I have a personal Discord server that I drop links into - fully intending to get them out of Discord and into my notes someday, though let’s just say I’m quite behind on that.

Mostly I find it useful because I can drop a link on from my phone and quickly access it from my PC, or vice versa. There is some organization into channel types (food, music, games, etc) but these days I just use a general channel as a dumping ground and figure I’ll sort later, ha.

I’ve had good success using it to write Python scripts for me. They’re simple enough I would be able to write them myself, but it would take a lot of time searching and reading StackOverflow/library docs/etc since I’m an amateur and not a pro. GPT lets me spend more time actually doing the things I need the scripts for.

I’m curious, how are you discovering new music this way? my understanding of soulseek and nicotine+ is that they’re great for finding music by artists you already know, but idk how they would work for discovery…?

degree in Visual Art, work in digital asset management for a marketing (blech) studio. I’d love to get into a DAM position at somewhere less ethically awful, like a symphony or museum or something, buuut my position pays really well relatively speaking to other similar similar jobs I’ve looked at, so that’ll have to wait until I feel more established in life.

took a couple basic comp-sci classes in college, though, and went to a coding bootcamp before I got my current position. running linux on my laptop, might switch to it on my desktop. I make use of bash for renaming files a lot at my job.

there’s a lot about tech-heavy areas that interests me, but it’d drive me crazy to be around too much of it. I think there’s a lot of good in the liberal arts that tends to get missed by the sort of hard rationalists that tend to hang out in tech spaces.

Thinking about reducing plastic fucks me up and it’s been on my mind a lot lately. Noticing every single time we bring new plastic into the household, and how hard it is to avoid. Chicken comes in plastic wrap, and even if we got it at a butcher counter, they still toss it in a plastic bag before wrapping it in brown paper. Bags of potting soil, our toothpaste tubes, peanut butter jars… it’s endless.

At least the majority of my clothes are cotton or wool, but another source is carpet and there isn’t anything I can do about this apartment carpet.

I don’t know anything about GPU design but expandable VRAM is a really interesting idea. Feels too consumer friendly for Nvidia and maybe even AMD though.

I can’t believe someone has paid for that domain name for 23 years… O_O

I like the friendlier feeling of Seaford (the o shapes have a little tilt to them rather than being straight on the grid), but I’m guessing they leaned towards the most “generic” of the five because as a default font you want it to become “invisible” almost. I think a more unique font would stand out and then become a little grating over time given how much it would be seen.

My high school and college journals are filled with so much angst about crushes and “do they like me? don’t they like me?” that it’s physically difficult to re-read them now, hah.

I had a crush on a redhead from about 10 until I left for college (it was a small town), then crushed on the various guys in my dorm and friend group (and one hot artist girl in a philosophy class) until I decided I needed to practice dating in junior year and actually went on a few thanks to Tinder. Though I didn’t escape entirely as I had a couple crushes on regular customers when I worked in an art supply store after graduating.

Now I’m happily partnered and do not miss the mental anxiety of crushes, though there’s a twinge of excitement in the idea of having a crush that will always be nostalgic.

Yup; hopefully there are some advances in the training space, but I’d guess that having large quantities of VRAM is always going to be necessary in some capacity for training specifically.

Yup; hopefully there are some advances in the training space, but I’d guess that having large quantities of VRAM is always going to be necessary in some capacity for training specifically.

So I’m no expert at running local LLMs, but I did download one (the 7B vicuña model recommended by the LocalLLM subreddit wiki) and try my hand at training a LoRA on some structured data I have.

Based on my experience, the VRAM available to you is going to be way more of a bottleneck than PCIe speeds.

I could barely hold a 7B model in 10 GB of VRAM on my 3080, so 8 GB might be impossible or very tight. IMO to get good results with local models you really have large quantities of VRAM and be using 13B or above models.

Additionally, when you’re training a LoRA the model + training data gets loaded into VRAM. My training dataset wasn’t very large, and even so, I kept running into VRAM constraints with training.

In the end I concluded that in the current state, running a local LLM is an interesting exercise but only great on enthusiast level hardware with loads of VRAM (4090s etc).

Using it to separate work from other uses makes sense to me - I think if I worked from my desktop rather than the company laptop, I’d be more inclined to use the virtual desktops.

Wanting to pin a floating window was always something I wanted on Windows, so I was excited to see that being natively supported by KDE.

Agree on disliking alt-tab because it’s non-deterministic! Cycling through a whole list of apps has always felt clunky to me so I never use it.

I really wish I could load Sway on my desktop… unfortunately I’ve got an Nvidia card and I couldn’t get the live ISO to boot with sway. :<

Very tempting to try it on my laptop though! All the setups I’ve seen using it look really clean.

How far away from your monitor do you sit to see all of the 49”?! It must all be in your peripheral vision, haha. (Edit: oh, I overlooked the ultra wide mention and was picturing a 49” tv type thing, haha. Ultra wide makes more sense!)

I actually went down from two monitors on my desktop to one… nothing wrong with the second monitor now sitting in my closet, but I’m liking the extra space on my desk and it feels more ergonomic to not be swiveling my neck as much.

I purged my comments and deleted my main account on July 1st, which was surprisingly emotional for me. I use Alien Blue on mobile, which still works so far, but now that my main account is logged out, I’ll never be able to log another account in because authentication has been broken in Alien Blue for a while.

I’m keeping Alien Blue installed for two reasons: one, for checking on a friend who only posts updates on reddit, and two, I read r/games a couple times a week for headlines and discussion. Lemmy just doesn’t have the same level of engagement or discussion as r/games; even though there’s a certain brand of insufferable commenters there, the majority of people post thoughtful comments that are more than one or two sentences long and those are the kinds of threads I like reading. Lemmy threads seem to be more shallow; lots of replies to the parent, but very few threads that go more than one or two comments deep.

It’s so interesting the different ways people organize their windows! I have a strong preference for never overlapping windows where possible at home, but on my work computer it happens all the time and I don’t mind. Each window definitely has its own “zone” on the screen though (browser in the upper left, slack in the bottom right, finder in the bottom middle, and so forth).

I’ve accidentally tried to switch workspaces with the i3 shortcuts when on a windows machine before! that muscle mememory, haha.

when I’m booting Windows on my desktop, I use MS PowerToys to snap windows around which gives me the same feeling of nice organization as tiling but feels more intuitive in the Windows environment for me.

Makes sense! I agree laptops tend to be too small for tiling; I don’t really use the tiling part of i3 on my laptop very much - usually only to pop open a terminal window on the side that I close after a few minutes.