If we’re talking about Matrix as a Discord alternative, then that would mean thousands of channels, each with hundreds or thousands of users, many with constant activity.
I’m not sure if anybody actually uses Matrix at the scale of the average Discord user. Sliding sync is supposed to help, but I don’t think the Matrix architecture can realistically scale that high.
I set up their accounts
Setup is the hardest part. Syncing multiple devices and device migration are also hard. I’ll bet you’re going to act as tech support every time they get a new phone. That’s fine for your family, but it’s hardly going to scale.
The performance issues show up when dealing with large groups syncing between instances. You might just not be using it that way, but that’s what needs to work seamlessly for a viable substitute for Discord.
Matrix is notorious for its poor performance with large/numerous groups. They keep claiming to improve it, but it’s still bad.
I mean, it’s great that it works for you, but be honest: isn’t your tolerance for technological friction a bit higher than the average bear’s? People complain that Mastodon is too hard, and Matrix is ten times worse to sign up for and use.
I hate to say it, but Matrix is never going to be mainstream. Its UX is bad and it seems like it’s too bloated to fix. If I tried to get people to move from Discord to Matrix, they’d never take me seriously again. It was hard enough getting people to move from Facebook Messenger to Signal.
Also interested in this. The ideal solution would stream to a private server for storage in real-time, with access control so you can grant trusted individuals access.
This would allow retention of evidence in a scenario where your phone is seized/destroyed/lost or you are detained, and would give you (and whoever you choose to grant access) the ability to control distribution, unlike a livestream to Twitch or YouTube or whatever.
FOSS projects are often labors of love.
Nobody who isn’t completely deranged loves marketing.
I’ve been using cryptpad.fr (the “flagship instance” of CryptPad) for years. It’s…fine. Really, it’s fine. I’m not thrilled with the experience, but it is functional and I’m not aware of any viable alternatives that are end-to-end encrypted.
It’s based on OnlyOffice, which is basically a heavyweight web-first Microsoft Office clone. Set your expectations accordingly.
No mobile apps, and the web UI is not optimized for mobile. I mean, it works, but does using the desktop MS Office UI on a smartphone sound like fun to you?
Performance is tolerable but if you’re used to Google Sheets, it’s a big downgrade. Some of this is just the necessary overhead involved in an end-to-end encrypted cloud service. Some of it is because, again, this is a heavyweight desktop UI running in a web browser. It’s functional, but it’s not fast and it’s not pretty.
Good point. You can’t even get an M* Pro with 128GB. Only the Max and Ultra lines go that high, and then you’ll end up spending at least twice as much.
Memory bandwidth is 256GB/sec, much less than M4 Max (526GB/s) or M2 Ultra (800GB/s). Expect performance to reflect that.
DNS over HTTPS. It allows encrypted DNS lookup with a URL, which allows for url-based customizations not possible with traditional DNS lookups (e.g. the server could have /ads or /trackers endpoints so you can choose what to block).
DNS Over TLS (DoT) is similar, but it doesn’t use URLs, just IP addresses like generic DNS. Both are encrypted.
And that’s the #1 reason to use Mint over Ubuntu!
Snaps make a little more sense in servers since you can package CLI stuff in snaps, but not in flatpaks. For GUI apps, it’s “fine” but it doesn’t solve new problems, and the way Canonical has migrated apt packages to snaps is aggressive and error-prone.
Honestly, that sounds great.
My biggest problem with Flatpak is that Flathub has all sorts of weird crap, and depending on your UI it’s not always easy to tell what’s official and what’s just from some rando. I don’t want a repo full of “unverified” packages to be a first-class citizen in my distro.
Distros can and should curate packages. That’s half the point of a distro.
And yes, the idea of packaging dependencies in their own isolated container per-app comes with real downsides: I can’t simply patch a library once at the system level.
I’m running a Fedora derivative and I wasn’t even aware of this option. I’m going to look into it now because it sounds better than Flathub.
