thot_experiment

I don't know if I'm crazy but I think social media is pretty okay at the like, core building and enhancing social networks thing.

Instagram is probably my most used one these days and I love seeing my friend's stories and I don't think I've parsed more than a handful of ads in the last 2 or 3 years that I've been an active user, probably a few tens of hours wasted with dumb reels, not a bad cost at all imo. I have probably 400 irl people and 200 internet accounts I follow. It doesn't have the charm and honesty of navigating a webring or whatever, but the friction is so low so I get to see a lot of stuff my friends, acquaintances and especially just people i'm peripherally in community with share that I probably wouldn't otherwise.

I miss the old internet for sure, but I'm not convinced the current situation is as horrible as people say.

Qwen Coder 30B A3B is far better than Qwen Coder Next imo. I may have inference issues or it's just a problem with running Coder Next at IQ4 XS, vs Q8 for the earlier/smaller model but I don't find the 80B to be much better at coding, even in instruct mode, and the insane speed and low latency of the smaller model is way more useful. Good one-line completions often happen in 300ms.

no FIM though :(, imo most slept on usecase for local models

> To paint a picture with words...Stefan Zweig, model intellectual and model European, ended his life in 1942 at age 61 in Brazil, having lost his home of 20 years in Salzburg, his beloved Europe and, in his own words, a large part of himself.

LMFAO do you understand how incredibly VILE it is to say this in this context?

This is the way. The number one metric for any tool is how much you care TRUST it, and the number two metric for any tool is how quickly you can fix it when it breaks, and number three is how easy it is to understand and modify for your particular purpose.

> It's profoundly depressing that the Jewish people, fresh off of 2k years of oppression, have decided to speedrun the same behaviours against someone else.

I know it can seem like this but it's important to make the distinction that Jewish people are not the same set as zionists and israelis, and that conflation is something the latter two parties DESPERATELY want you to make.

Yes, history happened and people should be held to account for it, not ad infinitum, but you know, if my dad killed your dad and took all his shit, and then left it to me, I'm pretty sure I shouldn't get to keep it and all the benefits that come from it just because I had nothing to do with it.

I said what I said; israel is the problem, I have no significant beef with Judaism (no more than any religion and less than some).

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extremes-of-israe...

They're almost certainly #1 global problem causers so it's usually the safest bet. Though I wouldn't be as expansive as you, the USA, Portugal, Spain and the USSR are no slouches. Can't be forgetting the Dutch either.

I don't understand what the purpose of making a distinction between monetary support in terms of direct aid, and indirect aid. The entire apparatus of the US government is paid for by our taxes, we pay for it either way. We also pay for it in instability and negative sentiment.

> Israel is by far the most condemned country at the UN in terms of resolutions passed against it

It's crazy to me that you know this and yet it seems like you are still in support of the US protecting Israel? You still think this is a net win for the world? That's incomprehensible to me.

What are you on about lmao, what is "leftist thought". My ideology? I'm not my ideology, my ideology is an ever shifting set of ideals I explore to try to build an internally consistent model for decision making. How in the world does a belief in US/UK meddling being the proximal cause for many of the modern issues in the region have anything to do with the crimes of the Kremlin. Can you please engage with the substance of my claims in any way? I'm not here to defend whatever "leftism" means to you.

I wonder if Iran being a dictatorship has a cause? Why does the Arab world hate Israel I wonder? Everything you're talking about is basically a direct result of UK, US and israeli bullshit in the area. It's people with exactly the same sort of colonial geopolitical ideas as you that CAUSED THE MESS IN THE FIRST PLACE.

The only reason Israel is able to commit the horrors they are is because they can fuck around without finding out due to US protection paid for by our tax dollars, we are absolutely complicit. Of course that's only in the immediate term, I urge you to look at the history of the region even a little critically, so much of the conflict there is rooted in British, American and Israeli meddling, it's an insane take to claim that we are not responsible and that we have not benefited immensely.

(Though to be honest my position is probably that we need to go past cutting off support and US tax dollars should go toward reparations for Palesine, Lebanon and probably Iran and others, we are complicit in a lot of fucked shit.)

((I don't think those places are lead by great individuals and everything is amazing to be clear, I also think the people there have suffered immensely from a century of american, british and israeli meddling and we should be held accountable))

US support for Israel is one of the most horrible things imaginable, really makes me ashamed. It is only the US standing between the current horrendous status quo and Israel being an true international pariah state. Hopefully we cut off support and usher in a find out era.

I actually care only about one specific thing here.

Do you believe it is moral to restrict access to something that is effectively infinite?

What are you talking about, most SaaS could be software that just runs on a computer, it's SaaS because you need a way to retain control to charge for it. Most of the effort going into developing software this way goes into the part that holds onto the value because distributed systems are hard. A lot of software is drastically easier to create if you don't turn it into SaaS. In any case I don't think SaaS companies don't create value, but I think the cost for that value is too high.

This applies to almost everyone working on SaaS; not in all cases, but the absolute majority work on SaaS means creating artificial scarcity in order to extract value from people. It is a fundamentally evil, antisocial, anti human thing to do. If you believe that is okay to restrict access to infinite resources to preserve the status quo you deserve the same place in hell as the people pushing gambling.

