greybeard

Yeah, it’s literal billboards that slowly pass in the cityscape, looking like a flat PNG pasted over it, not matching tone or theme in any way. It’s not subtle in the least.

Not the person you responded to, but I’ll give my unsolicited advice: I switched to Unifi NAS. QNAP has had a lot of security nightmares, and a bad habit of EOLing devices.

The best option might actually be using an old workstation and going with something like TrueNAS, but I enjoy the convenience of a purpose built box.

One big difference between Unifi NAS and something like QNAP or Synology, is that the Unifi NAS only does NAS work, it doesn’t run containers or “apps”. You need separate compute if you want to run containers.

Little eMudhra was asked to write down his a secret and hand it in to the teacher. He accidently gave the teacher the wrong paper.

And books just contain a series of words. You are playing semantics games. An ebook is just a bunch of electrons shoved into a rock. Yet, somehow, it also contains knowledge.

In a less abstract way, LLMs giant relational databases that are expressed by using the relationship between previous words to select a word that might follow. It’s in the relational graph that the knowledge is stored. The information is there, and the way we’ve figured out best to get it out is by generating tokens.

I recently gave Strata a shot for my local AI. I’m very impressed with the performance they have eeked out of my hardware. I’ve got a rather beefy gaming desktop I built as an AI server back when the current craze started, before prices started going up, but models up until this point really failed to take full advantage of that hardware. Strata (which uses a Qwen model) both simplified the setup process, and it maxes out the hardware when running.

Strata acts like an OpenAI compatible API server, I then have Hermes as a “harness” to make an “agent”, which I interact with on “buzz”, which is like discord, but made for bots. Although Hermes also supports discord and several other chat platforms.

If you have the hardware to run Strata, I recommend setting it up, it comes with a basic chat interface, which you can then grill to assist you with setting up Hermes and whatever else.

One thing I didn’t mention, is security. I highly recommend you treat AI as unpredictable, unreliable, and capable of being taken over by bad actors. This isn’t a problem for a pure chat interface, but Hermes gives the AI tools to do things, and those tools could be used to take over your computer, scan your network, and create all kinds of havoc. For my part, Hermes is running in a virtual machine which is on an isolated network. I keep tight control on what it does and doesn’t have access to in my network main network. That may not be something you have the hardware or knowledge to do, at the very least I recommend running Hermes in a docker container, and not giving it access to your personal desktop nor credentials to things like your email account.

Books contain knowledge, I doubt you will find many English scholars that disagree with that. In the same way, LLMs contain knowledge as well, they just also have the ability to output that knowledge in a more dynamic way than a book. You can argue some words that are more anthropomorphic, but knowledge has been attributed to inanimate objects for millennia.

I’ve got a Makerbot Thing-O-Matic hanging around still. I’ve considered trying to get it running again, but it ran pretty terrible when new. Modern slicing might help a little, but I doubt it will save it from its own horrendously out of date design.

I think most of the comments misunderstood you, or I did.

Keeping a dedicated admin separate from your daily use user is best practice. In a business setting it is a critical security line, and also seriously helps with auditing and logging. It makes sure that if my computer gets compromised, the active cookies and session tokens are all a standard user. It’s not fool proof, but it really reduces risk.

That said, in my home lab, I don’t bother with that separation. It’s far more work than the effort justifies, when the worst result of your systems being compromised is your media library not being available. What you will want, in any case, is a “break glass” account into every system you setup to use SSO. A local administrator that isn’t tied to SSO available in case your IDP is down, certificates expire, or you accidentally paint yourself into a corner (and you will).

I recommend, if you don’t already, using a password manager like BitWarden and having every single local admin be a long, randomly generated password.

Qwen is what I’ve found to work the best for me so far. I haven’t done an exhaustive search or anything, but the mixture of experts 35b models seem to work pretty well.

I’ve got a little more vRAM to play with, 20GB. It still struggles with giving it enough context to be useful for agentic stuff.

