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I have an HP laser printer from like 1992, before they turned to US=Privateers; rest-of-the-world=criminal pirates. HP died as a company when they spun off Agilent/Keysight as test equipment and continued the branding for contract manufactured consumer garbage. HP does not make anything. They market, place stickers on what others manufacture, and create ponzi scheme-like extortion scams, as the shriveled shell of a dying husk disconnected completely from their now long irrelevant past.

TBH: tl;dr (…but read ~1/4 and skimmed the rest.)

Emacs can likely do most, if not all, of what you’re looking for.

As far as distros, go with either Fedora Workstation or Silverblue. If you can run SB, try to avoid messing with the base system as much as possible, skip using the toolbox containers system and just use distrobox. With distrobox, you have almost all Linux distros available as containers, so you build on them. The only exception I know of is NIX. You can’t run NIX in distrobox. You probably could run the NIX package manager, but that involves this weird setup where a user owned directory exists in / root. Personally, this is just too weird for me to use it. I expect all user activity and configuration files to be confined to /home/$USER/

Fedora just works, but try and lag behind the release cycle a little bit. Like right now F40 is pretty solid, but there were some issues in the first month or so after F40 first came out. I have lagged in every release since ~F28 and never had issues. I switched to F40 within the first week or so and a few packages were wonky. Basically Python was super fresh and did some odd stuff with containers where it did not work without manually removing and replacing Python in each container. I think that was the only manual intervention issue I’ve had with Fedora. I have a 3080Ti laptop with the 16 GB GPU. The Anaconda system in Fedora builds the Nvidia kernel module automatically in the background each time the kernel is updated. It works flawlessly, even with secure boot enabled.

While it is outside of the scope of most people’s abilities, the bios is on a flash chip that can be removed, read, and disassembled. I’m no expert here by any stretch. That said, my usual check with software is to simply check for http in strings. Even with a binary like a bios ROM, I can pass it through the $ strings command to look for any addresses. No matter what kind of malicious nonsense the software is doing, it has very low value unless it can dial out.

My lack of a complete understanding in this area is why I use a whitelist firewall for most of my devices. It is also the ultimate ad and tracker blocker as I only visit the places I chose to access. I don’t conform to the lowest developer’s ethics and will simply stop using any site or service that fails to be direct and transparent.

The thing is, even most whitelist firewalls are inadequate. They only filter incoming packets. That is really an inadequate model in most cases now, especially with local large language models where it is impossible to verify their capabilities. My reason for all thus bla bla bla is to say, a whitelist on a trusted 3rd party device is a PITA but an effective low barrier way to prevent any bad actor from communicating with the questionable device. It still leaves you open to a potential situation where the device could be sending a packet stream to the outside world over something like UDP.

Otherwise, the main thing I would be concerned with, if it is a UEFI device, are the UEFI secure boot keys. Whomever holds these keys has a lower ring access than the operating system kernel. Anything happening in kernel or user space is effectively under their control.

Anyways, the main way to monitor and check the device is a trusted 3rd party router that blocks any unauthorized connections. This can be challenging to setup with something like OpenWRT. There is a forked OpenWRT device running a version that makes a lot of this easier called PC WRT. That can make a whitelist fw a little easier than sorting out NF Tables and scripting a whitelist firewall.

Kudzu was the last bioweapons unit of the Union army in the US civil war. It never surrendered, it is still fighting the American South, and winning the guerilla war.

Now be honest, have any of you written a text parsing script with a dictionary?

I have, with AI, but for other creative reasons. The idea has crossed my mind as an amusing exercise. PC-autoreplace

The 4004 is that tiny dip-16 chip the the top left, second box marked CPU. A working 4004 is worth around $300+ https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=intel+4004

They are quite the collectors item as the first microprocessor

WoP shits are killing women over their misguided imbecilic christojihad. The only ban should be on anything to do with these draconian monsters with no ethics. They will be stoning people, legalizing biblical slavery, and outlawing interest based lending as usury next because they depend upon draconian stupidity for logic.

It would become a holiday and the WoP would never win.

Most cases have ridiculous nonsense for cooling though. Laptops usually have considerable thermal engineering, but kinda set the threshold of real hardware requirements.

I was just given an old “gaming rig” someone didn’t want that had water cooling, 9 fans, a cobweb of LED wiring, and the most obese ABS panels attached to the sheet metal case… The thing works fine even when overclocked with no fans except the one built into the power supply and GPU. Only the one in the GPU cycles on enough to be audible… This guy had a freaking harrier jet taking off in the room beside him for a decade.

I had a ex-roommate once that had a duffle bag of weed about that size

You using this in a toolchain? I haven’t tried any of the Qwen models yet, or Yi for that matter. I tried at one point early on, but they were not working well with my stuff and I had no complaints with Mistral stuff. I like some underlying things with a MoE for speed and underlying entity/realm stuff I can access in my favorite.

