Basically the only thing that matters for LLM hosting is VRAM capacity

I’ll also add that some frameworks and backends still require CUDA. This is improving but before you go and buy an AMD card, make sure the things you want to run will actually run on it.

For example, bitsandbytes support for non-CUDA backends is still in alpha stage. https://huggingface.co/docs/bitsandbytes/main/en/installation#multi-backend

Assuming nominal voltage of 3.7, that’s about 60Wh. For comparison, the 14" MacBook has a 70Wh battery.

That’s not good battery life but it depends on what kind of usage they’re assuming with that 7H number. I’m not sure a MacBook runs that long under high load. If it’s 7H on a heavy load, that’s respectable.

Edit: not sure what class of device is the best comparison here. Laptop? Tablet? Phone? 🤷

I want it to be consistent dammit!

YES.

In tech terms, “intelligent” or “smart” usually means inconsistent and unpredictable. It means I need to do extra work to verify that the computer didn’t “helpfully” do something I never told it to do.

I understand autocorrect on phones, because phone keyboards suck very hard. I am still shocked that both Apple and Microsoft have decided to enable it by default on desktops and laptops with full keyboards. No, Apple, believe it or not, the username field in web sites is not supposed to have a capitalized first letter. If I wanted that, I have three whole keys on my keyboard that I could have used to do that. STFU and let me do my own typing. (Why usernames are case-sensitive in certain places is a whole other matter, one that’s far outside my control.)

Borg via Vorta handles the hard parts: encryption, compression, deduplication, and archiving. You can mount backup snapshots like drives, without needing to expand them. It splits archives into small chunks so you can easily upload them to your cloud service of choice.

I don’t use this feature much so I can’t speak to the details, but yes, it does support OPDS.

Screenshot:

English Dictionary Offline: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=livio.pack.lang.en_US . Still unbloated after all these years.

Librera (ebook reader): https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.foobnix.pro.pdf.reader/ . The pro version is free on f-droid, or you can buy it on Google Play if you want to support the dev.

Fossify Gallery: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fossify.gallery/ . This is a fork of the old Simple Gallery from before it got bought out. Same deal with Fossify File Manager and the other Fossify apps. Just no-nonsense functional apps.

You can root Graphene if you want to, right?

IIRC, Android has always had native support for keyboards and mice. I remember connecting a bluetooth mouse to my old Nexus 4 running…Android 4, maybe 5? It worked out of the box. Saved my butt when the touch screen broke. :)

Can’t say I’ve tried this in recent years but I think it still works, yeah?

I’ve never tried it myself, but I think you can run full Linux VMs on Pixel phones already. A quick search brings up https://www.xda-developers.com/nestbox-hands-on/

Anyone have experience with this or similar options? Personally I’ve never used anything more advanced than Termux (which is lean and super cool, but not a full-blown VM).

Yep. If it uses a cloud service, they’re probably going to squeeze you, pull a bait-and-switch, or go out of business. The only exceptions that spring to mind are services with significant monetization in the corporate space, like Dropbox. And I’m not really confident that Dropbox’s free tier will remain viable for long, either.

Even non-cloud-based apps are risky nowadays because apps don’t remain compatible with mobile OSes for very long. They require more frequent updates than freeware/shareware generally did back in the 90s. I remember some freeware apps that I used for 10 years straight, across several major OS versions, starting in the 90s. That just doesn’t happen anymore. I’ve been using Android for over 10 years and I don’t think there’s a single app I used back then that would still work.

Single-purchase apps are basically dead, at least on mobile platforms. Closed-source freeware is dead, too. If it’s open-source, if push comes to shove someone can always pick up the torch and update it. It’s very rare for an open-source project to be completely abandoned without there at least being a viable open-source alternative available.

At this point, I don’t even look at Google Play. It’s F-Droid or bust.

The ideal amount of storage is enough that I literally never need to think about it, never need to delete anything, and never need to use cloud services for things that could realistically be local.

It’s hard to say what that would be because I’ve never had a phone that even came close.

The largest phone I’ve owned was 256GB. That was “fine”, but it was NOT big enough that I could fundamentally change my habits. For example, I don’t carry my entire music collection on my phone. I don’t even do that on my laptop anymore since the advent of SSDs.

I have a 128GB phone now and it sucks. I’ve set up a one-way copy to my home desktop with Syncthing so I can safely delete photos, videos, and screen recordings from my phone. I need to do this frequently.

With the standard price-gouging in the industry, I will probably settle for 256 with my next phone. If prices were reasonable, I’d go for 1TB at least.

I miss SD cards but there are no viable options with slots anymore.

They mention that several times in the FAQ. :)

Yeah. It will almost certainly work, but you might not get the same quality as you get on Android. Check the specs of your specific model of earbuds to see which codecs they support. LDAC should work on Debian, but as far as I know Huawei’s proprietary L2HC codec does not work on Linux.

I’m not 100% sure about this since I’ve never used Huawei earbuds myself.

I only have a vague understanding of what iptv is but I guess it’s time to learn. This looks cool.

Yeah. It was a different time, when the general public had the disposition of a myotonic goat. I don’t think any of his stuff would seem shocking by today’s standards.

Does it require any creative thought for the user to get it to write “hello world”? No. Literally everyone launching the app gets that output, so obviously they didn’t create it.

A better example would be a text editor. I can write a poem in Notepad, but nobody would claim that “Notepad wrote the poem”.

It’s wild to me how much people anthropomorphize AI while simultaneously trying to delegitimize it.

I don’t think commissioning a work is ever as hands-on as using a program to create a work.

I suspect the hangup here is that people assume that using these tools requires no creative effort. And to be fair, that can be true. I could go into Dall-E, spend three seconds typing “fantasy temple with sun rays”, and get something that might look passable for, like, a powerpoint presentation. In that case, I would not claim to have done any artistic work. Similarly, when I was a kid I used to scribble in paint programs, and they were already advanced enough that the result of a couple minutes of paint-bucketing with gradients might look similar to something that would have required serious work and artistic vision 20 years prior.

In both cases, these worst-case examples should not be taken as an indictment of the medium or the tools. In both cases, the tools are as good as the artist.

If I spend many hours experimenting with prompts, systematically manipulating it to create something that matches my vision, then the artistic work is in the imagination. MOST artistic work is in the imagination. That is the difference between an artist and craftsman. It’s also why photography is art, and not just “telling the camera to capture light”. AI is changing the craft, but it is not changing the art.

Similarly, if I write music in a MIDI app (or whatever the modern equivalent is; my knowledge of music production is frozen in the 90s), the computer will play it. I never touch an instrument, I never create any sound. The art is not the sound; it is the composition.

I think the real problem is economic, and has very little to do with art. Artists need to get paid, and we have a system that kinda-sorta allows that to happen (sometimes) within the confines of a system that absolutely does not value artists or art, and never has. That’s a real problem, but it is only tangentially related to art.

I think you were downvoted by people who think “AI” was invented in the past decade.

You’re assigning agency to the program, which seems wrong to me. I think of AI like an advanced Photoshop filter, not like a rudimentary person. It’s an artistic tool that artists can use to create art. It does not in and of itself create art any more than Photoshop creates graphics or a synthesizer creates music.

It should be as copyrightable as the prompt. If the prompt is something super generic, then there’s no real work done by the human. If the prompt is as long and unique as other copyrightable writing (which includes short works like poems) then why shouldn’t it be copyrightable?