• 2 Posts
  • 76 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: September 27th, 2023
  • hersh@literature.cafetoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•Giuliani’s attempts to overturn 2020 election partly thwarted by wrong numberEnglish
    4·
    1 month ago

    Never liked him, but I acknowledge that he had some effective economic policies during his time as mayor. He was at least competent and sane. He went completely off the rails a long time ago, though.

    He’s often credited with cleaning up Times Square, which was known for prostitution back in the 80s. But honestly, he reaped what his predecessors sowed to a large degree.

    He used 9/11 like his personal sword and shield. He was lucky to be in a prominent position related the biggest and least controversial issue in America. I don’t imagine he ever would have been on the national stage otherwise. He was pretty much at the natural end of his career before then.

    NYC has a history of conservative mayors, which seems a bit odd since we’re so solidly liberal in federal elections. It sure doesn’t help when we get a Democrat as infantile and corrupt as our current mayor, Eric Adams. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prosecution_of_Eric_Adams

  • hersh@literature.cafetoTechnology@lemmy.world•Despite tech-savvy reputation, Gen Z falls behind in keyboard typing skillsEnglish
    8·
    2 months ago

    Absolutely this. Phones are the primary device for Gen Z. Phone use doesn’t develop tech skills because there’s barely anything you can do with the phones. This is particularly true with iOS, but still applies to Android.

    Even as an IT administrator, there’s hardly anything I can do when troubleshooting phone problems. Oh, push notifications aren’t going through? Well, there are no useful logs or anything for me to look at, so…cool. It makes me crazy how little visibility I have into anything on iPhones or iPads. And nobody manages “Android” in general; at best they manage like two specific models of one specific brand (usually Samsung or Google). It’s impossible to manage arbitrary Android phones because there’s so little standardization and so little control over the software in the general case.

  • hersh@literature.cafetoTechnology@beehaw.org•Kagi is announcing an AI Assistant.
    15·
    2 months ago

    I posted some of my experience with Kagi’s LLM features a few months ago here: https://literature.cafe/comment/6674957 . TL;DR: the summarizer and document discussion is fantastic, because it does not hallucinate. The search integration is as good as anyone else’s, but still nothing to write home about.

    The Kagi assistant isn’t new, by the way; I’ve been using it for almost a year now. It’s now out of beta and has an improved UI, but the core functionality seems mostly the same.

    As far as actual search goes, I don’t find it especially useful. It’s better than Bing Chat or whatever they call it now because it hallucinates less, but the core concept still needs work. It basically takes a few search results and feeds them into the LLM for a summary. That’s not useless, but it’s certainly not a game-changer. I typically want to check its references anyway, so it doesn’t really save me time in practice.

    Kagi’s search is primarily not LLM-based and I still find the results and features to be worth the price, after being increasingly frustrated with Google’s decay in recent years. I subscribed to the “Ultimate” Kagi plan specifically because I wanted access to all the premium language models, since subscribing to either ChatGPT or Claude would cost about the same as Kagi, while Kagi gives me access to both (plus Mistral and Gemini). So if you’re interested in playing around with the latest premium models, I still think Kagi’s Ultimate plan is a good deal.

    That said, I’ve been disappointed with the development of LLMs this year across the board, and I’m not convinced any of them are worth the money at this point. This isn’t so much a problem with Kagi as it is with all the LLM vendors. The models have gotten significantly worse for my use cases compared to last year, and I don’t quite understand why; I guess they are optimizing for benchmarks that simply don’t align with my needs. I had great success getting zsh or Python one-liners last year, for example, whereas now it always seems to give me wrong or incomplete answers.

    My biggest piece of advice when dealing with any LLM-based tools, including Kagi’s, is: don’t use it for anything you’re not able to validate and correct on your own. It’s just a time-saver, not a substitute for your own skills and knowledge.

  • hersh@literature.cafeOPtoLinux@lemmy.ml•How can I get OpenCL to work on Debian Bookworm with an AMD 7900 XTX?
    2·
    6 months ago

    Ah, somehow I didn’t see 18 there and only looked at 17. Thanks!

    I tried pulling just the one package from the sid repo, but that created a cascade of dependencies, including all of llvm. I was able to get those files installed but not able to get clinfo to succeed. I also tried installing llvm-19 from the repo at https://apt.llvm.org/, with similar results. clinfo didn’t throw the fatal errors anymore, but it didn’t work, either. It still reported Number of devices 0 and OpenCL-based tools crashed anyway. Not with the same error, but with something generic about not finding a device or possibly having corrupt drivers.

    Should I bite the bullet and do a full ugprade to sid, or is there some way to this more precisely that won’t muck up Bookworm?

  • hersh@literature.cafetoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•***
    5·
    7 months ago

    Thanks! I didn’t see that. Relevant bit for convenience:

    we call model providers on your behalf so your personal information (for example, IP address) is not exposed to them. In addition, we have agreements in place with all model providers that further limit how they can use data from these anonymous requests that includes not using Prompts and Outputs to develop or improve their models as well as deleting all information received within 30 days.

    Pretty standard stuff for such services in my experience.

  • hersh@literature.cafetoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•***
    6·
    7 months ago

    I’m not entirely clear on which (anti-)features are only in the browser vs in the web site as well. It sounds like they are steering people toward their commercial partners like Binance across the board.

    Personally I find the cryptocurrency stuff off-putting in general. Not trying to push my opinion on you though. If you don’t object to any of that stuff, then as far as I know Brave is fine for you.