hendrik

I usually start with the Wikipedia Article when I’m interested in new things. It’ll have many references at the bottom to read more about a concept.

Interestingly enough, there’s zero mention of Claude in there. And when I google it, there’s many very convoluted blog posts. And I can’t tell whether it’s above my head or hallucinated stories. They go on for like 20 pages but don’t really explain anything with all those words. Or what they actually found in Claude’s code.

Symbolic-AI in itself isn’t too hard. That’s stuff from the 1980s and in every computer science textbook. Just no clue how something like an expert system is supposed to be connected to a Chatbot or programming agent.

Totally agree. First of all with the Linux vs Meme… Yeah, we’re all living in more than one dimension. Guess I more or less wanted to say, most helpful advice I got on what non-spec combinations of RAM and computers work etc… I got from Reddit. I think it’s a bit an amount of users thing.

I’m also for human connection. I’m also here to talk to people. Especially in the comments. Also why I sometimes disagree with people on what the Threadiverse needs more of.

With the pamphlet bombings… Well, the internet changed a lot in my lifetime. We had times we thought it was a bit unethical to do statistics on what software you install, hence what packages in Debian are installed how many times. As a more privacy-oriented person you were told to just put it out there and not worry about collecting that kind of data… Or just write your Blog mainly for yourself and maybe some people will like it as well. I think as of today, that’s very niche way of thinking. Thanks to the advertising industry, we need exact page impressions. And everyone expects social media to come with all these engagement metrics, how many people saw the post… Not only professional “influencers”. I’ve heard random people will also have a look at the numbers. And your local youth organization also wants to know about the propagation of their invitation to the summer party. What the algorithm does to their posts, etc… Just counting how many people showed up isn’t how communication works any more. At least in my experience.

I’ve upheld the opinion, the change in the MAU is probably a rough indicator on our attractiveness. If a place is nice, people will come and want to join the party. But it’s a bit of a diffuse metric and doesn’t tell anything in specific. Plus it’s not the only factor.

If my quickly written down SQL query is right, those are the numbers for the last month from my instance’s perspective (my subscribed communities):

 num_comments | upvotes_on_posts | downvotes_on_posts | num_posts 
--------------+------------------+--------------------+-----------  
       188597 |          1646685 |              46461 |     13928  

So without the boosts, it’d be a total score of 135.

I guess with statistics, you’d always better ask a very specific question. I mean, these are just numbers, I guess? And if you’re fixing an old Linux computer, there is no point in lots of people commenting on meme posts. You want the one person who’s done this before to be part of the network, read your post and then reply… Or if you want to discuss politics, all the people re-posting the news articles on geopolitics don’t really count, you’ve already read the newspaper, now you’d like nuanced opinions in the comments. I’m a bit unsure whether a single abstract number means anything.

For the health of the overall network, I think MAU isn’t even all that bad. There’s probably a strong connection between “health” of a place, and how many people think it’s worth subscribing and then coming back on a regular basis.

Solid choice. I like Flask’s design. They have good documentation as well. And PieFed (and probably lots of other projects) also rely on flask-login and all these extensions.

I think Quart is the more modern (async) Flask successor. Or people use FastAPI, … That’s where active development happens. The Flask ecosystem is more stable, mature I guess? There’s plenty old plugins without recent updates. But most I had a look at were written in a very clean way, and they’re probably perfectly fine. Unless they’re niche or you find some discussion about security-related stuff in the bugtracker.

Yeah, It’s a weak point anyway. While the graphs aren’t detailed research, there’s also no reason to believe dbzer0’s perspective on the same network includes 8 times as many new users as LW for some reason. Or all the users in their communities have 8x worse karma for some external reasons. So we probably need further research.

It’s the “anarchist” mindset 🫣

Yes. As far as I know, any gguf file should be completely safe. There had been some bugs/security vulnerabilities early on in llama.cpp, but they fixed that and I think overall, they have a good track record.

Issues might come after that, if you run some Agents on top of it, and give them access to your computer. But you don’t have to do that. If you just talk to it, I don’t see any reason to be alarmed. Other than the usual stuff. Keep using your own brain once in a while, and don’t blindly trust what AI Chatbots tell you, they give inaccurate information all the time 😅

I’ve never heard that story. I think they might be hallucinating or trolling. Of course if you pull random Docker containers or execute some Github project to try new AI, you’re running other people’s code, and that could do arbitrary things…

But that’s not what we do. Usually, we download models in safetensors format, or gguf. And those are specifically designed to prevent this very thing, and not contain executable code.