I don’t know if any TVs are actually using it, but Amazon Sidewalk is a form of LoRa, low power, low bandwidth, long distance communication. It’s designed to let non-internet connected devices phone back home. I hear it is very popular with shipping trackers because you can put a small device in a pallet and have it send it’s GPS back for free. I’m not sure it would support the GBs of data TVs are phoning home with each month, but it could certainly send some data home.

My Christmas gift to family members last year were 3D printed lamps. I got a super cheap paper lantern style lamp from Ikea and removed the socket and cord, then printed a new base (filled with sand for weight), and printed a shade using a lithopane generator to have photos shine through. I was quite happy with the results.

Youtube has been feeding me Omarchy video lately, it seems like every single one I tried to watch brought up using Grok. I don’t know anything about Omarchy, but it was enough to give me the feeling something wasn’t right.

Other way around. PrusaSlicer came first. It was originally a fork of Slic3r, then Bambu and OrcaSlicer forked it. Prusa certainly has back ported some features from OrcaSlicer, which is the way open source should work. Everybody wins.

I pay a premium for Prusa because I like their philospohy of making as much of it as possible in house, and their general openness, not just in code, but in how their business functions.

My first 3D printer was a Makerbot Thing-O-Matic. I’m very willing to spend if I think it will benefit the entire ecosystem I’m interested in.

Also, with Prusa, I get to feel like I’m DIYing it, but with great and detailed instructions, and an all-in-one parts sourcing. They are also great at supporting their devices after the fact, which is sometimes necessary, because they often come out a little too hot.

I disagree, it will be worse in almost every way for war than quad copter with a gun mounted on it. Once the brains catch up, maybe, but for now it’s going to trip at the first slightly uneven flooring or raised threshold, and completely destroy itself on a power cable laying on the ground.

It’s a dumb promotional thing, they aren’t "Premiere"ing the game, they are are showing gameplay footage. It’s an Ad that Netflix users are paying for the privilege to be advertised to.

It’s pretty clear that robotics hardware has advanced way beyond the software. Do a backflip? No problem, that’s a predefined routine with good secondary control mechanisms to handle the variation between requested movement and actual movement.

Pick up a dish? Well, that’s going to take vision, control, understanding of how the grabber and various materials interact, and then fuse all that data into an expected result and a plan of action, then control of unexpected things like the plate slipping or the floor being slightly wet.

It’s amazing how far we’ve come and how much it has highlighted how far we have to go.

Obviously I don’t know your setup, but Linux is far easier for printing in most cases. The drivers are built in, and just work. No third party driver packages full of spyware and ink ads necessary.

Hardware support, in general, has always been a struggle for Linux, but in the last few years, two things have happened to tip the scale:

1. Technology kinda stopped advancing. Products are, more often then not, a rehash of last years model with no major changes. This means if Linux gets support for last year’s device, it’ll probably work with this years with minor to no changes.
2. Growing Linux popularity has increased the profile enough that companies are at least trying a little to support Linux, even if it is mostly just making sure Linux developers have documentation on the device.
3. And secret number 3, the tools and systems for reverse engineering USB devices have gotten better and more understood.

AI is finding bugs, which are getting fixed. That’s great, it means a more secure and stable system. As these vulnerabilities are patched out, they are gone forever(regressions not withstanding).

Theoretically, Linux could become perfectly secure. It’s not going to stop people from doing insecure things, but it could mean there are no unintended security weaknesses. We could hit a point were an “LTS” copy of Linux never receives a single security patch, because as long as the code isn’t changing, there’s nothing to fix.

Of course, this is all theoretical, and assumes that new classes of attacks or bigger chains for attacks are never found, but vulnerabilities should be a finite resource in a static codebase, and once that resource is fully exhausted, the code is now fully safe.

Ideally, open weights or open source models catch up, and this can all be done without paying a ransom to OpenAI or Anthropic, and is available through the whole stack, not just kernel level.

The first time I saw one of his comics I really thought it was AI as well. The yellow tint was part of it, but I think another part is the background and foreground not matching. Another thing that stood out was just the amount of detail, felt way more effort than most web comics.

It really is too bad for the artists, he clearly puts a ton of work into these, and it no doubt hurts to have others undercut that.