chaxor

Yes again, it's very strange to see a simple focus on one particular instance from one particular company to represent the entire idea of technology in general.

If windows 11 is far worse in many metrics than windows XP or Linux, does that mean that technology is useless?

It's one instance of something with a very particular vision being imposed. Windows 11 being slow due to reporting several GB of user data in the first few minutes of interaction with the system does not mean that all new OS are slow. Similarly, some older tech in a web UI (ChatGPT) for genAI producing non-physical data does not mean that all multimodal models will produce data unsupported by physics. Many works have already shown a good portion of the problems in GPTs can be fixed with different methods stemming from rome, rl-sr, sheavNNs, etc.

My point isn't even that certain capabilities may get better in the future, but rather that they already are better now, just not integrated into certain models.

I don't understand how everyone keeps making this mistake over and over. They explicitly just said "in 5-10 years".

So many people continually use arguments that revolve around 'I used it once and it wasn't the best and/or me things up', and imply that this will always be the case.

There are many solutions already for knowledge editing, there are many solutions for improving performance, and there will very likely continue to be many improvements across the board for this.

It took ~5 years from when people in the NLP literature noticed BERT and knew the powerful applications that were coming, until the public at large was aware of the developments via ChatGPT. It may take another 5 before the public sees the developments happening now in the literature hit something in a companies web UI.

I could be wrong here, but I believe this (ceph, et al) is the answer to the question: > """But what if I don't have a JBOD of 6x18TB hard drives with good amount of ECC RAM for ZFS? What if I have 3 raspberry pi 4's, at different houses with 3x 12TB externals on them, and 2 other computers with 2x 4TB externals on them, and I want to use that all together with some redundancy/error checking?" That would give (3x3x12)+(2x2x4)=124 TB of storage, vs 108TB in the ZFS single box case (of raw storage).

If you could figure out the distributed part (and inconsistency in disk size and such), then this is a very nice system to have.

A serious user of both suggested to use iroh instead

You mean OpenOffice? Because it's not quite the same thing. It can cause some differences in appearance for docx (though that doesn't mean much, since M$FT Word also doesn't display their own doc format consistently either).

I'm a bit confused here. These are recognized as being harmful. It's written all over the msds for these. What is the real change that is going to occur?

I remember dealing with these substances in tiny quantities in the lab, and they were treated as carefully as cholorosifonic super acids. A lot of care goes into their disposal or recycle. One problem is making methods that can detect waste streams at under ppt levels, which is pretty difficult, but that's the best effort for dealing with these substances at the moment.

It's worth noting here (even though I also use vim/markdown/typst, and Word is a thing of the past) that markdown does say something more than "just the text".

It puts the header notation and style (like italic, etc) in-line. So does Typst or LaTeX, and I can't think of any typical stand-off examples for headers and such, but it does muddy the text in-line in that sense. It typically doesn't really slow down the writing, but if you're writing \# as comments for code, then don't have those wrapped in \`\`\`, you can get some problems.

There are other reasons to not like Word other than 'it six's. One is availability. If you're on Linux all day, your options don't really contain word - it's not free to download and install due to needing a license. You have to go and find some other computer that runs windows, and start it up - just for that one document. Then you have a single use computer, which obviously isn't a great experience. Closest thing that I use is Google docs, sometimes. I (and many others like me) know how to use word (and excel) pretty well due to some life in that world. I still remember most of many of the hotkey combinations to step through the menus. The reason I use vim for everything now is - I use vim for everything. I live in vim/tmux/ssh/tui, so most problems go there first if they can. There are obvious benefits to the vim/git/Typst setup, if plots need to go in a document for example, but it's also strengthened by word not being easily available.

On an only slightly related note: is there any good way to check PDFs for malware/executables?

If I'm stuck with an attempt at it, the best I can think of is opening in a new QEMU or docker with no Internet access, but that's 1) a fair but of work to check something, and 2) probably not even that secure. Using some cli tool, like xxx, bat, or ranger, that does some processing to extract the text and looking at just that feels more secure - but I know it really isn't.

What is a simple tool to "clean" PDFs? An ML tool that does QEMU/docker/no-net to extract the content, turns that into game, and saves a typst/latex template with it would probably be the best possible outcome - but that's a decent (yet potentially very lucrative) task.

I never fully understood the use of ipfs/iroh for websites, but I really like the idea for data caching in data science packages.

It makes me more sense to me that someone would be much more willing to serve large databases and neural network weights that they actually use everyday, rather than 'that one guys website they went to that one time'.

