circuscritic

One way they conduct themselves is by using the politicians they’ve purchased to advocate for forming public-private partnerships, in areas where they shouldn’t exist, which they can then legally siphon off the resources from.

I disagree on the private sector aspect of this, but I agree on the democracy part. Although, I don’t really view America as true democracy at this moment in history, but that’s besides the point here.

Fusion technology is at a point in its life cycle where it needs to be a public sector project. There is no path to profitability in the near-term, that would justify private sector involvement, except as a means to extract profit from the very expensive research process of even making this technology feasible.

Not that I’m against the private sector within the nuclear power industry. I’m very excited to see what they can do with SMR technology. I’m just extremely skeptical of most private-public partnerships, especially in cases like this.

Fusion reactors are incredibly complicated… This is a research reactor, with the goal of figuring out how to create sustainable fusion for real world uses by 2050.

This is not a performative action for a determinative outcome, this is aspirational and has no guarantee of achieving its goals, which is good. This type of research and science needs to be funded, even when it may fail.

Maybe this will spurn competition between powers to accelerate their own fusion reactor research, and create a virtuous cycle that accelerates this technology becoming a major source of green energy in the near, or medium-term, future.

Unless there’s a way to secure public funding for them, this seems like a reasonable middle road.

Like Patreon, which while having its own unique set of problems, enables a paid content distribution ecosystem for independent creators unlike anything else available.

So, absent inserting invasive advertising, and lacking public funds, I can’t see how else they’re supposed to maintain infrastructure and development costs.

Not everyone has a safety deposit box, or the ability to access a proper and secure off-site storage.

And if you’re just keeping those in your house, then fire, flood, and other incidents can destroy all copies at once.

Nah, I’m with you, except I use BitWarden.

There are somethings either worth paying someone else to host, or where you trust a 3rd party more than you’re own setup. I realize other users may feel different, but ultimately it’s a judgement call

BW has been a pretty great opensource company, and it’s worth my $10/yr for premium.

TBF I’ve never configured an Arch system from scratch, so maybe it’s me that’s missing out.

The thing about Fedora that got me to stop switching, was that it just felt more adult then the various and fashionable Ubuntu based distros, or any other well regarded distro I used over the years. The right mix of stability and new features/support, pretty much out of the box.

Also, after tweaking Gnome a little bit for a more Windows 10 dock/bar style launcher/menu, it’s been perfect for me. Think I’ve been rolling with it since 38 now.

Anyways, best of luck with your new box.

Do whatever works best for you.

I will say that after years and years of regularly switching workstation and laptop distros for a variety of reasons, after finally giving Fedora a shake, I’m done. I’ve installed it on both my primary laptop and desktops and can’t imagine switching again.

But I am still sticking with Debian as my primary server base.

Oh, just FYI I don’t game, so if there are some HDR features for gaming you’re hoping for, I can’t speak to that.

Running Fedora with dual HDR monitors just fine, but it’s entirely possible that something is off that I’m not catching. They’re also running off my Nvidia GPU.

I’ll just add that they look the same as when I used to run Win10 on the same box.

I think the real question is, what do you want to repurpose it for?

Because the answer to your question is yes, it is usable, but whether or not it’s capable of what you want to use it for, we can’t say without more information.

Linux installation appears to be possible. This is a wiki to an Arch on ARM distro, but you might want to look for something a bit more user friendly if you’re not comfortable with Arch.

https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/rockchip/hisense-chromebook-c11#installation

Just remember, it’s a fairly low spec machine. Think of it like a Raspberry Pi with a keyboard and monitor built in, in terms of what you can hope to run on it.

No, I’m living in this thread. I’m talking about very specific issues related to LLMs, that I’ve highlighted ad nauseam.

Reread if you’re confused.

If anything, it shows that you believe in the concept of “AI” way more than I do, as you’re conflating LLM and FSD.

I don’t believe in AI, it doesn’t exist. Just specific advanced machine learning algorithms, some better than others, and some all smoke and mirrors. But here, now, I’m talking about LLMs.

Who’s talking about investing…? I’ve exclusively been talking about what LLMs can do now, today, for free (aside from energy costs).

None of what your throwing out there has anything to do with what’s being discussed here. It’s a red herring.

