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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • I assume the “kill it” comment was a little tongue-in-cheek. On small SBCs, like a Pi, or old hardware, it could be a problem. I’ve seen people with flatpaks taking up 30GB of space, which is significant. I’m not sure how much RAM it wastes. I assume running 6 different applications that have loaded 6 different versions of Qt libraries would also use significantly more RAM than just loading the system’s shared Qt libraries once.



  • I use LLMs for multiple things, and it’s useful for things that are easy to validate. E.g. when you’re trying to find or learn about something, but don’t know the right terminology or keywords to put into a search engine. I also use it for some coding tasks. It works OK for getting customized usage examples for libraries, languages, and frameworks you may not be familiar with (but will sometimes use old APIs or just hallucinate APIs that don’t exist). It works OK for things like “translation” tasks; such as converting a MySQL query to a PostGres query. I tried out GitHub CoPilot for a while, but found that it would sometimes introduce subtle bugs that I would initially overlook, so I don’t use it anymore. I’ve had to create some graphics, and am not at all an artist, but was able to use transmission1111, ControlNet, Stable Diffusion, and Gimp to get usable results (an artist would obviously be much better though). RemBG and works pretty well for isolating the subject of an image and removing the background too. Image upsampling, DLSS, DTS Neural X, plant identification apps, the blind-spot warnings in my car, image stabilization, and stuff like that are pretty useful too.



  • I agree with your overall statement, but if by environmentally conscious food, you mean vegan, it can easily be cheaper than an omnivore diet. Don’t use any of the meat or cheese substitutes or many highly processed foods, and it will likely be much cheaper (and healthier) than an omnivore diet.

    On the other hand, industrial agriculture isn’t very environmentally conscious; it basically turns fossil fuels into food (fossil fuel derived fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides; machinery, transportation, processing, and refrigeration powered by fossil fuels). Still more efficient than meat and dairy though, since the animals are fed the output from agriculture.

    I think EVs are about on par with ICE on total cost of ownership now (but higher initial cost still).





  • The RTO push is designed to keep the commercial real-estate market from crashing. I’ve never seen any good proof of this, but believe it. I don’t exactly know why CEOs of big companies would really care that much about commercial real-estate. Perhaps their large shareholders (hedge fund managers?) also own commercial real-estate and are putting pressure on CEOs? Perhaps at that level it’s just a big club, and all the wealthy just help eachother out, out of solidarity? Dunno.


  • Most politicians seem like grifters and change positions to whatever is popular with their base or donors though. So, it does seem like this is a part of some grand-plan. I don’t think many Republican politicians actually care about women’s sports or who uses which restroom, yet they manufacture outrage and campaign on it. This kind of stuff was on no “normal” person’s mind before media started focusing on it.





  • I (probably unreasonably) despise using web front-ends for desktop applications.

    GTK is OK. QT is very feature rich, but that adds complexity. Both can be cross-compiled to most systems and shipped with all the required libraries pretty easily.

    I haven’t used it in a long while, but I remember liking Java Swing for some reason. Java should be “write once, run anywhere.” But, cross-compiling isn’t usually too hard, so not sure how much that matters. There’s more modern frameworks for JVM-based languages now, but I haven’t tried them.

    I’ve noticed Gradio is popular in the ML community (web-tech based, and mostly used for quick demos/prototypes).

    Edit: For web applications, I prefer Angular’s more traditional architecture over React’s hook architecture.



  • Python is quite slow, so will use more CPU cycles than many other languages. If you’re doing data-heavy stuff, it’ll probably also use more RAM than, say C, where you can control types and memory layout of structs.

    That being said, for services, I typically use FastAPI, because it’s just so quick to develop stuff in Python. I don’t do heavy stuff in Python; that’s done by packages that wrap binaries complied from C, C++, Fortran, or CUDA. If I need tight-loops, I either entirely switch to a different language (Rust, lately), or I write a library and interact with it with ctypes.