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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?

Even more on the nose: https://youtu.be/LRq_SAuQDec?si=CAe210GZ_lKcc6_Y

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.

I haven't _needed_ windows in over 5 years, and I game pretty hard (though not much in the realm of anti-cheat compatibility drama). Bazzite is my daily driver now for development and pleasure.

Interestingly, I had the exact same experience leaving Shanghai - I had picked up some nifty lighters at the wholesale markets. They took me to the room, had me take them out, and I was lucky enough to be able to hand them off to a friend who was staying. No fuss, waiting, or intimidation. They just took care of my honest mistake.

Valetudo is what I was referring to. For the vacuum, it's the Roborock Q5+ back from 2023. Not top of the line, but it works well on our mixed hardood+ rug floors.

Seconding Roborock - we have a mid range one and it's effective and a huge step up in smartness from my old Samsung. I love being able to dispatch it to one or two different rooms and walk away knowing that it will get the job done.

As a bonus, there are open source drop in replacements for the mfg's cloud service so you can self host your floor maps and stats, if that's your jam. (this isn't roborock exclusive though).

I had just recently factory reset my samsung S90C QDOLED - and had to work through the annoying process of dialing the settings back to something sane and tasteful. Filmmaker mode only got it part of the way there. The white balance was still set to warm, and inexplicably HDR was static (ignoring the content 'hints'), and even then the contrast seemed off, and I had to set the dynamic contrast to 'low' (whatever that means) to keep everything from looking overly dark.

It makes me wish that there was something like an industry standard 'calibrated' mode that everyone could target - let all the other garbage features be a divergence from that. Hell, there probably is, but they'd never suggest a consumer use that and not all of their value-add tackey DSP.

YouTube is one from my experience. The team there had a pretty strong anti-orm stance. DB performance was an existential necessity during the early scaling. The object fetching and writing tended to be focused through a small number of function calls with well scrutinized queries and write through memcaching.

I get it... but you can pry my cloudflare-tunnel from my cold dead hands.

I'm no stranger to hosting things 'the hard way', but I am not going back from my happy casual hosting where I just spin up a docker container, and point the cloudflare tunnel at the local port and opt out of worrying over DDOS, SSL termination and certs, and everything else that goes with it.

With tailscale, I don't even keep port 22 open to the world.

I did a pro bono analysis of a ddos against a dolphin protection non profit, probably a lashing out from a butthurt fishing concern. A significant amount of traffic in that attack originated from the stark asn. Interesting to see them here.

Dyes, glyphosate, seed oils... Yeah. I like olive oil, and don't want to eat glyphosate, but you're fixating on the tenuous unfalsifiable presumed linkage of their toxicity to population level health problems.

I would still put my money on a person eating a commodity, non-organic, seed oil rich diet that is sanely balanced and appropriate for their activity level being healthier on average than an overeating gluten free organic-everything only touched by hemp fiber vegan who never exercises.

In circles of occult technology, a corporation would simply be understood as an "Egregore". Which is itself might be considered a slave of its constituents, but no more than they are a slave of the collective will.

Am I a slave to my cells? Are my cells a slave of 'me' (whatever 'me' is)?

I'm entertaining sending my kiddo to a Waldorf School, because it genuinely seems pretty good.

But looking into the underlying Western Esoteric Spirit Science, 'Anthroposophy' (because Theosophy wouldn't let him get weird enough) by Rudolph Steiner, has been quite a ride. The point being that.. humans have a pretty endless capacity to go ALL IN on REALLY WEIRD shit, as long as it promises to fix their lives if they do everything they're told. Naturally if their lives aren't fixed, then they did it wrong or have karmic debt to pay down, so YMMV.

In any case, I'm considering the latent woo-cult atmosphere as a test of the skeptical inoculation that I've tried to raise my child with.

Belgium is overpaying for labor then! Open up those dormitories for workers and you can squeeze employee costs down at least 20% and harvest that value! (cynicism)

I once had a kind DM accommodate my misuse of the 'summon steed' spell to materialize my war horse within the allowed 30 foot range above an enemy to drop it on their head.

At least it's not shitcoin crypto!

Wonder how well it will work from chromium in Wayland.

That is, I'm genuinely curious. Like is there any protocol or standard to mark a part of a DOM or a canvas as uncapturable? Up though the compositor and pipewire or however it happens these days?