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cecilkorik

@ cecilkorik @lemmy.ca

Posts
1
Comments
434
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • How my AI Agent views and maintains "our" homelab

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  • 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.

  • ‘Cost Me the Election’: Data Centers Trigger Voter Backlash

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  • As with most things, the problem is never the technology itself, technologies have problems, and we find solutions for those problems, that's what we do, that's how the progress of technology works. But nobody these days wants to let us have the solutions to the problems or even know what they are, when they can monetize a temporary remedy they can sell to us instead. And the problem is profitable, so they want to force us to have the problem; they won't let us stop using the problem technology either. Vulture capitalists preying on civilization and waiting for all of us to collapse from exhaustion so they can feed on our wallets, not caring that they're watching us die.

  • FR#168 – LLMs Join The Fediverse

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  • Yeah it's really upsetting. Some of the most genuinely intelligent and insightful people I know have talked exactly like that (many still do), and I know they're people because a) I've met some of them, and b) they were doing this before generative AI was a thing. Generative AI stole the natural styles and voices of our best and brightest and is wearing them like a fucking Edgar suit. It's sick.

  • [META] Are paid for, closed source projects, being advertised on this community, appropriate?

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  • That's fair, thanks for cleaning up the mess and sorry for being part of it.

  • [META] Are paid for, closed source projects, being advertised on this community, appropriate?

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  • Thanks for letting me and everyone else know you're childish and stupid enough to be worth blocking.

  • [META] Are paid for, closed source projects, being advertised on this community, appropriate?

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  • Microsoft punishes idiots who purchased a "perpetual" license of Office 2019 for Mac by disabling it next month, pirates unaffected

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  • Dunking on tech giants is the only kind of spice that makes modern life palatable.

  • Commodore's Next Hardware Release Is Dumb, And Proud Of It

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  • It's 2026 and I'm suddenly desperately interested in buying a flipphone from Commodore? What is even going on? Has reality itself completely jumped the shark?

  • Selfhosted Family Email and Calendar

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  • Not personally. I prefer to run bare metal whenever possible. It helps me understand how everything connects, it's the difference between being handed someone else's completed Lego sculpture and building it yourself, it takes a lot longer but you'll have way more appreciation for it after building it and a much more thorough understanding of how it's all put together and what's involved, and you're a lot better equipped to fix it if a piece breaks off.

  • Selfhosted Family Email and Calendar

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  • I self-host Nextcloud and use it extensively (if not primarily) for Calendar. All my calendars are hosted and synced with WebDav and I use a variety of clients but mainly Thunderbird desktop.

  • AI is making promises your brand never made. Hotels are paying the price

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  • And from whom are the hotels going to seek compensation for this fraud that has been perpetrated on them?

    Are they going to pursue the perpetrators? Of course not. Will they lobby the government for some form of compensation? Oh quite possibly. Will they "pass the costs onto consumers"? You'd better believe it.

    Working. As. Intended.

  • Quality gate as a solution?

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  • Might I presume you are in fact a devoted follower of the Omnissiah? You speak somewhat like a machine-spirit yourself, my servitor friend.

  • How do you manage you DB in a docker environment?

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  • I use a single centralized database running directly on the host (postgres) and make it accessible to the docker clusters.

    Pros: It's all in one place to backup all important data for every service, I find this a much easier and more reliable way to backup all services, and I'm confident if you tried it you would too. The application data becomes a first-class citizen instead of hiding inside some nameless docker volume. Significantly less database overhead. Consistent database version and tools.

    Cons: Lots. You need to manage and backup the database. You need to manage the database users and passwords too. Making the DB accessible to the docker clusters is nontrivial and can be fragile. You can no longer use the default "official" docker compose files, since they will almost never support an actual database service without several modifications, they're always built for spinning up their own docker container database. So you're going to be doing a bunch of work setting up users and passwords and performing extensive surgery on the docker-compose before you even start up the application, which adds a lot of friction, with lots of opportunity for error. All things considered, it's actually quite painful. Technically if one application abuses your database hard enough and exhausts its memory to crash it or something it would affect other applications too, but that's true of any services running on shared hardware abusing anything on that hardware, so it's not a realistically concerning con.

