It’s insane that this is even legal.

I’ve never actually tried it, but I think you could use BTRFS subvolumes to multiboot without partitioning the physical space.

And then maybe even use deduplication across subvolumes?

BTRFS can work across multiple disks much like ZFS. It supports RAID 0/1/10 but I can’t tell you about performance relative to ZFS.

Just be sure you do NOT use BTRFS’s RAID5/6. It’s notoriously buggy and even the official docs warn that it is only for testing/development purposes. See https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#raid56-status-and-recommended-practices

Edit: Another interesting thing to note between the two file systems is deduplication. ZFS supports automatic deduplication (although it requires a lot of memory). BTRFS supports deduplication but does not have built-in automatic dedup. You can use external tools to perform either file-level or block-level deduplication on BTRFS volumes: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Deduplication.html

Good advice!

This is also available with BTRFS. Personally I am leveraging this feature via Snapper, simply because it was the default on OpenSuse and was good enough that I never bothered looking into alternatives. I’ve heard good things about Timeshift, too.

This has saved my butt a couple times. I’ll never go back to a filesystem that doesn’t support snapshots.

I really liked ZFS when I used it many years ago, but eventually I decided to move to BTRFS since it has built-in kernel support. I miss RAIDZ, though. :(

If you got a problem, reinstall and do the same stuff again, you’ll almost certainly get the same problem again

Sure, but nobody’s likely to do that. If I wiped my system now, I doubt I could get it back to exactly the same state if I tried. There are way too many moving parts. There are changes I’ve forgotten I ever applied, or only applied accidentally. And there are things I’d do differently if I had the chance to start over (like installing something via a different one of the half-dozen-or-so methods of installing packages on my distro).

For example, I have Docker installed because I once thought a problem I had might have been Podman-specific. Turned out it was not. But I never did the surgery necessary to fully excise Docker. I probably won’t bother unless and until there is a practical reason to.

Also worth mentioning: you might still need to add the “most recent visit” column under the View menu. And if you dare to actually load any of those pages, they’ll move all the way to the top, and will not remain in their original location. It’s really annoying.

Whisper is open source. GPT-2 was, too.

Absolutely this. Phones are the primary device for Gen Z. Phone use doesn’t develop tech skills because there’s barely anything you can do with the phones. This is particularly true with iOS, but still applies to Android.

Even as an IT administrator, there’s hardly anything I can do when troubleshooting phone problems. Oh, push notifications aren’t going through? Well, there are no useful logs or anything for me to look at, so…cool. It makes me crazy how little visibility I have into anything on iPhones or iPads. And nobody manages “Android” in general; at best they manage like two specific models of one specific brand (usually Samsung or Google). It’s impossible to manage arbitrary Android phones because there’s so little standardization and so little control over the software in the general case.

btrfs’s RAID features are not production-ready, and at this point I doubt they ever will be. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs#Implemented_but_not_recommended_for_production_use

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Btrfs-Warning-RAID5-RAID6

ZFS is definitely more robust.

Is this legit? This is the first time I’ve heard of human neurons used for such a purpose. Kind of surprised that’s legal. Instinctively, I feel like a “human brain organoid” is close enough to a human that you cannot wave away the potential for consciousness so easily. At what point does something like this deserve human rights?

I notice that the paper is published in Frontiers, the same journal that let the notorious AI-generated giant-rat-testicles image get published. They are not highly regarded in general.

DuckDuckGo is an easy first step. It’s free, publicly available, and familiar to anyone who is used to Google. Results are sourced largely from Bing, so there is second-hand rot, but IMHO there was a tipping point in 2023 where DDG’s results became generally more useful than Google’s or Bing’s. (That’s my personal experience; YMMV.) And they’re not putting half-assed AI implementations front and center (though they have some experimental features you can play with if you want).

If you want something AI-driven, Perplexity.ai is pretty good. Bing Chat is worth looking at, but last I checked it was still too hallucinatory to use for general search, and the UI is awful.

I’ve been using Kagi for a while now and I find its quick summaries (which are not displayed by default for web searches) much, much better than this. For example, here’s what Kagi’s “quick answer” feature gives me with this search term:

Room for improvement, sure, but it’s not hallucinating anything, and it cites its sources. That’s the bare minimum anyone should tolerate, and yet most of the stuff out there falls wayyyyy short.

