u_tamtam

u_tamtam, 10 days ago

I’d like to share your optimism, but what you suggest leaving us to “deal with” isn’t “AI” (which has been present in web search for decades as increasingly clever summarization techniques…) but LLMs, a very specific and especially inscrutable class of AI which has been designed for “sounding convincing”, without care for correctness or truthfulness. Effectively, more humans’ time will be wasted reading invented or counterfeit stories (with no easy way to tell); first-hand information will be harder to source and acknowledge by being increasingly diluted into the AI-generated noise.

I also haven’t seen any practical advantage to using LLM prompts vs. traditional search engines in the general case: you end up typing more, for the sake of “babysitting” the LLM, and get more to read as a result (which is, again, aggravated by the fact that you are now given a single source/one-sided view on the matter, without citation, reference nor reproducible step to this conclusion).

Last but not least, LLMs are an environmental disaster in the making, the computational cost is enormous (in new hardware and electricity), and we are at a point where all companies partaking in this new gold rush are selling us a solution in need of a problem, every one of them having to justify the expenditure (so far, none is making a profit out of it, which is the first step towards offsetting the incurred pollution).

u_tamtam, 1 month ago

Aren’t they not the same thing at all?

u_tamtam, 1 month ago

Pydio used to be called ajaxplorer and was a pretty solid and lightweight (although featureful) solution, but then they rewrote the UI with lots of misguided choices (touch controls and android inspired interactions on desktop devices) and it became so horrendous, heavy and clunky that I almost forgot about it. I wonder if they reversed the trend (but from the screenshots it doesn’t look so).

u_tamtam, 1 month ago

How about nextcloud with only the bare minimum amount of plugins? Filles alone is pretty snappy.

u_tamtam, 1 month ago

You can always give a shot at using a third party client (possibly acting as bridge for other/better protocols, like e.g. slidge.im>xmpp or the buggy matrix equivalent), but you need to keep in mind that they will all require you to authenticate (and remain authenticated) using a smartphone, and that usage of 3rd party clients is forbidden from WA’s terms and conditions (which may lead to your account being blocked/deleted).

u_tamtam, 2 months ago

Russia supplied 77 per cent of China’s purchases

Not exactly a surprise, then. And good luck for the Russian’s arm industry bouncing back, considering its performance on the battlefield and its interleaving with western tech that it hasn’t managed to decouple itself from since 2014. China’s only taking a reasonable stance there.

u_tamtam, 2 months ago

Why? What’s wrong with safe, managed and fast languages?

u_tamtam, 2 months ago

Or rather a Dunning Kruger issue: seniors having spent a significant time architecturing and debugging complex applications tend to be big proponents for things like rust.

u_tamtam, 2 months ago

Yep but:

• it’s one runtime, so patching a CVE patches it for all programs (vs patching each and every program individually)
• graalvm is taking care of enabling java to run on java

u_tamtam, 2 months ago

and how much of this troubled history is linked to Java Applets/native browsers extensions, and how much of it is relevant today?

u_tamtam, 2 months ago

I agree with the sentiment and everything, but the whole gaming console industry has gone to crap after they started putting hard drives/storage in them with the goal of needing you to be online and not owning anything anymore. They are all equally despicable for that. Which makes emulation even more essential, just for preserving those games into the future when the online front will inexorably shut down.

u_tamtam, 3 months ago

I’m with you. Hg-git still is to this day the best git UI I know…

u_tamtam, 3 months ago

Well, if you have a GitHub account you can be notified about new releases with one click. And if you don’t, just use the RSS like it’s the 00’s ;)

u_tamtam, 3 months ago

I’ve been on the prusa slicer side of things for a long time, and you won’t see me arguing in favor of cura. That said, you should probably consider doing daily backups of your home folder, using something like Borg/restic which have great incremental and compressed backups (practically backing up TBs in seconds).

u_tamtam, 3 months ago

Report, as disinformation/propaganda/not news, hoping mods are not looking the other way

u_tamtam, 3 months ago

Not like “many other countries” but expectedly much worse: real estate has been de facto where most Chinese have been concentrating their wealth as “investment” in the absence of better local alternatives and the inability to invest abroad.

u_tamtam, 3 months ago

The important figure isn’t the total, but the fraction of GDP that goes into real estate, which is disproportionate in the case of China, for the reasons I mentioned, and more (another major one being the land leased by local governments to serve as their de facto revenue stream)

u_tamtam, 3 months ago

I have no idea what this is about, but was kotlin native considered here? And what ruled it out in favour of rust?

I’ve seen multiple JVM languages going the route of AOT/native compilation and now taking the spot of systems languages in some use cases (CLI utils, low footprint “cloud native” stacks, things requiring tight os-level integration) with often outstanding performance.

u_tamtam, 3 months ago

According to www.notebookcheck.net , a framework 13 with a Ryzen 7840U will run out of battery 22% faster than the macbook but will outperform the macbook by 85% on some benchmarks. I wouldn’t pick the mac.

u_tamtam, 3 months ago

Like vscode except extensions work together and not against each other and you don’t have to go on a wild hunt to have a cohesive environment :)

u_tamtam, 3 months ago

care to elaborate? The rest of the world definitely has higher environmental standards (and, more importantly, enforcement of them) than China. And that is a significant driver of the cost. You should read about the history of the PV industry in Germany before throwing insults.

u_tamtam, 3 months ago

What’s the deal with you, exactly? Are you denying the many substantiated academic reports of environmental damage caused by rare-earth extraction and refining as part of some anti-China conspiracy? Just so I know if it’s worthy of my time to engage at all.

u_tamtam, 3 months ago

My claim is that a large part of the cost effectiveness of importing from China is the outsourced cost of pollution, which will remain minimal (and competitively unfair) while China keeps turning a bind eye on it (which wouldn’t fly in non-authoritarian countries with freedom of information). And you haven’t disproved nor addressed that, only been fussing around arguing semantics.

u_tamtam, 3 months ago

The problem I’ve observed with XMPP as an outsider is the lack of a standard. Each server or client has its own supported features and I’m not sure which one to choose.

That’s a valid concern, but I wouldn’t call it a problem. There are practically 2 types of clients/servers: the ones which are maintained, and which work absolutely fine and well together, and the rest, the unmaintained/abandoned part of the ecosystem.

And with the protocol being so stable and backwards/forwards compatible in large parts, those unmaintained clients will just work, just not with the latest and greatest features (XMPP has the machinery to let clients and servers advertise about their supported features so the experience is at least cohesive).

Which client would you recommend?

Depends on which platform you are on and the type of usage. You should be able to pick one as advertised on joinjabber.org , that should keep you away from the fringe/unmaintained stuff. Personally I use gajim and monocles.