simply logging out or using an alt account

It is increasingly difficult to use X without an account. Not sure what the signup process is like nowadays. IIRC it used to require phone number verification in the Twitter days, but perhaps Musk relaxed the requirements in order to better pad the usage stats with spambots?

Yeah, AMD is lagging behind Nvidia in machine learning performance by like a full generation, maybe more. Similar with raytracing.

If you want absolute top-tier performance, then the RTX 4090 is the best consumer card out there, period. Considering the price and power consumption, this is not surprising. It’s hardly fair to compare AMD’s top-end to Nvidia’s top-end when Nvidia’s is over twice the price in the real world.

If your budget for a GPU is <$1600, the 7900 XTX is probably your best bet if you don’t absolutely need CUDA. Any performance advantage Nvidia has goes right out the window if you can’t fit your whole model in VRAM. I’d take a 24GB AMD card over a 16GB Nvidia card any day.

You could also look at an RTX 3090 (which also has 24GB), but then you’d take a big hit to gaming/raster performance and it’d still probably cost you more than a 7900XTX. Not really sure how a 3090 compares to a 7900XTX in Blender. Anyway, that’s probably a more fair comparison if you care about VRAM and price.

Basically the only thing that matters for LLM hosting is VRAM capacity

I’ll also add that some frameworks and backends still require CUDA. This is improving but before you go and buy an AMD card, make sure the things you want to run will actually run on it.

For example, bitsandbytes support for non-CUDA backends is still in alpha stage. https://huggingface.co/docs/bitsandbytes/main/en/installation#multi-backend

Assuming nominal voltage of 3.7, that’s about 60Wh. For comparison, the 14" MacBook has a 70Wh battery.

That’s not good battery life but it depends on what kind of usage they’re assuming with that 7H number. I’m not sure a MacBook runs that long under high load. If it’s 7H on a heavy load, that’s respectable.

Edit: not sure what class of device is the best comparison here. Laptop? Tablet? Phone? 🤷

I want it to be consistent dammit!

YES.

In tech terms, “intelligent” or “smart” usually means inconsistent and unpredictable. It means I need to do extra work to verify that the computer didn’t “helpfully” do something I never told it to do.

I understand autocorrect on phones, because phone keyboards suck very hard. I am still shocked that both Apple and Microsoft have decided to enable it by default on desktops and laptops with full keyboards. No, Apple, believe it or not, the username field in web sites is not supposed to have a capitalized first letter. If I wanted that, I have three whole keys on my keyboard that I could have used to do that. STFU and let me do my own typing. (Why usernames are case-sensitive in certain places is a whole other matter, one that’s far outside my control.)

What a career.

Has anyone played the original Fantasian? I’ll probably pick up Neo just to hear his music.

Borg via Vorta handles the hard parts: encryption, compression, deduplication, and archiving. You can mount backup snapshots like drives, without needing to expand them. It splits archives into small chunks so you can easily upload them to your cloud service of choice.

I don’t use this feature much so I can’t speak to the details, but yes, it does support OPDS.

Screenshot:

English Dictionary Offline: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=livio.pack.lang.en_US . Still unbloated after all these years.

Librera (ebook reader): https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.foobnix.pro.pdf.reader/ . The pro version is free on f-droid, or you can buy it on Google Play if you want to support the dev.

Fossify Gallery: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fossify.gallery/ . This is a fork of the old Simple Gallery from before it got bought out. Same deal with Fossify File Manager and the other Fossify apps. Just no-nonsense functional apps.

It’s certainly not an original thought. Lemmy is full of ornery old nerds like me. I don’t think there’s an “agenda” besides not wanting to an organization I have long liked and supported go down a road we hate.

Cheers, mate. :)

Agreed, for sure. I’ll still call them out on their bad moves, though.

Your feeling is incorrect. Post history is public if you care to confirm. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Mozilla is rapidly becoming an ad company, so I’m not really confident in it long-term. See: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/improving-online-advertising/

You can root Graphene if you want to, right?

IIRC, Android has always had native support for keyboards and mice. I remember connecting a bluetooth mouse to my old Nexus 4 running…Android 4, maybe 5? It worked out of the box. Saved my butt when the touch screen broke. :)

Can’t say I’ve tried this in recent years but I think it still works, yeah?

I’ve never tried it myself, but I think you can run full Linux VMs on Pixel phones already. A quick search brings up https://www.xda-developers.com/nestbox-hands-on/

Anyone have experience with this or similar options? Personally I’ve never used anything more advanced than Termux (which is lean and super cool, but not a full-blown VM).

Yep. If it uses a cloud service, they’re probably going to squeeze you, pull a bait-and-switch, or go out of business. The only exceptions that spring to mind are services with significant monetization in the corporate space, like Dropbox. And I’m not really confident that Dropbox’s free tier will remain viable for long, either.

Even non-cloud-based apps are risky nowadays because apps don’t remain compatible with mobile OSes for very long. They require more frequent updates than freeware/shareware generally did back in the 90s. I remember some freeware apps that I used for 10 years straight, across several major OS versions, starting in the 90s. That just doesn’t happen anymore. I’ve been using Android for over 10 years and I don’t think there’s a single app I used back then that would still work.

Single-purchase apps are basically dead, at least on mobile platforms. Closed-source freeware is dead, too. If it’s open-source, if push comes to shove someone can always pick up the torch and update it. It’s very rare for an open-source project to be completely abandoned without there at least being a viable open-source alternative available.

At this point, I don’t even look at Google Play. It’s F-Droid or bust.

The ideal amount of storage is enough that I literally never need to think about it, never need to delete anything, and never need to use cloud services for things that could realistically be local.

It’s hard to say what that would be because I’ve never had a phone that even came close.

The largest phone I’ve owned was 256GB. That was “fine”, but it was NOT big enough that I could fundamentally change my habits. For example, I don’t carry my entire music collection on my phone. I don’t even do that on my laptop anymore since the advent of SSDs.

I have a 128GB phone now and it sucks. I’ve set up a one-way copy to my home desktop with Syncthing so I can safely delete photos, videos, and screen recordings from my phone. I need to do this frequently.

With the standard price-gouging in the industry, I will probably settle for 256 with my next phone. If prices were reasonable, I’d go for 1TB at least.

I miss SD cards but there are no viable options with slots anymore.

They mention that several times in the FAQ. :)