I’ve taken your notes into account and come up with a Mk. 2 design:

Even if there were some multi- or omni-functional fediverse metaplatform, I think “what do you want to do” is still a valid question. Some people may want to host a public forum, others may want to host a private family chat, others may want to host and/or share images and video, still others may want to all those things and more with an all-in-one solution. I don’t think having a generalist platform would stop others from wanting to host niche or more specialized platforms for their own purposes; it all depends on what you want to do with your hardware.

With that said, I think it would be cool to have better interoperability between services. It’d be cool to have it so that if I make an account on a domain, I could hop easily between all the services hosted there. And it would be cool if it were easier for developers to make smaller services that can run on a general-purpose platform, and easier for admins to add and remove services as they wish, and maintain several services without it being an overwhelming hassle.

This seems needlessly combative. I think “what if we had a swiss army knife platform that integrated a lot of different functionality” is a perfectly fine question regardless of the asker’s inclination or ability to contribute to a platform’s development.

It’s a sad state of affairs. These dastard pilferers can just Something Search “data center construction site list” and find several public websites that describe where datacenters are currently in operation and where they are being built.

Consequence of living in the state that gave the world the KKK. It’s an official state holiday, so it shows up in a lot of holiday presets by default if your location is TN. Pretty shit situation all around, but I get why a TN resident would have it without wanting it. I’ve had it in my calendar before :/

I have a similar relationship with iptables. Like, I can do it, but it’s the boring stuff I gotta get out of the way to make the interesting stuff work.

edit: thought of another one. Any time I’ve ever opened xorg.conf, I was having a bad time.

If I have an old Roomba can I hack a new brain into it? I’ve got a Raspberry Pi and a soldering iron and a willingness to break them for science. Never done much hardware hacking though.

I think it’s good advice for beginners. If you’re inside a VPN you get a little more breathing room to figure out how to properly provision and wire up your services without having do deal with all the security and scaling concerns that can come from public hosting. Also, new hosters are really likely to set up their reverse proxy and not patch it and leave it open to known vulnerabilities that get exploited months or years down the line… not that that ever happened to me…

Anyway, I think inside a VPN is a good way to get your feet wet. Setting up a public website is fun but I wouldn’t advise it as a first step.

P.S. This is a hypothesis, I haven’t even designed the test for it, much less run it. What follow are my suppositions.

I think whether or not it’s a good idea depends on how similar all the models are. I don’t have a rigorous definition of “similar” but things like similar training data, similar design methodologies, similar QA processes would all contribute. Theoretically (I think), if they’re all dissimilar, they should each catch errors the others miss. However, the more similar they are, the more likely they have the same biases and weak spots, and your error rate from a response + verification may be the same or even higher than the error rate for just the original prompt, and you’d be unlikely to detect those errors using just two similar models. It can instill false confidence in the results because you’re doing something that should in theory increase the validity of the data, but in practice might make no difference or even make the quality of responses worse.

I think it’s tricky. It’s kind of like adding LLMs like vectors, and hopefully the effect can soften or at least reveal the shortcomings of individual models. Is it a good idea? I don’t know, I think there are good reasons to think it’s a waste of time and resources. I certainly think I’d need a better explanation of what use it would be before I spent more time building it. But I still think about what use it would be from time to time; I haven’t decided that it’s a bad idea yet.

One of the projects I started and never got to a satisfactory end state was basically that, plus a judging round. Every model would respond to the same prompt, then every model would evaluate every other model’s response for accuracy and completeness. Then the results would get logged to a spreadsheet.

It’s simple enough, but for N models it requires N + N^2 model calls so it takes forever to run any decent dataset on consumer hardware. If I had the resources and a way to run it that didn’t fry the planet, I think it would be a cool running set of comparative benchmarks. IDK if it’d be useful at all but I’m still interested to see the data.

Oh neat. Yeah, if something like that had existed (and I’d been aware of it) I probably would have used it instead of building my own shoestring version.

Nothing so fancy. I just made a little python script to prompt the first model, wait for a response, then prompt the next model with the initial prompt + the response, and so on. It was very hacky and slow.

Yup, ollama, various models. I initially downloaded it because I, along with thousands of other people, wanted to see what would happen if I made models debate with each other after RAGging them with various books (The Prince, The Art of War, The complete works of Shakespeare, etc.).

