^

I see a whole lot of theoretical “what if platforms did this or that,” when GoG is already doing it right. That’s the way.

I think this is what “want an EV, research it heavily” folks tend to end up with, where Teslas leans more “want an EV, don’t research it quite as heavily” crowd.

Not that either brand makes bad cars.

I just mean the Hyundai/Kia EVs are less “sexy” on the surface. Their charge and range is lower, but if you look into it, it’s an engineering compromise for faster charging. Hyundai isn’t a very “glamorous” brand, but their recent cars have been excellent, and if you actually look into Tesla, well… gestures at X. Lower end Teslas are priced somewhat attractively and tend to have better resale value than Hyundai at the moment, and it’s quite rational to assume “well, they’ve been making EVs longer.” But if you research it, Teslas have a more hidden costs over time, and even though some systems like the heatpumps are less refined than Teslas, Hyundai engineered the heck out of the car.

A Singapore paper:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Straits_Times

So not that strait, likely referring to:

Chromium can’t do absolutely anything they want though. Anything drastic would break compatibility with Safari and FF.

…But if they do, if they actually get effectively 100% market share, think about it:

• They could close Chromium’s source, and kill off 3rd party forks as a “security risk.”

• They could literally disable adblocking, not just “softly” like the Manifest V3 switch did.

• Similarly, they could implement custom ad and tracking APIs that are effectively unblockable.

• They could arbitrarily block web pages, or redirect them, purely for Alphabet’s interests.

• They could mandate that sites they use have to use Chrome, to shut out other browser efforts.

• They could encourage similar behavior from pages depending on Google ad revenue.

If all this sounds tin foil hat-ish (and I know it does), consider Google’s past behavior over the decade.

…Is it that different from what they’ve already been doing? To virtually no public pushback?

And this is why Safari and FF are so important. As long as they exist, that cant happen, but they’re getting dangerously close to market irrelevance.

Nintendo is beyond the event horizon at this point.

And that’s alright. Like, if you can afford a Switch and you get it so your family can play Pokopia and Animal Crossing, all their nonsense doesn’t really matter to your lifestyle.

…But if it does matter, “Nintendo Fans” are in waaay too deep to plausibly defend them anyway.

How much would 2-3 dual-later BDs cost?

The issue isn’t the technical possibility, but whether people are willing to pay the premium for installation media.

You know. Store agnostic game key cards would be so cool.

I’m fine with archiving downloads I’d want + keeping keycards.

Actually one addendum/correction:

You can use your integrated graphics to render the desktop. Plug your monitor into the UHD graphics instead of your Nvidia card.

This saves a notable about of VRAM you can use to fit more context, and speeds up inference a bit too. It also lets you configure models closer to your VRAM limit, as you no longer have the variability of apps randomly taking it.

The best you could run on that system, I believe, is Step 3.7 via ik-llama.cpp.

You don’t want, nor need, the iGPU. Unfortunately nothing is really optimized to use it for hybrid inference, and it’s not very powerful anyway. You’re better off with a CUDA/CPU backend.

How it would work in practice is:

• The “dense” parts of a MoE model like Step stay on the GPU.

• The big, sparse parts stay in CPU RAM.

• For prompt processing, everything is done on the GPU since the penalty for going over the PCIe bus isn’t too bad.

• For text generation (generating the actual output), your CPU cores run the sparse part. This is fine. It’s not nearly as slow as you’d think, as this part is really compute lite and AVX accelerated.

The tricky part is finding appropriate models and quantizations for your setup. You’re looking at something in the 100-170B range, basically, with the experts quantized to 3-4 bits and the dense weights at 6-bit or higher.

I can look around later, if you’re interested, but I haven’t kept up with model releases in this range other than the Stepfun series.

On a separate note, I wouldn’t containerize ik_llama.cpp.

It just wastes precious RAM and compute. It has basically no dependencies, so it’s not really a security risk, and there isn’t much good that bundles models with it.

Now, the UIs. Containerize those. Those have tons of dependencies, so it’s easier and safer.

Actually, this is scary, as it suggests Safari is shrinking.

Safari was really good at displacing Chrome on Macs. I try to get my family to use it (or a Safari fork like Orion) on theirs, but apparently all those “switch to Chrome” pop ups are working :(

I don’t want Chrome to be come the actual web standard. That’s straight up dystopian, as it gives Google absolute control over what’s left of the web.

This is a moot question, because the only thing that matters is engagement.

Internet forums:

• Are (mostly) specialized.

• Don’t have S&P 500-level advertising.

• Don’t constantly ping your phone by default.

• Don’t incorporate “dark patterns” in the UI.

• Don’t have AI-based algorithmic feeds.

• Have rules for posting, which slows down posting.

People didn’t give up on them; their attention got sucked away to other things. And nothing could have changed that, no matter how much they improved.

Not that I have any high horse to stand on.

For a few years, I’ve been telling myself I will become active in a few still-extant forums again (like DPReview and SpaceBattles). I never did.

People never really cared about information hygiene.

They tried to teach it at the “dawn of the internet for the average person” back then. The lesson was supposed to be to follow Wikipedia’s links, which do cite primary sources.

This is true.

But it turns out, no one cares. Schools failed. People fundamentally want validation of what feels good, and social media took full advantage of this.

We already have this! It’s called a tool harness, and basically any kind of local agent framework supports it already, as well as a whole slew of locally runnable LLMs in every size.

Apparently this represents ~0.9% of the U.S. population:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_United_States

That makes sense. The image host I used is pretty unreliable.

Which is the second issue. No image hosts even support JXL or AVIF, except catbox.moe, which is down now! It’s infuriating.

+1 for “contact admins.”

This isn’t Reddit, they are human beings you can reach.

Don’t let the stalker “win” by switching accounts. If you do that, just do it temporarily; they’ll get bored after a while. Then come back to this account.

What platform is that, out of curiosity? Im pretty sure everything should load an AVIF.

Om Android, or iOS?

Well even 64GB microSD cards are $35 now.

There’s a price floor to this kind of thing, and no cheaper read only tech has come to replace BDs.

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