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bamboo

@bamboo@lemm.ee

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bamboo ,

This is the part that has always confused me. Radioactive “waste” should either be radioactive enough that it can continue to be used in some capacity, or it’s inert enough that it’s not too complicated to just bury it, given the relatively small scale. I guess I assumed that there must have been a large gap between being useful and being inert and that must have been the problem with managing waste, but if spent fuel can be refined back into new fuel and inert waste, then I don’t see the issue.

bamboo ,

I think it’s fair to predict energy consumption will continue to rise. With that timescale, it’s basically “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today”. Doesn’t solve the immediate issue, but if we keep not starting new nuclear projects, it’s going to remain an issue forever.

bamboo ,

Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Thank you for the explanation! I really believe we need to invest in refinement tech to get more use out of fuel instead of worrying about how to infinitely store (and therefore waste) still-useful fuel.

bamboo ,

That’s an amazing chart!

bamboo ,

That’s how it works for now, but eventually the code itself will be removed from chromium, not just disabled. At that point they’d have to maintain a large patch set reimplementing it, which would be extremely time intensive to maintain and keep secure.

bamboo ,

There’s a lot more vendor lock in than there has been in the past. I don’t see there being a major change without legislation. It’s still too early to see how the EU’s DMA will affect market share, but it’s probably the best hope, even if it is limited to a few geographical areas.

bamboo ,

An even bigger restriction is how iOS just blocks all competing browser engines. It doesn’t matter what sites do or don’t require. If a site is broken in Safari, I just have to go use a different device. On all other operating systems you do have a bit more options, but they all pretty aggressively push you into using the manufacturer’s choice.

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bamboo ,

Theoretically, yes. A short is sorta a negative stock. When you hold a normal stock, the price can never go below zero. But when you hold a negative stock, there’s no maximum value that stock could rise to.

bamboo ,

Amazon Linux probably includes EPEL by default now

bamboo ,

Most people shouldn’t self host. It’s a hobby for people who want to do it, and there are benefits, but spending 3 hours on a weekend fixing stuff is not how most people wish to spend their time. Furthermore, it’s not a good use of most people’s time. We split labor up into specialties, forcing people to do work outside their specialty causes pointless inefficiency. I agree with what other commenters have said in that a better approach would be to have more small businesses hosting federated together, and anyone not inclined to self host should just purchase service through one of those many small providers instead.

bamboo ,

[kagi ad here]

bamboo ,

In my area, while we have laundermats, it’s also very common for apartments to have coin-op laundry for tenants. With the absurd levels of rent they charge, those landlords are doing just fine without a bit of extra laundry revenue

bamboo ,

The fediverse is an excellent place to find training data for AIs. I would just set up a bot that follows a bunch of people and let them send their data to me, then I don’t even need to bother with scraping.

bamboo ,

While I’ve never given Reddit a penny, it was totally different back then. In those times, the site was much smaller, and buying gold got you r/lounge access and supported the site. They felt more community oriented and weren’t aggressively monetizing the service. Nowadays it’s like paying for Facebook or twitter, absolutely not.

bamboo ,

It’s hard to say. I think it was obvious they planned to use ads and gold to break even, but it took many years to begin monetizing aggressively. Once new Reddit and the app came around, and they started making noise about an IPO, it became obvious.

bamboo ,

Scientific workloads often involve very large datasets. It might be high resolution data captured from various sensors, or it might be more “normal” data but in huge quantities. Assuming the data itself is high quality, larger datasets mean more accurate conclusions.

bamboo ,

I can understand why a project might want to do this until the law is fully implemented and testing in court, but I can tell most of the people in this thread haven’t actually figured out how to effectively use LLMs productively. They’re not about to replace software engineers, but as a software engineer, tools like GitHub copilot and ChatGPT are excellent at speeding up a workflow. ChatGPT for example is an excellent search engine that can give you a quick understanding of a topic. It’ll generate small amounts of code more quickly than I could write it by hand. Of course I’m still going to review that code to ensure it is to the same quality that hand written code would be, but overall this is still a much faster problem.

