Kata1yst

Kata1yst , 3 months ago to linuxmemes in Arch with XZ

I think the confusion comes from the meaning of stable. In software there are two relevant meanings:

1. Unchanging, or changing the least possible amount.
2. Not crashing / requiring intervention to keep running.

Debian, for example, focuses on #1, with the assumption that #2 will follow. And it generally does, until you have to update and the changes are truly massive and the upgrade is brittle, or you have to run software with newer requirements and your hacks to get it working are brittle.

Arch, for example, instead focuses on the second definition, by attempting to ensure that every change, while frequent, is small, with a handful of notable exceptions.

Honestly, both strategies work well. I've had debian systems running for 15 years and Arch systems running for 12+ years (and that limitation is really only due to the system I run Arch on, rather than their update strategy.

It really depends on the user's needs and maintenance frequency.

Kata1yst , 3 months ago to Technology in Have We Reached Peak AI?

Author doesn't seem to understand that executives everywhere are full of bullshit and marketing and journalism everywhere is perversely incentivized to inflate claims.

But that doesn't mean the technology behind that executive, marketing, and journalism isn't game changing.

Full disclosure, I'm both well informed and undoubtedly biased as someone in the industry, but I'll share my perspective. Also, I'll use AI here the way the author does, to represent the cutting edge of Machine Learning, Generative Self-Reenforcement Learning Algorithms, and Large Language Models. Yes, AI is a marketing catch-all. But most people better understand what "AI" means, so I'll use it.

AI is capable of revolutionizing important niches in nearly every industry. This isn't really in question. There have been dozens of scientific papers and case studies proving this in healthcare, fraud prevention, physics, mathematics, and many many more.

The problem right now is one of transparency, maturity, and economics.

The biggest companies are either notoriously tight-lipped about anything they think might give them a market advantage, or notoriously slow to adopt new technologies. We know AI has been deeply integrated in the Google Search stack and in other core lines of business, for example. But with pressure to resell this AI investment to their customers via the Gemini offering, we're very unlikely to see them publicly examine ROI anytime soon. The same story is playing out at nearly every company with the technical chops and cash to invest.

As far as maturity, AI is growing by astronomical leaps each year, as mathematicians and computer scientists discover better ways to do even the simplest steps in an AI. Hell, the groundbreaking papers that are literally the cornerstone of every single commercial AI right now are "Attention is All You Need" (2017) and
"Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge -Intensive NLP Tasks" (2020). Moving from a scientific paper to production generally takes more than a decade in most industries. The fact that we're publishing new techniques today and pushing to prod a scant few months later should give you an idea of the breakneck speed the industry is going at right now.

And finally, economically, building, training, and running a new AI oriented towards either specific or general tasks is horrendously expensive. One of the biggest breakthroughs we've had with AI is realizing the accuracy plateau we hit in the early 2000s was largely limited by data scale and quality. Fixing these issues at a scale large enough to make a useful model uses insane amounts of hardware and energy, and if you find a better way to do things next week, you have to start all over. Further, you need specialized programmers, mathematicians, and operations folks to build and run the code.
Long story short, start-ups are struggling to come to market with AI outside of basic applications, and of course cut-throat silicon valley does it's thing and most of these companies are either priced out, acquired, or otherwise forced out of business before bringing something to the general market.

Call the tech industry out for the slime is generally is, but the AI technology itself is extremely promising.

Kata1yst , 3 months ago to Technology in AI unicorn Inflection abandons its ChatGPT challenger as CEO Mustafa Suleyman joins Microsoft

Seriously. This guy thinks that regulators would have stepped in to stop OpenAI or Microsoft from acquiring a no-name 2 year old startup with two rounds of funding?

Please.

Kata1yst , 4 months ago to Technology in Reddit has never turned a profit in nearly 20 years, but it just filed to go public anyway

Apparently that wasn't one of his MBOs, so we can infer the board is a bunch of dumbasses.

