Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.
alcohol is also an upper
Uppers are stimulants. Alcohol is a depressant, not a stimulant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol
As a psychoactive depressant, it is the active ingredient in alcoholic beverages, and the second most consumed drug globally behind caffeine.[13]
In fact, that’s generally what you want to do, since if one device gets lost or compromised, you just revoke access to the key for that device.
For some workloads, yes. I don’t think that the personal computer is going to go away.
But it also makes a lot of economic and technical sense for some of those workloads.
Historically — like, think up to about the late 1970s — useful computing hardware was very expensive. And most people didn’t have a requirement to keep computing hardware constantly loaded. In that kind of environment, we built datacenters and it was typical to time-share them. You’d use something like a teletype or some other kind of thin client to access a “real” computer to do your work.
What happened at the end of the 1970s was that prices came down enough and there was enough capability to do useful work to start putting personal computers in front of everyone. You had enough useful capability to do real computing work locally. They were still quite expensive compared to the great majority of today’s personal computers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
The original retail price of the computer was US$1,298 (equivalent to $6,700 in 2024)[18][19] with 4 KB of RAM and US$2,638 (equivalent to $13,700 in 2024) with the maximum 48 KB of RAM.
But they were getting down to the point where they weren’t an unreasonable expense for people who had a use for them.
At the time, telecommunications infrastructure was much more limited than it was today, so using a “real” computer remotely from many locations was a pain, which also made the PC make sense.
From about the late 1970s to today, the workloads that have dominated most software packages have been more-or-less serial computation. While “big iron” computers could do faster serial compute than personal computers, it wasn’t radically faster. Video games with dedicated 3D hardware were a notable exception, but those were latency sensitive and bandwidth intensive, especially relative to the available telecommunication infrastructure, so time-sharing remote “big iron” hardware just didn’t make a lot of sense.
And while we could — and to some extent, did — ramp up serial computational capacity by using more power, there were limits on the returns we could get.
However, what AI stuff represents has notable differences in workload characteristics. AI requires parallel processing. AI uses expensive hardware. We can throw a lot of power at things to get meaningful, useful increases in compute capability.
Just like in the 1970s, the hardware to do competitive AI stuff for many things that we want to do is expensive. Some of that is just short term, like the fact that we don’t have the memory manufacturing capacity in 2026 to meet need, so prices will rise to price out sufficient people that the available chips go to whoever the highest bidders are. That’ll resolve itself one way or another, like via buildout in memory capacity. But some of it is also that the quantities of memory are still pretty expensive. Even at pre-AI-boom prices, if you want the kind of memory that it’s useful to have available — hundreds of gigabytes — you’re going to be significantly increasing the price of a PC, and that’s before whatever the cost of the computation hardware is.
Power. Currently, we can usefully scale out parallel compute by using a lot more power. Under current regulations, a laptop that can go on an airline in the US can have an 100 Wh battery and a 100 Wh spare, separate battery. If you pull 100W on a sustained basis, you blow through a battery like that in an hour. A desktop can go further, but is limited by heat and cooling and is going to start running into a limit for US household circuits at something like 1800 W, and is going to be emitting a very considerable amount of heat dumped into a house at that point. Current NVidia hardware pulls over 1kW. A phone can’t do anything like any of the above. The power and cooling demands range from totally unreasonable to at least somewhat problematic. So even if we work out the cost issues, I think that it’s very likely that the power and cooling issues will be a fundamental bound.
In those conditions, it makes sense for many users to stick the hardware in a datacenter with strong cooling capability and time-share it.
Now, I personally really favor having local compute capability. I have a dedicated computer, a Framework Desktop, to do AI compute, and also have a 24GB GPU that I bought in significant part to do that. I’m not at all opposed to doing local compute. But at current prices, unless that kind of hardware can provide a lot more benefit than it currently does to most, most people are probably not going to buy local hardware.
If your workload keeps hardware active 1% of the time — and maybe use as a chatbot might do that — then it is something like a hundred times cheaper in terms of the hardware cost to have the hardware timeshared. If the hardware is expensive — and current Nvidia hardware runs tens of thousands of dollars, too rich for most people’s taste unless they’re getting Real Work done with the stuff — it looks a lot more appealing to time-share it.