The luddites who hate on LLMs would have complained about the first compilers too, because they could write marginally faster assembly by hand.

Hello GPT-4o (openai.com)

GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”) is a step towards much more natural human-computer interaction—it accepts as input any combination of text, audio, and image and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds,...

bamboo ,

Llama 2 70B can run on a specc-ed out current gen MacBook Pro. Not cheap hardware in any sense, but it isn’t a large data center cluster.

1000+ Firefox for Android extensions now available – Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog (blog.mozilla.org)

The new open ecosystem of extensions on Firefox for Android launched in December with just over 400 extensions. Less than five months later we’ve surpassed 1,000 Firefox for Android extensions. That’s an impressive achievement by this developer community! It’s exciting to see so many developers embrace the opportunity to...

bamboo ,

Which parts of Firefox ares proprietary?

bamboo ,

To their credit, Safari’s extension support on iOS is reasonably good. Not like Firefox good, but compared to chrome it’s excellent!

bamboo ,

You misunderstand. This is protectionism plain and simple. US car companies are horribly inefficient. Better yet, the US car cartel eliminated most of their budget models to push trucks and SUVs that are more expensive. It doesn’t take much to undercut them, so the US government is banning the competition.

bamboo ,

[citation needed]

bamboo ,

While I can’t say any of this is wrong, you’re missing likely the single biggest component inflating the cost of US manufacturing: profit margins. Every step of the supply chain has a profit margin attached. Sometimes just a few percent, but often double digits. These compound, so a 5% margin on a simple component will see an additional 15% when sold as part of an assembly, which is then marked up another 20% when sold as part of the finished good. There’s also financialization which burdens US companies. Companies generally need to take loans to fund their operations, and end up having to pay heavy interest fees and rent which also drives up cost. Workers and environmental protections are more expensive, but in practice they are relatively minor compared to a lot of other inefficiencies US industry struggles with.

bamboo , (edited )

I think it’s incredibly naïve to think that because we’ve hit a boundary on one particular aspect of LLMs that the technology has peaked as a whole. There are lots of ways to improve LLMs that aren’t just increasing the parameter size, for example there’s been an uptick in smaller models that are optimized to run on client devices without large GPUs. There is probably a future where we have small 3-7B models that are competitive with today’s best 70B models, but can run in real time on any smartphone. We’ll have larger context windows, allowing LLMs to work on larger problems. And we’ll have better techniques for getting high quality information out of LLMs, there are already adversarial methods where two LLMs hold a debate on a subject that have proven more accurate and comprehensive data is possible. They’ll also continue to be embedded into different places in software that make them more useful, not just like a chatbot that lives in its own world.

bamboo ,

All of Apple’s M series chips have the ram right on the same package as the rest of the SoC. Not upgradeable, but also much faster than traditional off-package memory.

bamboo ,

The 13” version actually has a larger battery than its predecessor.

bamboo ,

In this case I was referring to bandwidth and latency, which on-package memory helps with. It does make a difference in memory-intensive applications, but the majority of people would never notice a difference. Also Apple will absolutely give you a ton of memory, you just have to pay for it. They offer 128GB on the MacBook Pro, and it’s unified so the GPU has full access to it, which makes it surprisingly good for running LLMs locally, for example.

bamboo ,

I think it is fair to say that the hype surrounding last year’s Reddit exodus has come to an end. But, Lemmy existed for several years before then, and will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. It’s not going to grow infinitely, but there will likely be more waves in the future that see spikes of activity followed by declines, but each one will bring in new users that will build up the community slowly.

