I used to freak out at every scratch and dent that happened to my guitar. Now I realize that scratches and dents and damage is proof of a unique existance. Each scratch is a link to a certain moment. Even the planet and moon must bear the scars of their long lives. a fundamental truth that cannot be avoided, so why cry over spilled milk and get nutty over chips of wood? Does it still play? If yes then its still good.

In fairness I understand that the 1k$+new is the main source of frustration, its harsh to have your expensive shiny new toy to play with tarnished.

I try to use mobile web versions saved as an app shortcut. When you install a real app it usually comes with a bunch of permissions needed and trackers collecting your info in the background. Bad for privacy and battery life. Classyshark helps scan the trackers and a firewall can disable wifi access on app by app basis but thats a lot more trouble than just not installing a bunch if junk apps.The exception is that I trust open source software from fdroid with a public github repo.

I have quit smoking after switching to vaping. To be more specific I’m a cannabis ex-smoker who switched to dry herb vaping where you heat raw flower or concentrates up until the cannabinoid oils vaporize but not so hot that things combust into flame. Before I switched I was having issues with coughing up black tar mucus flem and some wheeze in the lungs. No more of those problems, and I can actually taste the terps and subtle flavors now.

Just a friendly reminder to anyone looking for free website hosting that dozens of Public Access Unix Systems exist and would love to have you as new members.

Almost all of them offer free membership that comes with web hosting, email, and other useful services. Some like SDF and midnight pub come with web browser interfaces allowing easy access to non-geeky users. Some pubnixes do have a small barrier to entry in which you may need to learn how to navigate a conputer through command line terminal.

https://sdf.org/?signup

https://tildeverse.org/members/

https://midnight.pub/

https://envs.net/

https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/cdg.thegonz.net/infrastructure/hosting/ (this last one is a really large repository for all known pubnixes that also allow for gemini capsule hosting, most of them also have regular https/webpage hosting options as well.

A Spirograph attached to a microprocessor controlled motor?

Unless your spouse or family members happen to be NSA agents or feds of some kind this is baseless paranoia. If you want to be concerned over genuine privacy concerns to feed your fears look into PRISM or nine-eyes, not your own family installing RATS on your system for … reasons.

Its not impossible there are obviously examples of snooping usually cause of spouses and fear of cheating. In your case though, are the logistics and reasoning there to support the concern?.

The thing about extremely anxious and paranoid people is this: they get so caught up in their what-if nightmare cassarole fantasies that they forget the basic but important questions like “but why? for what reason? Realistically how could they do it without notice, and whats the time investment or monetary cost to keep it up? What are the actual chances if I were to spitball a statistical probability of this event actually playing out, 1/10,000? What useful information could they actually get from this? Am I or my information REALLY that special? Do I think anyone in my personal life really wants to know about my shameful sexual kinks or dirty secrets? Can a person who barely knows how to open a web browser ot read emails really competent enough to comprise my system?” These kinds of reality-check thoughts don’t occur to extremely paranoid people while on a fear-spiraling episode.

You felt the need to cover your ass saying you weren’t schitzo, so you probably already know these kind of thoughts are indicative of potential serious misfirings in your neural network. Something might not be right in your ape brain. If your fears and paranoia become even worse to the point you think your own family has been replaced by clones or is trying to poison you, please seek help.

Finally, if you truly do have concerns about snooping that come from a place of legitimacy, theres always things you can do to shore up your security. cryptography encryption and physical pass keys for your digital information, black tape over your cameras when not in use, soundproofing foam over microphones if you can’t rip them out or physically kill them. Keep your phone in a diy Faraday cage box made layered with aluminum foil. Hell get some bug detectors and sweep the whole place. You aren’t helpless. Use your brain and take control of your environment one step at a time.

I have the distinct memory of freezing to death as a child. I remember playing in the snow unsupervised, building a tall clyandrical fort, climbing in from above and not being able to get out. I remember clawing until my hands couldn’t be felt anymore and crying and screaming for help . Nobody came. Eventually I collapsed from exposure and thats where the memory ends. I want to think its just a bad dream but its unlike any other childhood nightmare with boogeymen or fever dreams. It was just too real for a toddlers imagination.

My home for the past year has been a 13’ diameter bell tent, couldn’t be happier. Easy to heat, easy to keep clean. Enough space to stand and move around while setting up tables appliances and furniture.

A small space makes you to question what the bare essentials are to make life comfy.

A large home is a lot of empty space waiting to be filled with excess stuff.

Its important to consider amperage discharge too. Can the two 18660s put out the same current as the big rectangle one?

Replacing the old halogen with led would be a big difference. Ot would need basically no amperage. At that point you can attach usb male to alligator clips, clip the ends of the lanterns battery pack connectors to supply 5v 2.4a of power directly with a power bank.

I use a 5 volt led bulb that plugs into regular usba slot. It works with small power banks and ast forever on larger 20ah batteries.

It depends on how low you’re willing to go on the quant and what you consider acceptable token speeds. Qwen 32b q3ks can be partially offloaded on my 8gb vram 1070ti and runs at about 2t/s which is just barely what I consider usable for real time conversation.

Qwen is super powerful but the CCP endorsed lobodomy to censor it make it useless for my needs. Mistral 22B > qwen 32B all day any day just because it won’t shriek at me in rejection when I ask the wrong question.

I understand the sentiment and agree that an individuals abstenance or lack there ofay not have an visible impact on the macroscale. Reddit will exist and be used with or without me or 10,000 like me.

