Lmao OK. I was looking at new phones coming out and all the Chinese phones have ultra thin 7000mah silicon carbon batteries that can operate in a wide range of temps while the average western phone has dogshit 4000mah lithium ion that degrades at 30c.

Deepseek R1 is genuinely shockingly good. I hooked it up to the internet and it basically un-enshittified my search results, finding me many amazing products. It seems they hardcoded some sort of logic process of how to talk to someone and answer questions, and then it creates a lot of text for this hardcoded logic 'reasoning'. Then it does what LLMs do best, summarize all the key points of an article or text! It often is plagued by normal human perceptions - if you ask it to find a non-greenwashed product for example it will throw in 'sustainable' products like recycled polyester, which you know, no polyester is sustainable because it constantly sheds plastic into your lungs. But interestingly it does recommend specific products that aren't greenwashed (theyre actually green) by the company even though it recommends the whole company.

Also, by virtue of being able to run this locally, it fixes a lot of the social issues and environmental issues around AI. They also did it with a far lower budget and way less workers than ChatGPT or Meta. A+++ 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳 🇨🇳

Truly unhinged that they decided to come out on this. Fellas, you are fucking Swiss why throw yourself under the bus for the US election

This is of course all very well known. The best way to prevent this sort of data collection is to install open source FOSS alternatives or block internet access to devices at the router level. For things like Android, you can do a more finegrained approach.

https://www.privacyguides.org/ has a decent list of alternatives, but are by no means exhaustive.

For Siri, it is very difficult for it to still function as a device without invasive access. You'd need to find a different thing for this, there are many Home Assistant compatible options that don't phone home. As a matter of fact, all of these sort of smart home devices tend to have home assistant compatible devices that can be stripped one way or another of all their telemetry leaks.

Pihole can rip out telemetry data and block ad domains at the router level too. For android without software changes (like swapping to Graphene OS), I strongly recommend https://nextdns.io/ which will help block telemetry and ads even in unpaid apps.

you can check the process to see if its communicating at all. none of the big ones do. its possible someone could be fucking with the file though, before the safetensors format this was a big issue, and still sort of is afterwards. only DL from reputable sources

Only reason I'd recommend signal to anyone is that its one of the few encrypted apps that doesnt have awful onboarding. A boomer can figure it out.

i will eat a gallon of peanut butter

AI actually can be very good at translating things locally while keeping tone and intent, and thats what mozilla mentions here. I'm fully down with AI powered local translation tools native to firefox, it'll put it way above the competition

Some LLMs are low enough in resource usage to do this on weak and older PCs

theres a lot of other places reporting on this, and a scientific paper in nature. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-02/breakthrough-in-diabetes-treatment-research/103278156

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-023-01707-x

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41421-024-00662-3

Idk how the guy with photoshop knowledge hasn't learned about inpainting, clone stamp, and content aware fill. feels fake off of that bit.

Imo the biggest benefit of AI is artists using it to speed up their workflow. I for example use it to mimic brushstrokes found in real oil paint art that would be insanely difficult to replicate in photoshop, fill in backgrounds, or to make a sketch I made while I was bored more than a sketch I forget about in a week

There are lots of people that do this prompting stuff with zero knowledge of computers or art and its very telling. If you train your own loras, use controlnet, inpaint with various tools, these things are all easy to fix. For me though, I hate taking orders when it comes to art, even when I'm doing it by hand, so obviously it will never be a job for me, just a hobby and sometimes people buy my shit.

those first 3 months or so of covid were bliss. every office drone was off the road. it was so fucking easy to get everywhere, and it was quick too

kinky