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This is the first I'm learning that it isn't just a C++ library.

In fact the first line of the wikipedia article is:

> llama.cpp is an open source software library


I am weirded out but this, I find it horrific, like some kind of mind zombie, leeching humanity from your family members.

Someone somewhere is thinking they're connecting with you and sharing their humanity but they're just shoveling their soul into a machine that is "meticulously documenting" them.

Sorry, but ick.


To give a different perspective: archival is important. If nobody does this job, generational knowledge is lost at some point.

I talked plenty with my grandpa, but I'm sure he didn't even tell me 20% of his life.

And my other grandpa died when I was still a kid, so I didn't even get to have adult conversations with him.

Imagine making this available to your grandgrandgrandson.


Yeah, but you're kaoD. You're a bonafide person. You should talk with other people; it's good. (We're chatting right now.)

That's quite different from chatting with a bot that pretends to be human. (Do you want to chat with my bot?)


Yes. And I will die along with the memories from my grandpa. Most of them died already with him, and I don't remember all our conversations.

I have no kids but, even if I did, let's say I'd pass 20% of the 20% he passed on to me, and they pass 20% of the 20% of the 20%... You get the idea.

Heck, I already forgot 50% of my life since I don't have a journal!

This is not an "either" situation. Archival is important.

People write memories for a reason. This is automating the process, not superseding human communication.

I am the sort of person that never took photos (live in the moment yadda yadda). 15 years later, I'm starting to regret it.


Why does it have to be black and white? Why can't a bot do the exploration and notetaking along with people in the channel?

That's not how I interpreted it as being in this instance, but it could certainly be that way.

I guess that'd be like keeping all correspondence in a shoe box (to be reviewed later -- or maybe never), or maybe the automated recording of my phone calls with others (which is completely legal where I am; I don't even have to tell them).

And I suppose whether I felt that would be creepy or not depends a lot upon intent, and consent.

If the intent were pure and good, and the consent both informed and granted, then I'd have no problem with any of this at all -- whether a shoebox, a tape recorder, or a bot is involved in taking the notes.


I called my parents, told them about the idea, they never even had Telegram before we started this project but they especially joined when they learnt that I was trying to build a family history. They are native Nepalese speakers therefore the system promptensured that the bot always responds to their questions and answers in Nepalese.

Btw my family know they are talking to the bot and they know that the bot is taking notes for our benefit. And I am in the channel and I enjoy reading those stories myself and would have never thought to ask those questions myself. Sometimes I ask the follow up questions myself too...

Well that makes it a lot less bad, it sounded from your post like it messages on your behalf and as you.

If it identifies as a bot then I find it a lot less objectionable.

I still wouldn't do it myself, but I can put the pitchfork down.


I actually think this is cool. How is this different than sitting people down with a camera every day and asking for a new random story? we won't be around forever and documenting it is one way to keep memories alive in people's minds

I was surprised myself how engaged my family have been with the bot. And equipped with the knowledge of our family history, it is able to ask deeply informed follow up questions! I would recommend trying it!

You are making a lot of assumptions.

I hope OP is using some self-hosted local model to document their family archives

This is actually a really interesting use case for a local model.

The writing might be a bit mediocre but it would capture all the information.

Parent post really stumbled on a great idea here.


Yeah. Azure is such a weird platform for not actually having a competitive way to just cheaply deploy a simple .NET app, it's a weird design decision.

You get dragged into "Container instances" when then require "Azure Container Registry" or something else that is never really clear what you're getting and how much it'll cost.

I run one thing using the free allowance, but for everything else I just rent a cheap VPS elsewhere.


One thing Azure offers that other clouds don't is so many customers already in it consuming other Microsoft products.

While I'm cloud agnostic, this unique difference for Azure should not be overlooked compared to the other clouds.


I might be misreading but I think you’re saying “go to a popular restaurant, it’ll be better”.

But popular restaurants can be better, and they can be worse..


There's a soft failure-mode for bitcoin where due to the alternating difficulty adjustment, you could end up with people only mining every other 2016-block adjustment.

Let's call this cycle A and cycle B.

If A is too hard, miners drop out, cycle B gets easier, miners flood back, cycle A gets harder.

This results in the hard cycle getting longer and the easy cycle getting shorter.

This isn't completely critical as there is I believe a small damping effect, so it isn't completely lethal to bitcoin, but a key thing about bitcoin mining is that whether other people are mining or not doesn't actually affect your own profitiability.

Other people dropping out doesn't actually mean you get more bitcoins per hour/watt, it only affects the next difficulty adjustment as a secondary effect.


The damping effect is that part of your costs are the hardware, space, depreciation etc. leaving that stuff idle costs money - so it makes sense to mine in the less profitable periods too.

That depends on each miner's energy costs, so long as (variable cost of energy - revenue from coins) < fixed costs. It's still negative cashflow either way, but the monthly losses have to be weighed against the cost of going insolvent and losing the hardware.

Yes though AFAIK electricity is a large %

Crypto-miners are switching to AI token farming when bitcoin is low. They have compute that's both installed and powered, so why not do what pays better?

For bitcoin at least, you need totally different silicon.