The results were uninteresting and I abandoned the project pretty quickly. I’ll sometimes use them for code analysis but they’re too slow on my rig to be really useful.

It’s very confusing when it happens to someone you know because they usually aren’t horrible people. Nor are they particularly stupid, at least not more or less than your average human.

I think people in left-of-center spaces like to say things like “The Republican party is a cult” as a sort of disparaging cliche without really appreciating what a cult is or how they operate in real life. They see things like “Donald Trump ate a live baby on camera today, also his support among Republicans is at 90%” and assume that 90% of Republicans are cool with infant cannibalism, when in reality those Republicans just don’t see the same news we do. They are actually in a cult, which means (among other things) that they are conditioned to believe the cult leader (Trump, at the moment) and his approved mouthpieces, and only them. They’re reminded, constantly, that the left is deranged and willing to say anything to make Trump look bad, so when Trump does something so heinous it actually does penetrate their media bubble, it gets brushed off as more evidence of the left’s lunacy. It’s a very resilient form of conditioning and it’s been going on way longer than the internet’s been around, and it’s… really hard. Because they aren’t horrible people, mostly. They’re mostly scared, and broke, and confused about the world, and they flock to people like Trump because they have been told by their handlers that he’s their best bet. Once he’s dead or too toxic even for the Republicans, they’ll be reoriented toward the next leader.

The problem of the dead internet isn’t that there are no human users, but that the human users are isolated from each other or herded into ideologically suitable echo chambers, where misinformation and lies can be harder to resist because they already have momentum. It’s also hard to prove because we’ve demonstrated the inclination to do it to ourselves even without malign orchestrating influences like giant corporations.

An indicator of a dead internet wouldn’t be that no one in your IRL experience uses the internet, but that either A) their experiences are extremely congruent with your own (you’re both in the same bubble) or B) their experience of the internet reality has no shared basis with your own (only one of you is in a bubble, or you’re both in separate bubbles). Which… does happen to me occasionally, especially with older folks. A lot of people are caught in the dead internet of facebook, and are being groomed and manipulated like cattle. The export products of the bot farming industry are influence, votes, hatred of minorities, etc. I suspect a lot of the MAGA elements of my family are deep into dead internet traps, though of course it’s hard to get an accurate picture of their media diet because they don’t trust me enough to share it.

Do I think this means the internet is now Certified Dead? No, but I think it’s a sliding scale of deadness and it’s somewhere between 0 and 100 percent. Where on that scale we are is difficult to pin down.

I’d settle for a crack so I can make it a plain ole linux htpc.

Bonus points if I can configure the remote.

I’ve never had this particular model, but I’ve had pretty good success printing off Brother printers with the generic print drivers, I don’t think I’ve used the proprietary downloads in a while.

Of note: I don’t have occasion to do scans all that often, so I can’t say if that works. Ditto the fax function, if that’s important all I can say is you have my pity. But I’ve used the print function to good success on a couple different machines.

Still I’d recommend testing it before committing to permanent changes, if possible. Printers are mysterious and capricious.

I do too, I think general-purpose compute has become a too-cheap way to solve problems that have more durable (and repairable) mechanical solutions. It makes the sticker price lower even if the total cost over the lifetime of the vehicle (or laptop, or washing machine, etc.).

I think it would be nice to have a law that certain hardware needs to have user-autitable and user-replaceable control software. If you want to ship your hardware product with some preinstalled software, the source code must be publicly available. I don’t know how it would get passed in America because it would make consumer electronics more expensive to manufacture, but I think it would be helpful in the long term to legally decouple hardware from closed-source software.

It surprises me too, but I actually think that’s fine. Lots of people have different skills and not everyone has to be the tech expert, as long as everyone acknowledges that it is an expertise and that that expertise deserves weight. But, most technical mistakes in an office setting don’t result in serious injury or death, and that happens a lot in mechanics shops. People who decide whether dangerous machines are safe enough would need to have a higher level of technical professionalism than your average desk jockey.

I think that attitude is pretty common among people who make software that can get people killed (e.g. medical) but my experience is limited to a few secondhand conversations so I don’t know how well-established that culture is. I’ve only ever worked on software that, if it failed, meant that a few people would get very upset and a bunch of people would get mildly upset, then we’d fix it and everyone would move on pretty quickly.