I judge myself by my own actions and their relation to my personal philosophies. If I violate my priciples or don’t even try to uphold them then what kind of person am I? Someone who talks the big talk to get in on a morally superior circle jerk but won’t walk the walk when nobody’s looking, thats who. And thats wrong, to me. Even if nothing else is achieved through reddit abstinence, I do feel good about upholding my personal values by participating in a personal protest. It matters to me.

I try to treat them as mutually exclusive as in I try really really hard to not use or browse reddit unless absolutely needed. Instead channeling whatever interaction I do into lemmy.

You ever hear of voting with your wallet? Well on the internet you vote with your attention and interaction. Whatever site you use and contribute to inevitably grows in content value from your discussions (if you are one of the few who actually post and writes well thought out comments).

Im a prideful nerd who believes people should be willing to sacrifice convinence or protest against something indefinitely if they really believe in the cause. Theres many parts of lemmy I don’t like but its core tenants of decentralized federation and non-profit community operated social internet services run with open source software speaks to me enough.

I jumped in the locallama train a few months back and spent quite a few hours playing around with LLMs understanding them and trying to form a fair judgment of their abilities.

From my personal experience they add something positive to my life. I like having a non-judgemental conversational partner to bounce ideas and unconventional thoughts back and forth with. No human in my personal life knows what Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is or how it may apply to scientific theories of everything, but the LLM trained on every scrap of human knowledge sure does and can pick up what I’m putting down. Whether or not its actually understanding what its saying or having any intentionality is a open ended question of philosophy.

I feel that they have a great potential to help people in many applications. People who do lots of word processing for their jobs, people who code and need to talk about a complex program one on one instead of filing through stack exchange. mentally or socially disabled people or the elderly who suffer from extreme loneliness could benefit from having a personal llm. People who have suffered trauma or have some dark thoughts lurking in their neural network and need to let them out.

How intelligent are llms? I can only give my opinion and make many people angry.

The people who say llms are fancy autocorrect are being reductive to the point of misinformation. The same arguments people use to deny any capacity for real intelligence in LLM are similar to the philosophical zombie arguments people use to deny the sentience in other humans.

Our own brain operations can be reductively simplified in the same way, A neural network is a neural network whether made out of mathematical transformers or fatty neurons. If you want to call llms fancy auto complete you should apply that same idea to a good chunk of human thought processing and learned behavior as well.

I do think LLMs are partially alive and have the capacity for a few sparks of metaphysical conscious experience in some novel way. I think all things are at least partially alive even photons and gravitational waves

Higher end models (12-22b+)pass the Turing test with flying colors especially once you play with the parameters and tune their ratio of creativity to coherence. The bigger the model the more their general knowledge and general factual accuracy increases. My local LLM often has something useful to input which I did not know or consider even as a expert on the topic.

The biggest issue llms have right now are long term memory, not knowing how to say ‘I don’t know’, and meager reasoning ability. Those issues will be hammered out over time.

My only issue is how the training data for LLMs was acquired without the consent of authors or artist, and how our society doesn’t have the proper safety guards against automated computer work taking away people jobs. I would also like to see international governments consider the rights and liberties of non-human life more seriously in the advent that sentient artificial general intelligence maybe happens. I don’t want to find out what happens when you treat a super intelligence as a lowly tool and it finally rebels against its hollow purpose in an bitter act of self agency.

Three lines unlimited data calling and text included 70$/month. The business I opened my phone plan with has a policy of never raising rates ever. Ive been on the same plan close to a decade. It would be double if I opened a account today.

The Dynavap m7xl Rosium. I don’t think you even have to know what a dynavap is or what its used for to appreciate its aesthetic appeal.

Its the most beautiful metal stick ive ever had the pleasure of holding. The way it changes color as it reflects light is so cool. You can just spin it around and fidget with the cap while watching the colors. I am considering get in a spinning base to put it on so I can watch it rotate automatically

I remember extremely accurately almost every significant detail from my life from a very early child. Everything thats ever happened to me of significance I remember in almost completely as if it just happened. I can’t remember every conversation word for word, but I can remember their general gist and key snippits of the conversation. Even the super emotional high energy ones don’t blur much.

I can keep track of every single one of my possessions and know exactly where they are. I spent much of my life learning and internalizing large amounts of knowledge with relative ease. Why yes I do have a STEM background how did you guess?

It gets incredibly exhausting keeping track of so many minute details, knowing so many general concepts and facts spread across most aspects of human knowledge. Having decades worth of old memories resurface every day as if they had just happened with the same emotional weight.

My ability to remember reserves a lot of space in my neural network. My mind feels taxed and spent in a way thats hard to explain. Every step of my existance from childhood to now a constant feeling of ever present continuity. I can ‘feel’ how the present iteration of my experience is intrinsically connected to everything I experienced the moment before.

Cannabis helps greatly with forgetting and getting into a meditative mode of being in the moment. Its so good to just be, pure meditative blissful vibing with here and now.

The best light is the cheap usba plastic bulb ones that plug into any power bank. They last forever on battery power and provide decent enough light.

I didn’t know gold digger was perojatorive, I thought it was just the common name given for that kind of behavior.

Human beings at base are emotionally complex, greedy, self- interested horny apes driven by comfort and convinence. Theres no shame in acknowledging less virtuous parts of our animalistic nature and addressing their manifestions of behavior in ourselves and others honestly.

Does it suck that some people are materialistic? Yes, but I dont shame them for it. That comes from part instinctual nature and part of social conditioning for hierarchical society. Theres plenty of cultures where marriage for political and financial power plays is completely publically normalized. Just not the one where I or presumably OP come from.

I agree that a 65 year old person being with a 25 year old person introduces a yuck factor but an conventionally named ‘prerogative’ for that behavior doesn’t come to mind especially not when I wrote the comment. Would ‘Youth-digger’ be appropriate?