Onihikage

Unfortunately I can’t even test Llama 3.1 in Alpaca because it refuses to download, showing some error message with the important bits cut off.

That said, the Alpaca download interface seems much more robust, allowing me to select a model and then select any version of it for download, not just apparently picking whatever version it thinks I should use. That’s an improvement for sure. On GPT4All I basically have to download the model manually if I want one that’s not the default, and when I do that there’s a decent chance it doesn’t run on GPU.

However, GPT4All allows me to plainly see how I can edit the system prompt and many other parameters the model is run with, and even configure multiple sets of parameters for the same model. That allows me to effectively pre-configure a model in much more creative ways, such as programming it to be a specific character with a specific background and mindset. I can get the Mistral model from earlier to act like anything from a very curt and emotionally neutral virtual intelligence named Jarvis to a grumpy fantasy monster whose behavior is transcribed by a narrator. GPT4All can even present an API endpoint to localhost for other programs to use.

Alpaca seems to have some degree of model customization, but I can’t tell how well it compares, probably because I’m not familiar with using ollama and I don’t feel like tinkering with it since it doesn’t want to use my GPU. The one thing I can see that’s better in it is the use of multiple models at the same time; right now GPT4All will unload one model before it loads another.

I have a fairly substantial 16gb AMD GPU, and when I load in Llama 3.1 8B Instruct 128k (Q4_0), it gives me about 12 tokens per second. That’s reasonably fast enough for me, but only 50% faster than CPU (which I test by loading mlabonne’s abliterated Q4_K_M version, which runs on CPU in GPT4All, though I have no idea if that’s actually meant to be comparable in performance).

Then I load in Nous Hermes 2 Mistral 7B DPO (also Q4_0) and it blazes through at 50+ tokens per second. So I don’t really know what’s going on there. Seems like performance varies a lot from model to model, but I don’t know enough to speculate why. I can’t even try Gemma2 models, GPT4All just crashes with them. I should probably test Alpaca to see if these perform any different there…

I actually found GPT4ALL through looking into Kompute (Vulkan Compute), and it led me to question why anyone would bother with ROCm or OpenCL at all.

PCIe gen 5 is for the PCIe slots and NVMe storage slots, but they’re backwards compatible; you can put a gen 3 component in a gen 5 slot and it will work at gen 3 speeds. Similarly, if you put a gen 5 component in a gen 4 slot, it will be limited to gen 4 speeds. Right now there’s very little appreciable difference between gen 4 and gen 5 unless you’re spending a lot of money on the component (GPU/storage). Another thing to note is that Gen 5 requires that both the CPU and motherboard support it; a CPU with gen 4 support in a gen 5 motherboard will limit all the slots to gen 4 speeds.

RAM is a totally different standard that must be matched exactly for what the motherboard has; if it’s a DDR5 motherboard then you have to use DDR5 RAM or it won’t even fit in the slots. You can get a PCIe gen 5 motherboard and just use gen 4 SSDs or GPUs, that’s perfectly fine and leaves you room to upgrade later.

Seems mostly fine to me, I game all the time on Linux (Bazzite gang 🤘) with a 3900X + 7900GRE, haven’t had any significant issues aside from needing to make sure clock speeds were configured correctly on the GPU. Two ram sticks is the way to go with these systems as sometimes they don’t support 4 sticks at full speed.

You’re right that GPU passthrough is definitely more for tinkering or advanced users with very specific needs (usually professionals who need Windows/Nvidia and choose to run it in a VM rather than dual-boot), with a budget to match. For a gamer couple, having fully separate systems is going to be much less hassle and more resilient against failure.

The one thing I would recommend changing is the power supply, it’s unironically the most important component in the computer because if it fails it can kill everything else, and the System Power 10 is known enough for being low-quality that discussions of that come up in web searches. Poor quality power supplies can damage your hardware and otherwise cause weird, intermittent issues even if everything seems to work fine most of the time, and will fail and shut off the computer when a good power supply would have just kept on chugging. Seasonic and Corsair are considered the best brands and have 10 year warranties - they’re more expensive, but they’re worth it. You want 80+ Gold or better these days, this is a buy once, cry once component.

