Careful, when the AIs get so good that you can ask them anything and they perfectly understand what you want and produce great results, you’re going to get left behind because… you won’t know how to use the… incredibly easy tools… hang on…

Apple proposed something a few years ago, when governments were making similar threats, that attempted to strike a middle ground. The idea was that upon uploading an image to iCloud Photos, a on-device scan would be run on that image and an encrypted report generated to be sent up along with the photo. There was differential privacy involved, the report would also sometimes be generated for entirely normal photos, so seeing a report didn’t necessarily indicate anything, and they had set it up such that the server would only be able to decrypt the reports if it had a sufficiently large number of photos that had been actually found to be CSAM by the local scan, so there would have to be many false positives to incorrectly get flagged.

It was incredibly controversial, and they ended up not doing it after all. In my opinion, it’s probably the lightest touch and most responsible way to do something like this, and obviously they always pick the most worthy cause for invading privacy… but I still viscerally dislike the idea that my computer would have code designed to try to get me sent to prison under certain circumstances (not that I’d ever be triggering that code with anything but a false positive of course). Somehow it’s worse than just saying “in the cloud you have no privacy, your photos aren’t encrypted on our servers, and if you upload CSAM we’ll drop a train on you.”

For about $2000, I picked up a Mac Studio with 96 gigs of RAM, which is effectively all VRAM thanks to Apple’s architecture. It doesn’t have the raw number-crunching power of the big GPUs but with all that space, you don’t need to worry much about the size of the model until they start getting really big, so it’s pretty easy and flexible.

I’m able to do basically everything that others are doing with AI, entirely locally. It generates text and writes code (it’s no Opus, but probably on par with the best of a year and a half ago), images, videos, songs, all that stuff (those last few are garbage but it’s basically the same level garbage that the cloud models are making). And I have total privacy, will never get a surprise price hike or lose access to a model I like, and know exactly how many bottles of water I’m using to cool it (zero).

It’s not heroin, it’s weed. There will be a market for it, but, like, you can also just make it yourself. 90% of what people want will just get done on device. I can’t see any way this turns into a trillion dollar industry.

* Latest fad

You say your house is clean, yet nothing’s stopping me from dumping out this bucket of mud on your floor, curious!

My guess is they didn’t want to route the cable around all the VMU stuff internally, so they just had it come out the bottom instead. There was a little divot that you could clip the cable into that pointed it forward if it really bothered you, but it really made no difference either way.

(_|_)

Most people don’t need a file to be in two places at once, it’s more confusing than convenient. And if they do want two of a file at all, they almost certainly want them to be separate copies so that the original stays unmodified when they edit the second one. Anyone who really wants a hard link is probably comfortable with the command line, or should get comfortable.

The Mac actually kind of gets the best of both worlds, APFS can clone a file such that they aren’t hard links but still share the same blocks of data on disk, so the second file takes up no more space, and it’s only when a block gets edited that it diverges from the other one and takes up more space, while the unmodified blocks remain shared. It happens when copy-pasting or duplicating a file in the Finder as well as with cp on the command line. I’m sure other modern file systems have this as well.

It doesn’t have to be a big baroque thing. When there’s a dotfile I configure regularly, I move it to a Git repo and use stow to put it “back” into place with a symlink. On new machines, it isn’t long before I try something that doesn’t work or see the default shell prompt and go “oh yeah, I want my dotfiles”, check out the repo, run a script that initializes a few things (some stuff is machine-specific so the script makes files for that stuff with helpful comments for me to remember the differences between login shells or whatever) and then I’m off to the races.

Hint: the solution depends on a more realistic and physics-based model of the problem than you’re using. And, even bigger hint, it’s less intuitive now that light bulb technology has changed to become much more efficient, you should imagine this problem taking place with a '90s bulb.

I don’t understand why this works, but it does

What was happening before was this: Git received your commits and ran the shell script. It directed the script’s output stream back to Git so that it could relay it back over the connection to display on your local terminal with remote: stuck in front of it. Backgrounding the npx command was working, the shell was quitting without waiting for npx to finish. However, Git wasn’t waiting for the shell script to finish, it was waiting for the output stream to close, and npx was still writing to it. You backgrounded the task but didn’t give npx a new place to write its output to, so it kept using the same output stream as the shell.