Lemmy is also part of the fediverse which does seem to be growing at a healthy rate, especially mastodon. It’s entirely possible that future software updates there will make Lemmy more visible to mastodon users and allow both communities higher levels of interaction.

bamboo ,

It could with software ray tracing, but it doesn’t have any GPUs. The CPU cores aren’t especially fast either, they just have a lot of them.

bamboo ,

MacBooks right now in particular are so far ahead of everything else right now. Nothing comes close in terms of performance and battery life. Some laptops can do one or the other, but if it’s fast you can expect the battery life to be shit or vice versa.

bamboo ,

Are 12+ hours of intense work realistic on those devices?

bamboo ,

This is a bad take. Yes, “algorithm” is a vague term, but it’s incorrect to suggest that they’re easily cloned. These algorithms are what makes social media companies. Without them, they wouldn’t have the same kind of user engagement. It’s why, outside of the fediverse, social media companies try to hide or demote linear timelines. It’s why they pour most of the R&D money into the recommendation algorithms.

bamboo ,

I think when Microsoft said Windows 10 was the last version, they were serious about it. And they kept it up for a pretty long time too. I think windows 11 happened only because some marketing person wanted to be able to pitch a new version, and a UX refresh was already being implemented.

bamboo ,

Just to add, image hosting for lemmy servers is also an issue already. Afaik they aren’t federated because even the occasional image will significantly increase the amount of storage required on instances.

bamboo ,

As a technical person working in tech, I’ve heard of home assistant but only ever spoken to one or maybe two people that have actually tried it. It doesn’t seem that mainstream. Meanwhile, every smartphone has a proprietary assistant built in.

bamboo ,

And fwiw, most computer users still aren’t Adobe CC users.

bamboo ,

UTM is really good as a free solution, otherwise Parallels is the go-to.

Reddit Is Taking Over Google (tech.slashdot.org)

Reddit, Quora, and other internet forums that have climbed up through the traditional set of Google links. Data analysis from Semrush, which predicts traffic based on search ranking, shows that traffic to Reddit has climbed at an impressive clip since August 2023. Semrush estimated that Reddit had over 132 million visitors in...

bamboo ,

Could you then bypass the quora login prompt with a user script that appends ?share=1 to every page?

bamboo ,

As a silver lining, at least it’s terrible at it

bamboo ,

The big advantage of google docs is that it is free and good enough. Most people don’t need advanced formatting options, font size and a few choices are sufficient.

bamboo ,

Sure but I can’t run libreoffice on my iPad, and that’s a deciding factor for more people than the licensing.

bamboo ,

Why wouldn’t you? They’re super convenient, being small and lightweight, with high quality keyboards that make them more laptop like, plus they support standard USB and Bluetooth keyboards. They aren’t full laptop replacements, but basic office productivity tasks they surely are, and have first class support from Microsoft office, google docs, and Apple’s office tools. In a meeting for example, they can be used to take notes, and then quickly screen mirror to a TV wirelessly or with a wired adapter and be used as a drawing tablet for sketching ideas or drawing diagrams. Extremely versatile, there’s nothing really like it (well, besides other tablets).

They certainly don’t replace a real laptop in all aspects, but they do for most people most of the time, hence why it’s common for people to use smartphones and tablets as their only computer.

bamboo ,

How noisy are these? I have a pair of shucked WD drives that should be equivalent to reds, and they’re pretty noisy in my otherwise quiet home office. Given they’re only 8TB, upgrading them to SSDs for full silence is something in considering as soon as the pricing and availability permits.

bamboo ,

As far as I know there is only one SSD model that meets my criteria (Samsung 870 QVO 8TB), and at $520 right now so I’ve decided it’s best to wait. I’d like it to be quieter but not so badly as to spend $1k on it (need two).

bamboo ,

Yeah it’s wild that the US government will fund private projects without getting the same bonds or shares that private investors would expect.

bamboo ,

FLAC is compressed, but unlike lossy codecs like AAC and MP3, FLAC is fully lossless. Lossy codecs delete information the authors believe you won’t notice, lossless compression keeps all the data and just tries to fit it in a smaller space. The original recording can be perfectly reproduced (taking into account sample rate and depth).

bamboo , (edited )

If not Lemmy, what else? Last summer I looked around and Lemmy seemed to be by far the largest that wasn’t on a single topic (ex, Hacker news)

bamboo ,

Kbin doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere. The repos are dead (one commit in the last two months, written in php which is not promising for new contributors), there’s really only one instance of it, and I don’t know of any communities hosted there. There’s also no app support, which is crucial for me to actually use the platform. The concept is good so I’d love to see it continue, but I also wouldn’t invest anything in the platform at this time.

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