@finestructure@mastodon.social
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finestructure

@finestructure@mastodon.social

Physicist & techie. #CERN alumnus.
Co-creator https://mas.to/@SwiftPackageIndex.
Hummingbird app https://hbird.app. Europe • he/him

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tonyarnold, to random
@tonyarnold@mastodon.social avatar

Does anyone have any guidance on running multiple VMs for CI on a single Mac mini? If I run two side-by-side, it's so slow as to be unusable - I'm looking for advice on memory setup, core counts, etc.

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

@tonyarnold We’ve been running two Mac VMs via tart on a mini very reliably. Host has 16GB, both VMs each, too. They just fight it out 😅

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

@tonyarnold Have not noticed contention, it’s been very reliable. Note that we run this to build packages of the Swift Package Index and they have a hard build timeout after 10mins. However we really hammer this machine: each VM runs two parallel builds.

We do this, because a lot of time is spent checking out the repo and prepping the build. I.e. without scheduling 2 builds in each VM we underutilise the host.

finestructure,
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@tonyarnold I believe I’ve split the cores but I’ll double check tomorrow.

finestructure, to llm
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•This• is the compelling use case for me. If I use a translator to write messages in French I'm not forced to come up with an initial attempt and I lose the learning aspect of that.

If instead I put something into ChatGPT and it not only corrects but explains what my mistakes were that's a huge win in terms of learning from your mistakes.

(I still don't trust the thing 100% but it's also not a high stakes situation – I'm not engaging in a nuclear arms treaty after all 😅)

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

@groue Yeah, my partner pointed that and a few other things out as well and now I’m less convinced this is working as well as I thought it was.

Yet another example where the answer sounds good but only because I don’t have the expertise to verify.

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

@rene I’ve actually noticed that about French punctuation, too, at least when it comes to ! and ? 🤷‍♂️

inthehands, to random
@inthehands@hachyderm.io avatar

So…the “Slack will now train AI using your data” thing is not as much of a five alarm fire as I’d first assumed:

“We do not develop LLMs or other generative models using customer data.” ← GOOD.

“Data will not leak across workspaces.” ← Or so they say. They •are• training across workspaces, but sounds like recommender systems and not generative models, so…we’ll see. Seems fraught. Still, that public commitment does mean something — legal exposure, at least.

https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/trust/data-management/privacy-principles

1/2

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

@inthehands I didn't read past the headline on this one mainly because some secretive big tech companies are using Slack and there's no way that training on their messages for a general model would fly. They'd get sued faster than a Cybertruck rusts in a drizzle.

gastonrampersad, to random
@gastonrampersad@mastodon.social avatar

Diablo 4 - season 4 manages to stick the landing. I can’t really target the tangible bits that are better but the whole game itself now feels cohesive and fun.

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

@gastonrampersad Oh interesting, maybe worth digging it out again? What put me off in the end were the seasonal resets. I guess that’s not changing, so I’m not sure this is for me. I don’t want to be levelling all the time…

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

@gastonrampersad That sounds great, will give it another go!

MuseumShuffle, to random
@MuseumShuffle@mastodon.social avatar

@daniel I see you woke up this day and chose violence.

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

@MuseumShuffle @daniel Brutal 🤣

Cdespinosa, to random
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Do not ask a language model questions involving reasoning, factuality, or moral judgment. Language is a vehicle for those, but it is not the SOURCE of them. And there is an enormous amount of language in the public sphere that’s devoid of them—and that trained the models.

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

@dgoldsmith @Cdespinosa This all feels akin to the magic trick where you ask someone for a number and given one you say “look under the lamp" - and there's a number!

What people don't realise is that for any given number there's a different place with that number.

•We• are injecting the intelligence into the LLM's responses by selecting those that match our expectations of intelligence. And all the nonsense is discarded as hallucination that can be fixed.

rene, to random
@rene@social.fouquet.me avatar

Sometimes I wish I had the average person’s ignorance towards IT issues. Every time I tell my wife or friends who are not in It about some new problem, like AI training on user data, or companies doing cross-service tracking for detailed user profiling, they just shrug and keep scrolling through Instagram. Ignorance is bliss.

