skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What are local LLMs good for?
There are various blog posts and YouTube videos out there whose basic content is: "Look, I installed an LLM on my shiny MacBook and was able to make it run". (Usually a MacBook, I think because 1. anything else makes it much more expensive to get a decent amount of GPU-accessible RAM and 2. I cynically suspect that part of the subtext of these is "look what a fancy laptop I can afford".)

What tends to be in shorter supply is much information about what these models are good for other than blogposts about "how I got a local LLM running on my machine".

I am in the market for a new laptop; it might be a Mac; I am curious what benefit I might get if I pay for more RAM and/or GPU cores in order to be able to run bigger models.

So, O glorious internet hive-mind:

If you have tried to run a local LLM on your own machine, what did you run on what hardware and what actually-useful things was it able or unable to do?

I am extra-interested in anything that would help me predict what extra value I might get from having a given amount more memory available to the GPU.

I am extra-interested in highly specific answers that let me know (1) some particular thing you were or weren't able to get the model to do satisfactorily, (2) whether it's likely that I'd agree with you about how satisfactory the outcome was, and (3) what hardware I'd need to be able to do similar things if I wanted to.

I'm interested in a wide variety of possible applications. (If you did some "running a large model on my own hardware" thing that isn't strictly an LLM, that could be interesting too. Image generation, for instance.)

If you did anything in the way of training or fine-tuning as well as just inference, that's interesting too.

I am not interested in general-principles answers along the lines of "AI is the future; if you aren't running LLMs on your laptop you're behind the times" or "LLMs are stochastic models and by definition can never do anything useful". (If you think one of those things, you might be right, but I get zero new information from the fact that someone thinks so; I already know that some people do.)

Thanks!
The New API
The notification banner is also a hoot:

> Service degradation: Our API is occasionally returning 2024 instead of 2025. Our intern is investigating and working on a fix. We apologize for any inconvenience and would appreciate if you could stop emailing us about it.
>The future is going to be awesome. Steam/Bandcamp for TV, film, fantasy and science fiction.

I'm not sure how awesome this future is when you reference Steam, a service where we own nothing. Then Bandcamp which has been a positive force originally, but bought up by the worst kinds of companies more than once recently.
Exceedingly interesting! Say, I have a board from back in the 80s that you may know about - nobody else I've asked has any idea. It's a "Parallon" ISA card from a company called Human Devices, that has something like 8 NEC V20s on it. I think it's an early attempt at an accelerator card, maybe for neural networks, not sure.

Some reference about its existence here, in a magazine that (ironically? serendipitously?) features a fractal on the cover: http://www.bitsavers.org/magazines/Micro_Cornucopia/Micro_Co...

Ever heard of such a thing? I think at this point, I'm trying to find someone who wants it, whether for historical purposes or actually to use.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37012347
That was addressed earlier in the conversation, multiple times.
There's no reason you should be getting downvoted for this, and I say this as someone who loves their Model 3. You're stating a fact about yourself that is, at the very least, loosely relevant to the posted article.

It's like a bunch of people who are a fan of the color yellow got mad when you said you're not a fan of yellow.
Sure, it was an oversight. I am glad the issue was resolved swiftly, and I think George Nachman managed the issue well. But it is the existence of the bugs discussed in this thread that make me feel like not using iTerm2. I do not understand how can one not use past events as arguments in favor of not using a piece of software. I'm more than certain that George Nachman is a great developer developing great software, and I am not saying otherwise. I will however not cede that I do not wish to use iTerm2 because of the existence of the dns lookup bug in the first place, combined with the high input latency - I will not use software just because someone has put a lot of effort in it - I have to feel good about using it too :)
Common Lisp supports something along those lines, mostly for optimization purposes.
Everyone should work up to at least meeting the physical activity guidelines for health [0]. Highly recommend the Barbell Medicine podcast for more information.

[0] https://www.barbellmedicine.com/blog/where-should-my-priorit...
“Own time”? I guess I think of it all as my own time, even when I’m cashing out on bits and blocks here and there.

One’s whole life should be a personal project no matter how you spend it! And the whole world is your teacher, you have to be the self learner.
After hearing the explanation of timescale cosmology, it seems blindingly obvious. Of course mass can cause time dilation on large scales. How could it possibly be otherwise? Given a heterogenous universe, time must also be heterogeneous with respect to mass concentration.

It's just pure relativity, I can't believe we haven't already reached consensus on timescape over dark matter.

