adutchman's recent activity

  1. Comment on LLMs can natively read and write neural network weights in ~tech

    adutchman
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    So could this mean that, as well as using frontier models to distill to cheaper models, Chinese and European players can also use the frontier models or their best models to improve them even...

    So could this mean that, as well as using frontier models to distill to cheaper models, Chinese and European players can also use the frontier models or their best models to improve them even more? That sounds great: it would mean the gap between open and sovereign models will close even more.

  2. Comment on Supermarkets freezers across Europe hit by second suspected cyber-attack in ~tech

    adutchman
    Link Parent
    That, and I have been told you need to sanitize the freezer on set intervals by heating them to ~50 c, so that is handy to be able to turn that on when you know they should be empty.

    That, and I have been told you need to sanitize the freezer on set intervals by heating them to ~50 c, so that is handy to be able to turn that on when you know they should be empty.

    4 votes

  3. Comment on Discoverable servers on Discord will have summaries, public messages will be open for search indexing in ~tech

    adutchman
    Link Parent
    Right, this will expose a treasure trove of information to the public web. Still would like communities to adopt open source apps like Zulip, but this is nice nonetheless.

    Right, this will expose a treasure trove of information to the public web. Still would like communities to adopt open source apps like Zulip, but this is nice nonetheless.

    21 votes

  4. Comment on Denmark has quietly ended its Collabora pilot, halting a major effort to replace Microsoft software and achieve greater technological independence in ~tech

    adutchman
    Link Parent
    I don't know tbh. What I was getting at, was that OnlyOffice set out to have good MS Office file support and a familiar interface from the get-go, while for LibreOffice, this was put in later. The...

    I don't know tbh. What I was getting at, was that OnlyOffice set out to have good MS Office file support and a familiar interface from the get-go, while for LibreOffice, this was put in later. The same goes for collaborative editing: OnlyOffice supports this natively, Collabora Office was a kind of hack where you kind of wrap the LibreOffice GUI or something but I don't follow that all closely.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on Denmark has quietly ended its Collabora pilot, halting a major effort to replace Microsoft software and achieve greater technological independence in ~tech

    adutchman
    Link
    I have a lot more faith in EuroOffice. The technical foundation of OnlyOffice is much better and nicer to use and EuroOffice solves the governance problem.

    I have a lot more faith in EuroOffice. The technical foundation of OnlyOffice is much better and nicer to use and EuroOffice solves the governance problem.

    17 votes

  6. Comment on Denmark tests humanoid robots in supermarkets to help to ease staff workload at night in ~tech

    adutchman
    Link
    I don't know if this will work. The video demo was quite sloppy and didn't fill FIFO (first in, first out. This makes sure the oldest items are first so you don't get moldy soup in the back of...

    I don't know if this will work. The video demo was quite sloppy and didn't fill FIFO (first in, first out. This makes sure the oldest items are first so you don't get moldy soup in the back of your shelf), so I'm not quite convinced. I am seeing mopping robots in my supermarket which is a more sensible idea imo.

    1 vote

  7. Comment on Denmark tests humanoid robots in supermarkets to help to ease staff workload at night in ~tech

    adutchman
    Link Parent
    That's a bit like what Lidl does. They just keep everything in cardboard boxes and swap them wholesale. Some products are refreshed as a pallet.

    That's a bit like what Lidl does. They just keep everything in cardboard boxes and swap them wholesale. Some products are refreshed as a pallet.

    2 votes

  8. Comment on Donald Trump strikes deal with Vladimir Putin to get diesel in sharp reversal of US policy weeks before midterms in ~society

  9. Comment on Fridges in French supermarkets hit by cyber attack in ~tech

    adutchman
    Link Parent
    Fair enough. Why you'd need to do that remotely boggles the mind. I do understand the grid use-case, but you'd hope you can only adjust within safe ranges remotely

    Fair enough. Why you'd need to do that remotely boggles the mind. I do understand the grid use-case, but you'd hope you can only adjust within safe ranges remotely

    1 vote

  10. Comment on Donald Trump strikes deal with Vladimir Putin to get diesel in sharp reversal of US policy weeks before midterms in ~society

    adutchman
    Link
    Last I heard, Russia didn't have enough diesel for their own citizens. Has that changed or is this the worst symbolic deal in history?

    Last I heard, Russia didn't have enough diesel for their own citizens. Has that changed or is this the worst symbolic deal in history?