Running it via bash -c means “don’t run this under this bash shell, start a new one and have it just run this one command rather than waiting for a human to type a command into it.”

The & inside the quote is doing what you expect, telling the subshell to background this task. As before, it’ll quit once the command is running, as you told it not to wait.

The last bit is &> /dev/null which tells your original, first shell that you want this command to write somewhere else instead. Specifically, the special file /dev/null, which, like basically everything else in /dev/, is not really a file, it’s special kernel magic. That one’s magic trick is that when you write to it, everything works as expected except all the data is just thrown away. Great for things like this that you don’t want to keep.

So, the reason this works is you’re redirecting the npx output elsewhere, it just goes into a black hole where no one is actually waiting for it. The subshell isn’t waiting for the command to finish, so it quits almost immediately. And then the top level shell moves on after the subshell has finished.

I don’t think the subshell is necessary, if you do &> /dev/null & I think it’d be the same effect. But spawning a useless shell for a split second happens all the time anyway, probably not worth worrying about too much.

In Haskell, that’s “unit” or the empty tuple. It’s basically an object with no contents, behavior, or particular meaning, useful for representing “nothing”. It’s a solid thing that is never a surprise, unlike undefined or other languages’ nulls, which are holes in the language or errors waiting to happen.

You might argue that it’s a value and not a function, but Haskell doesn’t really differentiate the two anyway:

value :: String
value = "I'm always this string!"

funkyFunc :: String -> String
funkyFunc name = "Rock on, "++name++", rock on!"

Is value a value, or is it a function that takes no arguments? There’s not really a difference, Haskell handles them both the same way: by lazily replacing anything matching the pattern on the left side of the equation with the right side of the equation at runtime.

The far right loves a strong man, and by definition there can be only one of those, prefers when “the natural order” is followed, and thinks the ends always justify the means. That keeps them pretty cohesive with the establishment right, who are making buckets of money under the system as it is now and are okay with just about anything else as long as that doesn’t change. When they fight, it’s because the far right is trying to do something stupid enough that the establishment thinks it risks their money or power, or the establishment is holding the far right back from fully implementing their “natural order” worldview, but there’s a lot of overlap where both can be happy, because the establishment really has no morals at all and are happy to use the far right to gain power if all they have to do is throw them some red meat every once in a while.

The left’s a very different story. On the far left, people are very principled, to the point where compromise or partial wins feel hollow because the only real win would be the entire principle being adopted en masse. It makes it harder to work together, because even groups with the same goals can get frustrated by the way the other one is doing it, or because the other group is going to keep going while the other wants to stop sooner. And the establishment left has a fair amount in common with the establishment right, they find the right’s goals uncouth and mean, but they do still fundamentally believe in capitalism and don’t want to upend the system. That leaves a lot less common ground and a lot more infighting overall.

I most associate it with Slashdot comments in the 2000’s, complaining about Microsoft spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Linux and the GPL to scare companies into thinking that if they used Linux, they’d have to open source all their software, so yeah, definitely not just a cryptocurrency term.

Superman wouldn’t even be able to see through those Coke bottle glasses Clark’s always wearing, duh.

I’m curious, what’s the worst case scenario in your eyes? I struggle to see why anyone would closed-fork it, or what threat it would pose if they did.

I’d believe that people are living happy, fulfilling lives there, sure, people usually find a way to do that regardless of their situation. But I’m pretty sure it’s not just propaganda that the same damn family has been in charge for the better part of a century, and that alone is enough for me to conclude that it is a fundamentally broken system that, even if it somehow isn’t as repressive and evil as it’s portrayed, will get there eventually.

This is a good point, we should ask some average North Koreans directly, that way we get a better balance of viewpoints. Maybe we can catch some on a vacation abroad or something.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not sure what the worst case scenario is… like, is some company going to get rich off of their proprietary cp and sudo implementation that they forked off of an open one?

The problem is that the sports industry has been propped up for decades with cable, where every subscriber paid fees for sports whether they cared about it or not. If they charged a reasonable price to just the people who care, it’d be a devastating loss. And cable was structured the way it was because that’s what made the most money, and though cable’s slowly being replaced by streaming, don’t be shocked when the streaming landscape starts to take on a similar shape. There’s already lots of bundling going on, remember when streaming meant that you could save a ton of money by just paying for what you wanted? They’re going to do whatever they can to keep the revenue from falling.