Kata1yst , 4 months ago to linuxmemes in Are these the supposed "benefits" of wayland

Xorg needs several of it's extensions to function at the same level as Weston+Wayland. At minimum you'd need xorg server, proto, lib, and driver... Maybe a few other things I'm forgetting.

Kata1yst , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to linuxmemes in Are these the supposed "benefits" of wayland

Weston is by file size, about equal to xserver. But really there is more utility in Weston than xserver.

Kata1yst , 4 months ago to Selfhosted in Spam posts

Yeah honestly no idea regarding moderation. But the codebase is maintained by a team.

Kata1yst , 4 months ago to Selfhosted in Spam posts

There is a team, not a sole dev.

I'm not saying everything is roses and rainbows, but this is FUD messaging being spread openly by the mbin dev team.

Kata1yst , 4 months ago to Technology in Thanks to OpenAI, it's never been clearer that Sundar Pichai is Google's Steve Ballmer

They put ads in.

Kata1yst , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to Technology in Why the recent Mozilla news isn't actually a big deal

But what if they don't need that many people working on Firefox? What if AI, VR, and Network programmers are fundamentally different in skills from a web browser programmer, and don't want to change their career trajectory?

What if, by not firing these people, Mozilla folds in 3 years and everyone ends up without a job?

Not every project makes 2x the money with 2x the people. It's the "Why can't 9 Mom's give birth in 1 month" problem. Hell most projects will slow down significantly with an influx like that.

Look, layoffs suck, but it's quid-pro-quo. Employees can leave at any time too. If a company isn't abusive or arbitrary with their layoff decisions, has decent layoff benefits, and doesn't refuse to give job recommendations, it's hard for me to hold it against the employer.

Kata1yst , 4 months ago to linuxmemes in The first reason should be enough

No argument here. I'm a PF2e player since beta and won't touch HasWizards products with a 10 foot disintegrate.

Kata1yst , 4 months ago to linuxmemes in The first reason should be enough

The base ruleset (SRD) only. Everything else is OGL, which has proven to be as open as Wizards Hasbro wants to make it.

Kata1yst , 4 months ago to Selfhosted in Second hand disks?

I've had great experiences with exactly one vendor of second hand disks.

https://serverpartdeals.com/

Currently running 8x14TB in a striped & mirrored zpool.

Kata1yst , 4 months ago to Selfhosted in Best Filesystem for NAS?

Yeah, you should be scrubbing weekly or monthly, depending on how often you are using the data. Scrub basically touches each file and checks the checksums and fixes any errors it finds proactively. Basically preventative maintenance.
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jammy/man8/zpool-scrub.8.html

Set that up in a cron job and check zpool status periodically.

No dedup is good. LZ4 compression is good. RAM to disk ratio is generous.

Check your disk's sector size and vdev ashift. On modern multi-TB HDDs you generally have a block size of 4k and want ashift=12. This being set improperly can lead to massive write amplification which will hurt throughput.
https://www.high-availability.com/docs/ZFS-Tuning-Guide/

How about snapshots? Do you have a bunch of old ones? I highly recommend setting up a snapshot manager to prune snapshots to just a working set (monthly keep 1-2, weekly keep 4, daily keep 6 etc) https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid

And to parrot another insightful comment, I also recommend checking the disk health with SMART tests. In ZFS as a drive begins to fail the pool will get much slower as it constantly repairs the errors.

Kata1yst , 5 months ago to Selfhosted in Best Filesystem for NAS?

ZFS is a very robust choice for a NAS. Many people, myself included, as well as hundreds of businesses across the globe, have used ZFS at scale for over a decade.

Attack the problem. Check your system logs, htop, zpool status.

When was the last time you ran a zpool scrub? Is there a scrub, or other zfs operation in progress? How many snapshots do you have? How much RAM vs disk space? Are you using ZFS deduplication? Compression?