Viewing profile — epihelix

Claiming RFK is not anti-vax, is like claiming Dario is not anti-open-weights. (Well, it's way worse that that, but I didn't want to invoke Godwin's law.) He is not "challenging sc…

I hope for local model chat inexperienced users are just using llama.cpp's built-in web server interface, which gives you everything you need. No need for a harness or any other ch…

Agreed. I live on an acreage with the sound of birds and the sea for company, and I could not possibly deal with high-density living. Peace, every single day, is just wonderful. (I…

True. But, these are still odd outliers in terms of low life expectancy, and that's something that the actual BMJ article cited ( https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194 ) …

Should they, though? What gives us the right to own another animal and to entrap it in captivity? I have never understood this attitude. If you genuinely love something, set it fre…

As someone who (foolishly) only drank decaf until my early 40s, I can tell you that the mental difference when you start drinking caffeine is just amazing. It is wonderful stuff. A…

I suspect their point was that optimising sleep is relatively simple. Go to bed in a timely manner, keep your bedroom cool, use blackout blinds and sunrise lamps. Don't drink caffe…

Would it not be easier to not drink so much caffeine late in the day? Unless you're jetlagged, there's not much evidence AFAIK that melatonin will induce sleep better than a placeb…

Personally, I just took a book in with me. (I thought everyone did, but apparently not.) Many share houses, when I was a student, put the film calendar for the local art house cine…

The problem is that an application isn't intuitively analogous to removable media at all. The last time I physically inserted a disc to run an app was in the CD Rom era. The click-…

This sounds like A1 slop to me.

Interestingly, that's many people's experience (including my own) of drinking good coffee with covid. I'm so sorry, is all I can say :(

Holy shirt balls, they had AI in the 1800s! Fricken' Dickens was a bot, and Austen was a clanker.

I know it's not what you wanted to start here with this comment. But the silly, tangential, petty bickering in this thread goes a very long way to explain our failure to act to sto…

While I also don't like the idea of LLM-generated novels, if you browse the shelves of an airport bookstore you'll see a load of facile by-the-numbers pap novels that could just as…

You have to be there to have a subjective experience of the Grand Canyon, for whatever that's worth. (This is essentially the qualia distinction between us and LLMs, writ large.) B…

Literally from TFA: > “We were somewhat surprised by how good the advice was,” Choukhmane said. “Especially when you read the kind of questions people asked, it was not a given tha…

I have no idea what Bubeck meant, and I agree about OpenAI's hypocrisy, but the problems with that infamous (and non-peer-reviewed) Apple preprint were the nature of the tasks (ins…

It still holds for the desktop, though. LLMs have helped me quickly code new software for lab equipment (total users ~6), a research tool for my partner, and for several desktop ap…

I'm writing this on a seven year old phone (an S10e), running a community ROM with A15, and I have no issues at all in installing any apps. This device is my daily driver (it has a…

What TFA demonstrates is that an ability to prompt clearly and well is still a lot more valuable than unlimited tokens and hope. The prompt they used was poor (what does growth mea…

The lack of easy browsing is an issue, but Darktable has never purported to provide an image browser / organizer. Quite the contrary, the devs have always been crystal clear that t…

Well, you shouldn't need to maintain - just compile a static linked binary and you should be good for the rest of your system's life. But more practically - I've been using darktab…

Personally, I was delighted to read the thoughts and perspective of someone who knows and understands the Odyssey better than just about anyone, on the Nolan film adaptation. It wa…

I think the trick is to learn exactly what things AI can give a 100x speed boost with, and use it for those tasks, and only those. The tasks where there's little-to-no speed boost …