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

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  • CVEs are constantly found in complex software, that’s why security updates are important. If not these, it’d have been other ones a couple of weeks or months later. And government users can’t exactly opt out of security updates, even if they come with feature regressions.

    You also shouldn’t keep using software with known vulnerabilities. You can find a maintained fork of Chromium with continued Manifest V2 support or choose another browser like Firefox.





  • Very solid, I think (except water protection, but my previous OnePlus also didn’t have good water protection anyway; and I’m careful enough).

    I don’t tend to use glyphs or the default launcher (and therefore its special widgets that only work there; but the ability to have apps in folders on my main screen while being hidden from the app menu is more important for me than a handful of widgets, so Neo Launcher it is).

    A recent OS update added configurable swap (up to 8GB), calling it “RAM booster”. I don’t use it, but if you want to run a local LLM (or rather a SLM), you could try making use of it? As long as you figure out how to make the model use main RAM and not the swap.

    I like the battery life (or maybe it’s just because it’s the first phone where I started charging at 20% and stopping at 80% semi-consistently).

    Termux still works despite the new Android versions becoming more hostile to apps executing binaries they didn’t have included already.

    One thing I miss from OnePlus is the ability to deny some apps network access entirely. (I think it was removed in later versions of Oxygen OS?)



  • I don’t focus on recommendations specifically. My typical process is:

    • spend anywhere from a few days to a few weeks figuring out which technical characteristics are important for this kind of product, which aren’t, why and when &c. This kind of information is usually available (and even obvious SEO garbage can give you new keywords to consider when searching);
    • based on these alone, determine what’s acceptable and what’s desirable for you;
    • if you haven’t already, find some kind of community around the topic and see which brands/manufacturers people commonly complain about and why; also see if there’re popular manufacturers only selling things via their own websites;
    • open your preferred store (or several) and filter the entire category based on what you’ve learned. Pick a few candidates and examine them closely;
    • go back to the community again and look up anything mentioning these candidates - including comparisons with other ones you haven’t considered. Perhaps consider them;
    • make the final choice.

    Skip some of these if irrelevant or if you don’t care enough. Spend extra time if you care a lot.

    It works well enough for every new phone (the market there is changing fast, so you start anew every time), it worked for my first PC I’ve decided to assemble with 0 prior knowledge, the mechanical keyboard and the vertical mouse, and pretty much every piece of tech I’m buying.

    And I’d say it’s reasonable to use Reddit without an account even if you disagree with what the platform owners are doing. The data is still valuable for such use cases.









  • I’m using local models. Why pay somebody else or hand them my data?

    • Sometimes you need to search for something and it’s impossible because of SEO, however you word it. A LLM won’t necessarily give you a useful answer, but it’ll at least take your query at face value, and usually tell you some context around your question that’ll make web search easier, should you decide to look further.
    • Sometimes you need to troubleshoot something unobvious, and using a local LLM is the most straightforward option.
    • Using a LLM in scripts adds a semantic layer to whatever you’re trying to automate: you can process a large number of small files in a way that’s hard to script, as it depends on what’s inside.
    • Some put together a LLM, a speech-to-text model, a text-to-speech model and function calling to make an assistant that can do something you tell it without touching your computer. Sounds like plenty of work to make it work together, but I may try that later.
    • Some use RAG to query large amounts of information. I think it’s a hopeless struggle, and the real solution is an architecture other than a variation of Transformer/SSM: it should address real-time learning, long-term memory and agency properly.
    • Some use LLMs as editor-integrated coding assistants. Never tried anything like that yet (I do ask coding questions sometimes though), but I’m going to at some point. The 8B version of LLaMA 3 should be good and quick enough.