Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)GE
Posts
1
Comments
1,002
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • 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? 🤷

  • I want it to be consistent dammit!

    YES.

    In tech terms, "intelligent" or "smart" usually means inconsistent and unpredictable. It means I need to do extra work to verify that the computer didn't "helpfully" do something I never told it to do.

    I understand autocorrect on phones, because phone keyboards suck very hard. I am still shocked that both Apple and Microsoft have decided to enable it by default on desktops and laptops with full keyboards. No, Apple, believe it or not, the username field in web sites is not supposed to have a capitalized first letter. If I wanted that, I have three whole keys on my keyboard that I could have used to do that. STFU and let me do my own typing. (Why usernames are case-sensitive in certain places is a whole other matter, one that's far outside my control.)

  • 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.

  • English Dictionary Offline: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=livio.pack.lang.en_US . Still unbloated after all these years.

    Librera (ebook reader): https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.foobnix.pro.pdf.reader/ . The pro version is free on f-droid, or you can buy it on Google Play if you want to support the dev.

    Fossify Gallery: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fossify.gallery/ . This is a fork of the old Simple Gallery from before it got bought out. Same deal with Fossify File Manager and the other Fossify apps. Just no-nonsense functional apps.

  • IIRC, Android has always had native support for keyboards and mice. I remember connecting a bluetooth mouse to my old Nexus 4 running...Android 4, maybe 5? It worked out of the box. Saved my butt when the touch screen broke. :)

    Can't say I've tried this in recent years but I think it still works, yeah?

  • I've never tried it myself, but I think you can run full Linux VMs on Pixel phones already. A quick search brings up https://www.xda-developers.com/nestbox-hands-on/

    Anyone have experience with this or similar options? Personally I've never used anything more advanced than Termux (which is lean and super cool, but not a full-blown VM).

  • Yep. If it uses a cloud service, they're probably going to squeeze you, pull a bait-and-switch, or go out of business. The only exceptions that spring to mind are services with significant monetization in the corporate space, like Dropbox. And I'm not really confident that Dropbox's free tier will remain viable for long, either.

    Even non-cloud-based apps are risky nowadays because apps don't remain compatible with mobile OSes for very long. They require more frequent updates than freeware/shareware generally did back in the 90s. I remember some freeware apps that I used for 10 years straight, across several major OS versions, starting in the 90s. That just doesn't happen anymore. I've been using Android for over 10 years and I don't think there's a single app I used back then that would still work.

    Single-purchase apps are basically dead, at least on mobile platforms. Closed-source freeware is dead, too. If it's open-source, if push comes to shove someone can always pick up the torch and update it. It's very rare for an open-source project to be completely abandoned without there at least being a viable open-source alternative available.

    At this point, I don't even look at Google Play. It's F-Droid or bust.

  • The ideal amount of storage is enough that I literally never need to think about it, never need to delete anything, and never need to use cloud services for things that could realistically be local.

    It's hard to say what that would be because I've never had a phone that even came close.

    The largest phone I've owned was 256GB. That was "fine", but it was NOT big enough that I could fundamentally change my habits. For example, I don't carry my entire music collection on my phone. I don't even do that on my laptop anymore since the advent of SSDs.

    I have a 128GB phone now and it sucks. I've set up a one-way copy to my home desktop with Syncthing so I can safely delete photos, videos, and screen recordings from my phone. I need to do this frequently.

    With the standard price-gouging in the industry, I will probably settle for 256 with my next phone. If prices were reasonable, I'd go for 1TB at least.

    I miss SD cards but there are no viable options with slots anymore.

  • Yeah. It will almost certainly work, but you might not get the same quality as you get on Android. Check the specs of your specific model of earbuds to see which codecs they support. LDAC should work on Debian, but as far as I know Huawei's proprietary L2HC codec does not work on Linux.

    I'm not 100% sure about this since I've never used Huawei earbuds myself.

  • That is probably true for podcasts on exclusive platforms like Spotify, but those are few and far between. Even with those, I don't think Spotify is delivering customized audio files to each user.

    It's more like with broadcast TV, where they have general demographic information that they use to attract advertisers.

    The general case is a plain ol' RSS feed accessed by any arbitrary client. There's not much data to be tracked there. And there's not a whole lot you can do with an IP address without introducing highly-visible problems. You can infer the general geographic location of your listeners, but that's about it. If you try to do personal tracking via IP address, it's going to be messy. Cell phones don't typically have persistent unique IPs, and even most laptop users are going to be running on a shared external IP (e.g. at a college campus, business, or any ISP that does not provide users with a dedicated IP). And again, they're not customizing audio files per user. It's a mostly static medium.

  • And the ease of repair, too. I have experience repairing laptops and phones, but even so, a lot of phones are just too much trouble for me.

    Historically, my phone batteries become nearly unusable after 3 years. Several of my old phones would still be usable (with extended support from LineageOS) if I could replace the batteries, but the labor cost is prohibitive. It doesn't make sense to spend $200 on a battery replacement when the phone is barely worth half that.