I mean, it probably will eventually, but that has nothing to do with LLMs, nor is it a technology that I want to exist.

I can definitely see a world where lobbyists for automakers and insurance companies create such a financial and regulatory burden, where only the wealthy can afford to drive their own cars, if they choose to. Where as everyone else must rent or lease their self driving car as is if it’s a IaaS or SaaS subscription.

But none of that has anything to do with using LLMs for the tasks they can accomplish, or telling people to stop bitching about them not being able to complete the tasks they aren’t good at, or even capable of.

Yes and no, I have self-hosted models on one of my Linux boxes, but even with a relatively modern 70 series Nvidia GPU, it’s still faster to use free non-local services like ChatGPT or DDG.

My rule of thumb for SaaS LLMs is to never enter in any data that I wouldn’t also be willing to upload cleartext to Google Drive or OneDrive.

Sometimes that means modifying text before submitting it, and other times having to rely entirely on self-hosted tools.

Llama is the model I use most often, followed by ChatGPT and Claude.

Others as well, but yes, it is incredible helpful for the tasks I use it for.

Weasel phrase? You mean the fact that I don’t treat them like their actual Ai, but just a tool that needs to be used properly, monitored, and verified?

There’s a reason why I never call them AI, because they’re not. They’re just advanced machine learning tools, and just like I keep a steady hand when using a table saw, I only use LLMs for tasks that they can help me do something faster, but are easy to verify they did it right.

And as someone who has been using them very regularly, I feel confident in saying that. It’s not a weasel phrase, I’m not trying to sell anyone snake oil about what they can actually do, and I acknowledge that they’re an oversold and overhyped means of cooking the planet faster, so it’s not like I would be mad if they were banned tomorrow, but until then, I will keep using them in ways that are actually fruitful.

But sure, if all you need to do is find one word in a single body of text, that’s not really a good use of an LLM, but that wasn’t what I was talking about.

If I need examples of various legal or ethical concerns documented in one, or multiple, pieces of writing, or other conceptual topics, I can give it a list, and then ask it to highlight all examples of those issues, and include the verbatim text where their present. I can then give that same task to a multiple different LLMs, with the same prompts, and a task that would have taken me hours to complete, takes me 30 to 45 minutes, including the time it takes me to give it quick read through see if anything was missed. But yeah, that requires a well crafted prompt, and it’s not infallible.

Replace belt sander with CBD. A compound with very real and tangible benefits for specific use cases, but is marketed as a modern day snake oil cure all.

Imagine seeing people regularly complaining on bluelight, erowid, or whatever forums educated drug users frequent these days, bitching that CBD didn’t cure their asthma, or STDs, so therefore it has no medical value.

They know it’s a tool, yet they keep complaining about how the gas station CBD isn’t magic and failed to cure their gonorrhea, even though they already knew it was never going to be able to, no matter what the packaging said.

But my analogy wasn’t meant to be critically analyzed and dissected, it was a throwaway example to highlight the problem of people on Lemmy, who actually know better, but keep whinging about LLM’s providing bogus URLs for citations, etc.

I’m not advocating for openai, their business model, or the environmental and financial cost benefit of current LLM technology.

They suck, it’s dogshit, and it’s not worth cooking the planet for.

I also don’t disagree about the very real possibility that the average user may actually get dumber and more misinformed by relying on LLMs.

But we’re on Lemmy, and I’m just tired of all these comments incessantly complaining about about how LLM’s can’t do x,y, or z.

Imagine being on a carpentry forum, and every day people complained about how their new belt sander was dogshit at cutting 2x4’s or screwing in fasteners, so clearly the problem was with the concept of belt sander technology.

It’s not a peer-reviewed journal or academic level source, and shouldn’t be used as that.

But if I need to find some technical or scientific writings on a subject, but I don’t know the correct nomenclature or need a more narrow set of keywords, that is something I can describe to the LLM and get back.

The keywords in their response can help me then hunt down the journal article or papers that I need using traditional search engines. I’m not just brainstorming here, this is something I do often enough to find real utility in it.

Again, these are problems that can be solved with traditional search engines, but at the cost of time and frustration sifting though every potential result.

You can spit out a hundred more examples of what an LLM can’t do, but as I already said, they’re not magic, just tools.