Recent submissions

Comment · 4 days ago
How useful would that actually be for local inference, when the bottleneck is, essentially, always memory size? I think the sweet spot is somewhere around 64 to 128 GB. That ought to be enough for almost all uses, like Qwen3.8-Flash-Next at a decent quant.
Comment · 23 days ago
Glossy displays are much better for image quality in light-controlled environments than matte. I cannot understand the love for matte display coatings, maybe you just live in a sunnier climate and want to work outdoors? I would never buy hardware with a matte display over glossy, given two equivalent choices. You just lose so much clarity and pop to basically rub a layer of vaseline over your monitor, diffusing the nice image quality into something oily/grainy looking.
Comment · 1 month ago
That is certainly one possible explanation, but I think another likely explanation is that once your brain learn programming, especially logic, data structures & algorithms, you just start seeing the ambiguity in non-programmers' writing so much more clearly.
Comment · 3 months ago
I can't think of a good reason as to why people would want housing to be a good investment except if their own wealth depends on it or they want to preserve the wealthy character of their own neighborhood. It takes away investment from local enterprise, local government, which would spur innovation, salary growth, better infrastructure, municipal services, etc.
Comment · 4 months ago
I had a similar experience last year applying for an evisa. I think pay off the issue was related to the pages timing out before the extremely slow server somewhere in India could process the query and respond. My relatives on their iPads and few year old mid-range dell Inspirons could not manage and had to consult me for help.
Comment · 8 months ago
It's a bad approach, it can still see the / directory, and eventually you want to give it sudo privilege or act as the root user to get anything done. Yet I really wouldn't trust these things as far as I could throw them, there is no "undo" button in the terminal.

I was like you with docker at the start of the week, I had managed to avoid it until now, but I didn't want to let agents do crazy sneaky stuff to my main system. VirtualBox, even with the guest additions just sucks as an environment to spend more than a few hours developing in, especially with how they take up precious RAM and VRAM that local LLMs need. Let me tell you: Docker for this use case at least turned out to be way easier than I thought! It only took me a few hours to really understand the main workflow for a basic project, docker is actually very nice to use, I should not have left it this long. With just a few commands I feel like I got enough sandboxing for my liking. For example, from my bash history yesterday:

    docker run -it --rm archlinux
this gives you an interactive archlinux container, and destroys itself when you exit with ctrl+d. If you want to re-enter where you left off, you can attach or start the container again if you omit the --rm flag.

    docker build -t flask_test .
this builds a container tagged "flask_test" using Dockerfile in the current directory. Dockerfiles are quite simple

    FROM python:3-alpine

    WORKDIR /my_app

    RUN pip install flask
    # copy app.py from the working directory to the container directory "."
    COPY app.py . 

    # Make port 5000 available to the world outside this container
    # this networking stuff is a bit of a mess to configure, you have to set it in flask, the Dockerfile, when you run the container, and you still get different URLs that the server is on, not all work on the host or the container, etc., it's a bit of a mess IMO. This turned out to not be necessary. 
    #EXPOSE 5000

    # Define environment variable for Flask
    ENV FLASK_APP=app.py

    ENV FLASK_RUN_HOST=0.0.0.0

    # run the command "flask" when the container starts with the "run" argument
    CMD ["flask", "run"]
The docs are very extensive, and feature a lot of (for me, anyway) useless commands like

    "docker ps"
    "docker images"
these are not that useful compared to this:

    docker container ls --all
which just shows everything.

Then, to restart from where you exited the next day:

    docker start -ia amazing_jemison 
This resumes the "amazing_jemison" (randomly assigned name) container. You see the name under column in the previous ls --all command. I don't get why they use CONTAINER IDs so much in the docs instead of NAMES, because they don't feature tab autocomplete, requiring wasted effort copying long hexadecimal strings.

I've been using throwaway archlinux docker containers all week, it's like a snappy VM, I just have to figure out how to launch graphics applications, although apparently that's an antipattern. I tried alpine, ubuntu, debian, etc., too, but archlinux is what I'm used to and the perfect balance between size and being feature-complete for me. Alpine boasts about the minimal image size but in reality you end up missing a lot of useful modern premium features that you have to redownload anyway. I never made a Dockerfile for it, it just downloaded the default archlinux image. After you exit out, and it selfdestructs with rm, and then you want to do it all again from scratch, as per the first command

    docker run -it --rm archlinux
and it will use a locally cached version, saving Docker from having to redownload

Overall a very good experience.