I guess you could share the power supply and cooling infra, but I am dubious the savings are enough to have half your silicon idle all the time.


What the hell is AI token farming?

I think they mean serving inference workloads

How does that work? Isn't most bitcoin mining done on custom ASICs? I didn't think that the ASIC could be repurposed for inference.

Training ASICs (like Google’s TPUs) can generally run inference too, since inference is a subset of training computations. TPUs are widely used for both.

Mining ASICs (Bitcoin, etc.) cannot be repurposed…they’re hardwired for a single hash algorithm and lack matrix math needed for neural networks.


The biggest cost is the power which is often on multi year contracts. The hardware is comparatively cheap

That's wildly inaccurate. The cost in enormous both on the inference side and the mining side and has short lifetimes if you want SOTA.

I think you're right, it's counterintuitive but less competition means less rewards to share for those who keep mining. Though transaction fees / hour shouldn't decrease, maybe your share of that is bigger.

The difficulty can only adjust by a factor of 4 which also limits the incentive change. You'd need more than 90% of miners to disappear to start seeing actual problems.

I thought the rate of mining was tied to the maximum transaction rate the network can support?

It's the other way around, and there's no obligation to even carry transactions when mining, although it's incentivised through fees.

Your mining rate is simply your hash rate vs the hash difficulty.

Conceptually, it's analoglous to rolling random numbers in (0,1) until you get to a number smaller than 1/X, where X is large.

How long it takes you to do that, isn't dependent on how many other people are also trying to do that, if you get 1 hit per hour, then lots of other people getting hits doesn't actually stop you getting your 1 hit per hour.

Now, that's not quite the whole truth, as there's a small amount of time needed for propagation of the previous chain, but with an average hit globally of ~10 minutes, that's not actually a big factor.

What could happen to incentivise people is increased fees if blocks get less common due to dropped miners, there'd be more competition to get into blocks if they start filling up.

That combined with the fixed costs such as depreciation as othes mentioned, keeps the risk of this form of failure to a minimum.


It does seem ridiculous that over 20 years ago, gmail was advertised with a real-time allowance ticking away increasing, which started at an incredibly generous 1GB allowance and you could watch it tick up in real time faster than you could fill it with mail.

People designed "gmail-as-storage" apps to take advantage of this.

20 years later and we get a pathetic 15GB for mail, photos and everything else combined.


1GB that grew to 7GB over about 4 years and then 15GB over another 5 years. And has been stuck at 15GB for about 13 years. https://lifetourer.com/gmail-and-storage-capacity-cmon-googl...

The limit used to cost a whole dollar of hard drive space (plus redundancy), sometimes more than that. If they kept that up with adjustment for inflation then 100GB would be the free tier today, not a $20/year tier.


TBF that's a little bit apples-to-orchards, since publicly routed e-mails have certain expectable size/frequency characteristics compared to, say, all the videos someone possesses.

Ai detectors are bullshit.

That said, the second paragraph has the distinctive stocatto tone of AI

But AI is shaping how we write, so this could well all be hand written just by someone who spends time with AI output.


AI is also based on how we write. Some people are bound to write in a similar vein to LLMs naturally. See this person’s blog about it [0].

[0]: https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...


> stocatto

Staccato, which is Italian for "detached, separated".

When I see simple Italian words used as technical terms in music or art, I think "oh, this must be what English speakers feel when they work in tech - a lot of common words becoming specific concepts in that particular field".


Also, he is dangerously close to "stocazzo", which is similar to a very offensive way to say "fuck no!".

Thanks for the correction, I felt I hadn't got the word quite right.

Consider what it'd mean if there were parts of the Earth that could not be seen from the moon, it would also mean those locations could never themselves see the moon.

Ignoring the orbital period implications, I think it'd be bigger news if either US or Europe, or Asia couldn't ever actually see the moon.


This is the best ELI5 explanation I have heard. Thanks !

I listen to post-rock.

There are usually no lyrics, there's an absolute ton out there, and something about the music gets my brain flowing better than other instrumental music.


I adore this genre, and if you enjoy this submission I'd recommend the following games:

    NANDgame ( Free! https://nandgame.com/ )
    Silicon Zeroes ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/684270/Silicon_Zeroes/ )
    Turing Complete ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/ )
    Human Resource Machine / 7 Billion Humans ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/792100/7_Billion_Humans/ )
    MHRD ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/576030/MHRD/ )
They're all slightly different in terms how the construction of a computer is pitched, none of them are perfect, they all have quirks and flaws, but they're all fun.

Some like Human Resource Machine take the approachof

I wish Turing Complete wasn't quite so buggy or awkward, for a while it was by far the most promising of the bunch, but it's never quite polished and it's ended up in a bit of frustrating state.

Notable mention also to The Signal State, Shenzhen I/O, and TIS100 which are higher level than this, but scratch a similar itch.

there's ones like TIS100 which I keep meaning to revisit, but I find it very difficult to get back into these games without starting from scratch, and resetting my TIS100 progress is too intimidating.


2.7 is confusing because you can wire up the bitline and the word line the wrong way around and the tests still pass.

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