Google Pixel hardware isn’t great
This is true, but if you’re coming from a Galaxy S8, a Pixel 9 will be a significant upgrade in performance. More comparable to an S21 or S22 as far as cpu performance goes.
Hi! Please consider offering downloads in epub format as well as PDF. PDF is difficult to work with, particularly when it has a hardcoded dark background like the Meteorina files. I am not able to read these comfortably on my e-reader, for example.
If you have source files in some other form you might be able to convert them easily to epub with something like Pandoc. I’d be willing to help figure out the process if you can send me a source sample to work with.
In my experience, this is more a problem if you are fully running your own mail servers, not so much if you are using an established email service. My MX record reflects my email provider, and my outgoing mail goes through their servers. So I’m as trusted as they are, in general. Your mail provider should have instructions on how to set up DNS for verification.
If you’re willing to pay money for it, you can get your own domain for $2-$15 per year, then use it with pretty much any commercial email service. That way you can change email providers without changing your address.
This is my plan going forward. I’m going to suffer the inconvenience of changing my address, but only one more time, not every time I want to change providers.
Kids these days and their “Plasma”. BACK IN MY DAY it was just KDE!
I’m not sure why this feels new to me. Perhaps it’s because I spent a lot of time on other DEs after 2009.
But also, from that link:
We will use “KDE” exclusively in two meanings:
- KDE, the community, which creates free software for end users
- As an umbrella brand for the technology created by the KDE community
So I don’t feel like it’s wrong to just call it KDE, just imprecise.
Sounds cool. I’m using LM Studio and I don’t think it has that built in. I should reevaluate others.
I’m not entirely sure how I need to effectively use these models, I guess. I tried some basic coding prompts, and the results were very bad. Using R1 Distill Qwen 32B, 4-bit quant.
The first answer had incorrect, non-runnable syntax. I was able to get it to fix that after multiple followup prompts, but I was NOT able to get it to fix the bugs. It took several minutes of thinking time for each prompt, and gave me worse answers than the stock Qwen model.
For comparison, GPT 4o and Claude Sonnet 3.5 gave me code that would at least run on the first shot. 4o’s was even functional in one shot (Sonnet’s was close but had bugs). And that took just a few seconds instead of 10+ minutes.
Looking over its chain of thought, it seems to get caught in circles, just stating the same points again and again.
Not sure exactly what the use case is for this. For coding, it seems worse than useless.
But any 50 watt chip will get absolutely destroyed by a 500 watt gpu
If you are memory-bound (and since OP’s talking about 192GB, it’s pretty safe to assume they are), then it’s hard to make a direct comparison here.
You’d need 8 high-end consumer GPUs to get 192GB. Not only is that insanely expensive to buy and run, but you won’t even be able to support it on a standard residential electrical circuit, or any consumer-level motherboard. Even 4 GPUs (which would be great for 70B models) would cost more than a Mac.
The speed advantage you get from discrete GPUs rapidly disappears as your memory requirements exceed VRAM capacity. Partial offloading to GPU is better than nothing, but if we’re talking about standard PC hardware, it’s not going to be as fast as Apple Silicon for anything that requires a lot of memory.
This might change in the near future as AMD and Intel catch up to Apple Silicon in terms of memory bandwidth and integrated NPU performance. Then you can sidestep the Apple tax, and perhaps you will be able to pair a discrete GPU and get a meaningful performance boost even with larger models.
Or perhaps you do not understand how Discord is commonly used.
People join dozens of servers. Maybe one for every game they play, every TV show they watch, every podcast they listen to. Everything has a Discord.
Even small Discord servers have many channels. Bigger ones will have dozens or hundreds of channels.
Some servers have millions of users. Most of the servers I’m in have thousands.
Many channels are default for all users in the server.
Not sure what the mathematical average is, but this is certainly common at least, and any alternative that can’t handle this is no alternative at all.