Combining the worst parts of capitalism with the worst parts of communism, we’ve basically created the perfect economic system. Well, for the billionaires and oligarchs anyway.

I make all my life decisions based on what CEOs say. The trick is, I usually go the opposite direction.

I don’t actually think benchmarks are fully reliable. They give you some idea of the model’s performance but there is also value in some models that aren’t necessarily reflected on every (or any) benchmark.

Ornith is a nice fine-tune of Qwen that works reasonably well on reasonable hardware, Bonsai also seems to be often recommended but I haven’t tried it personally. That said, from everything I’ve seen local agentic code is pretty computationally wasteful in many cases, it iterates heavily and confuses itself a lot and self-corrects often repeatedly. It hurts my soul to imagine the energy waste and environmentally damage if large numbers of people started using this routinely and carelessly.

It is meaningfully useful, I’ll grant you that, and when paired with highly specific and well-bounded tasks it performs quite well. I hate the idea of relying on it too heavily though. If you just throw it at things blind and without you also providing assistance to the model, it will get the job done, eventually, just in a really painful and stupid way. It’s not Claude, but for a locally-running substitute it’s remarkably good, it handles coding assistance very effectively, but it’s a very poor coder when operating completely independently. I find the best and most efficient use is to ask it for suggestions, keeping the pieces as small as reasonably possible, and then implement them myself based on what it suggests (either adjusting the model’s edits or copy-pasting the model’s suggestions). It’s very good at locating the relevant code and it usually suggests a reasonable design, which I typically tweak based on my own experience. Maybe that makes me old-school, maybe I’m a luddite, but that’s what my experience tells me to do. If you don’t have any experience, I guess you’re on your own, good luck with the models. They’re decent, but they’re not brilliant programmers (granted neither am I most days). That’s my opinion and I’m sticking with it until I see evidence to suggest otherwise.

No they weren’t, how did you get that idea? Nowhere did they ask for a specific fix, nor did they provide the details necessary for a specific fix. The OP asked how it works, and according to my reading of both their post and their comment, they seemed quite curious about what was going on (which is a good mindset to have when attempting to solve a problem) so my intention was to answer some of that curiosity by explaining “how”. You’re the one who decided someone should just provide a fix (which, in this case, would’ve been basically impossible)

Especially when a problem arises because of misunderstanding or ignorance (which is not a shameful thing, it’s simply the default state of understanding), an improved and better understanding of the situation often helps lead one quite quickly to the solution to the problem, and in this case, it seems like OP did solve their own problem once they had a better understanding, so… seems like a successful effort to me? Any particular reason we need to argue about this?

It works the same way it normally works. You generate the certificate, give it to them, tell them who you are, they verify who you are, then they sign it and give it back to you. Very routine and straightforward, except for the challenge part that they use to verify your identity.

Think of it in terms of delivering a pizza. The signed certificate is the pizza in this analogy, and they don’t want to send it to you until they’re sure it’s going to the right place. Either the store can send it to you (you have to give them your address and have port 80 open for when they arrive) or you can go pick it up at the store (you give them your address, they verify it through DNS, no port 80 required).

There’s never been anything preventing you from establishing a conversation with the certificate-issuer. You don’t need port 80 open for that. However, unless you have port 80 open the issuer cannot reach out to you, and that’s how they verify you are who you say you are. DNS challenges avoid them having to reach out to you directly, instead they reach out to DNS on your behalf and verify you are who you say you are that way instead.

Hook it up to the TV and use it for big screen web/media/gaming/retro-emulation. Steam and/or Sunshine/Moonlight can be used for low-latency streaming to play games from another PC (in either direction). You can use controllers and keyboard/mouse through either streaming method or bluetooth/wireless. Also handy for occasionally streaming things that don’t have smart-TV-apps, or for services where the only functional apps are service-locked, shitty and/or “Freemium” (most IPTV apps for example). Set it up for Wake-On-LAN (or Wake-On-WiLAN if it supports it). Lots of things you can do with a PC in the living room.

This is good thinking, and you may still want something like this anyway, as there’s always room for additional documentation, but let me propose an alternative that takes this good way of thinking a step further:

Infrastructure-as-code means my code is my documentation. How’s it configured? Look at the code. What’s it doing? Look at the code. Don’t understand why it’s doing that? Use more descriptive names for things and write more self-explanatory code. Is the code out of date with the current state? Stop implementing things manually and make the code run automatically instead so it’s never out of date anymore.

