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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Dynamic swap and zswap aren’t really the same as efficient ram usage it’s just good ways to mitigate when you run out.

    I disagree. If the OS automatically identifies unneeded pages and compresses them or swaps them out, it’s certainly using the physical memory more efficiently than if it wasn’t doing these things.

    avoiding multiple versions of the same library is what distros exist for

    But they can’t if the applications they want to ship don’t all use the same version. E.g. Ubuntu ships GTK 2, 3, and 4. Arch even still ships GTK 1 in addition to these three.

    avoiding loading different frameworks is what Desktop Environments are for

    What happens is you run KDE but then you still want to run Firefox so you still need GTK.


  • There are some advantages macOS can have but it depends on usage patterns and user knowledge:

    • You don’t have to configure swap on macOS, while on Linux you can get into a situation where e.g. at install time you set up some default 2 GB swap but then it’s not enough and you don’t know that’s a thing that can be changed.
    • You don’t have to configure compression for RAM or swap on macOS; on Linux you often have to know you can set up zram/zswap if you want it. Compression can make a huge difference for users that switch between memory heavy applications as long as they don’t literally switch every 5 seconds.
    • On macOS, applications generally use the same frameworks e.g. for UI (because there is not much choice), and they can be loaded once and shared between all of them. Linux can share libraries too but users can run into situations where their applications use multiple different versions of Qt, GTK, etc. at the same time, and then you have stuff like snap on top that comes with its own copies of even basic system libraries. Containers also do this. As a Linux user you can avoid library bloat to some extent but “normal” users are not aware of it in the first place.




  • I think the open slop situation is also in part people who just want a feature and genuinely think they’re helping. People who can’t do the task themselves also can’t tell that the LLM also can’t do it.

    But a lot of them are probably just padding their GitHub account too. Any given popular project has tons of forks by people who just want to have lots of repositories on their GitHub but don’t actually make changes because they can’t actually do it. I used to maintain my employer’s projects on GitHub and literally we’d have something like 3000 forks and 2990 of them would just be forks with no changes by people with lots of repositories but no actual work. Now these people are using LLMs to also make changes…





  • The article already notes that

    privacy-focused users who don’t want “AI” in their search are more likely to use DuckDuckGo

    But the opposite is also true. Maybe it’s not 90% to 10% elsewhere, but I’d expect the same general imbalance because some people who would answer yes to ai in a survey on a search web site don’t go to search web sites in the first place. They go to ChatGPT or whatever.



  • You don’t have to be the first person. I joined a startup a long time ago as a regular engineer and they made me team lead within a year. Startups generally move a bit faster and a lot more chaotically. Especially when they’re growing fast. You do have to be good but having a vision also helps.

    I stuck with them through acquisitions etc. and everything slowed down a lot. Should have gotten out of the large corporation life earlier tbh.


  • The bubble thing is more the financial aspect. None of these AI companies are profitable and they also don’t have a clear path to profit. For some time the business plan of Open AI was literally develop advanced AI and then let the AI figure out how to make money. Yet, these companies attract huge amounts of investment and are responsible for basically all of the economic growth in the US.

    Nobody thinks there are no uses at all for LLMs or image generation etc. or that people in general hate all AI. It’s a bubble because a lot of money is being invested in something that nobody managed to make profitable yet, so if the investment stops, then these companies will all implode.



  • Even that is just confusing. I sometimes use Perplexity (because Pro comes with my bank account - neobanks have zero focus). And by default it remembers things you say. So when I ask a question sometimes it will randomly decide to bring in something else I asked about before. E.g. I sometimes use it to look up programming related stuff, and then when I ask something else it will randomly research whatever language it thinks I like now in that context too and do things like suggest an anime based on my recent interest in Rust for no good reason.