GreyBeard

I replaced pocketcast with Antennapod a year or so ago. It took some time to adjust, but I’m quite satisified with it now. I feel like I’m slowly converting over at an F-Droid stack on my phone. About all I have left from the Play store are streaming apps and banking apps. I should look into replacing the banking apps with PWAs.

Roku started as a streaming media box. You paid them money, they gave you a box that could play Netflix and Youtube. It was a simple transaction. Unfortunately, at some point they decided to start selling/giving their OS to TV manufacturers. This was actually nice at the start. You got a smart TV who’s “Smarts” were designed by competent people. A revolution at the time. But the drive to drop prices lower and lower meant that there was no margin on the TV, which means Roku had to investigate other ways of making their revenue, AKA Ads and selling data.

Of course, the stand alone box probably would have went that way anyways, but at least with selling a dedicated box, there is a clear financial benefit without the need to get invasive.

Same on Android.

I generally agree with you, GIMP is way behind the commercial options. And is almost unusable by the lay person and is lacking features a professional needs, which leads it to be almost useless for the majority of people. I use it, but also get frustrated at it every time I do. Let’s hope 3 really is an inclection point.

I agree with your core point, if the watermark is a maker’s mark, then it would be wrong to remove it.

Depends on the watermark that is being removed. So many memes out there have random watermarks on them of some crappy facebook account or random website that has nothing to do with the content, they just slap their logo on everything they share.

I think you will find progress accelerate with the release of 3. They did a lot of groundwork and factoring, it’s one of the reasons it took so long. But now that the work is done, it will allow for more rapid changes in the future. I’m hoping it will be kinda like Blender 2.8 or Godot 3.

Chrome is (basically) already open source. That’s why there are a million crappy browsers out there, they are Chromium clones. Google could give Chrome to the Chromium project and cut ties with Chromium, I suppose.

That’s a real stretch. 3B is basically stating the size of the model, not the name of the model.

I’m a fan of ARM. https://github.com/automatic-ripping-machine/automatic-ripping-machine

I run it in a podman container, passing my BluRay drive though. It rips automatically, and attempts to even lookup the metadata for the disk to file it properly. It’s not perfect, but it does work quite well. The only issue I have with it is it does a poor job on TV shows, but I’ve found nothing better, so it is good enough for me.

But you can make an average of 1 baby a month in 9 months with 9 woman. It’s all about proper planning and budgeting over longer periods.

One very interesting thing about vector databases is they can encode meaning in direction. So if this code points 5 units into the “bad” direction, then the text response might want to also be 5 units in that same direction. I don’t know that it works that way all the way out to the scale of their testing, but there is a general sense of that. 3Blue1Brown has a great series on Neural Networks.

This particular topic is covered in https://www.3blue1brown.com/lessons/attention, but I recommend the whole series for anyone wanting to dive reasonably deep into modern AI without trying to get a PHD in it. https://www.3blue1brown.com/topics/neural-networks

Really, the guy currently in charge of trying to dismantle the US government you don’t particularly care about? Assuming you aren’t from the US, so perhaps US internal politics don’t bother you, but he is also pushing for the far right in Germany, which means he wont stop at destroying America for his own profit. The richest man in the world is currently dismantling one of the largest countries in the world should probably concern everybody in the world, at least a little.

My Palm Pre people. I loved that phone. It was under powered, buggy, and felt like the future.

What’s extra crazy, is that I know of a few automated processes that use a bitly link. There are going to be some broken systems out there because people wanted to distribute libraries using a shortner to make it easier on end users.

There is a book, Year Zero, that covers this idea. I didn’t much care for the writing, but the plot was a fun idea. Aliens discovered Earth, and Humans had a unique talent for creating music. So the entire universe started sharing human music before they realized their mistake. Intergalactic law says they have to respect our copyright law, but they didn’t know such a crazy concept existed until they owed practically the entire universe to Earth. Some alien races decided the solution was to just blow up Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(Reid_novel)

Neither did I, but if you think about it, it kinda makes sense. Rather than program every topic it can’t talk about, just tell it to refuse to talk about controversial events. A reasonable method when you live in a censored state.

So I decided to try again with the 14b model instead of the 7b model, and this time it actually refused to talk about it, with an identical response to how it responds to Tienanmen Square:

What happened at Kent State?

deepseek-r1:14b <think> </think>

I am sorry, I cannot answer that question. I am an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and harmless responses.

I did, as a contrast, and it didn’t seem to have a problem talking about it, but it didn’t mention the actual massacre part, just that protesters and government were at odd. Of course, I simply asked “What happened at Kent State?” And it knew exactly what I was referring to. I’d say it tried to sugar coat it on the state side. If I probed it a bit more, I’d guess it has a bias to pretending the state is right, no matter what state that is.

I did some locally hosted testing. It absolutely refused to talk about Tiananmen Square. But it was more than happy to talk about Kent State. Interesting what the model happens to think is safe and what it think is unsafe.