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Cake day: April 23rd, 2023

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  • Also, the raw material is expected to be quite rare relatively soon.

    To be fair, this wouldn’t be nearly as true if we had persisted with our original plan which was to reprocess the spent fuel, more than 90% of which is still usable material. Once we found a couple huge deposits of Uranium, it became much cheaper to simply mine more of it and dispose of the spent fuel, so the recycling plans were scrapped. Sure, we can technically still pull the spent fuel back out again and recycle it, but we spent many years building reactors without building an equal capacity of reprocessing facilities (which are almost as hard to build safely as reactors), so that ship has more or less sailed.




  • You’re entirely correct, but in theory they can give it a pretty good go, it just requires a lot more computation, developer time, and non-LLM data structures than these companies are willing to spend money on. For any single query, they’d have to get dozens if not hundreds of separate responses from additional LLM instances spun up on the side, many of which would be customized for specific subjects, as well as specialty engines such as Wolfram Alpha for anything directly requiring math.

    LLMs in such a system would be used only as modules in a handcrafted algorithm, modules which do exactly what they’re good at in a way that is useful. To give an example, if you pass a specific context to an LLM with the right format of instructions, and then ask it a yes-or-no question, even very small and lightweight models often give the same answer a human would. Like this, human-readable text can be converted into binary switches for an algorithmic state machine with thousands of branches of pre-written logic.

    Not only would this probably use an even more insane amount of electricity than the current approach of “build a huge LLM and let it handle everything directly”, it would take much longer to generate responses to novel queries.







  • OP is absolutely mistaken that it’s somehow ableist to stick to a meeting deadline or similar “punishment” for lateness, and t3rmit3 has said why much more eloquently than I could. However, you’ve said something that I can’t let pass without a rebuttal.

    perpetual lateness means someone values their time more than they do the commitment and the time of others. period.
    […]
    perpetual lateness, though, is a statement, that individual could not give a shit what others needs and responsibilities are

    This is making a moral judgment on what you believe is in someone’s mind, and your judgment is based on a false premise. There exists an extremely common mental disorder (so common that some might consider it a form of neurodivergence) that when left untreated makes it much harder to do the things you want and are obligated to do. It’s harder to start doing things, it’s harder to stop, it’s harder to focus yet too easy to focus, it’s harder to remember important things, and it’s harder to motivate yourself to do anything you aren’t doing at any given moment, and anything you have to put effort into motivating yourself to do leaves you with less mental energy to do anything else in that category.

    The one thing that can usually overcome all of these mental blocks is panic - when you’re actually out of time and Consequences are approaching if you don’t do something RIGHT NOW then you can finally do what you need to do and get something done - later than you wanted, worse than you wanted, more mentally drained, and with plenty of reasons to beat yourself up over it, not that it helps if you do. This is the reason behind why most people show up perpetually late. They might not let the emotional turmoil show, but if they’re consistently a few minutes late for everything, I can just about promise it’s not because they don’t care.

    People who have this disorder and receive prescription medication for it often describe the first dose as like receiving superpowers. The idea that they can decide they want to do something, and then just go do it? Without thinking about it? No buildup? No psyching yourself into it? No roundabout coping strategies? No reorganizing the entire structure of your life to make it happen? No bargaining with the goddamn monkey in your brain that almost never lets you do the rational thing? Wait, normal people don’t have the monkey? They live like this every day, without any expensive pills? Impossible. It couldn’t be that simple. Do they have any idea how lucky they are?

    Your misplaced sense of moral superiority is unfortunately quite common, but it’s not going to help these people, it’s going to hurt them. If it’s affecting their life, and it often is, they need treatment and training in how their brain works, not to be told they’re a piece of shit who doesn’t care about others and are choosing to inconvenience everyone else in their life including themselves. That’s only going to put them in a worse place.


  • Unfortunately I can’t even test Llama 3.1 in Alpaca because it refuses to download, showing some error message with the important bits cut off.

    That said, the Alpaca download interface seems much more robust, allowing me to select a model and then select any version of it for download, not just apparently picking whatever version it thinks I should use. That’s an improvement for sure. On GPT4All I basically have to download the model manually if I want one that’s not the default, and when I do that there’s a decent chance it doesn’t run on GPU.