Comment · 11 months ago
It's frustrating how some people insist on prefixing reddit URLs with "old", requiring everybody else who opens their link to load the wrong page, edit it, and reload the modern version. 3 seconds of OPs time could have saved thousands of people from wasting their 8 seconds each.
Comment · 1 year ago
It's just a question of having enough VRAM+RAM to fit the model into memory.
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 2 years ago
It's not as if Android offers anything either. Third party tools like syncthing can be used to backup the camera folder, but the root android folder is protected against copying because of permissions issues that Google refuses to fix. Same if you connect it to an external SSD. You have to root your phone truly be able to make a simple, complete backup. But that comes with a lot of disadvantages for financial apps, security, etc.
Comment · 2 years ago
I wish we could go back to this uncomplicated UX. I just spent literally 2 hours setting up a brand new Epson ET-2850 printer for my dad. I'm quite disgusted at how slow, bloated and disjointed the process was. The printer ships with an android app, which worked fairly well, and, on the Epson website, some Microsoft Windows software, which was one of the worst software experiences I've ever had. The Wi-Fi setup is totally disjointed on the printer, app and windows release. You enter the Wi-Fi password via the app, which should then forward it to the printer. That's fine, it's better than using the dreadful printer interface. The printer saw the right SSID right away. No confirmation was given whether it connected or not. No big deal.

The software on their website was a Windows executable .exe file that seemed outdated even 10 years ago. To complete the last few steps, the printer network connection had to be set up once again, even though I had already previously connected it. Each attempt would take around 10-20 minutes, only to fail. The network errors and troubleshooting steps were incredibly generic and unhelpful. The worst part, until that point, was that the printer shipped with outdated firmware, and I did an online firmware update via the printer itself, confirming that the printer's Internet connection had indeed already been established. Rebooting the printer did not help. It turned out that, despite only just downloading the Windows executable that same hour from the Epson website, they were shipping an old version .exe, with some bug that causes the network setup to not be detected. However, it never prompted me to update. Only after restarting the Windows computer, and then re-opening the .exe, did some update trigger, and it allowed me to finish setting through to the last step of the installer to download the rest of the bloat and let the printer appear in the list of available printers on the network on the computer.

I then did a test print via an iPad. Took about 15 seconds.

Comment · 2 years ago
I'm only seeing this now, sorry. First I'm not a doctor, so I can't give medical advice, certainly not if you believe you are already predisposed to something. I would say that there is no difference between the cheap and expensive devices, as long as they emit the correct wavelengths at the correct intensities. Since that's very low for targeting the eye (you are not trying to treat deeper joints/full body), you won't have to overspend. I think Prof Glen Jeffery mentioned a handheld red light in the 30 euro range for the morning treatment.

You can also look at (670/810 nm LED light strips to hang above your computer monitors and passively absorb some while starting at your monitor all day if you are getting an excess of blue light). I think that is another protocol though, but it might help.

I am sure though that it's more about consistency and treatment time (as in, you can't double the intensity to halve the treatment time). Furthermore, more is not better, it's more like an on/off switch after 2-3 minutes. You can do it every day, just like the solar spectrum is relatively higher in the required part of the spectrum at early morning sunrise every day.

But honestly, listen to Glen Jeffery, perhaps read /r/redlighttherapy

Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
Of course, there exists the whole field of photobiomodulation. Red light therapy (630/670/810/830/850/1060 nm red and NIR light) helps the eye in the morning (see Prof Glen Jeffery's work at UCL; the mitochondria are only sensitive to RLT during a certain window of the circadian rhythm, that coincides with early morning sunlight that is shifted towards the red/NIR), particularly when it comes to preventing and slowing age-related macular degeneration, but also improving colour perception, controlling blood glucose levels, improving athletic performance and recovery, mood and cognitive performance, and some other benefits. When I first got interested I thought I'd just get a small handheld LED device, but as I got deeper into it I decided to buy a large mains powered full body panel with 5 wavelengths. In particular the benefits to my sleep and skin have been fantastic, with the caveat that I live in northern Europe at a latitude of 53.3 degrees north. Perhaps those nearer the equator will feel more muted responses. That being said, improvements to vision are counterintuitively very difficult to actually judge without measuring, because the brain is constantly adjusting/hiding our defects.
Comment · 2 years ago
I wonder if we did a Fourier Transform of the power signal, would the 20 W appear in the DC bin as an anomaly?

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