Until now, it did not occur to me that there are some who believe multiplication and addition come before division and subtraction, respectively. Order of operations clickbait arguments make a bit more “sense” now.

16 GB VRAM GPU, models stored on SSD, rest of the computer doesn’t have to be crazy. Intel Arc is best bang for the buck at the moment. You can get LLM running on 8 GB cards or even the CPU, but IMO such small models are more novelties than workhorses. I personally use Debian but you’ll be fine as long as your distro’s repo has drivers recent enough for your GPU.

For perspective, I’m using such a build to help with boilerplate code, single-use scripts that I don’t have the patience to trial-and-error (like ones that have to deal with directory structures and special characters), getting an idea of what’s what when decompiling and reverse engineering, brainstorming tip-of-the-tongue ideas, and upscaling images.

First ignoring everything outside my direct control.

Still no, but I know what I want in my personal life and I see the path to get there. If the world doesn’t fall into chaos first. It’ll just take time, but what better use of my youth? If the past few years have taught me anything, it’s that trying to get there too fast will wreck my mind and body.

I think a lot of it now comes down to having a ‘Platonic ideal’ for myself and not living up to it. Like strictly an internal matter, I’m fine with other people seeing me the way I am. Even if I lived in a secluded bunker, I’d still be bothered that my eating and sleeping habits suck, my time management needs work, my athleticism is lacking, I never finished learning German, and my screen usage is ruining my back and eyes.

Actually, that would be kind of nice. I’d like to think that if I could be minimally- or un-employed but still well-housed and well-fed for a year, I could finally take a breath and go fix everything that’s been nagging at me.

I was so excited I could finally solve it, but unfortunately, it already was set to Latency.

Well, that’s the thing. I wasn’t going to bow down to that app’s demands or put a band-aid on it, I had to conquer it.

There is a particular camera app that a few of my close friends and I have used for group photos since over a decade ago. It’s proprietary and tracker-infested, but there’s a certain humor and nostalgia to the filters and effects that I’ve never found a good way to replicate without the app. It’s sort of an in-joke that we insist on using it whenever we do get together. So I have it on my secondary device and painstakingly patched the apk so it can run without any unnecessary permissions.

Shutter times are ridiculous on mine. The preview will be perfectly focused already, but then it takes a good second to actually capture, by that time it might already have lost focus. Capture resolution aside, it’s literally faster to screenshot the preview. And got into an argument with a friend once because the shutter time made miss a shot.

Not yet, but everyone I know that were summoned, total 3 instances, never actually served.

I don’t have a good answer, but I wonder the same and about the technical reasons why, if some websites require such data, the browser can’t just lie and touch up rendering in post to fit whatever unique window size I have. AFAIK, uBlock already does some of its own CSS touch-up so there aren’t awkward gaps where ads once were.

Of the browsers I’ve tried out, the Cromite project goes furthest to mitigate and obfuscate the data it hands out, but in their words, it’s still not comprehensive.

All sorts of animals have superior application-specific circuitry. Like bearded vultures that, while in flight, can drop bones precisely onto rocks to break them open and get at the marrow. But they lack the general-purpose processing power needed to abstract such skills into mathematical representations. Same abstraction likely needed to apply one skill creatively to other uses or apply logic to analyze something.

I’m no neuroscientist/biologist, but I could see an ideal scenario and measurement setup where dolphins and orcas maybe rival our general-purpose intelligence. But whatever it is, it still isn’t enough for them to build any recognizable society yet.

Removing all the system-level bloat that makes them unpleasant to use, perhaps stripping one down to the level of a fancy MP3 player with its microSD slot. Also having “disposable” phones to play with various rooted tweaks. All of my easily-rootable phones are too valuable as daily drivers to experiment on, while all of the ones I don’t care about also don’t have rooting methods yet.

Or maybe Meta’s walled garden is impenetrable to scraping?

afaik, that’s the case for Instagram. After scouring the internet for frontends, there are 3 archetypes:

• black boxes like imginn, gets you images and nothing else. no source code to audit, self-host, or build an API
• self-hostable frontends that get rate limited almost instantly, even for a single user
• proper alternative clients that got cease-and-desisted into the ground

They did a great job making a panopticon, closed to the outside, yet devoid of privacy

Can’t wait for one that’ll work on Android so I can maybe root some otherwise useless old phones

There is a lot to justify my move to Linux in hindsight, including privacy, less bloat, the nature of FOSS, etc. But before I really understood those concepts, a good chunk of why I switched over was my dissatisfaction with the loss of customization options starting with Windows 8.

I’d still never bounce back to Windows, of course, though I am strongly considering writing a full theming engine like Kvantum, but to act as a libadwaita replacement/shim, if it creeps into too many packages I use on a daily basis. I’m glad to see that the theming can be altered in some capacity system-wide, rather than being baked into each package.

A fine way to browse the modern web on old versions of Windows. Which is a niche use case that I personally don’t encounter.

If I’m logging in to services tied to my real identity and need to absolutely make sure everything on the website works correctly, I use plain Chromium from the Debian repo.

Well now I can’t unsee it

I feel this but with libadwaita apps. Stick out like a sore thumb, can’t theme them, and many aren’t even GNOME’s own core apps.

No fun. If I order something that requires a signature, I probably won’t be home at the delivery time to sign the package. So it gets dropped off at the post office, and when I go there to pick it up, they also ask for an ID matching the name on the package.

Admittedly, I’ve stopped trying on this end since I order to my actual home address, which would be trivial for any company to trace back to my name. I try to find everything I can in a physical store and pay with cash, the rest is usually niche hobbyist electronics that would never make it to a store.

Also used to be that you could go into a physical store, buy a prepaid credit card with cash, then spend it online. But fewer and fewer websites are accepting those prepaid cards.

thank god my family discouraged me from using those services back before I became privacy-conscious

Prepaid IoT sim cards

Not a heavy user, so I purchased one for 60 US that gets me 365 days of service or 24 GB, whichever depletes sooner. It defaults to T-Mobile coverage but can fall back to AT&T. No KYC. There are more premium options that get you Verizon coverage, also saw one advertising 300 GB a month at 50 Mbps for 350 a year, haven’t tried those yet though.

For the curious, I purchased from https://www.smartsimpro.com/, their website doesn’t give the best first impressions, but I can say that their data plan does work reliably for me once I configured the APN settings.