Mama told me not to come.

She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I initially started with natural language processing (small language models?) in school, which is a much simpler form of text generation that operates on words instead of whatever they call the symbols in modern LLMs. So when modern LLMs came out, I basically registered that as, “oh, better version of NLP,” with all its associated limitations and issues, and that seems to be what it is.

    So yeah, I think it’s pretty neat, and I can certainly see some interesting use-cases, but it’s really not how I want to interface with computers. I like searching with keywords and I prefer the process of creation more than the product of creation, so image and text generation aren’t particularly interesting to me. I’ll certainly use them if I need to, but as a software engineer, I just find LLMs in all forms (so far) annoying to use. I don’t even like full text search in many cases and prefer regex searches, so I guess I’m old-school like that.

    I’ll eventually give in and adopt it into my workflow and I’ll probably do so before the average person does, but what I see and what the media hypes it up to be really don’t match up. I’m planning to set up a llama model if only because I have the spare hardware for it and it’s an interesting novelty.











  • Grayjay on my Android phone. I like that it supports a lot of different services, and I have subs on Odysee, Rumble, and Nebula (I pay for a sub there). I sometimes download videos for offline use if I’m going to listen on my commute or something (no point in using up data if I don’t need to).

    On my desktop/laptop, I just use YouTube directly w/ uBlock Origin on Firefox (to block ads) without logging in. I don’t watch much YouTube on my desktop/laptop, and when I do, I’ll just look for a specific video or whatever.

    I also have NewPipe installed on my phone for when I want to find something specific (i.e. background music or something), because Grayjay’s search kind of sucks.






  • eBay is completely different though, since they have a lot of consumer protections, as well as a variety of services and used products. I got my phone on eBay used, which was about half the cost of buying new, and the phones was <6 months old. I also got a smart watch on eBay refurbished, again about half the price and there’s zero indication on the watch that it’s used or refurbished. I buy used Switch games (w/ case) on eBay as well, which aren’t as good of a deal, but I still routinely get them $30-40 when they’d normally retail for $50-60.

    You can buy utter crap on eBay, but you can also buy high quality used products. On Amazon, those same used products tend to be about 10% more expensive (my experience), and Temu just doesn’t have anything similar.

    If you’re after cheap everyday items, shop at your local dollar store or buy on AliExpress. If you’re after new electronics, wait until one of the regular sales (usually holiday season and tax season), or shortly after the next version launches, and then shop online (lots of retailers). If you’re after used electronics, check your local classifieds, and fall back to eBay.

    At no point is Temu on my list of options.