All kidding aside, support for self-hosted server or just a local program to store and visualize your data would be amazing

Alright, we generally seem to be on the same page :)

(Except numerous great books and helpful short materials exist for virtually any popular major, and, while they take longer to study, they provide order of magnitude better knowledge)

While I don’t fully share the notion and tone of other commenter, I gotta say LLMs have absolutely tanked education and science, as noted by many and as I witnessed firsthand.

I’m a young scientist on my way to PhD, and I get to assist in a microbiology course for undergraduates.

The amount of AI slop coming from student assignments is astounding, and worse of all - they don’t see it themselves. When it comes to me checking their actual knowledge, it’s devastating.

And it’s not just undergrads - many scientific articles also now have signs of AI slop, which messes up with research to a concerning degree.

Personally, I tried using more specialized tools like Perplexity in Research mode to look for sources, but it royally messed up listing the sources - it took actual info from scientific articles, but then referenced entirely different articles that hold no relation to it.

So, in my experience LLMs can be useful to generate a simple text or help you tie known facts together. But as a learning tool…be careful, or rather just don’t use them for that. Classical education exists for a good reason, and it is that you learn to get factually correct and relevant information, analyze it and keep it in your head for future reference. It takes more time, but is ultimately much worth it.

Modern LLMs can serve you for most tasks while running locally on your machine.

Something like GPT4ALL will do the trick on any platform of your choosing if you have at least 8gb of RAM (and for most people nowadays it’s true).

It has a simple, idiot-proof GUI and doesn’t collect data if you don’t allow it to. It’s also open source, and, being local, it does not need Internet connection once you downloaded a model you need (which normally takes a single-digit number of gigabytes).

People got so deep into their allegiance games that they cannot comprehend anyone standing for the truth.

Fuck .ml China fappers, and fuck .world Russia-guilty-of-everything fans. You’re equally terrible in enabling atrocities.

As I said, some cases are confirmed, some are wild speculations. And latter are commonly used in future arguments as confirmations, despite them being mere speculated assumptions.

You can have a barrage of “something-bad” confirmations like these out of thin air, and this is a common propaganda tactic.

Yes. There are quite a few completely unfounded pieces stating it is Russia or China or North Korea behind thing X with no proofs whatsoever.

These do not go to prove your point.

Now, there were some proven cases, but attributing every attack to one of these now without judge and jury is nothing but blatant and bold propaganda.

Literally anyone until proven guilty?

Russian here; good fucking luck banning VPNs

First, they evolve very rapidly and are able to evade even the most sensitive detection methods Russia and China are using

Second, people in power never want to apply the same restrictions to themselves, so, ironically, they themselves are often VPN users and as such they undermine themselves

Now defend it from domestic one.

But this reactor turns mercury into gold, and is meant to produce power.

Odd; some codecs are surely not available by default, but can be downloaded from Packman repo, and for the rest I didn’t ever face it.

Nice site you got there! Made from scratch or using some service/app?

Exactly

Or those “terraform Mars” fantasies

TERRAFORM THE DAMN EARTH FIRST

To me, there are two reasons we’re doing it too soon;

• We don’t really have technology needed to build a self-sustaining colony anywhere outside Earth; say, a colony on Mars is inherently dependent on Earth’s supplies, and will quickly die out as Earth does too; the technologies needed can largely be developed on Earth;
• The chance of some asteroid obliterating Earth in the coming millenia is so minor we might as well focus on much more real threats.

Yep, and I understand how little this message changes in the world

But at least it’s good to highlight the basics to ensure people understand the dangers and shortcomings

As if we didn’t know this already.

Space launches disrupt ozone layer, contribute to air pollution and global warming, waste a lot of resources, and produce tons upon tons of space debris.

We should be careful with this industry and technology, and use it when it makes sense. But hey, why not launch billionaires and their cars into space for leisure and launch hundreds of satellites under different brandings all promising the best Internet ever or whatnot?

Also, massive launches such as Starlink should be approved by international bodies, not national organizations. Cool, US has greenlit the launch, but now it’s a global headache.

I like the premise behind this.

But how do we differentiate? Unless explicitly mentioned, it might be hard to tell the difference between AI and native human message.

It’s enough for the other side not to mention the message is AI-generated to fool us for quite a while.

I would argue either RAID 5 or ZFS RAIDz1 are inherently unsafe, since recovery would take a lot of read-write operations, and you better pray every one of 4 remaining drives will hold up well even after one clearly failed.

I’ve witnessed many people losing their data this way, even among prominent tech folks (looking at you, LTT).

RAID6/ZFS RAIDz2 is the way. Yes, you’re gonna lose quite a bit more space (leaving 24TB vs 32TB), but added reliability and peace of mind are priceless.

(And, in any case, make backups for anything critical! RAID is not a backup!)

True!

Although, as another commenter pointed out, this will use Packman repo which is not official and apps there are not going through the same testing as in official repos.

So Flatpak is generally a better option. Still, if you want VLC as a native package, opi is indeed an easy and reliable way of providing it.

Fair point! Honestly, that’s exactly what I ultimately went for, I just know there are people around who strongly prefer native packages.

Flatpak contains all codecs etc., and works flawlessly.