section because it was honestly the worst one to gather info on

I feel this. I use Waistline. Or I should say I would use Waistline if it wasn’t such a drag, but in reality I haven’t launched it in months. It was the closest drop-in replacement I could find for MyFitnessPal (which is proprietary and extraordinarily bloated), letting me search a database of foods either by type or barcode. But MyFitnessPal was a much smoother experience. I still recommend Waistline because AFAIK it’s the best out there, but the bar is pretty low.

Both have a problem with redundant and contradictory items in the database, because they are at least partly crowdsourced. Lots of entries have weird or meaningless units.

That was the my first distro. Getting it to run off a FireWire drive was an interesting introduction to Linux.

Fun fact: yum stands for Yellow dog Update Manager. I know it’s been replaced by dnf but I still think that’s cool.

And you can’t tell when something is active/focused or not because every goddamn app and web site wants to use its own “design language”. Wish I had a dollar for every time I saw two options, one light-gray and one dark-gray, with no way to know whether dark or light was supposed to mean “active”.

I miss old-school Mac OS when consistency was king. But even Mac OS abandoned consistency about 25 years ago. I’d say the introduction of “brushed metal” was the beginning of the end, and IIRC that was late 90s. I am old and grumpy.

Say all you want about hallucinations, but AI will never be able to outperform humans at bullshitting, so sales and marketing is safe.

“It’s popular so it must be good/true” is not a compelling argument. I certainly wouldn’t take it on faith just because it has remained largely unquestioned by marketers.

The closest research I’m familiar with showed the opposite, but it was specifically related to the real estate market so I wouldn’t assume it applies broadly to, say, groceries or consumer goods. I couldn’t find anything supporting this idea from a quick search of papers. Again, if there’s supporting research on this (particularly recent research), I would really like to see it.

If there is any research from the last 50 years suggesting this actually works, I’d love to see it.

It says:

Available Architectures
aarch64, x86_64

And it uses Android Translation Layer. Interesting. I’ll give it a shot on my desktop later.

Yeah, they were able (and thus legally required) to hand over the user’s recovery email address, which is what got them caught. You don’t need to enter a recovery email address, and you can of course choose to use an equally-secure service for recovery.

One big technical issue to note is that Proton doesn’t use end-to-end encryption for email headers, which includes recipients and subject lines, among other things. So that’s potentially exposed to law enforcement as well. I believe Tuta does encrypt headers.

I don’t think the free accounts cost them a whole lot. You only get 1GB of mail space, and the free versions have minimal features (e.g. you can only create one email filter). They make their money on paid accounts, which seems legit to me.

However, it is still comparatively easy for a determined individual to remove a watermark and make AI-generated text look as if it was written by a person.

And that’s assuming people are using a model specifically designed with watermarking in the first place. In practice, this will only affect the absolute dumbest adversaries. It won’t apply at all to open source or custom-built tools. Any additional step in a workflow is going to wash this right out either way.

My fear is that regulators will try to ban open models because the can’t possibly control them. That wouldn’t actually work, of course, but it might sound good enough for an election campaign, and I’m sure Microsoft and Google would dump a pile of cash on their doorstep for it.

Who thought it was a good idea to let an internet ad company control our internet client?

It seemed a lot more reasonable 15 years ago. The default on Windows at the time of Chrome’s rise was Internet Explorer.

I am watching Ladybird with great interest. The world needs a new-from-the-ground-up browser.

Yeah, AMD is lagging behind Nvidia in machine learning performance by like a full generation, maybe more. Similar with raytracing.

If you want absolute top-tier performance, then the RTX 4090 is the best consumer card out there, period. Considering the price and power consumption, this is not surprising. It’s hardly fair to compare AMD’s top-end to Nvidia’s top-end when Nvidia’s is over twice the price in the real world.

If your budget for a GPU is <$1600, the 7900 XTX is probably your best bet if you don’t absolutely need CUDA. Any performance advantage Nvidia has goes right out the window if you can’t fit your whole model in VRAM. I’d take a 24GB AMD card over a 16GB Nvidia card any day.

You could also look at an RTX 3090 (which also has 24GB), but then you’d take a big hit to gaming/raster performance and it’d still probably cost you more than a 7900XTX. Not really sure how a 3090 compares to a 7900XTX in Blender. Anyway, that’s probably a more fair comparison if you care about VRAM and price.

Basically the only thing that matters for LLM hosting is VRAM capacity

I’ll also add that some frameworks and backends still require CUDA. This is improving but before you go and buy an AMD card, make sure the things you want to run will actually run on it.

For example, bitsandbytes support for non-CUDA backends is still in alpha stage. https://huggingface.co/docs/bitsandbytes/main/en/installation#multi-backend

Assuming nominal voltage of 3.7, that’s about 60Wh. For comparison, the 14" MacBook has a 70Wh battery.

That’s not good battery life but it depends on what kind of usage they’re assuming with that 7H number. I’m not sure a MacBook runs that long under high load. If it’s 7H on a heavy load, that’s respectable.

Edit: not sure what class of device is the best comparison here. Laptop? Tablet? Phone? 🤷

Borg via Vorta handles the hard parts: encryption, compression, deduplication, and archiving. You can mount backup snapshots like drives, without needing to expand them. It splits archives into small chunks so you can easily upload them to your cloud service of choice.

In theory, phones would be cheaper if they had longer shelf life.

Similarly, we don’t need new cars every year, but the beast must be fed, right? Right?!

We’re comparing it to gen 1 to emphasize how far it is from being competitive.

Not really new; this has been the case with all the Tensor chips. I kind of assumed Google was going to step up their game at some point, but I don’t think Samsung can produce chips on par with TSMC. Google is switching to TSMC for next year’s Tensor 5, so maybe we’ll see a big jump then.

That said, I don’t think it’s a deal-breaker. I’m running a Pixel 7 and it’s “fine”. The Pixel 6 had bad throttling/overheating problems, but the 7 and 8 are better. We’ll see what the Big Problem is with the 9 series. There’s always something.

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/cclicenses/

You probably want the SA (share-alike) or NC-SA (non-commercial share-alike) but take a look and decide what suits you best.

From https://creativecommons.org/faq/#do-i-have-to-provide-my-name-can-i-ask-that-my-name-be-removed :

Do I have to provide my name? Can I ask that my name be removed?

As a licensor, you may choose to receive under any name that you wish, such as a pseudonym or pen name, or you may choose not to be credited by name at all, and to publish anonymously. You do not have to be credited under your legal name. Most jurisdictions permit this, but you should check to be sure this is valid in your jurisdiction.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Google is the new Microsoft.