botanrice

until you get a teen obsessed with 3d rendering then they're up all night finding a way to convert manga into 3d scenes and your old laptop is running 100% cpu trying to keep up. xDD

Were there any parts of the process you felt could be reasonably chipped away at through improved beaureaucratic processes or lightweight advocacy?

I've been doing some advocacy work related to balcony solar mostly from a conceptual standpoint but am a renter and don't know much about the actual costs and process behind installing roof panels. I'm curious to know whether there are any low-hanging fruit we could organize around to reduce the regulatory burden on the consumer.

hey, really like your idea and have been brainstorming the same kind of tool! not as far along as you or the OP but I would love to hear about what your roadmap/plan is for a tool like this. all about helping the ppl. should i try the email on your site?

very solarpunk

I tried the first four listed and came to comment as I was confused by what the expected output should be. Just tried the rest of them and none of them were able to answer the prompt: "Give me a breakfast recipe that I can make in less than 5 minutes"

The closest was SmoLM2 135M Instruct which gave me the milk and cheese piece, which was at least close to what a recipe looks like.

Can someone help me understand whether these models are supposed to be good enough to be useful? I am asking these for a breakfast recipe and most of them are repeating text and giving me strange combinations of like chicken & parmesan or milk and like 8 cups of cheese. I really would love to use MicroLLMs and have been eagerly awaiting the day they could be useful, or at least run local LLMs for that matter, but these don't seem useful.

They don't even consistently pass the benchmarks included in the site, so what are they good for?

Edit: or is the purpose to just showcase that these small LLMs can run on WebGPU?

"intentional web surfing" is a phrase i've been exploring recently. hosting an event to turn it into an activity here in my city, should be interesting to see how people respond.

been thinking that for awhile now

I have either learned to tune it all out or have been worn down of all the terrible news. But of all the terriblew news to come from this administration, this kind of thing guts me the most :(

There is really no way around this, no silver lining. After years of working to get these programs implemented, to have the admin just willy-nilly spend money (what money!?!) to have them STOP. It hurts man.

I believe I discovered him through that same video! I now tell everyone I know about guerilla gardening lol, haven't got the know-how to do it myself quite yet though. Soon enough.

who is Asha?

not a part of Microsoft, I find it weird a company leader wouldn't sign their whole name even if an internal memo.

Same boat as you. It's wild that I can turn on the xbox, wait 20-30min for mandatory updates, then need to re-sign in or occasionally reset my wireless mac address due to some bug, then re-sign into my Xbox account even if I am fine playing offline but of course I forgot my password so now I'm on my phone doing 2FA to remember which email I used to reset the password.

Then I will need to update the game I want to play (somehow FIFA 23 still requires updates?), then re-sign in to EA whose password of course I also forgot so now I'm on my phone resetting my password for EA.

Now it's been 45minutes and I'm frustrated and realize I could have loaded up Steam or Switch and been playing this whole time. Not to mention that once the Xbox itself is working it will be running slower than the Nintendo Switch I own which is only about 2yr newer than it. just a bad system!

I legit got my old PlayStation 2 back up and running so I wouldn't deal with this. (sorry been needing to vent all this lmao)

I've had an Xbox I got from a friend and I legitimately don't know which Xbox it is lol

This is a really interesting development in language models and will be a small but relevant blip on the timeline in the development of artificial intelligence over our lifetimes

you make a good point on the discussion over time. I do miss that aspect of old forums, felt like you could have conversations as opposed to chats, in a way? It's unheard of for discussion to re-ignite on an old HN or Reddit post.

Also gotta love the long-term discussions that happen with 3-4 people saying serious things and then one complete rando coming in dropping an absurd conspiracy theory while the rest of the convo continues around them xDD

I actually had the same experience as you (own it, played it only a bit for similar reasons), but FWIW I believe there is a sandbox mode to just play around in.

Another chill medieval town building game is Manor Lords. It has some management but overal is laid back.

cool, thx for the tip!

yea I do think you're right. Really dislike that they've truly stuffed it down as everything getting auto-uploaded to OneDrive. Would be happy to use it to store certain docs but can't control how work sets it up ya know? stuck suffering instead lmao

Literally was just googling yesterday about why Windows File Explorer genuinely takes longer to boot up than microsoft edge. Insane how fast they are enshittifying.

have you met a realtor?

They can be some great people but as a profession they are known more for their extroversion and soft skills than their high IQ understanding of economics lol

why don't we kill off Goodreads instead! Bad UI, confusing, poor features, toxic users. Letterboxd is harmless, anyone could vibecode a replacement in a day and a half.

I wonder what the smallest, still practical, application of this would be now if you could implement it locally on your machine assuming you have decent hardware.

Maybe something with the file system? Like hover over any file and instead of seeing a snapshot or some details/metadata you could get a quick 1-2 line sentence on what it is. I suppose you may want to have that saved somewhere as well to cache it... but I'm def not an expert.

This would solve the always difficult issue of finding that one document! I still have trouble with document search on both mac & windows OS sometimes.

while these examples might be easy fodder for criticism I do feel like this whole idea of talking to an LLM across multiple applications and anything your pointer is on will give it context is pretty powerful and cool idea.

I'm imagining a webpage with a link - instead of opening a new link to quickly google something or opening three new tabs based on hyperlinks, i can point at a paragraph or line and ask it to tell me about it.

Maybe I can point at a song on Spotify and have it find me the youtube video, or vice versa (of course this is assuming a tool like this wouldn't stay locked into one ecosystem.. which it will).