I really hope the theory stands up to scrutiny and that JWST and friends keep sending us new evidence. Timescape cosmology is just so neat that it must be true. Hopefully this will lead us in some new interesting directions
Thank you. Might you give us a summary, to tide us over until we read the entire Federalist Papers? :)
I would guess that a book in bright sunlight is lower contrast than black on white on screen due to how the ink reflects light as well as the paper. There may also be effects related to the physiology or neurology of how our eyes and visual processing adapt to higher and lower light conditions.
How about, "through loving others, you find a reason to love yourself?"
You don't see the difference between miners striking to improve their livelihoods and striking for net neutrality rules? I'd think it would be obvious far fewer people are prepared to do the latter. The stakes simply aren't as high.
> fiduciary duty to maximize earnings

This is not how corporate fiduciary duties work (courts repeatedly ruled there is no explicit responsibility to maximise profits or minimise taxes; Swedish Aktienbolaget are a notable exception there), though it is a common misinterpretation of them.
Show me that it can scale then we'll see. So many announcements and promises are based on little tiny demonstrations on a lab bench.
A Book App Used AI to 'Roast' Its Users. It Went Anti-Woke Instead
This article really wants to sound sensationalist vs: "So all the stuff we used to ignore in our calculations, now that we are able to not ignore them it turns out that time dilation is acting in perfectly expected ways."
The video is good as a "Learn more" demo
Or even simpler: a garden is a wiki and a stream (feed) is a blog.
There's also a difference between saying you work at $FAMOUSCOMPANY and knowing it's true, it gives you a kind of confidence that you don't have if you say "I'm the CEO of my own startup" or something like that. I think actually "I retired early, working on some of my own projects" might work, but all sorts of problems creep up when money is involved like that, especially with family.
Having good technology and good products are orthogonal. People are conflating the two
https://www.quantamagazine.org/scientists-re-create-the-micr...
Could you tell me more about this idea? I'm not getting it.
So if a company that on paper was GTE started selling hot dogs from a cart they wouldn't be subject to food regulations right? Because they're an information service, not a food vendor!

Or maybe we should apply the laws as they are today to the actions organizations are today instead of imaging what they were in '96 and thinking they've never changed.

> In short, an “information service” manipulates data, while a “telecommunications service” does not.

I will forever respond to your comments with this quote until you really answer how an ISP substantively manipulated my POST request to Hacker News. This is the standard the court gave us. Tell me how my ISP is an information service here.
The problem is all the easy problems have been solved, and even all the hard problems have been solved in science. We're down to the really hard problems, and since our otherwise astoundingly accurate observations of how the universe acts are thrown off by them, everything looks weird and fringe at the very hard edges.
If the company hasn't updated their banner by April, I start thinking they're out of business.
she's not wrong though. it's exactly like one the comments says: "It's the intellectual equivalent of the wannabe tough guy staple: "I almost joined the military.""
To be fair, you didn’t specify that the functional requirements should be maintained, you only asked for better code. ;)
Where did I ever claim I was the sole voice of reason? Plenty of people on here are having a rational discussion about how this happened and several people recommended tips such as commit hooks to prevent WIP work from getting committed and released. That would be an example of a lesson learned. Indeed, it's entirely possible that George has learned that lesson too. I was just literally describing the logical problem with the assumed logic of "mistake made = lesson learned", especially when there's no evidence outlining what the lesson learned was. Similarly plenty of comments in response to things I've said have been fairly well balanced.

As for the backlash, I just highlighted how 2 responses in particular seemed emotionally charged and border line attacked me for completely innocuous comments. The first was completely condescending and sarcastic while adding no additional value to the conversation on a completely unrelated comment thread where I suggested that maybe, just maybe, the terminal you choose isn't going to meaningfully improve your productivity. Your conversation has accused me of being in league with people threatening violence to the iTerm2 author and again adding nothing to the discussion about what lessons were actually learned and then attacking me and demeaning me in all sorts of ways and accusing me of saying things I simply have not. How would you describe that? A logical defense of someone I'm not attacking?
> Snow Leopard (greatest OS release of all time)

Completely agree. Job's best delivery, ever.
There is no problem with pairing or with going with extreme programming values. In fact I support the majority of the points in this article.

However, the question you need to ask yourself is whether if you believe that it is worth investing all your time on every. single. ticket every day and pairing for meetings and stand-ups every. single. day. for that salary you negotiated (or worse that you took a lower salary for) all for the chance to increase it +10% to show that you are "performing" well for the employee of the month award at the company.

How are you going to get that time back? (Remember, you will not get any of it back).

Do you really think it is worth missing weekends for this if you are behind on a deadline?

Are you really sure?
In the case of Mandelbrot, there is a self similar renormalization process, so you can obtain such a formula. For the "fixed points" of the renormalization process, the formula is super simple; for other points, you might need more computations, but it's nevertheless an efficient method. There is a paper of Bartholdi where he explains this in terms of automata.
That's mostly what I meant by once in a blue moon tactical situation. Even then, I don't generally want someone hovering over my shoulder. And I don't love hovering over someone else's shoulder either. I'll usually turn it into a "lesson" more than a "pair session"
At least as far as American geopolitical dominance is concerned, the Marxist revolutions in both Russia's Empire and China were probably the best thing that could have happened to the U.S.