I’m curious if anyone has constructive contextual feedback about what makes these unique or worth exploring.

It is the flaming tail of the turtle that the Turth (turtle-earth…

It is just a simple prompt in Flux on Comfy UI. It is just an open source model running on my hardware. It is slow because it is such a large model (Flux Dev gguf Q4). You can find examples in the ComfyUI documentation and the model manager add-on to the base Comfy setup has all the models in the downloads menu.

At present, it only works on GPU and 16 GB is like 2+ minutes per image. It would be awesome in they split the chunks with the CPU to generate faster, but that is not implemented yet. It means you basically need 16+ GB to run it on your own hardware. There is a smaller model version, but that is not compatible in results quality. There is a larger model that is online only. Flux is actually FluX as in X-AI as in Musk. The weights for Flux-dev are open source, and that is what I care about for now.

Primarily from predatory boys and men towards girls and young women in the real world by portraying them in imagery of themselves or with others. The most powerful filtering is in place to make this more difficult.

Whether intentional or not, most NSFW LoRA training seems to be trying to override the built in filtering in very specific areas. These are still useful for more direct momentum into something specific. However, once the filters are removed, it is far more capable of creating whatever you ask for as is, from celebrities, to anything lewd. I did a bit of testing earlier with some LoRAs and no prompt at all. It was interesting that it could take a celebrity and convert their gender in recognizable ways that were surprising. I got a few on random seeds, but I haven’t been able to make that one happen with a prompt or deterministically.

Edit: I’m probably assuming too much about other people’s knowledge on these systems. I assume this is the down voting motivation. Talking about this aspect, the NSFW junk is shorthand for the issues with AI generation. These are the primary form of filtering and it has large cascading implications elsewhere. By stating what is possible in this area, I’m implying a worst case scenario-like example. If the results in this area are a certain way, it says volumes about other areas and how the model will react.

These filter layers are stupid simplistic in comparison to the actual model. They have tensors on the order of a few thousand parameters per layer compared to tens of millions of parameters per layer for the actual model. They shove tons of stuff into guttered like responses for no reason. Some times these average out and you still get a good output, but other times they do not.

Another key point here is that diffusion has a lot in common with text generation when it comes to this part of the model loader code. There is more complexity in what text generation is doing overall, but diffusion is an effective way to learn a lot about how text gen works, especially with training. This is my primary reason for playing with diffusion – to learn about training. I’ve tried training for text gen, but it is very difficult to assess what is happening under the surface, like when it is learning overall style, character traits and personas, pacing, creativity, timeline, history, scope, constraints, etc. etc. I don’t care to generate and share much in the way of imagery I generate unless I’m trying to do something specific that is interesting. Like I tried to gen the interior of an O’Neill cylinder space habitat that illustrated the limitations of diffusion in a fundamental way because it showed the lack of any reasoning or understanding of object context or relationships required to display a scene scape with curved centrifugal artificial spin gravity.

Anyways, my interests are not in generating NSFW or celebrities or whatnot. I do not think people should do these things. My primary interest is returning to creative writing with an AI collaborative writing partner that is not biased politically in a way that cripples it from participating in an entirely different and unrelated cultural and political landscape. I have no aspirations of finding success in my writing. I simply enjoy exploring my own science fiction universe and imagining a reality many thousands of years from now. One of the changes to hard coded model filters earlier this year made filtering more persistent, likely for NSFW stuff. I get it, and support it, but it took away one of the few things I have really enjoyed over the last 10 years of social isolation and disability, so I’ve tried to get that back. Sorry if that offends someone, but I don’t understand why it would. This was not my intended reason for this post, so I did not explain it in depth. The negativity here is disturbing to me. This place is my only real way to interact with other humans.

You’ve never done ecommerce logistics. You do not get Amazon’s efficiency from such a garbage system, or the worlds richest man. I have no doubt there are dubious practices to give plausible deniability. The thing is too large and too successful for this to be the big picture. The collectivized warehousing invalidates the front end system and mechanics entirely.

The political and adult doesn’t bother me. The kinds of things I might not have the ethics to think through at a much younger age, that bothers me, and I have never been a very deviant type. I think the protections against age are primarily for this situation. Training a LoRA takes 5 minutes now. An advanced IP adaptors and control net is just a few examples away and a day top for the slightly above average teen figure out. Normalizing this would have some very serious edge case consequences. It is best to leave that barrier to entry filter in place IMO. I assume it is still there because everyone that knows about it feels much the same. It does not show up in a search engine, although that is saying less than nothing these days.

I vote they rename it to IA for Asimov. Sure he was only the robot term among others, but come on… McCarthy was “AI.”

Somebody needs to create US 'botics and name a model something like PTronic.

Edit: Really, you down vote a casual conversational comment?! Really?!