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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 25th, 2023

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  • You’re assuming it’s impossible to MITM the keys.

    It’s not. Forcing a renegotiation of secrets isn’t something most people will notice, and there is fault tolerance for message signing built in to matrix. No individual can defend their hosted assets against a nation-state, which is what we’re trying to defend against here. You have to maintain control of the hardware. And even that won’t stop someone kicking in the door, but at least you’d have warning.






  • It’s a very nice concept to be able to dump a shitload of knowledge into a folder, look at “processing…” for a few seconds, then ask questions to get exactly what you’re looking for out of it rather than having to go digging through the mound of information and without having to worry that the computer just threw in a few made up facts for giggles. The idea is that the dumping happens over time mostly, allowing you to quickly find buried information from years ago with a few relevant queries.

    One thing I’d do with this is dump all my emails into it, from across all my accounts. That might save me having to search keywords in 8+ accounts over 4-5 different platforms every so often…

    It also might have been useful in a lawsuit I prosecuted a few years ago. Instead of going through two years of encrypted messages by hand to pull out relevant excerpts with context, I could have exported the lot and just asked for the information. If it worked it could have saved me months (I spent a few hours after work every night screenshotting, dating the screenshots in chronological order, then I’ve that was done I kept a spreadsheet that I filled with relevant excerpts and links to the screenshots, by reading every single screenshot… it was a lot).


  • Exactly what it says, what’s confusing about it? The problem with LLMs is that they bullshit; the problem with LLMs bullshitting is that you have to check everything they say, they are not trustworthy - severely limiting the utility. So, don’t trust LLMs. God meanwhile is assumed to be the paragon of honesty, and thus completely trustworthy, so would be the only entity to be trusted implicitly.

    This works even if you don’t believe in god, like me: trust nobody, everyone must bring data if they want me to trust what they say.


  • I use a Kinesis Advantage 2. Also very expensive, but a bit older and a monoblock design instead of two halves. Despite being only a single piece, this thing alone reversed the developing RSI in my wrists thanks to the superior ergonomics.

    The vertical mouse I resisted a lot longer but eventually I got tennis elbow so I caved. But where I love my Kinesis 2, I hate the vertimouse. It’s comfortable, but imprecise, and too tall so I always accidentally knock it over switching between keyboard and mouse. Still, my elbow is healing, so I cannot and will not go back to a traditional mouse. I’ve been seriously considering a trackball though…

    For those reasons, I would class these devices as medical requirement rather than luxury. If you have pain from computer work with non-ergonomic hardware, you deserve to spend the money on these things. You’re taking care of yourself.



  • When you tear down next, look for missing board components or any that lean at an angle they’re not supposed to. Canned air has been known to shear poorly-attached caps or whathaveyou clean off the board. Or maybe one of the wires in the 12v cable is broken and it’s delivering power just to most pins… The paperclip test just tells you if the PSU is dead dead, are you able to test with a multimeter instead?

    Buzzing while the power supply is off makes me wonder if there’s literal bugs in it, if it’s buzzing while it’s unplugged. I suppose the buzzing could also be remaining power discharging, if it happens just after it’s been unplugged.


  • Splitting out storage and computer is definitely good first step to increase optimization and increase failure resiliency.

    Exactly why I’ve been considering doing it this way for my new setup! I had to leave my last one on the other side of the planet and have felt positively cramped with just a couple TB worth of internal drives, can’t wait to properly spread out again.




  • Where would an open source LLM that you run locally phone home to, exactly? It requires a lot of GPU compute, do you think someone’s just going to give that away for free, without even requiring an account they can turn into saleable data?

    But wait, there’s an even better way to be sure: download OpenHardwareMonitor so you can watch your GPU go to 100%, and this or GPT4All or something. Then airgap your computer, and try it yourself.