Just a guy shilling for gun ownership, tech privacy, and trans rights.

I’m open for chats on mastodon https://hachyderm.io/

my blog: thinkstoomuch.net

My email: [email protected]

Always looking for penpals!

  • 3 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 21st, 2023

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  • I am a fan of LLMs and what they can do, and as such have a server specifically for running AI models. However, I’ve been reading “Atlas of AI” by Kate Crawford and you’re right. So much of the data that they’re trained on is inherently harmful or was taken without consent. Even in the more ethical data sets it’s probably not great considering the sheer quantity of data needed to make even a simple LLM.

    I still like using it for simple code generation (this is just a hobby to me so Vibe coding isn’t a problem in my scenario) and corporate tone policing. And I tell people non stop that it’s worthless outside of these use cases and maybe as a search engine, but I recommend Wikipedia as a better start almost Everytime.










  • Personally I’m a huge fan of the Alcoholics Anonymous understanding of “god” and I think it applies more widely.

    In AA it is supposed to be A-religious so as to accommodate as many people as possible. To them, god is whatever higher power you need to put your faith into to do better. An entity who you are striving to make proud or you are asking for guidance or help, etc.

    This genericized god idea kinda gives up the game to me as an atheist, but it doesn’t mean it’s bad. In fact it’s made me believe in god as an idea.

    There are plenty of studies on “manifesting” goals and how saying out loud to yourself or to someone at all substantially increases your chance of succeeding in your goal. This is just prayer or a magic spell or whatever else you wanna call it. I call it a ritual.

    The fact that god is a made up idea has been uncontested in my mind for eons, however the psychological power of a belief in god is new to me and makes me appreciate the systems of religion more (doesn’t excuse a lot of their bullshit).



  • The biggest perk for me for a dedicated NAS is redundancy and hot swap ability.

    It is inevitable that a few of your spinning disks will die and need to be replaced, a proper dedicated NAS box will let you pop out and swap that drive and then the NAS software will rebuild the array for you with no data loss.

    Obviously you can do most all of this with a normal desktop, but it’s generally easier with the right hardware.

    I custom built mine running Truenas which was way cheaper then a dedicated NAS, but also I’m an IT turbo nerd so I wanted to do the whole thing myself.




  • Online book clubs are kind of a thing.

    Welcome to Lemmy, just find a community and start chatting. If it’s dead/empty, start filling it.

    I try to open myself up to people as best I can here and on Mastodon just because we’re pretty used to the algorithm TM deciding who we talk to or where we engage for a long time now and I don’t think we are collectively ready to have non-hostile “discussions” in that we just don’t know how to do it.

    What’s been on your mind? If you don’t wanna share here try the casual conversations community. They might be better to receive you.




  • Couple things

    1. Start applying for things you’re not sure and you know you aren’t qualified for. Often recruiters or HR people don’t actually know what the fuck the job needs and just sorta copies similar job titles recs. Once you’re able to talk to the actual hiring manager, then you can see if you’re a good culture fit and if they can give you some on the job training.

    2. Get a job at something not really what you wanna do but feels related enough. For me, my big break into my career was working at a call center for a hospital. It was not IT related, but it got me office experience that I spun into IT experience.




  • This is something I tell people all the time. It’s just as easy to troubleshoot on Linux as it is on Windows the biggest issue is that most people are just kinda innately aware of Windows troubleshooting by virtue of the fact that they’ve been doing it for so long. Linux is probably just as complicated skill wise, but most people just aren’t used to it yet.

    And that’s especially true for gamers. If you’ve gone through the dance of tweaking BIOS settings or DDU removing drivers and reinstalling them, then you’re probably gonna do fine on Linux. The only difference is sometimes there won’t be a GUI you have to go hunt down. It will be like 3 commands someone has already written out for you that you copy/paste into the CLI. Which is WAY better in my opinion.