Without going into deeply detailed arguments for why, they essentially threw these large, geographically and socially rich countries back by decades from levels of wealth and power that they could have achieved much earlier to become stronger rivals for dominance before was actually the case in modern history.

The USSR did eventually industrialize itself into a major military and economic power under Stalin, but only at grotesque cost in human lives, resources and efficiency that first had to overcome the vast destruction that had happened between 1917 and 1933 or so. The Nazi invasion didn't help after that but the communist system had already done considerable damage by itself.
Do you actually use Bandcamp as creator? I am friends with a music band and they say their label/distributor provides much more revenue than Bandcamp.

Still not enough to live off it but if you consider that literally anyone can publish music it's not surprising.
In C, you still need to write the types in the definition.
I agree. I haven’t run into a “hard problem” in my career

By hard problem I mean technically at the top 5% of a problems in the industry that can’t be solved by throwing money at a SaaS or using a cloud provider.
Well worth trying WoW Hardcore by the way. Permadeath changes everything:

- People know they need to get help from others. There's less bad behavior.

- You can't cheese anything, like running in to a camp to grab the quest item, letting yourself get killed, and then resurrecting.

- You find it acceptable to do side quest things like making potions and other useful stuff.

- The levels below 60 are no longer a speedrun with barely anyone else to be seen. People die all the time, and they restart all the time, so the lower levels have a lot of life. On non-hardcore, getting to 60 is inevitable.

- You have to prepare properly. Not only bringing all the consumables you'll need for raiding, also knowing what the boss is gonna do.

- Because the game is old, you get older players with old people issues like having kids. It's much more sympathetic towards life getting in your way.

- You feel an actual adrenaline rush when things go wrong. You might have 8 days played on a character who could die if you don't get out of a sticky situation. People are constantly reporting heightened heart rates. If you play non-hardcore, it's just "meh I'll run back".
looks like they did a new piece about it: https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/12/30/honey-browser-extensi...
Testing on a desktop machine with many cores is not a good simulation of that environment. You run your tests on your local machine as much as possible. Then you run on the real production hardware enough tests to be confident.

I don't work automotive, but my application is very similar - an embedded display running ARM CPUs. I do a lot of testing on x86-64 and only rarely encounter portability issues. When I do discover such things they have always been things that I need real hardware to debug on not something an ARM desktop would help with.
Random thought: does the idea that entanglement, time, and space being intimately linked have anything to do with this?
> Cookie stuffing is criminal fraud

There is no disagreement about that. Murder is also criminal. The disagreement is whether what Honey did classifies as "cookie stuffing". (I hope there is no disagreement that it does not qualify as murder, which is a different crime.)

> Obtaining money by means of false or fraudulent pretenses is wire fraud.

This is ... not the definition of what "wire fraud" is, but let's leave it aside as it's irrelevant to this discussion.

> Honey's extension stuffs a ton of different affiliate cookies via its extension

I have not seen any evidence that Honey's extension stuffs more than one cookie for any given transaction. In my understanding "cookie stuffing" refers to a practice of stuffing a ton of cookies for one transaction, not to a practice of "stuffing" one cookie for multiple transactions. Moreover, "cookie stuffing" is not a result of "stuffing" a "cookie", just like "guinea pig" is not a "pig" and it didn't come from a place known as "Guinea". "Cookie stuffing" is a specific legal term describing a certain well-defined behavior, and it would be inaccurate to apply it to anything that involves "cookies" and "stuffing". In other words, if I put some jelly inside an Oreo, this would not qualify as "criminal fraud" known as "cookie stuffing", even though it can be said that by doing that I'm "stuffing" (putting "stuff") inside a "cookie" (Oreo). That's why I asked if you're a lawyer -- they usually understand that e.g. "wire fraud" could be done without any "wire", for instance completely wirelessly -- or that someone committing a "regular" fraud while holding a pack of wire in their hand does not commit "wire fraud".

P.S. The search for "stuffing" in the filing you attached brings no results, so I assume the lawyers also don't argue that Honey engaged in "cookie stuffing" (which is criminal).
Looks great, but GitHub metrics indicate that, unfortunately, the project has stalled. The last commit was six months ago on master and two months ago on develop.

source: https://github.com/pavelsevecek/OpenSPH/graphs/contributors
maybe training LLMs on 4chan wasn't the best idea after all
PayPal Honey is also involved in lawsuit where it stole Referral Codes and replaced them with its own.

