davidy123

I think it would be better for everyone to get four days a month to choose as days off. Then it would be better distributed. I would prefer this to a four work week. After a few days in a row the freedom really sinks in, so I'd love to be able to take a week off every month, guilt free.

Please do. I can't believe basically every calendar app quantizes things to "months," with a disruptive jump from one to the next, which is just annoying when you want to access time as a day by day, week by week thing. We could get rid of "months," using week number instead for example, and it would not really matter, but we're all forced to that paradigm.

Not that open. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_clones

I grew up in a small town in Ontario with a Vic 20, then C64. A few years after I moved to Toronto, the Amiga seemed the next logical step, but then PC "clones" started getting all the attention.

I really never met any Apple people. My focus at that point became PC clones, as clunky as they were. There were lots of shops that tried to sell Apple II clones, but Apple wiped them out. The PC has an open design.

I dropped the attachment to a particular brand, but the appeal of openness and choice has never left me. I've tried the Apple ecosystem a few times and do involuntary tech support for it, I'm just glad the industry has this foundation of openness.

edit: put "clones" in quotes, because that's not a fair characterization (open by design), but it's the one people use.

>You can't really even find a kit with 4 DDR5 sticks.

https://www.corsair.com/ww/en/Categories/Products/Memory/VEN...

4 X 48GB DDR5 5200 40CL latency. G-Skill just came out with some new kits that are even faster.

Yes. I am in rural(ish) Canada. A community got together and with regional and national funding created https://fibreargenteuil.ca/en/ It was intense, they had to fight, sometimes publicly, tooth and nail with the utility pole controllers. But I'm typing this from fast, reliable (knock the nearest of many trees) fibre internet with very reasonable (all things considered, though I wish they had a more basic tier for down and out folks) pricing.

I follow a few rural internet groups, at first most members thought Starlink would be all they'd ever need, now they are very unhappy.

I think LED lights will lose some of their brightness in the short term, but maintain a useful plateau much longer. At least, that's how LED projectors work, vs lamp projectors, which steadily decline until they're unusable.

However, I would always buy standard socket LEDs unless you're really committed to that lighting style.

Incandescent generate heat, they're great if you need heat and one tone of light and that's it.

LEDs are part of a progression to everything being addressable, think of them as pixels. There's a decreasing incentive to not make everything addressable and support not just dimming but also colour. This is ultimately a completely different approach to environments. Transitioning from "the lights are on and I can easily see my broccoli" to very fine relationships between sources and qualities of light and their interpretation. Some of the benefits will be emergent, which sounds like hand-waving, and sometimes it is. (-:

Not sure what you mean. Firmware updates are supported by fwupd.

> Then when they're old, you've got students, hobbyist etc who find new ways to teach old dogs new tricks: like motherboard swaps (X62, X210 etc)

Yup. I'm going to break a few taboos here and post this: https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/338007901...

I think you underestimate the Thinkpad commitment to Linux, and the effect the community has. I'd like to know officially, but since they target workstations there are probably a low but countable % of users that run Linux. They officially support it for many models, and sell a few models with it installed. Their people are passionate about it, give presentations etc. I've never experienced the hardware switcharoo for low level hardware like wifi chip, they do that for storage and display panels, but that doesn't matter for Linux compatibility.

Linux supports firmware updates via fwupd. It's integrated into most distros.

Wikidata was consciously designed without consideration for the semantic web/rdf. I remember being dismayed by this, but they added some facilities later. It is designed around a purpose built data model. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikibase/DataModel

Maybe it's not "link rot," it's just information that's no longer relevant. Design your systems to be able to handle that. And you'll be able to interop and reason with all kinds of data.

Hmm there are quite a few 16" OLEDs on the market these days, I assume there is a common size for '16".' I'm hoping not to upgrade for another year, so will see then.

I would probably switch after decades of thinkpads (and one Mac I just didn't like) if they offered a model with AMD chip, a good keyboard, Trackpoint, and OLED display.

You're right, that's within a "few" years. I should have said "couple."

That's more than three generations older than the 6850U I'm using. It predates the M1 release. It's only a few years ago that we could expect decent battery life without tweaking on Linux, probably just after the T495 series. (-: These days, tweaking with TLP &c could yield worse battery life, in my experience.

