Disclaimer: : All of my LLM experience is with local models in Ollama on extremely modest hardware (an old laptop with NVidia graphics) , so I can’t speak for the technical reasons the context window isn’t infinite or at least larger on the big player’s models. My understanding is that the context window is basically its short term memory. In humans, short term memory is also fairly limited in capacity. But unlike humans, the LLM can’t really see (or hold) the big picture in its mind.

But yeah, all you said is correct. Expanding on that, if you try to get it to generate something long-form, such as a novel, it’s basically just generating infinite chapters using the previous chapter (or as much of the history fits into its context window) as reference for the next. This means, at minimum, it’s going to be full of plot holes and will never reach a conclusion unless explicitly directed to wrap things up. And, again, given the limited context window, the ending will be full of plot holes and essentially based only on the previous chapter or two.

It’s funny because I recently found an old backup drive from high school with some half-written Jurassic Park fan fiction on it, so I tasked an LLM with fleshing it out, mostly for shits and giggles. The result is pure slop that seems like it’s building to something and ultimately goes nowhere. The other funny thing is that it reads almost exactly like a season of Camp Cretaceous / Chaos Theory (the animated kids JP series) and I now fully believe those are also LLM-generated.

If it turns out to be the former, I don’t blame them.

I used to buy their stuff and use tuya-convert to flash Tasmota onto them. But they kept updating the firmware to lock that out, and I ended up returning a batch of 15 smart plugs because none of them would flash. They were too much of a PITA to try to crack open and flash the ESP8266 manually so I returned the whole batch as defective, left a scathing review, and blackballed the whole brand.

If you’re gonna repost stuff from ml at least re-upload it so I don’t have to connect to it.

• Not every <input type="text"> is suitable for political opinions.
• Political opinions are like assholes: we all have them, they all stink, we all think our own doesn’t stink, and the world is a better place when everyone doesn’t have them on constant display.
• People who inject politics into everything are generally insufferable and there’s a reason major communities have rules prohibiting politics.

Personally, I love that layout.

I’m always at a loss for what to put up as wall decorations, and I hate rats nests of cables. Win-win!

New U.S. rules will soon ban Chinese software in vehicle systems that connect to the cloud

Seems to me that the easiest way to get into compliance would be to not make the car connect to the cloud/internet. I’m gonna drive my 2017 model until I can buy a new car that isn’t a smartphone on wheels.

which does not explain why this port or the others are blocked. I also lack the technical background to understand this decision.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but understanding the reason for that decision is pretty important if you’re planning to run your own email server. A misconfigured email server (which is very easy to do) becomes a problem for everyone else when it inevitably gets used to spam. There’s also a lot of ancillary things to configure correctly as well (DKIM, SPF, DMARC policies, spam filtering, etc) lest everything seems to work but no one is able to receive mail from you or it always ends up in their spam folder.

While I disagree with port 25 being permanently blocked on residential (and often even business-class) connections, I understand why in the grand scheme of things.

I don’t read Finnish, but here are the general reasons why:

1. Port 25 is for SMTP transport and typically only used for server-to-server (MTA) email traffic. This is unauthenticated between servers. Clients (MUAs) connect through a “submission” port which is pretty much expected to be authenticated/access-controlled. That’s why you can send emails to an email provider but you can’t be an email provider yourself. By blocking port 25, malicious people or people that have been compromised with malware cannot just blindly blast out spam email. This reduces spam considerably, though with a compromise of slightly restricting what a residential connection can be used for.

2. Most big email providers universally block emails that originate from an IP address that’s assigned to a residential IP/provider. Same reason as above. This means even if your ISP were to unblock port 25 for you, you likely wouldn’t be able to send email to any major email provider (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, AOL, etc) as they would just sinkhole any messages you send to users there.

That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.

Can you bypass that and host at home?

Yes, if you’re willing to work for it. You can setup a VPS (cloud server) and port-forward across a VPN connection to your home server. Your DNS records for your email server would point to the VPS’s IP, and the email server would need to be configured to use the VPS as its default route so all traffic goes in/out over the VPN connection. This is how my email server is configured.

Sounds easy enough, right? Well, good luck getting a VPS with a “clean” IP. Most VPSs you can get in public clouds are already on one or more public spam blocklists as well as many private/internal blocklists. You can clean up an IPs reputation and make it work with minimal to no delivery problems, but it’s a LOT of work and often requires finding hidden forms to submit the request (Microsoft/Outlook was a brute, and I only found the link to the form in a forum post). I’ve cleaned up two IPs like that, and it took 2-3 weeks of work before I was able to get reliable delivery.

Seems like they’re creating a new account per post now.

Suggestions (keep in mind I don’t know the technical viability of these):

1. Rate limit signups in Lemmy to one per 24 hours per IP (if I understand the rate limits correctly). Anyone requesting multiple accounts per day is immediately sus anyway.
2. Block their IP address
3. Use registrations the way they’re meant to be used instead of rubber-stamping them with a bot
4. In addition to the above, check against a list of their known accounts. There’s not an easy regex way I can see, but the account names all have a similar “feel” to them.