I'm very surprised it's not as popular, if not more popular to just have @iroh-memoize decorators everywhere in people's database ETL code.

That's a better use case (sense the user has a vested interest in keeping the data up) than helping people host we sites.

Only keep your passwords in your head. That way only one person can know them - you. And then, you can forget them, and now no-one knows them.

As we continually have told to and is pushed upon us by IT - this is the most secure system to have.

The one that no one can use.

If there's nanotubes in there, You're **ed

It's ok if you: 1) Tell it what you want 2) Then realize it messed up because you forgot to specify more details 3) Repeat 1) & 2) ~25-50 (maybe>100) times, with different restarts/contexts with a clear goal of style and performance in mind. 4) Make some minor adjustments on your own

Now you have that 6 line script you wanted.

Honestly it is still pretty useful though, as you can see 'your code in different clothing styles' in some sense, very quickly to choose the best/most performant option. You just have to know what that looks like before going in, and it helps make it 'tangible' quicker.

It's a place to learn languages.

Like Rust or Go.

:)

Fantastic!

If Kuzu and LanceDB are added we could have a perfect way of dealing with graphs, vector, and tables all together in one ecosystem. Honestly may be worthy of a thin wrapper project around those.

They would work so incredibly well together to free people from the horrible corporate "cloud" mess/B's everyone keeps trying to push.

Agreed

We should be suggesting self hosted and decentralized solutions to website hosting and file hosting.

On that note, does anyone have any secure methods of providing serving a file from your computer to anyone with a phone/computer that doesn't require them downloading/installing something new? Just a password or something? Magic-wormhole almost seems great, but it requires the client to install wormhole (on a computer, not phone), and then type specific commands along with the password.

Is there a simple `iroh serve myfile.file` from server and then client goes to https://some.domain.iroh/a086c07f862bbe839c928fce8749 and types in a password/ticket you give them?

That would be wonderful.

The font names are edit.exe?

I always found it strange that fonts are executables and yet we hear so few uses of fonts as malware.

The Linux repo for Ms fonts seems like such a perfect way to get RCE on Linux computer due to the number of people that need some crappy Times New Roman for a paper submission requirement. They're even called TimesNewRoman.exe or Arial.exe.

I see. Perhaps the added benefit I am trying to create with this other system is that specifying remote locations isn't necessary, and is just inherited as the distributed network. Anytime anyone runs it, they're added to the network, so it scales with the number of users.

Sorry - memoizing.

I am interested in making a system that can memoize large databases from ETL systems and then serve that on iroh or ipfs/torrent, such that a process that may take a supercomputer a week to process can have the same code run on a laptop and it will notice it's been done my a university supercomputer before already and grab that result automatically from the decentralized network of all people using the software (who downloaded the ETL database).

That way you save compute and time.

That seems more like what blogs and posts are for, not academic journals. Unfortunately things have degraded so much that there is very little difference between a blog and a research article, but there should be a very large distinction.

It should be a requirement that every paper be completely reproducible, for any software part of the paper. On any OS or systém, it should work. Similar to requiring statistics to be reported a certain way, there should be guarantees that the code should be available and work in all circumstances.

It's nice when people use gitlab, for this reason

I'm not versed in this, so apologies for the stupid question, but wouldn't statically linking be more secure, if anything? Or at least have potentially better security?

I always thought the better security practice is statically linked Go binary in a docker container for namespace isolation.

Nix has decentralized caching and memorizing?

I think that typically a rewrite in, well anything, can be helpful - simply because the first write wasn't sure of what may work or what the correct model for the system should be, or how to handle specific parts of the system etc.

A rewrite in Rust can be good for those reasons, as it removes the "cruft" of old implementation, but also gets the nice properties of speed and such.

But ultimately the thing I love most about Rust is not even the safety and such - it's the package management and build system. Just look at the horrible python/js scene for how bad packaging and build systems can be, and you'll understand why that basic uniform experience can be so nice.

Typst is pretty close to markdown for simple things, and scales nicely to hard things. So you don't really need to worry about the markdown-pandoc shuffle anymore.

Typst.

Typst is better IMO

Try out Typst.

It senses changes to any file and auto-updates the doc lightning fast - it's far better than LaTeX IMO

Ah. So,

If you send a check to the editor and say "for the journal": you call it a publishing fee.

If you send a check to the editor and say "for you to give to the journal": you call it a bribe.

Like that?

This is the real answer.

Many of the problems in academia are due to publish or perish. Very many of them.