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[–] [email protected] 14 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

if I wanted to cheat the downvote count I’d just modify our instance’s database. our view of votes is different and neither our posters nor our instance really give a fuck which posts random federated weirdos like or don’t like

feel free to report me to me though

[–] [email protected] 23 points 20 hours ago (8 children)

no, the downvotes are me because a lot of these takes are shitty

[–] [email protected] 7 points 20 hours ago

my least favorite thing about old forums, which carried over to a lot of open source spaces, is how little moderation there is. coming into the help forum with a “no fuck you help me the way I want” attitude should probably be an instant ban and “what the fuck is wrong with you” mod note, cause that’s the exact type of shit that causes the community to burn out quick, and it decreases the usefulness of the space by a lot. but somehow almost every old forum was moderated by the type of cyberlibertarian who treated every ban like an attack on free speech? so you’d constantly see shit like the mod popping in to weakly waggle their finger at the crackpot who’s posting weird conspiracy shit to every thread (which generally caused the crackpot to play the victim and/or tell the mod to go fuck themselves) instead of taking a stand and banning the fucker

and now those crackpots have metamorphosed into full fascists and act like banning them from your GitHub is an international incident, cause they almost never receive any pushback at all

[–] [email protected] 19 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

So I check the 7b model again, and this time round that’s also censored. I panic for a few seconds. Have the Chinese somehow broken into my local model to cover it up after I downloaded it.

what

[–] [email protected] 4 points 21 hours ago

oh this is brilliant, I’ve been looking for something like this

[–] [email protected] 3 points 22 hours ago

ah, I stand corrected! the figures I was looking at previously were for doing it at acceptable speeds in a data center.

can you imagine the intensity of the RGB in the boy genius Prompt Engineer’s new $6000 custom top end gaming PC with server components? maybe they’ll have the LLM slowly plagiarize them a Python script that turns on more RGB when the GPU’s under load.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (3 children)

Is the R1 model better than all existing models? Well, it benchmarks well. But everyone trains their models to the benchmarks hard. The benchmarks exist to create headlines about model improvements while everyone using the model still sees lying slop machines. No, no, sir, this is much finer slop, with a bouquet from the rotting carcass side of the garbage heap.

[…]

This crash doesn’t mean AI sucks now or that it’s good now. It just means OpenAI, and everyone else whose stock dipped, was just throwing money into a fire. But we knew that.

Slop generators are cheap now, and that’s a sea change — but the output is still terrible slop, just more of it.

this bares repeating. I’ve seen quite a few people declare that DeepSeek fixes all of the issues with LLMs as a technology, but that just isn’t true. a DeepSeek LLM is still an unreliable plagiarism machine with no known use case trained on massive amounts of stolen data, even if OpenAI and other American ghouls were the ones who did the theft in the first place.

there’s a small victory in that Altman and friends were exposed very publicly as lying grifters, and that’s worth celebrating. but it’s very important to not get swept up in a hype wave, especially one crafted by people who are much more competent at managing public opinion than Altman & co. from what I understand: no, this thing isn’t meaningfully open source. ~~no, you can’t run the good version at home.~~ sure, it performs great at the benchmarks we know were designed to be cheated. yeah, DeepSeek LLMs are probably still an environmental disaster for the same reason most supposedly more efficient blockchains are — perverse financial incentives across the entire industry.

but hey, good news for the boy genius Prompt Engineer at your company: he gets to requisition another top end gaming PC, absolutely drowning in RGB, to run ~~the shit version of~~ DeepSeek on. maybe in a couple months he can spin switching from OpenAI’s rentseeking to a DeepSeek LLM startup’s slightly cheaper rentseeking into a mild pay bump.

e: see david’s reply, I’m wrong about not being able to run the full version at home — but you need $6000 of fairly specific hardware and it’s molasses slow

[–] [email protected] 5 points 23 hours ago

I love both the content of this post and the fact that it’s a self-contained torture test for our pict-rs upgrade

also, lol @ musk, war genius, starting a domestic dispute with his ex-girlfriend cause she dared to betray him in his baby mobile 4x game when betrayals are a core part of every 4x I know

I’m getting the strong mental image of musk being the guy who flips the board 12 hours into Twilight Imperium cause the other players didn’t let him win

