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2 yr. ago

  • Yup; hopefully there are some advances in the training space, but I’d guess that having large quantities of VRAM is always going to be necessary in some capacity for training specifically.

  • So I’m no expert at running local LLMs, but I did download one (the 7B vicuña model recommended by the LocalLLM subreddit wiki) and try my hand at training a LoRA on some structured data I have.

    Based on my experience, the VRAM available to you is going to be way more of a bottleneck than PCIe speeds.

    I could barely hold a 7B model in 10 GB of VRAM on my 3080, so 8 GB might be impossible or very tight. IMO to get good results with local models you really have large quantities of VRAM and be using 13B or above models.

    Additionally, when you’re training a LoRA the model + training data gets loaded into VRAM. My training dataset wasn’t very large, and even so, I kept running into VRAM constraints with training.

    In the end I concluded that in the current state, running a local LLM is an interesting exercise but only great on enthusiast level hardware with loads of VRAM (4090s etc).

  • Using it to separate work from other uses makes sense to me - I think if I worked from my desktop rather than the company laptop, I’d be more inclined to use the virtual desktops.

  • Wanting to pin a floating window was always something I wanted on Windows, so I was excited to see that being natively supported by KDE.

    Agree on disliking alt-tab because it’s non-deterministic! Cycling through a whole list of apps has always felt clunky to me so I never use it.

  • I really wish I could load Sway on my desktop… unfortunately I’ve got an Nvidia card and I couldn’t get the live ISO to boot with sway. :<

    Very tempting to try it on my laptop though! All the setups I’ve seen using it look really clean.

  • How far away from your monitor do you sit to see all of the 49”?! It must all be in your peripheral vision, haha. (Edit: oh, I overlooked the ultra wide mention and was picturing a 49” tv type thing, haha. Ultra wide makes more sense!)

    I actually went down from two monitors on my desktop to one… nothing wrong with the second monitor now sitting in my closet, but I’m liking the extra space on my desk and it feels more ergonomic to not be swiveling my neck as much.

  • I purged my comments and deleted my main account on July 1st, which was surprisingly emotional for me. I use Alien Blue on mobile, which still works so far, but now that my main account is logged out, I'll never be able to log another account in because authentication has been broken in Alien Blue for a while.

    I'm keeping Alien Blue installed for two reasons: one, for checking on a friend who only posts updates on reddit, and two, I read r/games a couple times a week for headlines and discussion. Lemmy just doesn't have the same level of engagement or discussion as r/games; even though there's a certain brand of insufferable commenters there, the majority of people post thoughtful comments that are more than one or two sentences long and those are the kinds of threads I like reading. Lemmy threads seem to be more shallow; lots of replies to the parent, but very few threads that go more than one or two comments deep.

  • It's so interesting the different ways people organize their windows! I have a strong preference for never overlapping windows where possible at home, but on my work computer it happens all the time and I don't mind. Each window definitely has its own "zone" on the screen though (browser in the upper left, slack in the bottom right, finder in the bottom middle, and so forth).

  • I've accidentally tried to switch workspaces with the i3 shortcuts when on a windows machine before! that muscle mememory, haha.

    when I'm booting Windows on my desktop, I use MS PowerToys to snap windows around which gives me the same feeling of nice organization as tiling but feels more intuitive in the Windows environment for me.

  • Makes sense! I agree laptops tend to be too small for tiling; I don't really use the tiling part of i3 on my laptop very much - usually only to pop open a terminal window on the side that I close after a few minutes.

  • We eat yogurt marinated chicken breast pieces cooked on a frying pan with curry sauce, alongside rice-cooker steamed veggies. We usually get 6 lbs of chicken, chop and marinate in an evening, then eat that for ~4-5 days; also keep on hand things like pasta and frozen meatballs for the days where we’ve run out of chicken but haven’t shopped yet. We allow ourselves to order food once or twice a month but no more; this usually happens on days where we’ve run out of chicken.

    That both of us are totally cool with eating the same thing for months on end really helps cut down on cooking time. 😅

  • I appreciate this point of view! My BA is in visual arts, but I’ve also leaned heavily into tech, programming as a hobby, etc.

    I think there’s a lot of different topical threads at play when it comes to AI art (classism and fine art, what average viewers vs trained viewers find appealing in a visual medium, etc) – but the economic issue that you point out are really key. Many artists rely on their craft for their literal bodily survival, so AI art is very much a real threat to them.

    But, when I first interacted with Midjourney, and seeing my mom (just an average lady) being excited about AI generated art, I can’t help but see it like photography – all of a sudden the average person gets access to a way of visually capturing things that make them happy, that they think look cool, something they saw in a dream but didn’t have the skill to create visually... and that doesn’t sound like an inherently bad thing to me.

  • Ooo, Aldi had Musli lately but it was one of their “limited edition” aisle things and my store ran out recently. I got really used to it for breakfast, so I’ll have to look into Seitenbacher’s!

  • What font are you using for the clock/taskbar? Looks nice! I’ll have to poke around KDE for that taskbar too, it automatically gave me the icon only version and idk if I like it.

  • I’d think about it at a high level and then get more granular. What are your favorite riced screenshots? What parts of them particularly appeal to you? On the other hand, are there things about your setup that bother you? Then, take what you like and don’t like and let that guide you in customization.

    I am pretty opinionated, so I care about changing little things. Examples of little things I tweaked when installing KDE recently:

    • made the digital clock display on one line instead of two
    • removed blur from lockscreen
    • hid user info + switch user options from lockscreen

    For me the rest of the visual adjustments came from picking color schemes, fonts, icons, and wallpapers I like.

  • Pushing Daisies is a really wholesome show, funny and what I found to be an interesting plot too.

  • Never heard of them, but just looking at a registrar comparison chart, their renewal costs are pretty high. eg. $20 for .wiki renewal at Porkbun and $30 at Hover. Maybe they bundle in a lot of services along with it that make the price worth it? but unless you're taking full advantage of those (if they're offered) then you could def get a better deal elsewhere.

  • Namecheap has okay starting prices but man their renewal prices aren’t great compared to other registrars.

  • I just transferred all my domains out of Namecheap into Porkbun. I think Porkbun is 10 to 50 cents more expensive than Cloudflare, but they seemed a bit easier to use and could hold all my TLDs. So far, a way better experience than Namecheap!