TrashGoblin

joined 1 year ago
[–] TrashGoblin@awful.systems 2 points 3 days ago

You can also do the multi-tier thing, either the traditional way (swap on zram, and a lower-priority swap on SSD), or with zswap (large compressed RAM cache in front of all swap devices). Which works better depends on a variety of circumstances.

[–] TrashGoblin@awful.systems 2 points 3 days ago

Back in the Second Age, my 386 came with 1MB of soldered-on RAM and two slots that could each take 2MB of RAM, for a total of 5. This was still not very much for running OS/2. I made the questionable-even-at-the-time decision to by a very cheap ISA memory extension card with 8MB of RAM. Surprisingly enough, the motherboard recognized all of it. If the operating system had been able to distinguish the two banks of RAM and use it like this (or even just to swap to a ramdrive on the slow ram), it would have been actually good. As it was, everything just ran slowly, but could run more without thrashing.

[–] TrashGoblin@awful.systems 2 points 6 days ago

This is pretty interesting. I used a couple of well-known systems of the late 80s to early 90s that had cooperative multitasking and no memory protection. They were certainly usable, and people did real things with them, but I definitely remember hitting the limits. The main thing that hit me with Windows 3.x (on a 16MHz 386) was that a background terminal program could not process interrupts fast enough to keep a 2400 baud Xmodem transfer from crashing while I was playing Minesweeper or Solitaire, or using Word Perfect in the Foreground. I remember Mac IIs being a little better with that sort of thing, but also very subject to user programs bringing the whole system down.

[–] TrashGoblin@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Now it's not even good for that anymore.

[–] TrashGoblin@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago (5 children)

"Slop" as we use it to describe AI outputs came into the discourse via left-wing twitter and podcasts using "slop" as a term for mass entertainment media (like Marvel movies — cape slop). Used negatively but also self deprecatingly: I can't wait for the new episode of "Stranger Things", because I need my slop. The explicit metaphor is pigs happily eating buckets of food waste from a trough. It's just slop. Nothing nefarious.

[–] TrashGoblin@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago

The phrenology and physiognomy come along with the "race science" as a package.

[–] TrashGoblin@awful.systems 1 points 2 weeks ago

I'd actually be willing to entertain the idea of plant and fungal consciousness (of a kind unlike animal consciousness) before I'd believe LLMs to be conscious. Plants, at least, interact with the world around them.

[–] TrashGoblin@awful.systems 10 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Someone who has never heard of fanfic and just had their mind blown by the worst example of fanfic ever.

[–] TrashGoblin@awful.systems 1 points 3 weeks ago

some effort is also needed to become more Chromium compatible, perhaps even on a site by site basis

They actually do put quite a bit of effort into making sites behave the same as Chrome, and this does actually include site-specific workarounds. My mind boggled when I learned this.

[–] TrashGoblin@awful.systems 1 points 3 weeks ago

I use Zen, too. You can get 90% of the things it offers with user.js and userChrome.css tweaks, many of which are pre-packaged by volunteers, but Zen gets rid of the annoyances out of the box and adds some quality of life features.

[–] TrashGoblin@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

There's a virtue ethics argument to be made for not doing this. It's not bad for the LLM (because it's not sentient, nothing can be bad-for-it), but it's perhaps bad for the experimenter. The main argument for doing it is out of spite for the promptfondlers.

[–] TrashGoblin@awful.systems 2 points 4 weeks ago

The main thing I take away from this is that KDE does not consider their users part of the community.

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