Tools and MCP servers are a different story. Once you give your LLM access to the internet, it …well… has access to the internet. It mostly does what it’s supposed to do. But there’s occasional stories how someone’s AI Agent deleted all their email. Or reproduced some scifi story tropes and tried to use the internet to blackmail their user. AI can also make mistakes. Like you tell it to write a software project and it accidentally includes your password and API key. Or tell private information about you to other people if you grant it generous access to everything. The news about OpenClaw is full of hilarous anecdotes about things going wrong.

I didn’t have any luck with some uncensored Qwen 3.5 either. It always reasons about the guardrails. And it leans towards weaseling itself out of the situation. And the 3.5 version goes on for 1500 tokens anyway, just to think about how to respond to “Hello”.

I didn’t do a lot of LLM stuff lately. I’m also looking for a new local model which isn’t censored nor a sycophant, nor overly verbose and repetetive. But I guess I see that with a lot of models. And lots of the supposedly uncensored ones will give you the kids version of a murder mystery story, because they’re still averse to violence, conflict, taboo and all kinds of things.

And a lot of internet recommendations are older models from at least a year ago?! At least I didn’t find any perfect fit (yet).

I think there’s two concurrent, but different definitions of the word Fediverse. One means, software that can speak the ActivityPub protocol. And the other one means, social media service which is able to interconnect between different websites.

The first one is more useful if you want to use it and know whether it connects you to your friends on Mastodon and the other big ones. The latter is the more technical definition and includes older protocols as well, as well as newer ones and alternative approaches to form a network in a certain way. I guess it’s the more correct one. But it doesn’t tell you a lot as a user. Maybe technically it can exchange your user statuses but nobody uses it so you can’t really do anything with it in reality. Or there’s two approaches and you were talking about a different manifestation than somebody else, and you’re both federated but not part of any compatible ecosystem.

Laptops are designed to be fairly power-efficient. I don’t know what yours does. But mine goes down to only a very few watts if idle and the display is switched off. There’s the Linux tool “powertop” which shows power consumption and it can also tune most components to go to low power. Sometimes there’s also a power profile setting. That shouldn’t be on “performance” or anything like that. I don’t think Linux has more to offer, except sleep with wake-on-lan.

Uh, it is a bit more involved. The Arch Wiki has a lengthy article on it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wake-on-LAN

Basically, you’d enable it in your BIOS/firmware. Make sure it’s enabled in the network driver. And then you need to figure out a way to send such a magic packet. You can make your router or another device in the network send it. Or do a port-forward or send it through a VPN.

Sure, I’m not debating that. And there’s other ways to destroy or impede (with) something to generate attention towards it. Sorry for getting political here, but other example that comes to my mind is how people supposedly cut cable ties of the German train system to draw attention to the cause of climate politics. It is massively annoying for all commuters, and people who are already on board for a more enviromentally friendly way to get to work. Because now everyone is 2h late, except people with a car. And I always question the validity of it.
But ultimately it’s completely unclear who does it. Could very well be people trying to make climate activists look bad in some false-flag-operation. And in this instance (post deletion) I’m willing to believe it’s genuine.
But the gist of it is the same… Is it going to archieve the long-term goal? Because the short- and mid-term way of working is, you’re being destructive to tear down the remaining good things about something faster, so it eventually is going to have to get replaced… And I’m more on board with, focus on direct constructivism. For example I just left Reddit and went here. And I’m somewhat happy the crowd working towards something is more pronounced than the people immediately trying to destroy it as well. I mean theoretically we probably should - by that reasoning. I’ve seen the AI scrapers hammer my Fediverse instance, too.

I use my homeserver for it. It’s located in the broom closet and on 24/7. But there’s ways to do it with a laptop. You can inhibit standby and let it run contunuously. Or configure Wake on Lan and wake it up before you use it… I mean a switched-off computer obviously can’t do any computation.

Uh. I hate the power deleters. It mainly makes conversation worse for the remaining humans on Reddit.

And the office files, PDFs, html pages etc should be fairly easy to implement. There’s a plethora of tools like markitdown or docling, designed mostly for AI to read files by a one-liner like markitdown file.pdf.

Maybe have a look at Forgejo’s issue tracker as well: “Forgejo for enterprise #308”
I believe that’s pretty much your question. (And for example the linked managed option is from Switzerland.)

https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/308

My bad. Sorry. You’re right of course. I think next to Forgejo, there’s Sourcehut as well. AFAIK they’re based in the Netherlands. I occasionally see some projects there. They have a paid service, aimed at “hackers” which wouldn’t exclude commercial use as per my understanding… But I’m not sure. And the software is fairly minimal compared to Forgejo, so I’m not sure if that fits your bill either.