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

18 minutes isn’t even long

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago

from what I’ve been told, a digital nomad visa and EU citizenship by descent are a couple of routes worth looking into. I have frustratingly little detail on the expectations around the visa though, and citizenship by descent laws vary by country.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 days ago (1 children)

then I’d tell it to shove itself into a fucking locker, that’s what

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

oh cool, the logo’s just a barely modified sparkle emoji so you know it’s horseshit, and it’s directly funded by Scale AI and a Rationalist thinktank so the chances the models weren’t directly trained on the problem set are vanishingly thin. this is just the FrontierMath grift with new, more dramatic, paint.

e: also, slightly different targeting — FrontierMath was looking to grift institutional dollars, I feel. this one’s designed to look good in a breathless thinkpiece about how, I dunno…

When A.I. Passes This Test, Look Out

yeah, whatever the fuck they think this means. this one’s designed to be talked about, to be brought up behind closed doors as a reason why your pay’s being cut. this is vile shit.

 

since we’ve been experiencing a few image cache breakages, I’m scheduling some maintenance for January 24th at 8AM GMT to upgrade our pict-rs version, increase the total amount of storage available to our production instance, and do a handful of other maintenance tasks. this won’t include a lemmy upgrade, but I plan to do one soon after this maintenance round. I anticipate the maintenance should take around 2-4 hours, but will post updates on the instance downtime page and Mastodon if anything changes.

 

we have a WriteFreely instance now! I wrote up a guide to why it exists, why it's so fucking janky, and what we can do to fix it.

 

this is somewhat of a bigger update, and it's the product of a few things that have been in progress for a while:

email

email should be working again as of a couple months ago. good news: our old provider was, ahem, mildly inflating our usage to get us off their free plan, so this part of our infrastructure is going to cost a lot less than anticipated.

backups

we now have a restic-based system for distributed backups, thanks to a solid recommendation from @[email protected]. this will make us a lot more resilient to the possibility of having our host evaporate out from under us, and make other disaster scenarios much less lethal.

writefreely

I used some of the spare capacity on our staging instance to spin up a new WriteFreely instance where we can post long-form articles and other stuff that's more suitable for a blog. post your gibberish at gibberish.awful.systems! contact me if you'd like an invite link; WriteFreely instances are particularly vulnerable to being turned into platforms for spam and nothing else, so we're keeping this small-scale for instance regulars for now.

alongside all the ordinary WriteFreely stuff (partial federation, a ton of jank), our instance has a special feature: if you have an account, you can make a PR on this repository and once it's merged, gibberish will automatically pull its frontend files from that repo and redeploy WriteFreely. currently this is only for the frontend, but there's a lot you can do with that -- check out the templates, pages, less, and static directories on the repo to see what gets pulled. check it out if you see some jank you want to fix! (also it's the only way to get WriteFreely to host images as part of a post, no I'm not kidding)

what's next?

next up, I plan to turn off Hetzner's backups for awful.systems and use that budget to expand the node's storage by 100GB, which should increase the monthly bill by around 2.50 euros. I want to go this route to expand our instance's storage instead of using an object store like S3 or B2 because using block storage makes us more resilient to Hetzner or Backblaze evaporating or ending our service, and because it's relatively easy to undo this decision if it proves not to scale, but very hard to go from using object storage back to generic block storage.

after that, it'll be about time to carefully upgrade to the current version of Lemmy, and to get our fork (Philthy) in a better state for contributions.

as always, see our infrastructure deployment flake for more documentation and details on how all of the above works.

 

this post has been making the rounds on Mastodon, for good reason. it’s nominally a post about the governance and community around C++, but (without spoiling too much) it’s written as a journey packed with cathartic sneers at a number of topics and people we’ve covered here before. as a quick preview, tell me this isn’t relatable:

This is not a feel good post, and to even call it a rant would be dismissive of the absolute unending fury I am currently living through as 8+ years of absolute fucking horseshit in the C++ space comes to fruition, and if I don’t write this all as one entire post, I’m going to physically fucking explode.

fucking masterful

an important moderator note for anyone who comes here looking to tone police in the spirit of the Tech Industry Blog Social Compact: lol

 

this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:

Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.

I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.

The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.

