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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • Apples and oranges.

    Package managers only install a package with defaults. These helper scripts are designed to take the user through a final config that isn’t provided by the package defaults.

    Whether there’s a setup wizard doesn’t have anything to do with whether the tool comes from a package manager or not. Run “apt install ddclient”, for example, it’ll immediately guide you through all configuration steps for the program instead of just dumping a binary and some config text files in /etc/.

    So that’s not the bottleneck or contradiction here. It’s just very unfortunate that setup wizards are not very popular as soon as you leave Windows and OSX ecosystems.


  • There’s literally no good reason to replace it with a shell script on a website.

    I fully agree that a package manager repository with all those tools would be preferable, but it doesn’t exist, does it? I mean… content is king. If the only way to get a certain program or functionality is a shell script on a website, then of course that’s what is going to be used.


  • I know a lot of people like buying used drives but the ones for sale are usually loud enterprise edition drives which won’t work for me. Should I buy the drives now or wait until BF for a possibly better sale?

    HDD prices haven’t really moved in any meaningful way over the course of the past years and I don’t recall them ever moving significantly even during special promotions (short of pricing errors). I strongly suggest to treat high-capacity hard drives as the luxury consumables that they are and just buy them as needed. Unless you particularly enjoy bargain hunting as a passtime I really don’t think it’s worth the effort and opportunity costs in this particular context.






  • Enshittification is inevitable for all free services (services as in with a server component).

    No, it is not that bleak. It is only inevitable when there is an active push for a short-term maximization of user base monetization (which is very much in the nature of VC). It can usually be avoided with products that are wholly under the ownership of all users (such as a cooperative or a government-provided service) or - only if one is lucky - with products of financially independent private enterprises under vaguely benevolent and unhurried leadership (such as Steam, to some extent)





  • Why do people host LLMs at home when processing the same amount of data from the internet to train their LLM will never be even a little bit as efficient as sending a paid prompt to some high quality official model?
    inb4 privacy concerns or a proof of concept this is out of discussion, I want someone to prove his LLM can be as insightful and accurate as paid one. I don’t care about anything else than quality of generated answers

    If you ask other people for their reasoning and opinions, it doesn’t really make any sense to put something “out of the discussion”, does it? :P

    But no, if you have no qualms about sharing your innermost feelings, sexual preference or illegal plans with those that have an explicit desire to exploit that information then there is little reason to attempt something as complicated and wasteful as self-hosting your own LLMs.




  • I often reply under Japanese posts, and I always assume users will use a translator as I do, but maybe in the context of a Japanese this may look rude?

    Can’t speak for others (obviously, as this is about individual etiquette perceptions) but I would consider it to be polite to only enter conversations with unknown parties in languages that the parties have shown to be capable of speaking and understanding.
    Using a new language entering a conversation would therefore signal either familiarity (“I know they understand me”) or rudeness (“I don’t care if they understand me”) to me, I suppose.




  • It’s so much easier to set up and install than Matrix.

    Unbelievably so. Mumble is… basically one setup command. Don’t even need a domain. And it needs absolutely no resources, can run on a Pi Zero.
    Setting up my own Matrix server was honestly one of the most difficult things I’ve ever attempted in decades of non-professionally using computers and I’m still not sure I’d be able to properly take care of the installation if it breaks. Sooo many moving parts. All the federation-oriented projects that rely on adoption rates reaaaaally desperately need setup wizards before any other additional feature.