I see your point, but I just leave it on "balanced" unless the battery is critically low. Fan very rarely comes on, everything runs quickly, and I get decent battery life. This was NOT, btw, my experience with Intel laptops.

I get at least 5h on a Thinkpad T14s (Ryzen 6850U), without tweaking, using "balanced" mode. I know some people think 5h is not enough, but it's plenty for a full day of work. If the System 76 system was Intel based, that might have been the problem, AMD has been way ahead of them for power usage in the last few years.

Can the moderator change the title to "Show HN: Alpaca.cpp – Run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM on a PC?"

It runs great, with no hacking, on my Intel Ubuntu computer. I presume it will work on any system that can run make and has enough RAM.

The title implies it works only on a Macbook.

This board has a battery, so the memory is retained for up to a year between reboots. So you can copy your data to it once, and it's super fast.

Though, using ordinary RAM and initializing it before use, copying say 128GB is only going to take a few seconds these days.

Sure, and I also get the "Apple lifestyle" POV.

I guess my PoV is with a GPU + inexpensive RAM, I can do some things more quickly, and other things are at least possible. But granted, hardware nuts and bolts is a hobby for me too, I've always enjoyed researching and building systems, there is a huge community of people and companies, and I much prefer KDE to MacOS, Android to IOS.

If Apple released a reasonably priced system with lots of RAM, or that could take a GPU, I'd not have as much to stand on, but they don't seem inclined to do that.

Here's BoM, $2170:

$700 for 192GB https://www.corsair.com/us/en/Categories/Products/Memory/VEN...

About $200 for a LGA1700 board with four slots (currently Asus and Gigabyte support 4 X 48GB memory modules on consumer hardware)

$200+ for a CPU

$120 for an 850 watt PSU

$700 for a used 16GB quadro, or a new 12GB A2000

$150 for 2TB NVME storage

$50 for some kinda case (I use an XTIA open frame, it is the opposite of a Macbook)

These are "best prices," You'd have to pay around 10% more if you're not into finding deals.

You, sir or madam, are a hero.

You can put together a 192GB 16+ core x86 system with 16GB CUDA card and multi TB of fast storage for $2000ish. I'm not trolling, just wondering why people go to "Apple" all the time, when other approaches may be better for this kind of work. Yes, the CPU - RAM interface is not as fast, but the CUDA card is much faster, and the large cheap memory makes some things a lot more practical. If I'm not mistaken, in these approaches, GPU + VRAM + CPU + RAM are used in conjunction, so it all adds up to quite a bit more powerful system for the same amount of money if working with them is a main goal. If Apple had expandable RAM it would be a different story.

The Dewey system is famously stuck in its time and culture. Look at religion, there are multiple top level cateogries for Christian religion related things, then there's "Other religions" for everything else. At this point, it's embarassing and insulting.

I can look at the javascript of many "big corporate" websites and see they are often a sprawling mess of homebrew code. I'm sorry your electricity company's React website is bad, but I don't think an anecdote is data. Any framework can get abused, not using a framework doesn't mitigate the problem. But trying to update a site that uses a different approach for every little feature spread across many pages, without any idea of what a component is, that's a nightmare. At least you can sensibly incrementally improve React across a site's components with well worn tools, especially as a team.

I don't love Microsoft, but it's for the best they adopt a well known and rounded framework like React, rather than try to invent yet another of their own frameworks, like the ones you mentioned. I don't know why this has anything to do with Electron, since their React push is for their front end frameworks for their main corporate product, Office365 (or whatever it's called today).

I don't think you are living in the real world. Is Microsoft corporate? React is a first class choice in their frameworks.

React is like nearly any other tool, use it well, and it's great. Well optimized React is lightweight to the client and a joy to test and debug. That said, Web Components are even better, but I'm guessing that's science fiction to you.

I am very far from an expert on this, but I think domain specific conversational AI would be much more useful than these large models. It's fun to ask an AI to compose a fresh 600bpm hip hop song about the relationship between materials science and the breeding habits of mosquitoes, but an open-source medical AI, application support AI, or many other applications would be much more practical, if they could be accurate enough. And especially if they could run "standalone." They could also consult with each other, as a network of specialized AI. Is work inching closer to more specific, more accurate applications? Or is this just a big gimmick/distraction phase around a maybe not so great idea of AI?

Wait'll you guys hear about buying more RAM and using it as a RAM disk.