If you don’t have a UPS, I would also recommend getting one at some point, either one big shared unit (if they’ll be close together) or two individual units. Having backup power will allow you to shut down the computers gracefully during a power outage, and prevents the worst-case scenario where the power goes out while the computer is installing updates and it turns into a brick.

I mainly recommend Universal Blue distros to newbies, like Bazzite or Aurora. The immutable nature more or less means users don’t have to worry about performing maintenance of system apps like they might on some distros, mostly don’t have to worry about dependencies, and are less likely to irreversibly break the system themselves or in an update.

That said, these distros are Fedora-based, and I think that’s fine. No idea who out there is recommending Arch of all things.

He did at the beginning, but he helped them get what they wanted in the end, and I think that counts for something.

“We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.

“We know that many of our members weren’t happy with our original agreement,” Russo said, “but through it all, we had faith that our friends in the White House and Congress would keep up the pressure on our railroad employers to get us the sick day benefits we deserve. Until we negotiated these new individual agreements with these carriers, an IBEW member who called out sick was not compensated.”

Counterpoint: Scumbag companies ninja-editing their timestamped warranty page such that the only way you know they edited it after you bought the product is because it was archived previously.

Archives are ideal for identifying sneaky behavior like that. You never know when an admin might have the ability to delete or edit something without anyone noticing.

Looking into it, ZOOM Platform is run by the Jordan Freeman Group, which has a similar mission statement to GOG, that being a DRM-free games platform that also touches up and sells old games. They seem to have acquired publishing rights to the FlatOut trilogy, along with either source code or enough resources to touch them up without it. I didn’t know about them until this post, so it’s nice to see that GOG isn’t the only DRM-free old-games platform around.

Technically, any model trained on LAION-5B before December 2023 was trained on CSAM.

But yeah, I expect any porn model trained on a sufficient diversity of adult actors could be used to make convincing CP even without having it in the training data. AI image generation is basically the digital equivalent of a chainsaw - a tool for a particular messy job that can really hurt people if used incorrectly. You wouldn’t let a typical kid run around unattended with one, that’s for sure.

The ELI5 for Fedora’s atomic desktops is that if Windows had an Atomic Desktop version, Program Files and most of the Windows folder would be read only, and each program you installed yourself would go into its own folder in your user directory. That’s the basic idea. It’s harder to screw up an Atomic system as long as you stick to containerized app formats like flatpak/appimage whenever possible. It makes it easier for everyone to diagnose problems, and easier for users to roll back if an update has problems. Even if you were to install it right now, you could use one simple command to “roll back” to any image from the last three months.

The benefit of Bazzite is you have all of the above, plus a lot of gaming-related stuff preinstalled which, if you were to install them yourself in a normal Fedora environment, you’d likely have to spend a lot of time just learning how they’re supposed to be configured, how they interact, which versions have problems, and how to troubleshoot problems when an update to one app breaks a prerequisite for something else; eventually you end up in config hell instead of actually using your computer. With Bazzite, the image maintainers are the ones in config hell - they work out the kinks, app versioning, communicate with upstream to fix issues, all that, so your system should be in the most functional state that a Linux system can be, so you only have to think about using your apps.

tl;dr

• Atomic Desktops are more resilient to randomly breaking from updates or user error, and are easier to revert to a prior state if problems do arise
• Bazzite is a custom Atomic image with lots of gaming stuff preinstalled and preconfigured to work properly out of the box
• If you’re a gamer and wanting to try out Linux, Bazzite is going to be the least painful way to get your feet wet.
• Immutable distros are excellent for daily driving. I daily drive one myself!

MPV is a video player.

If “nearly every app” that people already use suddenly has a big warning on it, people will quickly decide the warnings are meaningless and start ignoring them, like Prop 65 warnings. Congratulations, we’ve moved the needle backwards.

