Just a guy shilling for gun ownership, tech privacy, and trans rights.

I’m open for chats on mastodon https://hachyderm.io/

my blog: thinkstoomuch.net

My email: nags@thinkstoomuch.net

Always looking for penpals!

  • 3 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 21st, 2023

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  • Personally I’m a huge fan of the Alcoholics Anonymous understanding of “god” and I think it applies more widely.

    In AA it is supposed to be A-religious so as to accommodate as many people as possible. To them, god is whatever higher power you need to put your faith into to do better. An entity who you are striving to make proud or you are asking for guidance or help, etc.

    This genericized god idea kinda gives up the game to me as an atheist, but it doesn’t mean it’s bad. In fact it’s made me believe in god as an idea.

    There are plenty of studies on “manifesting” goals and how saying out loud to yourself or to someone at all substantially increases your chance of succeeding in your goal. This is just prayer or a magic spell or whatever else you wanna call it. I call it a ritual.

    The fact that god is a made up idea has been uncontested in my mind for eons, however the psychological power of a belief in god is new to me and makes me appreciate the systems of religion more (doesn’t excuse a lot of their bullshit).




  • I want someone to prove his LLM can be as insightful and accurate as paid one.

    Are you using LLMs as search engines?

    Bold.

    I use Gemma, LLama 3.2, and Deepseek to either fix formatting, summarize documentation to give me commands for Linux software, and write simple code structure for me to refine into working code.

    Sure it takes longer to generate than a cloud compute would, but

    1. privacy obviously. I know you dismissed it but that’s really the biggest reason anyone will have.

    2. this feels better environmentally. I actually don’t know if that’s true, but it objectively touches less computers for such simple tasks. It would be wasteful of infrastructure to do it over the web.

    3. it’s just cooler to have a conversation with my computer. I’ve learned a lot about how the whole process works and that’s more valuable to me as a non dev than just getting the end results.





  • This is something I tell people all the time. It’s just as easy to troubleshoot on Linux as it is on Windows the biggest issue is that most people are just kinda innately aware of Windows troubleshooting by virtue of the fact that they’ve been doing it for so long. Linux is probably just as complicated skill wise, but most people just aren’t used to it yet.

    And that’s especially true for gamers. If you’ve gone through the dance of tweaking BIOS settings or DDU removing drivers and reinstalling them, then you’re probably gonna do fine on Linux. The only difference is sometimes there won’t be a GUI you have to go hunt down. It will be like 3 commands someone has already written out for you that you copy/paste into the CLI. Which is WAY better in my opinion.