Don't create artificial scarcity. Don't play zero sum games.

I've basically stopped using agentic AI completely as I've found the easy wins it gets me almost always come with tons of debt I have to pay down later. I specifically find the loss of situational awareness that comes with agentic development to cost far more than the utility I get from the code it writes.

As a result of this I've switched almost entirely to using qwen-coder3 locally in FIM autocomplete mode, and that's been pretty fantastic. Since I'm still doing most of the programming myself I keep the codebase loaded up in my brain the way I'm used to but so much of the tedium of programming is accelerated by the mind-reading autocomplete with 300ms latency (to useful completion, not first token).

Agents are neat but fundamentally it's a hack on top of the best autocomplete you could imagine, I find using it to do the thing it actually does gives me by far the best UX.

Oh I was completely wrong about the model management stuff btw, llama-server has fully fledged model management baked in now, you just have to make an *.ini with your model configs (most models can do this themselves, I pointed qwen3.6 at the relevant part of the docs and it wrote me an ini with all of my model configs in about 2 minutes) and you can swap between models via api or a dropdown menu in the UI.

these people cannot be taxed out of existence soon enough, and that's better than they deserve

I was pretty big on ollama, it seemed like a great default solution. I had alpha that it was a trash organization but I didn't listen because I just liked having a reliable inference backend that didn't require me to install torch. I switched to llama.cpp for everything maybe 6 months ago because of how fucking frustrating every one of my interactions with ollama (the organization) were. I wanna publicly apologize to everyone who's concerns I brushed off. Ollama is a vampire on the culture and their demise cannot come soon enough.

FWIW llama.cpp does almost everything ollama does better than ollama with the exception of model management, but like, be real, you can just ask it to write an API of your preferred shape and qwen will handle it without issue.

It's probably been well over a decade since the last time I read a book, maybe two. Maybe it's an ADHD thing? but my retention and immersion is just so so so much deeper when I listen to audiobooks, even at 1.6x-2x (depending on the narrator) I feel like I'm transported in a way that reading physically just doesn't give me.

LMAO ok, I mean that's bad but if we're referencing history to contextualize a situation let's start with the USA and UK deciding that "sovereign country" isn't a real thing if they vote to nationalize their oil industry. We're heading toward decade 8 of FAFO here with zero lessons learned.

I wish my bike hadn't gotten stolen, I had audioreactive LEDs on there and I'd take a video for y'all. Maybe it's time to resurrect the project.

I don't think FFTs are particularly good for music visualization if you're trying to be expressive because there isn't a particularly meaningful mapping from an FFT to the subjective experience of music and it adds significant latency. I ended up using a few stacked bandpass filters as well as mixing the raw PCM into the light strip for texture. Compressor with a slow attack and even slower release for auto-leveling (the release has to be like 20 seconds to make sure you don't up the gain a bunch during a breakdown in the music). I ran all the realtime stuff on one core of an ESP32 and a bluetooth stack and all the UI stuff on the other. I was getting about 200FPS on a strip of about 120 SK9822s w/ a custom HDR driver giving me about 11.5 bits of color per channel.

I really miss my bike, watch your shit on caltrain.

It's eternally crazy to me that people tolerate advertising, it's just something I've never been able to wrap my head around. It's like someone telling me they don't mind peeing their pants or support israel or something, it's just like, I understand the words you are saying but I cannot put myself into a position where they make sense. You have a finite amount of time on earth, why would you waste any of it watching ads?

Gemma 4 E4B is an incredible model for doing all the home assistant stuff I normally just used Qwen3.5 35BA4B + Whisper while leaving me with wayy more empty vram for other bullshit. It works as a drop in replacement for all of my "turn the lights off" or "when's the next train" type queries and does a good job of tool use. This is the really the first time vramlets get a model that's reliably day to day useful locally.

I'm curious/worried about the audio capability, I'm still using Whisper as the audio support hasn't landed in llama.cpp, and I'm not excited enough to temporarily rewire my stuff to use vLLM or whatever their reference impl is. The vision capabilities of Gemma are notably (thus far, could be impl specific issues?) much much worse than Qwen (even the big moe and dense gemma are much worse), hopefully the audio is at least on par with medium whisper.

If someone can't be bothered to write it I can't be bothered to read it.

Ehhh sort of, I see what you're saying about it maybe not meeting the technical definition of extortion but I think you're missing the forest for the trees a little bit. The whole point is that when a company tries to force you to pay them through manipulative practices, you should not do that. That when companies manipulate you even if it makes economic sense to pay you shouldn't. That's fully compatible with not using the free service if you don't like the terms.

Obviously the root problem is the incentive structures created by a system that relies on scarcity to assign value to things being applied to things that effectively cost zero to duplicate. Obviously companies are not my friends, I self host everything, heck I even have a local copy of my VPS, it's on solar, I'M fine. I don't expect Github to do good things and make good choices, but that doesn't mean I can't be mad about it when they do things I don't like. Also I live in the real world and have to deal with society and there would be friction I create for myself when I try to exist in tech and refuse to use github, might be a worthwhile trade but it IS a trade.

Probably don't reward extortion with money.