I've been lucky with my upgrade/build timings. Built my first PC right before the crypto madness, and did my last major upgrade right before the AI madness.

I'm going to run my current system until it crumbles to dust. With any luck, the market will have settled a bit by then.

As for projects, I have lots of old "useless" tech that I can work with. Like old laptops, phones, Raspberry Pis, even mobos and other spare PC parts. Building small is more interesting to me than building big.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    You can't turn it off anymore in Golden Gate. It is a mandatory download (in countries where it is supported) now.

    You can still disable some specific AI-related features, but you can't block the models entirely.

    I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, that's a ton of disk space, and Apple is notoriously chintzy when it comes to storage. On the other hand, I do want the default to be local-only models, and giving developers easy access will make that the path of least resistance. Most of my problems with LLMs don't apply to moderately-sized local models.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    You can strangle somebody with your arm.

    But can you strangle someone with a dead arm? It sounds very different than using a live arm. Without any muscle activation I think you'd be putting a lot more stress on weak points in the snake's body and it might just tear apart. But I have no first-hand experience strangling people with live or dead arms (or snakes), so I'm just playing armchair murderer here.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 weeks ago

    I would have much preferred if all that effort went towards improving GIMP and existing open formats.

    Well... if it was a 4-day vibe-coding project, then that's not a lot of effort, and I don't think GIMP wants to deal with that scale of AI contributions anyway.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    It's more than just that. Smaller models are improving rapidly and are already "good enough" for the majority of consumer use cases. It is entirely realistic that in a few years, there will be virtually no demand for trillion-parameter LLMs. Demand for inference might not shrink in terms of functionality, but it will absolutely shrink in terms of memory and compute requirements. And then there will be a hell of a lot more server capacity available than anyone needs or wants, because they're over-investing like crazy now.

    What happens when hundreds of billions of dollars spent on datacenters basically goes *poof*?

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  • [–] 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 child)

    I've heard of similar techniques using masks on the back of your head to discourage tiger attacks in villages close to wild tiger populations.

    As I recall, it gets less effective over time because tigers are not stupid, just risk-averse. They learn with repeated exposure.

    I'm going from memory. I'll try to dig up sources when I have time.

    Edit: Found it on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_attacks_in_the_Sundarbans#Precautions

    Fishermen and bushmen originally created masks made to look like faces to wear on the back of their heads because tigers always attack from behind. This worked for a short time, but the tigers quickly caught on to the ruse, and the attacks reportedly continued. One local honey gatherer, Surendra Jana, 57, summarised the general feeling of the tigers adapting to their efforts: "Before we could understand the way they attacked...We don't feel safe any more, knowing our brothers have been attacked in spite of the tricks we use."

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  • It's like Safari in terms of performance and battery usage, with extension support that isn't pants-on-head stupid like Safari's, better customization, and some advanced features. That's all I really want.

    Safari is just too basic for me to use as an everyday browser (especially on iOS).

    I think the original impetus was that Safari makes it unreasonably difficult to change its search engines.

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