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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Admittedly I’m just toying around for entertainment purposes - but I didn’t really have any problems of getting anything I wanted to try out with rocm support. Bigger annoyance was different projects targetting specific distributions or specific software versions (mostly ancient python), but as I’m doing everything in containers anyway that also was manageable.


  • For AI and compute… They’re far behind. CUDA just wins. I hope a joint standard will be coming up soon, but until then Nvidia wins

    I got a W6800 recently. I know a nvidia model of the same generation would be faster for AI - but that thing is fast enough to run stable diffusion variants with high resolution pictures locally without getting too annoyed.



  • It surely is a bubble - so probably a bit different than many other bubbles.

    I think OpenAI made the right call (for them) to commercialize when they did - as that pretty much was their only chance to do so. Things has moved fast over the last 1.5 years - and what used to take a decade in tech has happened within months: OpenAI is the dinosaur company grandfathered in, while for already about a year it’s been more sensible for anybody wanting to do something with LLM to selfhost (or buy hosting capacity, but put up own data) one of the more open language models, and possibly adjust or re-train it.

    As a company owner I get a ridiculous amount of spam for a year already from all kinds of companies building products on top of OpenAI stack, or are trying to sell training or conferences. All those companies will be left with nothing once all the slower users realize technology has moved on. It’s like somebody trying to build all their product offerings based on VMWare stack nowadays.

    If you as a company want to offer something around AI right now the safest option is probably offering hosting, or if you want to do more hands on, adjustment of open models. Both of those are very risky, and many will go bust in years to come - but not as suicidal as building on top of a closed dinosaur.


  • They used to link to my dig wrapper on my homepage for having their clients debug DNS problems for many years - even with translations of my UI in the various language help sites. I always found it amusing that a hoster of their size does that, instead of spending a lunchbreak to throw something together that integrates with their help page.

    There also was a non significant number of users which didn’t understand that my homepage had nothing to do with OVH, and ended up mailing me about their DNS problems.









  • Wall is a linguist, which influenced several of his design choices. You have a wide variety of expressing what you want in perl, just as with natural languages - some ways are maybe a bit harder to read for newcomers, while others are not worse than something like python. Typically you’d have coding guides for projects.

    I did a webchat in perl in the 90s, and eventually rewrote it in php3 - php was easier to manage properly isolated between users than perl via the CGI interface, so it became popular with hosters very quickly. I went back to doing all my web scripting in perl once I started hosting my own servers,though.





  • This thing seems to be a mess with huge rightwing dicks trying to find something that sticks, with people from the other side coming up to defend her.

    I think as a scientist - and especially someone in her role - sloppiness is not a valid excuse, her stepping down was correct, and nobody should make excuses for that. It also is not OK how the rightwing nutjobs are behaving here, but I’ve lost my faith a long time ago that there are still people who can look at both issues, so that will just be a mud slinging competition from both camps until it is forgotten.



  • I’m a father of two young kids nowadays, and I also was a teenager in the 90s with internet access when my parents didn’t really know what it is.

    I think her statement should read “no unrestricted/unlimited smartphone access for children”, but I think for a child time limited, guided smartphone access is important - just by letting her use my phone now and then I don’t think I’d be able to have her build up the media competency required for not wasting her pocket money on nonsensical predatory games when she’s a teenager.

    She’s 7 now - she generally can chat with a limited amount of people (family members and some friends), make pictures, and request app installation. I’m approving pretty much every free app nowadays - at the beginning I was curating, but we went over game mechanics several times, so she’s now recognizing predatory or low effort games herself, and gets rid of them after trying them out. I have my doubts educating a teenager with significantly more technical skills, disagreeing with everything you say, and some ability to throw money at the problem will be as open as her to slowly learning those kind of pitfalls.