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  • I think it's just for enterprise contracts, yeah.

    Fedora seems like a good general-purpose pick to me, because it is modern, it has a large community, and it's easy enough to install and use. It has similar advantages as Ubuntu — that is, a large community and broad commercial third-party support — without the downsides of having a lot of outdated software and lacking support for new hardware. I think Fedora is less likely to have show-stopping limitations than a lot of other distros, even beginner-friendly ones like Mint.

    But that's just one opinion. There's nothing wrong with Ubuntu or derivatives. I've heard good things about Pop_OS as well, though I've never tried it myself.

  • Tuta.com is similar to Proton Mail + Calendar.

    • Location: Germany
    • Governance: Private GmbH (German corporation, similar to an American LLC)
    • Integrity/trustworthiness/transparency: Better than Proton IMHO. All their apps are open source and available on F-Droid. They encrypt email headers (unlike Proton, who are weaselly about this in their marketing materials).
    • User Experience: Ehhhh...6? I'm not in the best position to compare because I do not have a premium plan, so I am not able to examine features like inbox rules/filters. Much like Proton, it doesn't support full-text email search unless you have it cache your entire mailbox locally (either via the web site or app). They do not support POP or IMAP, but do offer their own desktop and mobile apps.
    • Pricing: €3/month for 20GB, €8/month for 500GB. https://tuta.com/pricing
  • That's when Windows 10 stops getting security updates. Expect most software vendors to drop support for Windows 10 this year if they haven't already. That doesn't necessarily mean things will stop working, but it will not be tested and they won't spend time fixing Win10-specific problems.

    In enterprise, you can get an additional three years of "extended security updates". That's your grace period to get everyone in your org upgraded.

    While I strongly relate to anyone who hates Windows 11, "continue using Windows 10 forever" was never a viable long-term strategy.

    Windows 10 was released in 2015. Ten years of support for an OS is industry-leading, on par with Red Hat or Ubuntu's enterprise offerings and far ahead of any competing consumer OS. Apple generally only offers three years of security updates. Google provides 3-4 years of security updates. Debian gets 5 years.

    There has never been a time in the history of personal computing when using an OS for over 10 years without a major upgrade was realistic. That would be like using Windows 3.1 after XP was released. Windows 10 is dead, and it's been a long time coming.

    Now go download Fedora.

  • Silly question perhaps, but are you sure you're using the correct port on your Linux system? If I plug my external HD into a USB2 port, I'm stuck at 30-40MB/sec, while on a USB3 port I get ~150-180MB/sec. That's proportionally similar to the difference you described so I wonder if that's the culprit.

    You can verify this in a few different ways. From Terminal, if you run lsusb you'll see a list of all your USB hubs and devices.

    It should look something like this:

     
        
    Bus 002 Device 001: ID xxxx:yyyy Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
    Bus 002 Device 002: ID xxxx:yyyy <HDD device name>
    Bus 003 Device 001: ID xxxx:yyyy Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
    Bus 004 Device 001: ID xxxx:yyyy Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
    
      

    So you can see three hubs, one of which is 2.0 and the other two are 3.0. The HDD is on bus 002, which we can see is a USB 3.0 hub by looking at the description of Bus 002 Device 001. That's good.

    If you see it on a 2.0 bus, or on a bus with many other devices on it, that's bad and you should re-organize your USB devices so your low-speed peripherals (mouse, keyboard, etc.) are on a USB2 bus and only high-speed devices are on the USB3 bus.

    You can also consult your motherboard's manual, or just look at the colors of your USB ports. By convention, gray ports are USB 1.0, blue ports are 2.0, and green ports are 3.x.

    If you're running KDE, you can also view these details in the GUI with kinfocenter. Not sure what the Gnome equivalent is.

  • Half the movies released in 3D during the last wave were poorly done conversions not even shot for 3D.

    Only half? -_-

    I've only seen a few movies that were actually filmed in 3D. Even Gravity was filmed in 2D.

    The problem is that actually filming in 3D requires using different (and expensive) hardware, and different creative direction all across the board. You can't just upgrade to a 3D camera and call it a day. Not many studios will put in that kind of effort for something that is not proven in the market. And not many filmmakers are actually skilled at working in 3D, simply due to lack of direct experience.

