A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2021

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  • I think that’s a size where it’s a bit more than a good autocomplete. Could be part of a chain for retrieval augmented generation. Maybe some specific tasks. And there are small machine learning models that can do translation or sentiment analysis, though I don’t think those are your regular LLM chatbots… And well, you can ask basic questions and write dialogue. Something like “What is an Alpaca?” will work. But they don’t have much knowledge under 8B parameters and they regularly struggle to apply their knowledge to a given task at smaller sizes. At least that’s my experience. They’ve become way better at smaller sizes during the last year or so. But they’re very limited.

    I’m not sure what you intend to do. If you have some specific thing you’d like an LLM to do, you need to pick the correct one. If you don’t have any use-case… just run an arbitrary one and tinker around?


  • Thanks! I’ve updated the link. I always just use Batocera or something like that, which has Emulationstation and Kodi set up for me. So I don’t pay a lot of attention to the included projects and their development state…

    I didn’t include this, since OP wasn’t mentioning retro-gaming. But Batocera, Recalbox, Lakka, RetroPie are quite nice. I picked one which includes both Kodi and Emulationstation and I can switch between the interfaces with the gamecontroller. I get all the TV and streaming stuff in Kodi, and Emulationstaation launches the games. And I believe it can do Flatpaks and other applications as well.






  • We have some of these things. You can type in dpkg --get-selections to get a list of all packages on a Debian distribution. You can use apt-clone to install or transfer all installed packages to a new system, with a single command. You don’t need to install every package seperately. And Fedora will have a similar concept. I think the package manager also keeps track of some of the config files. You can use dpkg-reconfigure to configure your locale and several other things. These are being used for fully automated rollouts. And I believe other distros have similar tools and package managers. And then we have proper configuration management like johntash said.

    And remember, Linux is an organically grown ecosystem for quite some time now. We have things like the FHS and it’s always the same 3 locations where config files reside. But it’s not a tight ecosystem like iOS and there is no central authority mandating every developer on earth use the same config format and syntax to describe things.

    NixOS on the other hand follows a declarative approach. You’d compare that to Debian configured by Ansible (for example). Not Debian alone. And I mean go ahead and install some software which isn’t packaged yet, and you’ll find out why NixOS isn’t more popular. It’s a nice and clever thing, though. Both the declarative aspect and being immutable. But it comes at a price. And then we have some issues with the implementation and I think the error messages are always very unclear. That’s the two main issues I struggle with. It always requires very advanced programming concepts to do very simple things, and I often need to have a look at the source code to find out what to do. And if the config doesn’t apply, it often provides a very unhelpful trace, sometimes it doesn’t even say which of my config file broke. Earlier this week, I spent almost 2 hours to do something that would have been an “npm install && npm run dev” on a different distro. And that’s why it isn’t very popular. It is very nice, though.


  • Isn’t that the idea behind offgrid living? I mean people do it, so obviously it can. Energy can be harvested by solar panels for electricity, or converted in a diesel generator from oil/petroleum which you’d need to buy. And you can chop down wood and burn it to heat the place or cook something… The smarty-pants answer is - energy isn’t “created”, you convert it. So I think the answer is more where do you get the energy source. As with wood, that might be available around a cabin in the woods. Solar and wind might be avalable almost everywhere, and you can buy devices to convert it and batteries to store it. Other things like oil probably need to be bought.




  • I feel there is a general sentiment to fight each other (online), right now. It is one of the current topics which get people riled up, but not the only one. Not that fighting, trolling and hating on something (or being stupid) is a new thing… All of that has a long tradition on the internet. But I think we need to think hard about what we envision this place to be… Or become. A nice place to talk and maybe have an argument every now and then? Or a place where extreme opinions are very loud and drown out constructive discussions and push people to the side… And I think we need to be super careful once the hate turns not just against things, but people. Most of this is not healthy, neither for the individual users, nor for this online-space. And these storms in a bottle don’t create anything and they change nothing about the world. It’s just making everyone miserable once it dominates the atmosphere.

    (And I don’t think we need to discuss the facts, or what AI is and what it does. From my experience, nobody listens to that or is interested in facts. That’s not what the confrontation is about… Or at least people have a predetermined stance anyway and arguing facts does nothing to settle this.)

    Edit: But the example you gave serves other “controversial” topics as well… I’m not really surprised that it’s people with strong oppinions who gather there. And then it’s a meme and the entire community advertises with shitposting and being anti-imperialist. So I’d say that one specific post had it coming. And both sides are argumentative and escalate.







  • Sure, I have an old PC with an energy efficient mainboard and a PicoPSU and I wouldn’t want anything else. I believe it does somewhere around 20W-25W though. And I have lots of RAM, a decent (old) CPU and enough SATA ports… Well, I would go for a newer PC, they get more energy efficient all the time… But it’s a lot of effort to pick the components unless some PC magazine writes something or someone has a blog with recommendations.


  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.detoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldNAS Power Consumption
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    17 days ago

    You’ll want to look up the QNAP as well. I’ve seen reports with quite some variety on the power consumption. Depending on the exact model, it could be somewhere in the range from 25W to 55W… So could be less, could be the same. And have a look at the amount of RAM if you want to run services on it.


  • I think Radicale, Baikal, SabreDAV or NextCloud are the most common choices. I read those names a lot.
    But I believe only one of those isn’t written in PHP.

    I’d really recommend digging into the “hacking” though. Unless you learn from your specific mistakes and avoid that in the future, you might run in to the exact same issue again. And I mean it could be a security flaw in the program code of the WebDAV server. But it could as well be a few dozen other reasons why your server wasn’t secure… (Missing updates, insecure passwords, missing fail2ban, a webserver or reverse proxy, unrelated other software… There are a lot of moving gears in a webserver and lots of things to consider.)