There are some workloads for which there might be constant load, like maybe constantly analyzing speech, doing speech recognition. For those, then yeah, local hardware might make sense. But…if weaker hardware can sufficiently solve that problem, then we’re still back to the “expensive hardware in the datacenter” thing.
Now, a lot of Nvidia’s costs are going to be fixed, not variable. And assuming that AMD and so forth catch up, in a competitive market, will come down — with scale, one can spread fixed costs out, and only the variable costs will place a floor on hardware costs. So I can maybe buy that, if we hit limits that mean that buying a ton of memory isn’t very interesting, price will come down. But I am not at all sure that the “more electrical power provides more capability” aspect will change. And as long as that holds, it’s likely going to make a lot of sense to use “big iron” hardware remotely.
What you might see is a computer on the order of, say, a 2022 computer on everyone’s desk…but that a lot of parallel compute workloads are farmed out to datacenters, which have computers more-capable of doing parallel compute there.
Cloud gaming is a thing. I’m not at all sure that there the cloud will dominate, even though it can leverage parallel compute. There, latency and bandwidth are real issues. You’d have to put enough datacenters close enough to people to make that viable and run enough fiber. And I’m not sure that we’ll ever reach the point where it makes sense to do remote compute for cloud gaming for everyone. Maybe.
But for AI-type parallel compute workloads, where the bandwidth and latency requirements are a lot less severe, and the useful returns from throwing a lot of electricity at the thing significant…then it might make a lot more sense.
I’d also point out that my guess is that AI probably will not be the only major parallel-compute application moving forward. Unless we can find some new properties in physics or something like that, we just aren’t advancing serial compute very rapidly any more; things have slowed down for over 20 years now. If you want more performance, as a software developer, there will be ever-greater relative returns from parallelizing problems and running them on parallel hardware.
I don’t think that, a few years down the road, building a computer comparable to the one you might in 2024 is going to cost more than it did in 2024. I think that people will have PCs.
But those PCs might running software that will be doing an increasing amount of parallel compute in the cloud, as the years go by.
So an internet
The highest data rate it looks like is supported by LoRa in North America is 21900 bits per second, so you’re talking about 21kbps, or 2.6kBps in a best-case scenario. That’s about half of what an analog telephone system modem could achieve.
It’s going to be pretty bandwidth-constrained, limited in terms of routing traffic around.
I think that the idea of a “public access, zero-admin mesh Internet over the air” isn’t totally crazy, but that it’d probably need to use something like laser links and hardware that can identify and auto-align to other links.
These guys appear to have a global visualization of the Meshtastic network nodes that they can see.
No. What in my comment gave you that impression?
This is New York City, and from the Google Street View image, it looks like there’s not a lot of street parking there.
My guess is that a number of cities with a lot of density, like NYC, probably should mandate a certain amount of public parking garage space for users in an area. Multistory parking garage space isn’t cheap, but using up street space via committing space to street parking also has costs in terms of congestion, even if the business owner doesn’t bear the costs.
EDIT: I also note, by way driving the point home with a sledgehammer, that in my Google Street View image, there’s a different vehicle parked on the sidewalk in the same spot, a red sports car.
GitHub explicitly asked Homebrew to stop using shallow clones. Updating them was “an extremely expensive operation” due to the tree layout and traffic of homebrew-core and homebrew-cask.
I’m not going through the PR to understand what’s breaking, since it’s not immediately apparent from a quick skim. But three possible problems based on what people are mentioning there.
The problem is the cost of the shallow clone
Assuming that the workload here is always --depth=1 and they aren’t doing commits at a high rate relative to clones, and that’s an expensive operation for git, I feel like for GitHub, a better solution would be some patch to git that allows it to cache a shallow clone for depth=1 for a given hashref.
The problem is the cost of unshallowing the shallow clone
If the actual problem isn’t the shallow clone, that a regular clone would be fine, but that unshallowing is a problem, then a patch to git that allows more-efficient unshallowing should be a better solution. I mean, I’d think that unshallowing should only need a time-ordered index of commits referenced blobs up to a given point. That shouldn’t be that expensive for git to maintain an index of, if it doesn’t already have it.
