• 3 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • for some percentage of the population, morality isn’t a guardrail

    There’s more to human behavior than expressing ideas of correct behavior and violent enforcement of those ideas. Both of those are very limited, rely on oversimplified abstractions of how people are, and often have adverse side effects. What we are like and how we live is a complex product of how we engage and relate to our environment and the people around us; the best overall solutions to problems will be holistic improvements to that environment.

    To extend your medical analogy, sometimes serious threats to your health call for antibiotics, but it is not the case that scouring your body of foreign organisms will make you healthier in the absence of an antibiotic-treatable threat, it’s actually important to have those.

    Bringing it back to how online spaces are organized, I think it’s important for most people to feel like there is a way to express their genuine thoughts because if it’s all just people finding different ways to repeat a dogma, that’s a failure of communication, communication is not meaningfully happening, and an environment where you are unable to communicate is a shitty and dysfunctional one. That doesn’t mean all spaces must accept all points of view, but sincere and open communication should generally be a priority, protecting that is what free expression is about.




  • The main complaints about Matrix I’ve heard though are about behind the scenes stuff rather than features, which the video touches on:

    But there are some reasons why I think XMPP is superior. In Matrix, when you join a room, your server downloads and stores the entire history of that room. If someone on a federated server posts illegal content in a room you’re in, your server is now hosting it, and you are liable. Whereas in XMPP, messages are relayed in real time. Group chat, MU history stays on your server hosting that room. So your server only stores messages for your users which means that no content caching there is no content caching from other servers. This is a fundamental architectural difference which makes the XMPP protocol better in my opinion.

    Personally I don’t know that much about it but I briefly looked into what it would take to write a client for Matrix a few years ago and it seemed pretty daunting to work with. Maybe it would be possible to write software that implements more Discord features on top of XMPP to have something that works more smoothly.












  • If your focus is LLMs, get a 3090 gpu. Vram is the most important thing here because it determines what models you can load and run at a decent speed, and having 24Gb will let you run the mid range models that specifically target this amount of memory because of this being a very standard amount to have for hobbyists. These models are viable for coding, the smaller ones are less so. Looking at prices it seems like you can get this card for 1-2k depending on if you go used or refurbished. I don’t know if better price options are going to be available soon but with the ram shortage and huge general demand it kind of doesn’t seem like it.

    If you want to focus on image or video generation instead, I understand that there are advantages to going with newer generation cards because certain features and speed is more of a factor than just vram but I know less about this.