 

we’ve exceeded the usage tier for our email sending API today (and they kindly didn’t email me to tell me that was the case until we were 300% over), so email notifications might be a bit spotty/non-working for a little bit. I’m working on figuring out what we should migrate to — I’m leaning towards AWS SES as by far the cheapest option, though I’m no Amazon fan and I’m open to other options as long as they’ve got an option to send with SMTP

 

after the predictable failure of the Rabbit R1, it feels like we’ve heard relatively nothing about the Humane AI Pin, which released first but was rapidly overshadowed by the R1’s shittiness. as it turns out, the reason why we haven’t heard much about the Humane AI pin is because it’s fucked:

Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said.

it’s fucked in ways you might not have seen coming, but Humane should have:

Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now) for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned to someone.

 

as I was reading through this one, the quotes I wanted to pull kept growing in size until it was just the whole article, so fuck it, this one’s pretty damning

here’s a thin sample of what you can expect, but it gets much worse from here:

Internal conversations at Nvidia viewed by 404 Media show when employees working on the project raised questions about potential legal issues surrounding the use of datasets compiled by academics for research purposes and YouTube videos, managers told them they had clearance to use that content from the highest levels of the company.

A former Nvidia employee, whom 404 Media granted anonymity to speak about internal Nvidia processes, said that employees were asked to scrape videos from Netflix, YouTube, and other sources to train an AI model for Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems, and “digital human” products. The project, internally named Cosmos (but different from the company’s existing Cosmos deep learning product), has not yet been released to the public.

 

so Andreessen Horowitz posted another manifesto just over a week ago and it’s the most banal fash shit you can imagine:

Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain.

Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.

does this shit ever get deeper than Regulation Bad? fuck no it doesn’t. is this Horowitz’s attempt to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup? you fucking bet.

here’s some more banal shit:

We find there are three kinds of politicians:

Those who support Little Tech. We support them.

Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them.

Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.

I find there are three kinds of politicians:

  • those who want hamburger. I give them hamburger.
  • those who abstain from hamburger. I do not give them hamburger.
  • those who have questions about hamburger. I refer them to the shift supervisor in good faith.
 

it can’t be overstated how important the Nix evaluator is to the Nix ecosystem; it implements the Nix language and package manager, maintains the store, has a hand in the low-level workings of every Nix tool, and is the focus of the push by Eelco and friends to commercialize Nix and keep it appealing to military-industrial interests.

all of the above is why I joined the Aux CLI SIG, which focuses on maintaining a fork of the Nix evaluator for the Aux ecosystem. but just now I saw the announcement for Lix, a Nix evaluator fork that focuses on modernizing the codebase (including gradually replacing C++ with Rust), maintaining correctness (something the upstream evaluator has been notoriously struggling with lately), and doing right by its community. I found myself nodding along to their description of the project and feeling something I haven’t felt since I read the open letter — I’m finally feeling excited for the future of the technology behind Nix.

I have no idea if Lix will become Aux’s chosen evaluator fork, though the Aux CLI SIG can help determine that collectively (and I’ll have many more details on Aux in a post later tonight). here’s what’s truly exciting though: by following Lix’s install steps and pulling auxpkgs-unstable, we can have a package ecosystem and NixOS fork that’s completely independent of the Nix community, and we can have it right now. I’m so excited by that news that I’m going to spin up a host just to give Lix+auxpkgs a try later tonight.

here’s the Aux thread about Lix; so far, there’s a lot of high-level support and excitement for using it as Aux’s evaluator.

 

this thread fucking sucks for me to have to post, but the linked open letter is an important read. none of the systemic issues pertaining to marginalized folks and commercial/military-industrial interests in the Nix community I’ve previously written about on TechTakes have been solved; in fact, they’ve gotten worse to the point where the Nix community moderation team is essentially in the process of quitting. that’s the beginning to an awful end for a project I like a whole lot.

even if you don’t give a fuck about Nix, the open letter is an important read because the toxicity, conflicts of interest, and underhanded tactics detailed in it are incredibly common in the open source space. this letter could have been written about a multitude of infamously toxic open source projects; Nix is lucky that it has marginalized folks involved who care about the direction of the project and want to make things better, but those people are actively leaving, after being burnt out by the toxic people and structures entrenched in Nix’s community. that’s a fucking tragedy.

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