Basically every dollar the company has made is basically illegal.
While I do think wealth inequality is a big issue of our time, I don't think it is an issue of civilizational level disintegration -- that would look like the total amount of wealth in our society decreasing, which by all accounts doesn't seem to be happening.

While I'm far from rich, I have done well the last couple years after many years of being poor. But even when I was poor I looked around and saw lots of people who were wealthy and doing well, which I took as a general measure of how society was doing, instead of using my own situation or those in my immediate circle as a measure of that.
Thanks, that will be time-saving.
I think it's technically impossible for Apple to get training data from this due to the encryption. In which case it's not a likely option at all.
Yes in mice but this is startling to me that you can just drop a random protein from one species and have it work in another. Whatever weird programming language life is made from it seems to be a surprisingly forgiving environment. I wonder if the leap between a fish and a mouse is less than the distance between a mouse and a human?

And no I doubt this will suddenly work in humans I’m more just fascinated by genetics proteins and life in general and just constantly amazed any of this works at all.
Just an idea, what if malicious bots started unsubscring thousands of email addresses to harm your business.

Even if you send a confirmation email afterwords that's potentially millions of emails you are sending because of bots.
Actually no. When you're learning a piece from scratch, you start with 60bpm or slower and slowly polish your performance and reach to the normal speed of the piece. If you're going to perform with an orchestra, you also rehearse a lot. We started 14 weeks before the actual concert date (used to play double bass in a symphony).

Learning the instrument is akin to learning the programming language. Music theory is the same thing as programming languages / intro to computation courses. You pass through them once and revisit as needed. Not everyday.

However, when you finish a piece, 95% of the skill required to play it again is permanent. You just rehearse it a couple of times and, viola. The performance is there.

The constant exercise part is very on par with what programmers do every day. You either code (work) or playfight/practice (hobby projects). Also, composers and genres have similar structures in their pieces, so when you get used to them, you can just fly through them, even if you play for the first time.

There are a couple of comments which say that we're talking about senior programmers here. Senior musicians can play what they see in the first pass, or just improvise/remix what they hear for the first time (see [0]).

So, in most cases, the partitions in front of the musicians are cheat sheets. I remember just looking at the section and playing half (sometimes most) of it without even looking to it.

The live/improvised performance is akin to "hacking" in programming. I had my mentor who taught me playing double bass had to improvise a bridge section of a piece because he forgot that specific part. He said that since he knows the motifs, he bridged the part on the fly, in a solo performance in conservatory, and he got a pass because how he handled it. This is how we hack something together when we're in a rough spot and dig our way out of it by knowing what we're doing, but improvising and trusting the process.

So, I draw these conclusions from 10+ years of live concerts and 15+ years of professional sysadmin/programming/research work.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pYHCGYJbw0
It works fine in Opera on an old Android tablet.
The root cause as I understand from other comments in this thread is a double whammy of the feature existing itself and that they managed to create a release with a WIP commit that enabled the feature. The resolved the issue by ripping out the feature. However, the latter issue remains unaddressed and to me is equally if not more concerning - there should be good practices in place to ensure that feature flags aren't even being controlled via code edits and instead there's .gitignor'ed config files that are read in a developer build for turning those features on. Additionally, git commit hooks that scan for WIP comments & prevent pushing them and sprinkling WIP comments around temporary changes might also be good defense in depth measures.
You can get RSS feeds of random indie web posts. I’ve found a few good sites this way.

https://indieblog.page/rss
Thanks for sharing your work.

Please post direct links to HN not redirections.

Your work might make a good candidate for ShowHN if it meets the guidelines.

Thanks again.
Packet loss is supposed to be deterministic?
How easy are zebrafish to raise? What is their lifecycle? Can I raise millions of them in my basement or will I need to buy some warehouse? How long do they take? What do they eat? Any venture capitalists willing to fund my next business?
My claim, this entire time, is that the reality is that you, as an individual, have no rights to consent or volunteer beyond what society bestows upon you. Your usage of documents from the founding of the United States of America, if anything, entirely support my argument. The Declaration of Independence might talk about equality but the reality is that blacks and women were not equal. It took society choosing to give them rights for them to receive them. That's not an idea, that's the reality. Whether or not you like it or not or think it's a good idea doesn't get in the way of that is what reality is.

> We are not nearly as free now as free people were when the document was written. We are subject to much more authority.

Tell this to a slave in 1776.

> It seems as though in your view, anything "society" does is legitimate, is that so?

No, "legitimate" is a judgement, I'm saying that what society does is what society does and there is no philosophy or higher abstraction defining it. It's just reality. I think if society is functioning in a way we disagree with, our only option is to try to convince enough people to change it. We can use language that tries to define philosophies around consent and individual rights in order to be persuasive but if society doesn't agree then you don't get those things, even if you really think that's how it should work.