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Gemini: Capricorn

It's a really good daily multitool for data. E.g. I often have to do work on multiple csv and excel files, joins and filters etc. I hate excel but am fine with SQL. With a duckdb session in dbeaver, I can literally select, project, and join the files on disk as if they were tables. It saves so much time and fuss

For bigger integrations I use it as a trino alternative. If I have to combine multiple data sources I'll walk down the DB buffet and fill my local duckdb with datasets from each source with pandas.read_sql, and then do the joins locally, and publish or push the data back out.

The int8 release is very capable and runs acceptably on consumer gpus

I let myself get mildly excited with the last Omni release, but it turns out it (and this one) can't do the one practical thing I want - Sync generated video to provided pre-existing audio.

Meanwhile, I'm happily using Minimax H3 locally on my 12Gb 4070RTX to finally finish the lip syncing to recorded dialog on my abandoned 20 year old Flash animation hobby projects.

This kind of magic is the reason that I'm very itchy to be able to line up real work on Datomic or XTDB someday.

Sounds like about the right level of cognition for a talkie toaster!

Very relatedly, I've just started reading the 'Culture' series of sci-fi space operas by Iain M Banks, and the notion of ubiquitous sentient, super-intelligent spacecraft and appliances hits differently than it would have before being faced with the reality of their existence in everyday life.

I'm not super deep on LLM development, but with ram being a material bottleneck and from what I've read about DeepSeek's results with offloading factual knowledge with 'engrams' I think that the near future will start moving towards the dense core of LLMs focusing much more on a distillation of universal reasoning and logic while factual knowledge is pushed out into slower storage. IIRC Nvidia's Nemotron Cascade is taking MoE even further in that direction too.

I don't need a coding model to be able to give me an analysis of the declaration of independence in urdu from 'memory' and the price in ram for being able to do that, impressive as it is, is an inefficiency.

Exactly! Any knowledgeable observer would have expected him to run for elected office instead.

You seem a bit... political. What's your favorite tech stack?

Neat! I had been wondering if anyone was trying to implement a model in silico. We're getting closer to having chatty talking toasters every day now!

I took the easy way out, similarly - got an ArcadeVGA pci board, which is basically an ancient Radeon that supports 15khz well. I drive it with a groovy arcade Linux install and a pc2Jamma adapter that maps jamma buttons to keyboard input and VGA to the crt.

While I can TOTALLY believe that TikTok might be doing classification and censoring of uploads - tech issues that happen during notable events will INEVITABLY be interpreted as partisan censorship.

A personal brush with this was with Scientology Protests around 2008 if I recall - I was at YouTube and there was a great kerfuffle among many of the top personalities who uploaded videos siding against Scientology. Their videos were not making it into the top rankings or getting the expected visibility. To them the obvious answer is that they were being deliberately suppressed - after all Scientology was a paying advertiser and brand on YT.

The reality was that the entire viewcount pipeline, and downstream aggregations were busted for about a day. Nobody was getting their full views counted in a timely way for that time.

My quick rebuttal is that gaming is pretty close to 'there' if you pick a distro that prioritizes it. I run bazzite-DX (nvidia rtx4070) for dev and pleasure and gaming there is ON POINT. I don't play any anti-cheat games, but Cities Skylines, Doom Eternal, Cyberpunk (with full raytracing and HDR), GTA5-Remaster, etc, all run like champs. As of last month, full HDR10 mode started working in chrome and video players too, so hdr videos get those popping brights.