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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • CVEs are constantly found in complex software, that’s why security updates are important. If not these, it’d have been other ones a couple of weeks or months later. And government users can’t exactly opt out of security updates, even if they come with feature regressions.

    You also shouldn’t keep using software with known vulnerabilities. You can find a maintained fork of Chromium with continued Manifest V2 support or choose another browser like Firefox.




  • Mostly via terminal, yeah. It’s convenient when you’re used to it - I am.

    Let’s see, my inference speed now is:

    • ~60-65 tok/s for a 8B model in Q_5_K/Q6_K (entirely in VRAM);
    • ~36 tok/s for a 14B model in Q6_K (entirely in VRAM);
    • ~4.5 tok/s for a 35B model in Q5_K_M (16/41 layers in VRAM);
    • ~12.5 tok/s for a 8x7B model in Q4_K_M (18/33 layers in VRAM);
    • ~4.5 tok/s for a 70B model in Q2_K (44/81 layers in VRAM);
    • ~2.5 tok/s for a 70B model in Q3_K_L (28/81 layers in VRAM).

    As of quality, I try to avoid quantisation below Q5 or at least Q4. I also don’t see any point in using Q8/f16/f32 - the difference with Q6 is minimal. Other than that, it really depends on the model - for instance, llama-3 8B is smarter than many older 30B+ models.


  • Have been using llama.cpp, whisper.cpp, Stable Diffusion for a long while (most often the first one). My “hub” is a collection of bash scripts and a ssh server running.

    I typically use LLMs for translation, interactive technical troubleshooting, advice on obscure topics, sometimes coding, sometimes mathematics (though local models are mostly terrible for this), sometimes just talking. Also music generation with ChatMusician.

    I use the hardware I already have - a 16GB AMD card (using ROCm) and some DDR5 RAM. ROCm might be tricky to set up for various libraries and inference engines, but then it just works. I don’t rent hardware - don’t want any data to leave my machine.

    My use isn’t intensive enough to warrant measuring energy costs.




  • Very solid, I think (except water protection, but my previous OnePlus also didn’t have good water protection anyway; and I’m careful enough).

    I don’t tend to use glyphs or the default launcher (and therefore its special widgets that only work there; but the ability to have apps in folders on my main screen while being hidden from the app menu is more important for me than a handful of widgets, so Neo Launcher it is).

    A recent OS update added configurable swap (up to 8GB), calling it “RAM booster”. I don’t use it, but if you want to run a local LLM (or rather a SLM), you could try making use of it? As long as you figure out how to make the model use main RAM and not the swap.

    I like the battery life (or maybe it’s just because it’s the first phone where I started charging at 20% and stopping at 80% semi-consistently).

    Termux still works despite the new Android versions becoming more hostile to apps executing binaries they didn’t have included already.

    One thing I miss from OnePlus is the ability to deny some apps network access entirely. (I think it was removed in later versions of Oxygen OS?)



  • I don’t focus on recommendations specifically. My typical process is:

    • spend anywhere from a few days to a few weeks figuring out which technical characteristics are important for this kind of product, which aren’t, why and when &c. This kind of information is usually available (and even obvious SEO garbage can give you new keywords to consider when searching);
    • based on these alone, determine what’s acceptable and what’s desirable for you;
    • if you haven’t already, find some kind of community around the topic and see which brands/manufacturers people commonly complain about and why; also see if there’re popular manufacturers only selling things via their own websites;
    • open your preferred store (or several) and filter the entire category based on what you’ve learned. Pick a few candidates and examine them closely;
    • go back to the community again and look up anything mentioning these candidates - including comparisons with other ones you haven’t considered. Perhaps consider them;
    • make the final choice.

    Skip some of these if irrelevant or if you don’t care enough. Spend extra time if you care a lot.

    It works well enough for every new phone (the market there is changing fast, so you start anew every time), it worked for my first PC I’ve decided to assemble with 0 prior knowledge, the mechanical keyboard and the vertical mouse, and pretty much every piece of tech I’m buying.

    And I’d say it’s reasonable to use Reddit without an account even if you disagree with what the platform owners are doing. The data is still valuable for such use cases.