I have complete confidence in my setup and life is easy now. Except when the IAC breaks. But that’s rarely a panic situation, just mildly frustrating.

I wonder how this compares to Stoat. I found this comparison of many different options but I’m not sure how up to date it is

rsync, SyncThing, or Nextcloud. I use all three, often on the same machine at the same time, for various purposes.

rsync is great for scheduled syncs (but intentionally not TOO frequent – where blowing away one copy would almost instantly blow away the other copy could be a concern.) and outstanding for one-off syncs. With the right command line options it can even create a rough approximation of snapshots with copy-on-write rolling incremental backups. I believe this is the original documentation for that particular trick although it has spawned many genuine backup tools which operate very similarly using rsync under the hood, like rsnapshot.

SyncThing is great for large, intensive datasets that you want to keep perfectly synchronized across multiple computers at the same time. One example is my saved games, so without relying on Steam “cloud saves” or anything, I can just save my game and hop from gaming on one computer onto my laptop and pick up right where I left off.

Nextcloud is what I use for keeping separate copies of all my documents, photos from my phone, etc. It’s easier than SyncThing to setup and manage in my opinion, it’s simple and reliable and reasonably user-friendly in most use-cases, and seems to be more compatible with a lot of software due to its similar design to something like Dropbox. It isn’t ideal for handling huge numbers of files or very large folders in my personal opinion, but it does work if you want to try it.

I donated a server to my brother across the country to use as his media server, it also doubles as my own offsite backup. And vice versa for his, although he’s not really tech savvy enough to care.

Or a heat pump dishwasher? If he finds a way to turn a heat pump into lighting he’s got it made.

No screenshots, but I had an old server with a pair of mirrored 8GB Seagates hosting a particularly specialized service on a very beefy and regularly maintained UPS and it had a server uptime of 21 years (had not been rebooted since somewhere around 1999) when I finally decommissioned it about 5 years ago, both disks would’ve been the same. It was on the public internet the whole time too, running Debian Slink with kernel 2.0.36, which had been awkwardly patched and rebuilt somehow to make the service (itself already obsolete at that time) actually work. I don’t know why I remember all this, but I do.

I do remember monitoring the SMART status at various points and the drive bearings must’ve been pretty cooked because those two drives were always running at 50-60C and I had a big old box fan pointed at the thing with the side panel off.

This example is also why I don’t always buy into the cult of “you must always regularly update all software immediately all the time”. Old software is not always bad software, same with old hardware. Sometimes it’s genuinely possible to have a bulletproof system. The problem is you never really know you do, until it either enters survivorship bias or becomes catastrophically proven otherwise. But you can make educated guesses, and if you’re going to naively assume that your old software must have exploitable security holes it seems equally naive to me to assume that updates must never have exploitable security holes. I think the risk calculus has to be done on a case-by-case basis.

I’ll answer your question first, but I have some issues with the framing you’re using around that question. The two other main methods of practical temperature management available to us are evaporative cooling and geothermal. Your body has a built-in evaporative cooling mechanism called sweat. Fans take advantage of this. But not everyone has equally effective bodies for this, not all climates are particularly effective for it (high humidity makes it extremely ineffective) and not everyone finds it comfortable for their situation. Swamp coolers are a different form of evaporative cooling that move the evaporation process onto a substrate which then cools things down with a fan. You can also find natural evaporative cooling working for you in many places, for example around large bodies of water. There is an externalized cost here if you’re trying to make evaporative cooling work in an environment that’s unsuitable for it, and the cost of fresh water is a significant line item on the energy budget too. Don’t neglect that by assuming evaporative cooling is a clear win that is automatically preferable to an air conditioner. All these evaporative solutions share the reality that they’re going to add (often very significant amounts of) humidity to the air. Air conditioning on the other hand can actually remove humidity from the air, and is one of the few practical methods of doing that. It’s solving the issue in a different way, but it’s a significant and important difference.

The other option is geothermal. This is genuinely underutilized today and I think we can certainly save a lot of energy budget by accessing stable and susprisingly comfortable temperatures underground basically year-round. Geothermal heat pumps (which use air conditioning technology) are by far the most practical way of doing this in our current situation, but older solutions involving buildings that are deeper in the ground or that have airflow going through the ground can provide access to this temperature too – with the caveat that you’ll often run into problems with water, flooding, or condensation/mold unless you’re in a particular sort of environment where this is not a concern.