The problem is that Homebrew has users repeatedly unshallowing a clone off GitHub and then blowing it away and repeating
If the problem is that people keep repeatedly doing a clone off GitHub — that is, a regular, non-shallow clone would also be problematic — I’d think that a better solution would be to have Homebrew do a local bare clone as a cache, and then just do a pull on that cache and then use it as a reference to create the new clone. If Homebrew uses the fresh clone as read-only and the cache can be relied upon to remain, then they could use --reference alone. If not, then add --dissociate. I’d think that that’d lead to better performance anyway.
I don’t run a home automation system, but if you want an open solution and are willing to do some configuration, my understanding is that the main contenders are OpenHAB and Home Assistant.
I’d also suggest !homeautomation@lemmy.world as a more-specialized resource than !selfhosted@lemmy.world, though I imagine that there’s overlap.
Tokyo and London are confirmed as the company’s first international markets
Apparently their software is capable of driving on the left.
I don’t know if “GPUs” is the right term, but the only area where we’re seeing large gains in computational capacity now is in parallel compute, so I’d imagine that if Intel intends to be doing high performance computation stuff moving forward, they probably want to be doing parallel compute too.
Amazon’s Fallout countdown delivers possibly the only thing more pointless than a New Vegas or Fallout 3 remaster
I’d buy a remaster.
Someone almost managed to inject a vulnerability into the source code for sshd.
You’re probably thinking of the Jia Tan attack on xz; because of a distro patch in Debian, code in xz had the ability to affect sshd. The changes weren’t actually to the sshd source, but trying to use an obscure route to affect sshd.
I’d say that now is one of the strongest arguments for upgradability. Memory is really expensive right now. At some point in something like 1-3 years, it will probably be considerably cheaper. If anything, CPUs and motherboards are expected to be cheaper during this period due to reduced demand for new PCs. If you can tolerate less memory now and want to save money, upgrading then would be a good idea.
Well…I’m agreeing that it happened and was a factor, but also pointing out that the “don’t let black people have guns” practice predated the Black Panthers stuff by a considerable amount of time.
EDIT: Basically, a major concern in the US in the runup to the American Civil War was the prospect of a slave uprising. There were a lot of black people in the US who had been kept as slaves and were not super happy about the fact.
At about the same time, in Haiti, there had been such an uprising.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution
Shortly after the revolution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haitian_massacre
The 1804 Haiti massacre was carried out by Haitian rebel soldiers, mostly former slaves, under orders from Jean-Jacques Dessalines[1][2][3][4] against much of the remaining European population in Haiti, which mainly included French Colonists.[5][6] The Haitian Revolution defeated the French army in November 1803 and the Haitian Declaration of Independence happened on 1 January 1804.[7]
Throughout the early-to-mid nineteenth century, the events of the massacre were well known in the United States. Additionally, many Saint Domingue refugees moved from Saint-Domingue to the U.S., settling in New Orleans, Charleston, New York, Baltimore, and other coastal cities. These events spurred fears of potential uprisings in the Southern U.S. and they also polarized public opinion on the question of the abolition of slavery.[9][10]
At the time of the American Civil War, a major pretext for Southern whites, most of whom did not own slaves, to support slave owners (and ultimately fight for the Confederacy) was fear of a slave uprising similar to the Haitian Revolution.[34] The perceived failure of abolition in Haiti and Jamaica were explicitly referred to in Confederate discourse as a reason for secession.[35] The slave revolt was a prominent theme in the discourse of Southern political leaders and had influenced U.S. public opinion since the events took place. Historian Kevin Julius writes:
As abolitionists loudly proclaimed that “All men are created equal”, echoes of armed slave insurrections and racial genocide sounded in Southern ears. Much of their resentment towards the abolitionists can be seen as a reaction to the events in Haiti.[9]
In the run-up to the U.S. presidential election of 1860, Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote “I remember the horrors of St. Domingo” and said that the election “will determine whether anything like this is to be visited upon our own southern countrymen.”[10]
Abolitionists recognized the strength of this argument on public opinion in both the North and South. In correspondence to the New York Times in September 1861 (during the war), an abolitionist named J. B. Lyon addressed this as a prominent argument of his opponents:
We don’t know any better than to imagine that emancipation would result in the utter extinction of civilization in the South, because the slave-holders, and those in their interest, have persistently told us … and they always instance the ‘horrors of St. Domingo.’[36]
Lyon argued, however, that the abolition of slavery in the various Caribbean colonies of the European empires before the 1860s showed that an end to slavery could be achieved peacefully.[37]
John Brown attempted to induce such a slave revolt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown's_raid_on_Harpers_Ferry
From October 16th to 18th, 1859, American abolitionist John Brown attempted to initiate a slave revolt in Southern states by raiding an armory[nb 1] in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). The raid is frequently cited as one of the primary causes of the American Civil War.[3]
And you had Nat Turner’s Rebellion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner's_Rebellion
Nat Turner’s Rebellion, historically known as the Southampton Insurrection, was a slave rebellion that took place in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Led by Nat Turner, the rebels, made up of enslaved African Americans, killed between 55 and 65 White people, making it the deadliest slave revolt for the latter racial group in U.S. history.