You have to meet people where they’re at. I finally switched to Linux when MS introduced a feature I wanted no part in (Recall AI), but I would have given up within a day or two if the transition hadn’t been basically seamless. I was able to pick up right where I left off, using all the same apps I did on Windows except MusicBee RIP, but now I’m in a better position than before, on an open-source OS instead of closed-source. Now there’s a little less friction between me and better, freer software.

When I look at Firefox in Discover, it only shows the list of permissions the flatpak will be given out of the box, with no warning of it being “potentially unsafe.” This certainly does seem like the better way to handle it.

Also, the warning on the Flathub website is clickable - it expands into the full permissions list. Why it defaults to “no information except maybe dangerous” is beyond me.

It’s a little more tinkering than Windows, but definitely less than it’s ever been, and getting better all the time. I’ve found it to be basically exchanging one set of weird OS quirks for another. And hey, if you have any issues, the folks in the Universal Blue Discord are super friendly and helpful!

The biggest thing missing for me is good VR support at the OS level. Even with all the optimizations in Bazzite making regular games perform about equivalent to Windows, latency in VR is awful, and motion smoothing just plain isn’t supported in Linux yet, on any hardware. Those two pain points make the experience much worse than on Windows, I’d be motion sick in minutes if I tried to actually play something. Thankfully, normal gaming works just fine, and I don’t play VR as often as flat games, so I can just boot into Windows when I want to do that.

The second thing is the poor state of music players. I’m used to the very extensive feature set in MusicBee, and not a single native player hits all the boxes that MusicBee does. It can be run in Bottles, but not very well, and as a newbie, it took me a lot of extra tinkering to get things working even sort of right - file permissions, dotnet stuff, font libraries, etc. I still haven’t quite gotten file permissions working right, and font rendering is pretty bad (and custom font selection is broken entirely), but maybe I’ll figure some of that out eventually so I can stop booting into Windows whenever I want to make changes to my library.

Bazzite, from Universal Blue, based on Fedora Atomic Desktops. Immutable-style distro which means critical OS files and folders are read-only and all system apps (the ones preinstalled) are updated together as a full image rather than piecemeal. Anything not preinstalled can be installed in a distrobox or as a flatpak/appimage/aur, or as a last resort, layered with rpm-ostree. Extremely user-friendly, everything a gamer needs is either installed and preconfigured out of the box or available as a flatpak. Bazzite’s the first time I had a good enough experience on Linux that I made it my daily driver; now Windows is the secondary OS I only go to when I really need that one thing that only works there.

The Billet Labs prototype water block being so poorly handled was a consequence of them growing too big for Linus to manage; he hadn’t internalized that they weren’t six guys working out of a house anymore, but a proper medium sized business that didn’t need to strain for every bit of content to keep from going under, and could afford to slow down a little to get things right. They ended up taking a break from the constant grind to reorganize after GamersNexus put out a big piece on all the things LTT was doing wrong, all the sacrifices they were making to quality and accuracy for the sake of pushing out more and more content to stay relevant, and how badly they mishandled the prototype.

Not sure Linus has forgiven GN for the “hit piece” but I think they really needed the shock of it in order to get them to actually course correct immediately rather than keep putting it off.

I’d get premium if they weren’t so insistent on bundling in bullshit I don’t want or care about to justify the high price. I put up with enough of that from cable TV. I’ll pay when there’s an ad-free tier that doesn’t do anything else and is a reasonable price for “the service that’s free with ads, but without ads”. If there was a per-device premium tier that I could throw on my Roku, and all my family members could have premium when they stream from there, I’d pay for that. I’d pay for family tier if it didn’t have the dumb single-household rule which screws over truckers and those who travel for a living.

Google has options they could take to convince consumers to pay to not see ads, but there’s no creativity left there, no effort to court the market or adapt the service and prices to what potential customers need and are willing to pay. And it’s because they believe they are the market, and want to keep it that way.

It’s not gone, they didn’t even take down all of the Nintendo games, they took down specific games (reddit link), albeit a lot of them, but there’s still lots of stuff left.