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xrmagnum commented on Open models by OpenAI   openai.com/open-models/... · Posted by u/lackoftactics
captainregex · 20 days ago
I’m still trying to understand what is the biggest group of people that uses local AI (or will)? Students who don’t want to pay but somehow have the hardware? Devs who are price conscious and want free agentic coding?

Local, in my experience, can’t even pull data from an image without hallucinating (Qwen 2.5 VI in that example). Hopefully local/small models keep getting better and devices get better at running bigger ones

It feels like we do it because we can more than because it makes sense- which I am all for! I just wonder if i’m missing some kind of major use case all around me that justifies chaining together a bunch of mac studios or buying a really great graphics card. Tools like exo are cool and the idea of distributed compute is neat but what edge cases truly need it so badly that it’s worth all the effort?

xrmagnum · 20 days ago
It's striking how much of the AI conversation focuses on new use cases, while overlooking one of the most serious non-financial costs: privacy.

I try to be mindful of what I share with ChatGPT, but even then, asking it to describe my family produced a response that was unsettling in its accuracy and depth.

Worse, after attempting to delete all chats and disable memory, I noticed that some information still seemed to persist. That left me deeply concerned—not just about this moment, but about where things are headed.

The real question isn't just "what can AI do?"—it's "who is keeping the record of what it does?" And just as importantly: "who watches the watcher?" If the answer is "no one," then maybe we shouldn't have a watcher at all.

xrmagnum commented on Why not use DNS over HTTPS (DoH)?   bsdhowto.ch/doh.html... · Posted by u/Bogdanp
xrmagnum · 3 months ago
I find it problematic that this article recommends disabling DoH, which leaves users with unencrypted DNS — still centralized (e.g. to Google’s 8.8.8.8 or an ISP) and now vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Replacing one form of centralization with another while giving up encryption doesn’t improve privacy — it worsens it.

If the goal is to reduce centralization, a better approach would be to use encrypted DNS (DoH or DoT) with resolver rotation or randomization. That way, users retain privacy from local networks and ISPs without concentrating all DNS traffic in a single provider’s hands.

xrmagnum commented on Show HN: GPTBot: A fully serverless Slack bot with GPT-4 support   github.com/LIFTE-H2/GPTBo... · Posted by u/xrmagnum
loren-ipsim · 2 years ago
I’ll check this out - just commenting to say thank you for providing a “deprovision” script!
xrmagnum · 2 years ago
Thanks for taking a look! Don't hesitate to ask should you have any questions or recommendations!
xrmagnum commented on Amplify UI – Don't just prototype. Connect your UI to the cloud   ui.docs.amplify.aws... · Posted by u/michidk
xrmagnum · 3 years ago
We recently had to move away from Amplify unfortunately.

Here are some examples of problems we faced:

* Building Issues

we consistently have release problems that ends up taking a lot of of our time. eg: a CLI update would end up breaking our CI [1].

* Overall instability

we regularly have problems that we need to work-around ourselves, sometimes in a really not elegant manner because we have not a lot of control. [2]

* Data Layer

DynamoDB is the DB of choice for Amplify. We do not understand this choice technically. It may make sense from a sales pitch perspective to use a serverless database along with other serverless technologies (API Gateway, AWS Lambda). Technologically speaking though:

  - DynamoDB is a great, high performance NoSQL DB. To quote Rick Houlihan: "Not a flexible database but a really efficient DB to use at scale". You need to know your access patterns to query the DB in a efficient way. 

  - Amplify is aimed to bootstrap an application in no-time, letting front end developers focus on building. When doing so, the product is rarely defined upfront, let alone its access patterns. At this stage, data needs to change shape & format to adapt to new use-cases. In other words, data needs to be migrated. To this date though, the Amplify team does not provide a way to migrate data [3]
This disconnection between the initial business cases of DynamoDB and Amplify can even be seen within the AWS teams themselves. [4] We don't believe any of them are to blame. The solo Front End Engineer bootstrapping a quick Amplify app for a PoC feels like a way different use case than a team of highly trained data engineers working on their Single Table Design for their micro-service. Amplify rightfully tries to offer an easy way to deal with storing data. And so it follows a standard SQL design with DynamoDB. This though leads to bad performance (original selling point of DynamoDB) or other limitations hard to anticipate.

Overall it is pretty clear and fine that Amplify focuses on PoC projects rather than production ones (with features like Geo-tagging [5] but no way to migrate data). However, when starting to get traction, it is a shame we need to completely eject instead of being able to extend because of lack of (boring but necessary) fundamentals.

[1] https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-cli/issues/10164

[2] https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-category-api/issues/3...

[3] https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-cli/issues/1407

[4] https://twitter.com/houlihan_rick/status/1513137762895110147

xrmagnum commented on U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord   scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/rbanffy
sampo · 5 years ago
USA per capita CO2 emissions are large, but at least they have been coming down moderately fast. From 2007 to 2017, USA reduced emissions by 20%, whereas if we take Germany as an example of a country with strong "green" element in politics, Germany reduced by 8%.

Apply linear extrapolation, and USA would go below Germany in 20 years. Extrapolating with exponential decay, in 40 years.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country...

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/germany?country=~DEU

xrmagnum · 5 years ago
Energy & emissions are complex to account for. I don’t know too much about the US but in France we had quite good results in term of reductions.

But where do they come from? From the optimisation of our energy consumption? Or from the relocation of some of our companies abroad?

xrmagnum commented on Way to keep your cool running a Raspberry Pi 4 (2019)   jeffgeerling.com/blog/201... · Posted by u/guiambros
no_gravity · 5 years ago
My PI is too cool. It freezes.

I have playing with a PI Zero W over the last weeks. At first everything worked as expected.

But now it developed some strange "hangings" I cannot explain. It kinda randomly freezes in time for a few minutes every now and then.

Sometimes it takes several minutes to ssh into it. Sometimes, the terminal just freezes for several minutes.

Neither top nor iostat seem to show any elevated activity during these periods. Since they hang throughout the freeze, its a bit hard to say though.

The strangest thing: Pings to the PI always come back fast. So its probably not that the hardware really freezes completely.

xrmagnum · 5 years ago
Is your hostname added to /etc/hosts?

u/xrmagnum

KarmaCake day82November 11, 2013View Original