dws.rip? That hit kind of hard.
Readit Newsdws commented on Show HN: DWS OS, a Plan 9 Inspired Web “OS” dws.rip... · Posted by u/tdubey
>Bryan Woods, College Station’s city manager, said at the meeting that city officials ran tests of a Prime Air drone and found it had noise levels between 47 and 61 decibels.
That's surprisingly quiet. I don't know the situation in Texas, but 40% of the EU population is exposed to road traffic noise exceeding 55 dBA. My own back garden exceeds 60dBA for most of the day, with regular peaks closer to 70 dBA due to railway noise.
Imagine that every so often, without warning, a 47-61 db house fly buzzes somewhere in your house. I'd grab a swatter and hunt it down before it disturbed me again.
dws commented on Exo: Run your own AI cluster at home with everyday devices github.com/exo-explore/ex... · Posted by u/simonpure
I used to be excited about running models locally (LLM, stable diffusion etc) on my Mac, PC, etc. But now I have resigned to the fact that most useful AI compute will mostly be in the cloud. Sure, I can run some slow Llama3 models on my home network, but why bother when it is so cheap or free to run it on a cloud service? I know Apple is pushing local AI models; however, I have serious reservations about the impact on battery performance.
> Sure, I can run some slow Llama3 models on my home network, but why bother when it is so cheap or free to run it on a cloud service?
Running locally, you can change the system prompt. I have Gemma set up on a spare NUC, and changed the system prompt from "helpful" to "snarky" and "kind, honest" to "brutally honest". Having an LLM that will roll its eyes at you and say "whatever" is refreshing.
dws commented on Tech nostalgia enthusiasts have made a PiDP-10, a replica of the PDP-10 theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/zdw
Correction -- it's a 2:3 scale model of a PDP-10 front panel, concealing a Raspberry Pi running an emulator. In the original equipment, the panel would have been attached to one of several racks containing the CPU and main memory, cabled up to peripherals (tape drives like in '60s movies, disk drives the size of washing machines) through wires under the false floor of a dedicated computer room...
The PiDP-10 accurately models the console, but it doesn't depict the rest of this at all.
Full authenticity would also require raised flooring, and an audio track of people shouting "SAVE YOUR FILES!" whenever the lights flickered.
dws commented on Lore Harp McGovern built a microcomputer empire from her suburban home every.to/the-crazy-ones/t... · Posted by u/adrianhon
Wait, how did remote first work in the 60s? Did they post in punchcards? TTYs weren't really much of a thing at that stage, were they?
Coding forms, accumulated until someone had access to a keypunch.
Turnaround time could be days, which encouraged being very scrupulous when coding.
dws commented on The Lone Volcano in California's Central Valley nytimes.com/2024/03/21/us... · Posted by u/benbreen
Do they actually market their wines that way? I thought it would make an interesting comparison, but when I looked on their web site I didn't see any indication of which wine came from which type of soil.
(I'm a wine aficionado who happens to believe that most wine marketing is BS. I'm particularly skeptical of terroir, so a chance to do a proper controlled experiment would be really interesting.)
I don't know it they market this way. I learned it at the winery, from someone who clearly loved the wine. It was a, "Try these two. Taste the difference?" thing, followed by the story. And then you walk outside the tasting room, look up at the hill, and see it.
dws commented on The Lone Volcano in California's Central Valley nytimes.com/2024/03/21/us... · Posted by u/benbreen
There's a vineyard in that area, Sobon Estates, that has a unique feature. If you look up into the vineyard from the winery, there's a dividing line between volcanic soil and alluvial soil. The same varietal of grape produces a noticeably different wine depending on which side of the line it was grown on.
dws commented on Things unexpectedly named after people (2020) notes.rolandcrosby.com/po... · Posted by u/prawn
Sedona, Arizona.
Named for Sedona Schenbly, of Goren, Missouri. She and her husband had moved to Arizona for their health. He wanted to open a Post Office, but the Post Office authorities didn't favor his suggestion of naming it "Schenblyville Station." Thankfully, he chose to name it after his wife.
dws commented on First do it, then do it right, then do it better twitter.com/addyosmani/st... · Posted by u/erfanebrahimnia
Fred Brooks. The Mythical Man Month. 1975.
Chapter 11. Plan to Throw One Away.
"This I now perceived to be wrong, not because it is too radical, but because it is too simplistic. The biggest mistake in the 'Build one to throw away' concept is that it implicitly assumes the classical sequential or waterfall model of software construction." -- The Mythical Man-Month, 20th Anniversary Edition, pg. 265
dws commented on Llamafile lets you distribute and run LLMs with a single file github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/l... · Posted by u/tfinch
Can confirm that this runs on an ancient i3 NUC under Ubuntu 20.04. It emits a token every five or six seconds, which is "ask a question then go get coffee" speed. Still, very cool.