As for the framing: You have to look at it systemically I think. We do a lot of things that seem dumb on the surface, and sometimes they are dumb, but more often they are making tradeoffs for particular reasons and a lot of times those turn out to be the right tradeoffs, there’s just a lot of complexity to the system that you’re glossing over. You can certainly argue those reasons, and try a different path, as long as you understand them first. Some of the reasons might be invalid or the tradeoff might not be the right trade, but I don’t see the benefit in making blanket value judgements without understanding what they are and why they’re happening. But I think you’ll find it more challenging than it seems to come up with a better solution in the long run.

What is your specific objection to air conditioners? Temperature is a huge line item on any energy budget, and it has to be managed somehow. There are few places on the planet where humans can live year-round without some form of temperature management, and quite often that requires energy. Firewood is not always a given and not perfectly sustainable at least the way we use it. An air conditioner is not propaganda it is a tool, and you have to figure out if it’s the right tool for the job but that’s never going to be a binary true/false. I think saying you’re “completely opposed” to them and calling them propaganda might be blinding yourself to what the actual goal is and what tools you can use to get there.

Using an air conditioner to live in a hot place is, at least as I understand it, still more energy efficient than using any kind of heater or even a heat pump (which is just an air conditioner in reverse) to live in a cold place, and hot places also have more readily available sources of other energy, typically, so this is not necessarily the wrong choice as transmitting energy long distances is not always a good call either. But you have to understand the tradeoffs you are making. This is why it might seem like propaganda, but it might just be that someone’s done the math and come out to this answer. If you are looking at different numbers, or missing some of those numbers, you might come to a different conclusion, but the air conditioner itself is not the problem, the disagreement in the numbers and the context you are putting those numbers is going to be the root cause you need to figure out.

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Not what OP is using obviously, but AMD X3D CPUs and Mac systems can be quite competitive for AI if you’re lacking VRAM. Not all CPUs struggle with inference, and some GPUs aren’t so hot at it either. GPUs are generally better, especially the really high-end ones, but throwing in low- and mid-range cards and high-end CPUs stuff starts to look somewhat muddier.

Yes, I don’t hate the technology, I hate all the evil companies abusing this technology for profit, fascism and death, which is very close to all of them.

But they are not the only ones working on the technology, and even though they have stolen many of people’s entire lives worth of work for making these models and not only didn’t compensate them, but in many cases replaced them and terminated their employment, in many cases we are stealing it right the fuck back from them and making it open to everybody, because fuck them. It doesn’t belong to them in the first place, it belongs to all of us. We can’t put the genie back in the lamp or the toothpaste back in the tube, but we can make sure we are keeping our own data for ourselves once we take these monstrous, bloated, oligarchs down. We will not the libraries of Alexandria burn down again, and we won’t let them have the only copies.

I won’t pretend I don’t have various issues with open weight models using this technology, but they’re more like “I don’t like systemd’s philosophy or developers” level of issues, not “I think they will destroy democracy, civilization and possibly all of humanity” level of issues.

With the evil companies, I absolutely DO have “I think they will destroy democracy, civilization and possibly all of humanity” level of issues.

I have no personal experience with that. It must be really nice.

I don’t think you grasp the sheer scale of humanity’s ongoing and relentless efforts to exceed even the most optimistic projections of any possibly sustainable boundaries, without any regard for anything beyond their completely myopic perception of their immediate needs in the present moment, but I do appreciate the context you’re providing.

It will be a miracle solution until the elevated water temperatures start affecting the ecosystem downstream and potentially the health of the river as a whole, if not the effectiveness of the system itself. Then people will realize that actually perhaps it wasn’t so miraculous after all, and like all engineering choices, is a compromise between what we’re getting from it and what we’re giving up. We could even point at the new algae problem in the reflecting pool as an example of such unintended consequences from heating the water above traditional norms. For some of the same reasons you shouldn’t dump raw sewage into the river, it’s not an infinite garbage disposal, it can’t just endlessly absorb your waste whether it’s domestic, biological or heat or anything else. You’re not getting rid of it, you’re just making it someone else’s, somewhere else’s problem, potentially at some other time. But maybe it’s a reasonable solution for right now, it might be better than the alternatives, maybe the tradeoffs are pretty minor or even legitimately ignorable when weighed against the benefits. But as long as we cling to the insane idea of endless, infinite economic growth, they’re only ignorable until it that growth makes it inevitable that someday they’re not, and calling it miraculous feels a lot like pretending there aren’t any downsides, and I don’t really like that in principle.