Point is that the concept of talking to the computer with mouse as pointer is pretty cool and i guess a step closer to that whole sci-fi "look at this part of the screen and do something"

so amazing thank you for sharing!!

hey man, live on the other side of the country from you but just want to share that the collective desire for a third space is so strong that i think no matter what you do you are doing the right thing (so long as it isn't like actively harmful or exclusive, etc.).

like, i live in a big city with a tech scene and i still yearn for a space to just go and hang out to hack in that isn't a college. you are doing a service!

FWIW, not sure how you're funding it and i have no experience just offering a take: I've always felt like I would definitely be fine with spending like $15/mo on having access to a barebones space. Maybe $20-30/mo if there was more that came with it (e.g. coffee machine, occasional events). I know rent is a PITA but I get turned off by coworking spaces that charge upwards of $200+/mo, it's just not feasible obviously for a community space.

Take with that what you will, just offering one person's pov prob in your primary demographic. i'm also kinda cheap lol so maybe i'm the low end, lol

well there's place for both, right? I think it's valid for us to agree at the end of the day that you need to have so-called radical groups that accept nothing less than what they stand for to push, what they call it, the "Overton window" of societally acceptable policies and whatnot? Sure so the radical group pushes these ideas into mainstream consciousness but you need sympathetic, but more moderate groups to make it palatteable to everyone. I think this is a good thing.

The tricky part is where to draw the line? Let's take on the behemoth of black lives matter movement for sake of discussion. Anyone with progressive ideals can get behind the base premise and of course empathize with the origin of it. Many people, whether they identify with left politics or not, maybe saw those origin moments in 2020 and agreed it was messed up and we should be better as a society. And ofc you wouldn't expect the leaders of the movement ot say, "no we dont want to scare the slightly racist people so we just want more bodyacms, its okay if there is still systemic racism" - no! they should push for the most equitable possible society. Cops should be held more accountable for bad acts, any potentially racial motivations need to be investigated, shit, while we're at it, there should be less cops since they are so militaristic in many places! (I agree).

But one thing leads to another and then that push for radical change becomes "defund the police" and all of a sudden you have a cultural backlash because now you're coming after 'good hardworking cops' and now it's a culture war! Now you've got those sympathetic, if apathetic, people who felt bad about george floyd, etc. suddenly hearing that we need to 'get rid of the police' and that could lead to safety issues or their cousin is a cop, whatever. Now they're against it.

--

So, interesting thought experiment. If permacomputing folks say, no, you must be anti-capitlist and feminist and post-marxist to practice sustainable computing, essentially, now some of prime demographic who could have joined the movement (hackernews) are a little skeptical because they maybe are a little capitalist or don't understand feminism. Then the average wealthy non-tech person who buys a new phone every year hears this and instead of hearing the core principle of, huh, maybe i could buy less phones if that would foster all these positive things instead hears that by doing so they are being anti-capitlist, marxist, whatever tf it is and they get turned off, then it's "woke"!

So where is the line drawn? Do you say, eh it's fine this is for a radical group and that's how it is. Or do you try to draw in others? Quite an interesting sociological discussion actually!

honestly man I am not an expert at the terminology of liberal vs. leftist vs. progressive vs whatever. I'm just empathetic and care about uplifting our fellow citizens and want to support policies that do that, and ofc i see how capitalism harms people and the environment. but I also think that can be done without declaring the intersection of beliefs! if someone sympathizes with one of those things but hates two of the others then you've lost someone who might partake in your cause.

i also respect that there's a place for radical groups for sure, so hey, so be it if this group wants to run like this. just feels a shame to lead on a movement that can attract a wide swath of people with it's core concept but then exclude them if they don't share your exact beliefs, as OP was suggesting.

idk man I see your points for sure but feel like you're taking a pessimistic and dramatic take on it. Doing a little something is better than nothing when it comes to climate action. And doing a little something a couple times might lead to greater involvement.

environmentalists (myself included) have tried the doomsday "we need to act now!" approach and it turns off a lot of people, clearly, as evidenced by our societal regression (in the US at least).

any attempt to help weed whack is worthy of inclusion imo

that's a valid analogy for sure, I get that and see your point. But I'm not sure it applies 1:1 here, though. Whereas the systems you refer to are often structured around this idea of like corporate contribution for good feels, this permacomputing is a novel idea & upstart movement that they want to spread to more people with the goal of a more sustainable society and thoughtful use of electronics.

> more sustainable society and thoughtful use of electronics

This is where I feel there is a difference and disagree with their overt statement of ideologies as the core of the movement. Any environmentalist worth their salt should celebrate any action or idea that just generally supports getting more people to care about, get involved with, or want to protect the environment -- regardless of their age, sex, background, whatever. See: national parks.

And then in the sense of sustainable use of electronics. Who is more sustainable in this sense than the old white dude who runs the computer repair shop or the indian dude running the phone repair place? If I'm on board with permacomputer, I want to look at these guys as the experts in long-lasting & recylable use of electronics... but what's the overlap between those guys and intersectional feminism, ya know?

> Maybe that's by design?

hey man, if they just want a group built around their values to make friends and take on the machine that's fine. who am I to say they shouldn't? anyone should gather with who they please. It's just a shame to turn people off from a movement by defining such a narrow intersection of beliefs, as the OP comment here says. I also would argue that it doesn't have to be strictly *anti-*capitalist as much as pro-socialist/communist/whateveridk.

What do you think?

honestly bruh this is weirdly combative and not a good look on behalf of whatever movements you stand for