Loops finally seems usable now. I tried the beta a while back and it was kinda “Meh” but it’s improved significantly since. And you can browse on the website now, too. I’m not into short form videos, but credit where it’s due.

Well, I do like short form videos, but I hate panning for the gems and just let my friends send me the ones that rise to top.

It’s so common for “anti-censorship” to be code for “Nazi-friendly” that I’m immediately suspicious of any platform that uses that as a selling point.

I’m similarly suspicious, but it’s not just code for “nazi-friendly” but also crackpots, maladaptives, etc. Rational people who read and say “anti-censorship” in this context know it means that it’s not beholden to corporate or government interests. But everyone else seems to want to interpret that as “I can say whatever I want! How dare you mod anything I say?! Freeze-peach, y’all!”

I wish they’d pick a different term for these non-corporate alternatives, but I don’t have a better suggestion to offer right now.

Trash? None.

Clutter / work-in-progress: No comment.

I asked similar a few weeks ago: https://startrek.website/post/33957879

The answers were all pretty much what you’ve already listed: FreeCAD/OpenSCAD for parametric parts and Blender for sculpted shapes.

The only one not covered in that post was OnShape because I was specifically asking for ones that weren’t SaaS/cloud based.

I don’t even bother with local ports anymore. It’s just too much hassle when I switch providers, email services all seem to universally sinkhole anything originating from a residential IP even if I am able to convince them to unblock 25/TCP, and I refuse to pay extra for a static IP or upsell to business class at a massive price increase.

My ISP, while otherwise fine, still has not rolled out IPv6 yet and the DHCPv4 lease duration is short and will randomly assign a different IP rather than renewing the lease on the existing one. I don’t like relying on dynamic DNS or relying on running a daemon to update my public DNS records when my public IP changes. Been there, done that, and bought a crappy t-shirt at the gift shop.

I’ve had a VPS for close to 10 years now that is my main frontend and, through some VPN and routing trickery, allows me to have my email server on-prem but use the VPS for all inbound and outbound communication. A side effect benefit of this setup is I can run my email server from literally anywhere and from anything with an internet connection. I’ve got a copy of my email stack on a Pi Zero clone that stays in sync with my main one. During long power outages, I can start that up and run it from a hotspot with a power bank running it for almost 2 days (or indefinitely when I’m also charging the power bank from a solar panel lol).

Yep, same except being one of the first ones in the state.

The best part is it works when the power is out and doesn’t flap constantly if the electricity blips. Every cable provider I’ve ever had has failed spectacularly at maintaining the UPSs in the neighborhood nodes.

I can understand that speeds vary by area, but it’s not like it’s difficult at all to have those in a database where a web tool can return them based on your zip code. But yeah, it was like that when I signed up with Optimum (nee Suddenlink) years ago.

The other thing they do is require a truck roll for any kind of hookup. They almost got some of my business back but were so rigid that I said “the hell with it”. My fiber provider was having some growing pains and I called Optimum to reactivate my service on a lower plan to use as a backup connection (I work from home). All they needed to do was setup the account and re-authorize my modem (my hookup was still live and I had my own modem). They flat out refused to do any of that and required a tech to come “within 3-5 business days” and read the modem serial number to them to activate it. So I said hell with it, called T-Mobile, and activated my old 5G hotspot.

I would guess it’s not just Comcast. Optimum serves my area and they’ve basically been begging people to switch back since this area got fiber a few years ago.

Their offers are like $25/mo for 200/10 Mbps and no data caps. But they’re not guaranteeing the price. Seems like they’re going after the lower end of the market.

I basically say “boo hoo”. This is what actual competition looks like. Cable companies have sat on their ass and milked their infrastructure for decades (only updating the headend equipment to keep up).

Optimum cold called me once and I flat out told them if they wanted me back, they need to run fiber to my home, give me the same symmetrical speed I have now, for at least $10 less than I’m paying my fiber provider, and lock that price for at least 5 years. The rep basically kinda sighed, so I guess they’ve heard that response from more than just me.

Chee-chew-choo-cha-chooo

The irony of Lennart “let’s change everything about Linux because I know better” Poettering creating a company called Amutable is not lost on me.

But also, that tracks because now it’s “I know better so now you can’t change anything” which is pretty on brand.

The base system is stable. The only instability I really had with mine was the fingerprint sensor resetting every week. It would just stop registering until you turn fingerprint detection off, reboot, and re-enroll all of your prints. The second update they pushed seems to have fixed that.

Their default launcher could use some work. I replaced Minimal Launcher with a similar one that works identically. The problem with Minimal Launcher is it is hardcoded to certain apps. I’ve de-googled mine so I don’t use Google clock or calendar. Clicking the time or date in Minimal Launcher will only take you to Google Clock or Calendar (respectively) rather than asking what app to open or trying to detect the default app for that. I submitted a bug for that a couple months ago but so far no fix.

They also seem to only update their software (launcher, quick settings, keyboard config, etc) through system updates rather than via apps. You also can’t disable any of them either.

I also haven’t heard anything more about them supporting non-Googled or third party Android builds.