    However, GPT4All allows me to plainly see how I can edit the system prompt and many other parameters the model is run with, and even configure multiple sets of parameters for the same model. That allows me to effectively pre-configure a model in much more creative ways, such as programming it to be a specific character with a specific background and mindset. I can get the Mistral model from earlier to act like anything from a very curt and emotionally neutral virtual intelligence named Jarvis to a grumpy fantasy monster whose behavior is transcribed by a narrator. GPT4All can even present an API endpoint to localhost for other programs to use.

    Alpaca seems to have some degree of model customization, but I can’t tell how well it compares, probably because I’m not familiar with using ollama and I don’t feel like tinkering with it since it doesn’t want to use my GPU. The one thing I can see that’s better in it is the use of multiple models at the same time; right now GPT4All will unload one model before it loads another.


  • I have a fairly substantial 16gb AMD GPU, and when I load in Llama 3.1 8B Instruct 128k (Q4_0), it gives me about 12 tokens per second. That’s reasonably fast enough for me, but only 50% faster than CPU (which I test by loading mlabonne’s abliterated Q4_K_M version, which runs on CPU in GPT4All, though I have no idea if that’s actually meant to be comparable in performance).

    Then I load in Nous Hermes 2 Mistral 7B DPO (also Q4_0) and it blazes through at 50+ tokens per second. So I don’t really know what’s going on there. Seems like performance varies a lot from model to model, but I don’t know enough to speculate why. I can’t even try Gemma2 models, GPT4All just crashes with them. I should probably test Alpaca to see if these perform any different there…




  • He did at the beginning, but he helped them get what they wanted in the end, and I think that counts for something.

    “We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.

    “We know that many of our members weren’t happy with our original agreement,” Russo said, “but through it all, we had faith that our friends in the White House and Congress would keep up the pressure on our railroad employers to get us the sick day benefits we deserve. Until we negotiated these new individual agreements with these carriers, an IBEW member who called out sick was not compensated.”



  • Beats me on what do they spend those taxes

    It’s spent on what is by far the most powerful, expensive, and expansive military in the world, with funding about equivalent to the next ten militaries combined. All of Europe barely has any military spending by comparison; NATO is almost entirely propped up by the US military industrial complex. If US foreign policy wasn’t so doggedly imperialist, we might have room for some healthcare.

    That’s not even getting into how medical corporations in the US are more or less financially unrestrained and allowed to make as much money as they want, paired with an insurance industry with the same conditions, and both industries becoming more and more consolidated, with all the big players participating in the stock market. The result is a race to the top in which everything is made far more expensive than it needs to be in order to please shareholders. In this environment, spending government money on US healthcare is substantially less efficient than the same spending would be in a European country.

    Correction of these markets, as with housing, is likely to be financially devastating to the economic elite, but also critical to the prosperity of real people in this country.



  • The ELI5 for Fedora’s atomic desktops is that if Windows had an Atomic Desktop version, Program Files and most of the Windows folder would be read only, and each program you installed yourself would go into its own folder in your user directory. That’s the basic idea. It’s harder to screw up an Atomic system as long as you stick to containerized app formats like flatpak/appimage whenever possible. It makes it easier for everyone to diagnose problems, and easier for users to roll back if an update has problems. Even if you were to install it right now, you could use one simple command to “roll back” to any image from the last three months.

    The benefit of Bazzite is you have all of the above, plus a lot of gaming-related stuff preinstalled which, if you were to install them yourself in a normal Fedora environment, you’d likely have to spend a lot of time just learning how they’re supposed to be configured, how they interact, which versions have problems, and how to troubleshoot problems when an update to one app breaks a prerequisite for something else; eventually you end up in config hell instead of actually using your computer. With Bazzite, the image maintainers are the ones in config hell - they work out the kinks, app versioning, communicate with upstream to fix issues, all that, so your system should be in the most functional state that a Linux system can be, so you only have to think about using your apps.

    tl;dr

    • Atomic Desktops are more resilient to randomly breaking from updates or user error, and are easier to revert to a prior state if problems do arise
    • Bazzite is a custom Atomic image with lots of gaming stuff preinstalled and preconfigured to work properly out of the box
    • If you’re a gamer and wanting to try out Linux, Bazzite is going to be the least painful way to get your feet wet.
    • Immutable distros are excellent for daily driving. I daily drive one myself!