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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • IMHO LLM usage isn’t coherent with independence. That being said I wrote quite a bit on self-hosting LLMs. There are quite a few tools available, like ollama itself relying on llama.cpp that can both work locally and provide an API compatible replacement to cloud services. As you suggested though typically at home one doesn’t have the hardware, GPUs with 100+GB of VRAM, to run the state of the art. There is a middle ground though between full cloud, API key, closed source vs open source at home on low-end hardware : running STOA open models on cloud. It can be done on any cloud but it’s much easier to start with dedicated hardware and tooling, for that HuggingFace is great but there are multiples.

    TL;DR: closed cloud -> models on clouds -> self-hosted provide a better path to independence, including training.










  • just that the mobile Proton Mail app does not support fulltext search. I know why, but I still think it’s doable the same way as in the web browser

    If your mobile has a modern Web browser I’m pretty sure you can do full text search in there too.

    Also FWIW it’s a constant struggle for everyone.

    Corporations do their very best, both technically but also with marketing and lobbying, to make it nearly impossible. We have to learn, help each other, vote and it will never stop. Still, each step mattes so kudos on even attempting.


  • Prof Christian Brand, the emeritus professor in transport at Kellogg College,
    

    This guy doesn’t even have a degree.

    I really hope you are a troll lobbying for the car industry … because a rando questioning the credential of an Oxford professor which we can verify with a single DuckDuckGo query reading “Professor Christian Brand is an interdisciplinary environmental scientist, physicist and geographer with over 25 years research experience in academic and consultancy environments.” from the page of one of the most prestigious university in the World, for centuries, is really weird.

    It doesn’t mean though that appeal to authority is right and thus that whatever Prof Christian Brand writes is correct. It’s not because he’s a professor researching in the area of expertise of the paper that he’s right… but his credentials are definitely on point.




  • I think the “trap” is to believe “we” can “win” once and for all.

    Under capitalism (and I’m not suggesting there are better systems, only highlight a core mechanism) there will always be competition to capture value, both customers and lawmakers who (should) protect them.

    There are countless examples but one of the most obvious on that topic if Microsoft itself with it’s sadly now classic EEE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish of which we can admire the comtemporary version with Github. Initially Github was acquired and no changed, nowadays a lot of basic functionalities, e.g. search within a repository are locked behind a login, there are more and more advertisements for Microsoft other products, e.g. CoPilot. That last product itself is questioning the foundation of free software and open source with its license washing process making unclear who did what, breaking provenance, etc.

    The same happened with Google acquiring Android but not locking it down more and more.

    The list could grow longer and longer, overall the point is to showcase a pattern : nothing is just “let” alone to grow on its own. It’s gradually captured and enshittified until there is nothing left but the name of a project because corporations exist only to extract more money. There is no moral, only an imperative for profit or their death.

    So… unfortunately we WILL have to keep on both building AND protecting what’s been built so far with newer and more powerful threats. Microsoft, Google, and all large corporations who advertise themselves as allies of free software and open source MUST be judge on what they actually do, not on what they claim.

    We have to push back and we will always have to. This year and the next.






  • Sadly FUD as ANYTHING that is NOT increasing profit for surveillance capitalism, i.e Google, Meta, etc is a win for privacy!

    Of course /e/OS could be better, GrapheneOS could also be better (including on security) but the big picture is that still ANY of those solutions is making surveillance capitalism, the loss of privacy for profit and power, less efficient. That’s good for all of us who, being on Lemmy or other federated instance, believe we do benefit from having more privacy, or at least not trading it away.

    TL;DR: be inclusive, bring others up, don’t be exclusive aiming for perfection none of us can attain.