FR. My dad is dead and my mom is broke. And she’s partially broke because she helped me pay for college and I’m beyond grateful. But there’s no way she could help me financially anymore.

I read fried shrimp instead of friendship at first.

People say nope to proton and signal in here without offering a better alternative. I’m open to shitting on them (proton CEO really pissed me off by praising the trump admin), but just saying nope to them without functional alternatives isn’t helpful.

DivestOS used to be the bomb. Super secure. Monthly updates. Super private. Ran on tons of hardware. But it was run by 1 guy and he recently dropped the project. Which is fair, it was a lot of free labor and donations weren’t paying the bills, but so sad :(

I have a FP 4 that is just starting to get screen burn. I will probably just replace the screen soon to be honest and keep using it.

/e/OS is good, I also use Calyx with MicroG and all of my bank apps work.

Like everyone else said, pixels are the best phones for non stock OS. You can unlock them easy and they are quick to release security updates so the open source security nerds who made graphene OS (the best open source OS) love pixel phones.

The problem with newer Samsung (post 2021 is update) is they don’t allow you to unlock the bootloader (at least for US phones). This pretty much squashes your ability to put a new OS on it.

DivestOS is no longer maintained, RIP. Long live Calyx.

Not super common or super niche. I use R. And it completely made up code a year ago. Sometimes I still does, but less. And when I ask it for citations it can make shit up too. I really stand by the assertion that it needs a lot of babysitting.

But, between it getting better and me getting better at asking and some patience, I get what I want. But, it does require a lot of fine tuning and patience. But its still just faster than googling. And I could see the argument that the models haven’t improved but that they just have access to search engines now and that I’m mostly using them and a search engine. And sometimes they’re so whacked out I’ll ask them to search for something but theyll tell me they don’t have access to the internet and they’re so absolutely convinced of that that I have to close that chat and start a new one.

If you feed it in documentation or ask it to search for its answers in substack (or really just whatever search constraints you want) and then tell it to give you the links it used, you might have a better time. This forces it to look up an answer instead of hallucinate one. And when it gives me code, more complicated things usually fail pretty hard at first and I have to feed it the error output for a few rounds and guide it a lot.

I don’t know what to tell you. I have them successfully compiling tables of search outputs to compare different things for method development and generating code, saving me hours of work each week. It all needs to be checked, but the comparison comes with links and the code is proofread and benchmarked. For most of what I do it’s really just a jacked up search engine, but it’s able to scan webpages faster than me and that saves a lot of time.

As a hobby, I also have it reading old documents that are almost illegible and transcribing them pretty well.

I really don’t know what you’re doing that you’re just getting nonsense. I’m not.

Technology these days works in that they always lose money at the start. Its a really stupid feature of modern startups IMO. Get people dependent and they make money later. I don’t agree with it. I don’t really think oir entire economic system is viable though and that’s another conversation.

But LLMs have been improving exponentially. I was on board with everything you’re saying just a year ago about how they suck and they’re going to hit a wall even. But the don’t need more training data or the processing power. They have those and now they’re refining the LLMs. I have a local LLM on my computer that performs better than chat GPT did a year ago and it’s only a few GB. I run it on a shitty laptop.

LLMs with access to the internet are usually about as factually correct as their search results. If it searches someone’s blog, you’re right, the results will suck. But if you tell it to use higher quality resources, it returns better information. They’re good if you know how to use them. And they aren’t good enough to be replacing as many jobs as all these companies are hoping. LLMs are just going to speed up productivity. They need babysitting and validating. But they’re still an extremely useful tool that’s only going to get better and LLMs are here to stay.

I get the desire to say this, but I find them extremely helpful in my line of work. Literally everything they say needs to be validated, but so does Wikipedia and we all know that Wikipedia is extremely useful. It’s just another tool. But its a very useful tool if you know how to apply it.

Yeah, it has AI vibes but i dont think this one is AI. Up until very recently at least, AI has struggled with cat pupils.

Two low glycoalkaloid varieties are unlikely to create a high glycoalkaloid variety (and its unlikely to find a high glycoalkaloid variety outside of south America. But it’s possible. Like two short people having a tall child.

Also its probably sterile.

If you want to pollinate it to collect seed (debatable if that’s a good decision), use an electric toothbrush. The pollen needs the vibrations of a pollinator to be released.

I don’t have cartridges and I’ve had no issue with the ink heads in the years I’ve had the printer.

You’re probably right, but I’m just printing random documents on occasion.

I have an epson eco tank. No more ink cartridges.