For houses, most people’s barrier is the downpayment. Loans on raw land are more risky, because it’s not immediately going to be someone’s home (which people will go to extremes not to lose), and there’s no guarantee a home will ever be finished there. All things being equal, it’s usually cheaper to buy an older home than to build one (to code). I guess an exception would be buying land, having utilities ran, septic tank/well installed, and driveway and pad poured for a trailer, then getting an old trailer and fixing it up (all assuming zoning allows). Even that would be more expensive than buying a plot with an old trailer already on it though. But, I guess you can’t use a lot of downpayment/mortgage assistance programs on trailers either.

Pipes are often in crawl-spaces or other outer extremities of structures indirectly heated by the warmth coming from the living spaces of the structure, so 55F is a good rule of thumb in some climates.

Hmm. I just assumed 14B was distilled from 72B, because that’s what I thought llama was doing, and that would just make sense. On further research it’s not clear if llama did the traditional teacher method or just trained the smaller models on synthetic data generated from a large model. I suppose training smaller models on a larger amount of data generated by larger models is similar though. It does seem like Qwen was also trained on synthetic data, because it sometimes thinks it’s Claude, lol.

Thanks for the tip on Medius. Just tried it out, and it does seem better than Qwen 14B.

Bellingcat

Larger models train faster (need less compute), for reasons not fully understood. These large models can then be used as teachers to train smaller models more efficiently. I’ve used Qwen 14B (14 billion parameters, quantized to 6-bit integers), and it’s not too much worse than these very large models.

Lately, I’ve been thinking of LLMs as lossy text/idea compression with content-addressable memory. And 10.5GB is pretty good compression for all the “knowledge” they seem to retain.

I’ve seen this term on Mastadon. I’m actually confused by it a bit, since I’ve always thought replies are to be expected on the Internet.

I think women have a problem with men following them and replying in an overly familiar manner, or mansplaining, or something like that. I’m old, used to forums, and never used Twitter, so I may be missing some sort of etiquette that developed there. I generally don’t reply at all on Mastadon because of this, and really, I’m not sure what Mastadon or microblogging is for. Seems to be for developing personal brands, and for creators of content to inform followers of what they created. Seems not to be for discussion. I.e. more like RSS than Reddit (that’s my understanding at least).

My friend just hooks his laptop up to his TV, connects to his VPN, and plays popcorntime (streaming torrents). He used to use streaming sites, but those have been getting taken down left and right.

I think I’ve heard there are a lot of genetically male, but born female people in sports. I wonder if the same people are against those people playing in sports.

Idk how many transphobic people just care about specific issues. There’s a lot of “groomer” rhetoric, hate, and general disgust. It’s easy to get people to hate what they don’t understand; and a lot of media is trying their hardest to cultivate hate against trans people to create an out-group, so they can control the in-group.

Idk about this. I think most people care if their partners, sisters, daughters, and themselves can get healthcare that may involve an abortion. I think a lot of people do vote on vibes, and being “weird” is damaging. The Republicans are the party that won’t stop talking about transgender people; I don’t recall Harris mentioning transgendered people once.

I kinda agree with most of your other points. Economic well-being is what people vote on first and foremost. Dunno if celebrity endorsements actually hurt though. A thing to note is that, barring a tech advancement, recession, or depression, prices don’t generally decrease. I.e. wages (and government assistance) needs to rise at about the same rate as inflation (preferably more than).

Harris lost because she was seen as not going to change much of anything from Biden. She even conceded to false narratives of the right (such as immigration), instead of providing an alternative narrative that could inspire people. The economic changes she ran on were uninspiring, and I’m not sure they would’ve helped most people (mostly people don’t start small businesses, or even really have a desire to; not sure if downpayment assistance wouldn’t just increased prices and fees).

Meh, I would’ve given 3/5 stars to U.S. democracy since the Voting Rights Act. Stars taken away for FPTP, gerrymandering, campaign finance, “lobbying,” and the electoral college. I believe we’re going to go to 0/5 stars with completely rigged elections rather than just manufacturing consent and lightly tipping the scales like they’ve been doing.

Yeah, I think this could be the end of free and fair elections in the U.S., and there’s no coming back from that without a revolution. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think most of us will directly be killed by this change; our lives will just be shittier. It’ll be like living in Russia. Given how utterly incompetent the administration is looking, and the things they say they’re going to do (mass deportation of a significant part of our workforce, blanket tariffs, gutting social safety-nets), we may speed-run an economic and societal collapse. That could sow the seeds for a horrible and bloody revolution.

Or, maybe I’m wrong and the important institutions will somehow hold against a christo-fascist party controlling all branches of the federal government and a president with immunity. If there are still are free and fair elections, then congress could block a lot of things in 2026, and start repairing some of the damage in 2028.

Still, it does not bode well that the U.S. elected these people in the first place, and at best, the U.S. will slowly crumble for decades.

Court mandated drug counselor told us it makes men grow tits.

I remember liking Opposing Force and Blue Shift too.

know how to lobby the government.

I’m thinking this may be how it’ll work. More like “bribe” though, and Trump is probably doing this on purpose to coerce companies for bribes. Aka, racketeering on the highest level.

I don’t think federation has to be an obstacle for non-tech people. They don’t really have to know about it, and it can be something they learn about later. I really don’t know if federation stops people from trying it out. Don’t people think, “I don’t know what instance to join, so I’m not going to choose any?”

Personally, having no algorithm for your home feed is what I don’t like about it. Everything is chronological. Some people I follow post many times a day, some post once per month, some post stuff I’m extremely interested in sporadically, followed by a sea of random posts. Hashtag search and follow is also less useful because there’s no option for an algo.

The UI seems fine to me. I guess I’m not picky about UIs. The one nitpick I have is on mobile, tapping an image will just full-screen the image instead of opening the thread.

I haven’t checked it out in years. From my understanding, IPFS aims to be a distributed filesystem that kinda works like Bittorent. If you access a file, you then seed it. Last time I checked it out, the project was jumping on the crypto bandwagon… Just checked out their website now, and don’t know WTF it is.

That’s not really good evidence. They could’ve made more money by just holding an SP 500 index fund. Their recent Visa trade is better evidence.

Ok, yes, I support actions like these, and they are good for community defense against small civilian fascist groups. There are not the numbers to counter organizations like FBI, DHS, or national guard though. Things are a bit different when the fascist group you’re trying to counter is the federal or state government with the will to kill and immunity from their actions.

The left is such a small population in the US, it’s irrelevant. If we are to believe Trump’s rhetoric, any group that becomes too much of a nuisance will be deemed “the enemy within,” and be shot.

Things are quite different. While Trump was in office, he did multiple things that were worse than what Nixon did, and was never forced to leave office. I think our institutions were stronger back then. We didn’t have a very good democracy when Hoover was president, and it took many decades for the Voting Rights Act to get passed (which has recently been weakened by SCOTUS, and will probably be weakened much more). I think we’ll regress quite a bit. Republicans obviously want more of an autocracy/oligarchy. I think it’s a very real possibility we have Russia-style “elections” in the future, and I don’t even know how you come back from that. Assuming democracy isn’t completely destroyed, it may take many decades of fighting and changing the minds of the people who aren’t disenfranchised to get back to where we were. Hell, even civil war is on the table if Trump follows through on some of his more egregious promises (i.e. if he deems Democratic state governments as the “enemy within” and tries to use the military to depose them).