So you have the situation after the American Civil War where you have a lot of now-free black people who the US Constitution guarantees the right to arms…and a lot of white people really worried about what happens if they get ahold of said arms. They went out and tried to figure out whatever loopholes they could to make sure that blacks didn’t have access to firearms.
The Black Panthers incident that you’re referring to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
The Mulford Act is a 1967 California statute which prohibits public carrying of loaded firearms without a permit.[2] Named after Republican assemblyman Don Mulford and signed into law by governor of California Ronald Reagan, the law was initially crafted with the goal of disarming members of the Black Panther Party, which was conducting armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods in what would later be termed copwatching.[3][4] They garnered national attention after Black Panthers members, bearing arms, marched upon the California State Capitol to protest the bill.[5][6]
But also, going back prior to that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_night_special
The earliest law prohibiting inexpensive handguns was enacted in Tennessee, in the form of the “Army and Navy Law”, passed in 1879, shortly after the 14th amendment and Civil Rights Act of 1875; previous laws invalidated by the constitutional amendment had stated that black freedmen could not own or carry any manner of firearm. The Army and Navy Law prohibited the sale of “belt or pocket pistols, or revolvers, or any other kind of pistols, except army or navy pistols”, which were prohibitively expensive for black freedmen and poor whites to purchase.[21] These were large pistols in .36 caliber (“navy”) or .44 caliber (“army”), and were the military issue cap and ball black-powder revolvers used during the Civil War by both Union and Confederate ground troops. The effect of the law was to restrict handgun possession to the upper economic classes.[22]
The next major attempt to regulate inexpensive firearms was the Gun Control Act of 1968, which used the “sporting purposes” test and a points system to exclude many small, inexpensive handguns which had been imported from European makers such as Röhm, located in Germany.
Oh, yeah, it’s not that ollama itself is opening holes (other than adding something listening on a local port), or telling people to do that. I’m saying that the ollama team is explicitly promoting bad practices. I’m just saying that I’d guess that there are a number of people who are doing things like fully-exposing or port-forwarding to ollama or whatever because they want to be using the parallel compute hardware on their computer remotely. The easiest way to do that is to just expose ollama without setting up some kind of authentication mechanism, so…it’s gonna happen.
I remember someone on here who had their phone and desktop set up so that they couldn’t reach each other by default. They were fine with that, but they really wanted their phone to be able to access the LLM on their computer, and I was helping walk them through it. It was hard and confusing for them — they didn’t really have a background in the stuff, but badly wanted the functionality. In their case, they just wanted local access, while the phone was on their home WiFi network. But…I can say pretty confidently that there are people who want access all the time, to access the thing remotely.
Might be helpful to have a reproducible test case for it.
The incident began from June 2025. Multiple independaent security researchers have assessed that the threat acotor is likely a Chinese state-sponsored group, which would explain the highly selective targeting obseved during the campaign.
I do kind of wonder about the emacs package management infrastructure system. Like, if attacking things that text editors use online is an actively-used vector.
So, I don’t want to get into a huge argument over the best way to deal with things, since everyone has their own use cases, but if that’s your only concern, you have a list of hosts that you want to put the key on, and you still have a key for another device, that shouldn’t be terribly difficult. Generate your new keypair for your new device. Then on a Linux machine, something like:
That should use your other device’s private key to authenticate to the servers in question and copy the new device’s pubkey to the accounts on the host in question. Won’t need password access enabled.