Oh, yeah, I can see why uniform randomness would be a problem. I thought the criticism was directed at “Just sort people into a Lemmy server either based off their interests or location”

I was thinking that you do a little questionnaire and it gives you the best matching server.

Do you know why? It sounds to me like a great addition to the fediverse.

Shut down as in someone shut down the website or people telling you that the idea is trash?

Pick the one everyone else is using. Your friend has a Hotmail? You make a Hotmail. Everyone switched to Gmail? You’ll also switch to Gmail. Also for a lot of people, email is just email. They don’t even know that you can choose a different provider.

When it came to email, we didn’t care about the system becoming too centralized. They were all run by large companies that had the resources to keep things running for a long time, so no need to consider how long your email will survive. Most people didn’t even know they had options. If someone you know made an aol email, then you also made an aol email. The content you receive is exactly the same regardless of where you sign up. No need to think about who federates with who, or how the instance gets moderated. Email is email.

You can’t log in from your lemmy.world account, but you can interact with it through lemmy.world as if you had an account there.

Reddit has a recommendation algorithm to do most of that work for you.

rTorrent with Flood front end.

My only complaint so far is being unable to reach the rTorrent TUI when it’s running headless. It otherwise works great.

You’re supposed to connect them to your cochlea. The eardrums don’t respond correctly to electrical inputs.

What are these Manjaro controversies?

Submarines work by manipulating their density, don’t they? Then they just float at whatever level matches their density.

I would be equally amazed to see something denser than water swimming.

I’ve never found Bing chat to match up with the free ChatGPT. It often just refuses to answer my question while ChatGPT will at least take a guess and give me something to work with.

Perfectly fine tool, but they should not be used when you’re being evaluated on your ability to do arithmetics.

They do not have sales data, so they use two different proxies: number of reviews, and number of active players.

I don’t see mention of how they get the number of active players. I’m assuming it’s through stats in Steam or something similar. If that’s the case, then their assumption of this number being biased towards being larger than the true number would be wrong. If you choose to both pirate and buy the game, chances are good that you’ll be playing the pirated version, and therefore would not get counted towards active players.

You mean at the tail end of a thread that opened with me pointing at the environmental costs?

Exactly! Hence my confusion. If you care about energy costs, then shouldn’t saving energy be a good thing? Why would the benefit be 0?

Weren’t you just telling me that the environmental cost has no impact on your stance?

It sounds like you don’t like how LLMs are currently used, not their power consumption.

I agree that they’re a dead end. But I also don’t think they need much improvement over what we currently have. We just need to stop jamming them where they don’t belong and leave them be where they shine.

Yeah, they operate very opaquely, so we can’t know the true cost, but based on what I can know with certainty given models I can run on my own machines, the numbers seem reasonable. In any case, that’s not really relevant to this discussion. Treat it as a hypothetical, then work out the math later to figure out where we want to be and what threshold we should be setting.

Indeed. Though what we should be thinking about is not just the cost in absolute terms, but in relation to the benefit. GPT-4 is one of the more expensive models to run right now, and you can accomplish very good results with their smaller GPT-4o mini at 0.5% of the energy cost^[1]. That’s the cost of running 0.07 LED bulbs over an hour, or running 1 LED bulb over 0.07 hours (i.e. 5min). If that saves you 5min of time writing an email while the room is lit with a single LED bulb and your computer is drawing energy, that might just be worth it, right?

[1] Estimated by using https://huggingface.co/spaces/genai-impact/ecologits-calculator and the pricing difference between GPT-4o, 4o mini, and 3.5 (https://openai.com/api/pricing/). The assumption I’m making is that the total hardware and energy cost scales linearly with the API pricing.