    3 votes

  11. Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech

    adutchman
    Link Parent
    Absolutely, getting started is a mess nowadays. I have hope that the slop companies will quickly get overtaken by ones that actually give a shit (as in, the worse will get worse, the best will get...

    Absolutely, getting started is a mess nowadays. I have hope that the slop companies will quickly get overtaken by ones that actually give a shit (as in, the worse will get worse, the best will get better).

    1 vote

  12. Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech

    adutchman
    Link Parent
    Oh yes absolutely, there are a lot of great tools (of which Krita and Kdenlive are also Kde tools, just like this one). I would guess the goal is more to make it easier to combine...

    Oh yes absolutely, there are a lot of great tools (of which Krita and Kdenlive are also Kde tools, just like this one). I would guess the goal is more to make it easier to combine entertainmentforms (I have an animation that I want to turn interactive). The author is an avid contributor to KDE, so like you said he has a trackrecord.

    2 votes

  13. Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech

    adutchman
    Link Parent
    Probably more like, know a bit of UX/UI and requirements engineering.

    Probably more like, know a bit of UX/UI and requirements engineering.

  14. Comment on Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all in ~tech

    adutchman
    Link
    Nicollò Venerandi is currently making a replacement the old fashioned way (as in, he puts in an effort) and it seems to be going quite well. It is a full studio to make QT apps, animations, videos...

    Nicollò Venerandi is currently making a replacement the old fashioned way (as in, he puts in an effort) and it seems to be going quite well. It is a full studio to make QT apps, animations, videos and audio all using a clickable nodes UI. He recently put up a nice demo (imo) but he used some AI in the demo (voice-overs and such) making people think it was slop. Hopefully he puts a new one up soon.

    https://invent.kde.org/niccolove/plasma-studio
    https://youtube.com/@niccoloveslinux

    6 votes

  15. Comment on US-Denmark-Greenland security deal: The dramatic and strange negotiation process in ~society

    adutchman
    Link Parent
    Yup. They themselves have now called a spade a spade by admitting it is the MAGA propaganda channel.

    Yup. They themselves have now called a spade a spade by admitting it is the MAGA propaganda channel.

    4 votes

  16. Comment on Productivity tools on MacOS in ~tech

    adutchman
    Link Parent
    Homebrew is great. Made me feel a bit more at home as a Linux user when I had a macbook for work.

    Homebrew is great. Made me feel a bit more at home as a Linux user when I had a macbook for work.

    2 votes

  17. Comment on Looking for more pop / rock songs with sick sax solos! Got any ideas? in ~music

    adutchman
    Link Parent
    :(. I wish you luck on your search then!

    :(. I wish you luck on your search then!

    1 vote

  18. Comment on How to get better at academic writing quickly? in ~humanities

    adutchman
    Link
    You can post a snippet here or send a DM, I/we can take a look if you want. I didn't do university, but I do write as my job.

    You can post a snippet here or send a DM, I/we can take a look if you want. I didn't do university, but I do write as my job.

    3 votes

  19. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    adutchman
    Link
    I fell into a rabbit hole of trying to optimize import times in a Python project (I know, seems pointless, but I made a fair amount of progress). For it, I use an LLM to instrument the package...

    I fell into a rabbit hole of trying to optimize import times in a Python project (I know, seems pointless, but I made a fair amount of progress). For it, I use an LLM to instrument the package with Pyinstrument, see what the bottlenecks are, and suggest a change. This has worked quite well, but one package I could not get rid of stood out to me: Pint. It's a supposedly small package for converting units, but it took a while (some 500 odd ms I think) to get imported and started.

    Turns out it has all sorts of complicated machinary to read a DSL at import time, which was quite slow. I tried improving it but ran into the limits of the architecture.

    That's when I thought: surely, this does not have to be complicated? So I am currently working on a library which implements the core functionality of Pint, but with a focus on speed and simplicity.

    I used LLMs in some novel ways for me here: use it as a brainstorming partner, as a researcher on other tools and as a researcher to see how packages actually use the package. It also helped to have it implement the arithmetic itself, since that is not my strongest suit. I think the result is pretty nice, I hope to finish it in a few weeks (hopefully, we all know how these things often go).

    1 vote

  20. Comment on Looking for more pop / rock songs with sick sax solos! Got any ideas? in ~music