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

@rene @nicklockwood Haha, pwned 😄

I've given up trying to argue with my partner about these things and so you can imagine my surprise when I saw her use DDG on her laptop recently!

finestructure, to beeper
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I've used for several weeks now across , , , , and it's been a great improvement to the messaging mess:

• I've actually had an easier time keeping up with Slack than in Slack itself
• Initially I ran clients side by side but Beeper updates just as fast and I've since stopped running most except for Discord which I use for calls
• Even so, it's great to run it in parallel to Discord, because it's easier to text chat in Beeper while in a video call

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

Another huge plus of Beeper is that when you set it up on a new machine that’s a •single• login to get all your chats set up.

Just saved me faffin about with 5 service logins to get everything up and running 👌

#Beeper #Discord #Slack #Whatsapp #Signal #Telegram

finestructure, to StarCitizen
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’s graphics are simply stunning. And that’s just the little tutorial habitat. Which I’ve not yet managed to leave 🤣

Apparently, I need to eat and drink first, which I failed at yesterday. I’d picked up a box which I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to put down 😅

Today I managed to eat and drink. But drinking isn’t correctly advancing the tutorial so all that’s left is to admire the amazing level of detail.

It’s a very beautiful alpha 👌

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

So I’ve managed to complete the tutorial and leave the habitat. Not only that, I took to the skies, went to orbit and visited another planet.

This is a space simulation, its “realism” and fidelity is astounding. Quotes, because who knows what space flight in the future will be like! It’s certainly believable. And the future is using the metric system, so that’s a win 🤣

Who knows if this will ever come together as a game but boy does it look and feel amazing.

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

@redalemeden I'm on Windows! I doubt this will make it to any other platforms but who knows 🤷‍♂️

Make sure you have a decent system (gfx card), because this feels more like a tech demo. There's some gameplay but I think you mostly go there for the look and feel, and that leans heavily on the tech.

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

Couple of things that stood out to me:

• the sound when rocketing up through the atmosphere really delivers a sense of the forces at play - your ship “groans”!
• condensation forms on your ship’s windows, with water starting to run off - it's incredibly immersive
• likewise stepping out of the ship on an ice planet makes your visor fog up and you really feel exposed to the elements

Just really well done, amazing level of detail 👌

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

@redalemeden 4070 Mobile is what I’ve got!

inthehands, to random
@inthehands@hachyderm.io avatar

This is a perfect case study in how LLMs (don’t) work.

Please consider carefully what human processes a systems like this could actually replace. https://toot.cat/@devopscats/112445057997076822

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

@inthehands I’m now thinking of LLMs as “taking the cabbage across the river”.

finestructure, (edited ) to Starfield
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Spent an hour last night in and came away impressed with the visuals. The writing, um, doesn't quite keep up? Lowly miner touches a stone and then is offered a ship to leave the derelict moon?

Arthur at least managed to pull the sword without fainting before gaining the kingdom 😅

Let's see if this gets better after this rather weak opening! 🤞

finestructure, to random
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

Since there’s talk of the Core Technology Fee again, it’s 50 Euro Centibels, and 100 of them make a Eurodollar.

pilky, to random
@pilky@mastodon.social avatar

One thing I don’t get: what’s the downside of Apple allowing macOS to run in a VM on iPad? It doesn’t take anything away from those who don’t want to use it. You just ignore the feature and keep using your iPad as-is.

Apple doesn’t even need to build it themselves, just allow the tech they already have to run and be allowed on the App Store, that way someone like Parallels can come along and provide it (which would also allow Linux, Windows, etc)

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

@helge @pilky @lapcatsoftware VMs can’t sign into iCloud, which sadly also makes them as a means to bring macOS to the iPad less useful than people think.

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

@helge @pilky @lapcatsoftware You can sign into iCloud on VMware? TIL!

finestructure, to random
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

Folks who squash their merges, I’m curious why you are making that trade-off. I’m guessing the pro argument is a cleaner merge graph?

The big argument against it for me is that you lose granularity for git bisect. I've often been able to narrow down breakage (sometimes long past the merge) due to individual commits in the merge. If I'd merged in a giant blob all I'd have had to go by is that giant blob. (1/2)

finestructure,
@finestructure@mastodon.social avatar

@fork_dev Oh nice, it’s the branch detail on hover that's new, isn't it?

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