Something like for-jay-yo.

From https://forgejo.org/faq/ :

Forgejo (pronounced /forˈd͡ʒe.jo/) is inspired by forĝejo, the Esperanto word for forge.

“Smart” may as well be synonymous with “unpredictable”. I don’t need my computer to be smart. I need it to be predictable, consistent, and undemanding.

I’ve been using Kagi for a while, so I’ll post a few quick thoughts I had after reading the article, linked blog, and mastodon thread.

The one thing in the blog post I strongly disagree with is her statement that the summarizer is “the same old AI bullshit”. I think they just assumed that without actually testing it. The summarizer is fantastic, and is a great example of the right way to use LLMs. Its output comes entirely from the URL or file you specify. It does not hallucinate. You can ask it follow-up questions about the document, and again, its replies are limited in scope to what’s actually in that document. If you ask it something out of scope it’ll tell you that it can’t find that information in the document. This is great because it’s using the LLM for what LLMs are actually good for — complex language parsing — and not for what they’re bad for, like reasoning or information storage/retrieval. It’s actually quite difficult to misuse the summarizer. It’s straightforward and effective. This is Kagi’s killer feature, IMO.

I can’t speak as highly of its search-integrated AI features like FastGPT. They mostly take information from the contents of the first few search results, but they also seem to “fill in the blanks” more than I’d like. Sometimes it gives me information that is simply not in the sources that it cites. It’s not as bad as using ChatGPT (which hallucinates all day every day, and if it ever tries to cite source is hallucinates those, too) but it needs improvement.

That said, Kagi doesn’t shove the AI down your throat like you might think reading the blog post. These are separate features that need to be explicitly activated. Plain searches don’t return results from the LLMs. If you want that, you need to explicitly go to the assistant or trigger the “quick answer” feature on the search results page. EDIT: I just realized that this is not totally true as of a few weeks ago, when they added a feature to automatically trigger the “quick answer” blurb for search queries ending in a question mark. Perhaps that’s why Lori felt like it was over-emphasized.

Anyway, back to the summarizer, here is an example of it in action. I gave it the URL of the Mastodon post. I think this is an excellent result. I also asked it an unrelated followup question so you can see that it limits itself to the information in the URL. It will not make shit up!

The summarizer lets me download conversations in markdown form, so I’ll just paste it right in here so you can see.

Exploring https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770

Assistant:
Key points:

• The author wrote a blog post criticizing the search engine Kagi, which then prompted the CEO of Kagi, Vlad, to email the author directly to argue against the criticism. [1]
• The author woke up to an email from Vlad, the CEO of Kagi, who was upset about the blog post the author had written. [1]
• The author decided to publicly share the email exchange with Vlad, as they felt it was important for people to see his unhinged behavior. [1]
• The author refused to engage in a private debate with Vlad, as they did not want to be taken “to Crime Scene Number Two” without any accountability. [1]
• The author believes Vlad is unable to accept criticism or disagreement, and that it “eats him alive” when someone doesn’t agree with him or his company. [1]
• The author states that no other search engine CEO has emailed them directly to “mansplain their company” in this manner. [1]
• The author sees Vlad’s behavior as “petty and sad” and believes he has no understanding of boundaries. [1]
• Other users in the thread share similar experiences of Vlad’s inability to accept criticism and his tendency to simply restate his own opinions rather than address counterpoints. [1]
• The author and others characterize Vlad’s behavior as that of a narcissist who cannot tolerate disagreement. [1]
• The author and others are amazed by Vlad’s decision to set up a separate company in another country just to print and give away t-shirts, rather than focus on improving Kagi’s core search functionality.

[1] lori (@lori@hackers.town)

Query:
What’s the capital of North Dakota?

Assistant:
The knowledge provided does not contain any information about the capital of North Dakota. The context is focused on an email exchange between the author and the CEO of Kagi search engine regarding criticism of the company.

Apple: builds their entire software ecosystem on free, open-source foundations.

Also Apple: better have a million euros if you want to even start distributing software.

The best use case for an external app store is free open-source software, like we have on the Android side with F-Droid. Apple stopped that before it even started. Jeez.

“no functional impact”? We clearly have very different ideas about the function of a display.

It’s always something with Google, isn’t it?