    I saw the Hobbit movies in high framerate 3D in the theater, and while they were not good movies, they looked absolutely amazing because they were committed 100% to the format from start to finish — not just with the hardware, but with the lighting, makeup, set design, everything. It's a shame the movies sucked, and it's a shame that there has never been a way to watch them in HFR 3D outside of select theaters.

  • As far as I can see #ollama and #lmstudio do not provide privacy statements.

    That's because they are not online services (which is a good thing!). Online services like ChatGPT and desktop applications like LM Studio are not in the same product category.

    LM Studio is more akin to, say, VLC or Notepad++ (which also do not have privacy policies). These are desktop applications that have some limited network functions (like autoupdates).

    That said, LM Studio does offer details of which features require internet access and which are fully offline here: https://lmstudio.ai/docs/offline . In short: everything important is offline. It has built-in search features so you can find and download models from Huggingface, and it also has an autoupdate feature to find and download new versions. You could run it on an airgapped system (or more likely, set it up in a container/VM without network access), and simply load in model files manually if you prefer.

    Personally I recommend LM Studio, because it's super easy to set up and use but still quite powerful.

  • They're like 20 years too late to start copying Apple here. Apple had their shit together with their product line for a good while after Steve Jobs returned and eliminated the absolute insanity of Apple's mid-90s lineup, which had at least three times more models than any sane person would find useful.

    But recently, Apple went off the deep end. Boggles the mind that "Pro Max" ever made it past the brain-mouth barrier in a boardroom, let alone into an official product lineup.

  • I think there's a solid argument to be made for ants as the world's dominant species. There are even supercolonies that span multiple continents. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3352483/

    They will likely continue to thrive in the post-human global environment. Their success does not rely on human development (like, say, rats), nor are they severely threatened by human development (like...well, most things).

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    Jump
  • Yep. AGI is still science fiction. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably just trying to fool investors. Ignore anyone who is less than three degrees of separation away from a marketing department.

    The low-hanging fruit is quickly getting picked, so we're bound to see a slowdown in advancement. And that's a good thing. We don't really need better language models at this point; we need better applications that use them.

    The limiting factor is not so much hardware as it is our knowledge and competence in software architecture. As a historical example, 10 short years ago, computers were nowhere near top-level at Go. Then DeepMind developed AlphaGo, which was a huge leap forward and could beat a top pro. It ran on a supercomputer cluster. Thanks to the research breakthroughs around AlphaGo, within a few years had similar AI that could run on any smartphone and could beat any human player. It's not because consumer hardware got that much faster; it's because we learned how to make better software. Modern Go engines are a fraction of the size of AlphaGo, and generate similar or better quality results with a tiny fraction of the operations. And it seems like we're pretty close to the limit now. A supercomputer can't play all that much better than my laptop.

    Similarly, a few years ago something like ChatGPT 3 needed a supercomputer. Now you can run a model with similar performance on a high-end phone, or a low-end laptop. Again, it's not because hardware has improved; the difference is the software. My current laptop (2021 model) is older than ChatGPT 3 (publicly launched in 2022) and it can easily run superior models.

    But the returns inevitably diminish. There's a limit somewhere. It's hard to say exactly where, but entropy's gonna getcha sooner or later. You simply cannot fit more than 16GB of information in a 16GB model; you can only inch closer to that theoretical limit, and specialize into smaller scopes. At some point the world will realize that trying to encode everything into a model is a dumb idea. We already have better tools for that.

  • I don't have this chart in my review, I guess because I was 100% Linux. Kind of surprised I didn't have a little Mac time in there, since I do sometimes use Steam on Mac while traveling. But thinking back, I guess it's been a while.

  • I know this is from 2015, but even then, it was a bit late to make this argument. This was already mainstream enough in the 90s to be the punchline in syndicated comic strips. By 2015, we already had "customer experience engineers" (i.e. tier-1 helpdesk). The ship has not only sailed, it has sunk.

    Anyway, the phrase originated in an era when programming was very different from what it is today, when most programmers came from a background in electrical engineering or something along those lines.

  • Apple's monitors have an entire OS in them. They have much of the same internals as an iPad. Honestly, I have no idea why, because they don't do anything especially fancy.

    Samsung makes "smart monitors" with Tizen or some shit like that.