    I consider it worthwhile, but I might be wrong. Also I hate docker in general. I understand why people use it. It's the same reason I use it. But I still hate it. I think system installations are so much easier to manage in the long run, but initially more work, and you need to invest that work at a time when you're not even sure if you really want to run this application or if it's going to be compatible with the rest of your environment. So docker is the easy solution. But then you're basically trapped in dockerland. It's not that bad, I just hate it in principle. I wish there were a better way.

  • Quality gate as a solution?

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  • As a software reliability engineer, this is what I've been doing for the last 10 years, and yes that's exactly the right idea. No notes.

    Actually, I do have one note, the real quality gate at that point becomes the quality of your tests. It turns into a bit of a "who watches the watchers" situation, especially when major new features and systems get added, since they may come with a ready made suite of absolutely useless if not actively detrimental tests. That said, not only are high-quality tests often easier to implement and reason about than high-quality software would be if it were entirely on its own, and AI is also surprisingly good at it, at least if you've got someone with some experience and knowledge of the desired outcome to guide it. The domain-specific knowledge is not becoming less useful.

    The bad news is that it's a bit of a different skill-set, I don't think it's anything that anybody should struggle too much to pick up though. And I don't know and am not trying to claim how well this strategy works on the security side of the equation, we have a security review team who handles that question independently.

    Beyond that, I don't really care where your code comes from, I don't care if an AI wrote it or a dog wrote it or you found it in an eldritch obelisk glowing with demonic runes. If it seems well-tested and passes all the existing tests and isn't obviously wrecking anything, I have good enough confidence it will be fine, and only the gods of chaos can possibly say otherwise. May Grandfather Nurgle have mercy on me.

  • In 2024, a tiny, spherical rover called SORA-Q arrived on the Moon. It could fit into your palms, rolled around the surface for nearly two hours, capturing images and relaying data back to Earth

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  • Japanese aesthetic sense is pretty unmatched. Gimme a future full of pastoral buddhist temple cherry blossom cyberpunk anime waifu gundam space battleships orbiting over Mount Fuji, just pump that shit straight into my veins.

  • Google just fired a warning shot in the AI subscription price wars

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  • Hot take: It's a useful tool for debugging because it is, in a very overcomplicated way, a good search algorithm (like Google itself USED to be before it was ruined by SEO and ads) and probabilistic, large language model search is potentially a good solution for finding and discovering useful content from the internet that real people have created. No, you can't absolutely trust its outputs of course, but neither can you trust everything else you find on the Internet either. It's dangerous because it's convincing, not because it's wrong. Things being wrong or misleading should be expected. This is the internet.

    Generative AI is generally pretty shit-quality plagiarism that is good at convincing people it is novel and brilliant because it's borrowing novelty and brilliance from millions of people at once. It's a pretty awful technology. Maybe it has some genuine applications, though I haven't thought of too many that aren't completely nihilistic. But machine learning and language models in general do absolutely have genuinely interesting applications. It requires a nuanced understanding of what they are and what they're doing, which is a level of understanding that I don't think a lot of the current AI-pushers even have themselves.

  • AI helps those who help themselves

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  • Excuse me for having a little fun. Didn't mean to interrupt your serious business day.

  • AI helps those who help themselves

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  • New plans to stop children taking, sharing or viewing nude images

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  • Yeah we need to stop blaming individuals and political parties and start blaming ourselves for our complete inability to hold our own governments accountable. This is not democracy, and the more we convince ourselves this is "normal" for democratic governments to be this corrupted and/or incompetent (if you want to be generous) that they ignore the wishes of the actual human beings who they represent in favor of the corporations and state apparatus and "the economy", the worse things are going to get. Governments of any color and stripe acting like this is NOT normal, it is NOT democracy, and it is NOT acceptable, and democracy requires us to hold them accountable. People need to get ANGRY and protest while we still are able to, not be apathetic and accepting and normalize it. You did not vote for this. Do not let them get away with it.

  • Laptop as server, how to best manage battery?

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  • If you have an option in the BIOS or drivers to set the battery charging threshhold to stop charging at 80% or possibly even lower (I believe Lithium Ion/Polymer cells are happiest at around 40-60% state of charge, which is why they are usually shipped that way). Sometimes this feature exists, but only vaguely described as "battery life optimization" or some similar wankery that they never properly explain.

    You can also just remove the battery entirely if it will be always plugged in, but setting it to a low/modest maximum charge gives you a nice, reliable, built-in UPS in case of power interruptions.