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I'm not strictly talking about adherent vegan or vegetarian lifestyles, though those certainly do count towards this discussion.

I feel like there's an absolute plethora of good, different reasons to reduce animal based proteins. The big one for most people right now is obviously cost. Simple meals like meatloaf or stroganoff simply aren't worth it (to me) to make with beef when beef is $8/lb for 70/30. But lots of other reasons like the environment, animal welfare, and health consciousness exist.

As far as a lifestyle goes, it definitely feels like the winds have shifted considerably. While IRL here in the southeastern US you do still have those "I'll eat 1 steak for every vegan who cries about it" types, online, that type of talk is extremely cringe in most contexts and circles. Now I just feel like when people say they are vegan, there isn't an instant visceral reaction from everyone like there used to be. I recall not too long ago, everyone's favorite joke was "how do you know someone is vegan? Because they'll tell you!" when all that person did was decline a burger. In fact, quite the opposite seems to happen today. There's a lot of "good for you/I wish I could do that" type comments. Just seems like things are shifting culturally.

I'm not personally vegan or vegetarian, but I have drastically reduced my animal products. I make black bean burgers instead of regular burgers. I make my fried rice without any meat. I make a lot of curry that just happens to be vegan. I just bought groceries for the next 2 weeks and the total amount of animal products is 1 pound of ground pork, 1 pound of scallops, and 8oz of mozzarella cheese. That's it. Years ago I would eat animal products pretty much for every meal.

Is it just me? Or have most people reduced their consumption too? It's hard to tell because everything at the grocery store is "protein protein protein" and there's a lot of social media content of body builders eating a dozen eggs and 3 rotisserie chickens for dinner and that type of content, but I'm not sure how much of that actually exists in real life. Seems too expensive for the average person.

For most of the history of Tildes, if someone came across the site and decided they wanted to join, but didn't know anyone already on, they could email Deimos with an invite request. However, with the rise of LLMs, the noise-to-signal ratio has become so high this is no longer a way to join Tildes - explanation by Deimos: https://tildes.net/~tildes/1vl3/is_there_any_interest_in_building_a_tildes_successor#comment-if6r

I've read the recent discussions on Tildes being maintained as is and not actively grown, but I think most of us believe the community is up for many more years of enjoying each other's company, and would like to pick up a few more members along the way if they seek us out. That just requesting to join isn't possible anymore makes me a little sad.

I had the thought that larger sites are able to invest more resources into spam account filtering, many of us have active accounts on other social media sites (or other types of sites with community interactions), and I speculate that almost everyone who finds tildes and is interested in joining has already been active in some other online community. Some of us Tilderinos could post here our handles in other communities, and offer to consider sharing one of our invite requests to Tildes if DM'd in our other community. We'd have to reject requests from new accounts, and use some judgement on established ones, but I am thinking having people go through the filtering process those other communities use would reduce the spam requests enough to make it workable.

What do you guys think?

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The prices have increased, and even before people called it too expensive.

I am just wondering - do you have one? What do you use it for? I've been thinking of getting one (as a business expense, I guess the price is high, but then again - what other option do you have for compute? renting GPUs is quite expensive, any comparable amount of VRAM is very expensive - ok if you have space and mostly want to do inference, I guess you have better options (3090 or 5090)

For me, I have just been considering having some more compute available for robotics, finetuning, trying out selfhosted and fine tuned LLMs, among other things. My other setup (M1Pro 32GB and a 1070 Mini) could work for some stuff, but especially for the robotics part it's mostly about NVIDIA...

Curious about any experiences.

This is an unofficial Boost for Lemmy port.

With the Any significant changes to Tildes are extremely unlikely topic (and the Tildes successor one) from the other day about how this site was now in minimum maintenance mode, that gave me the motivation to finally look into porting Boost to work with Tildes. Knowing that the site won't change felt like a good time to "make" an app for it. For the longest time, the two mobile apps that I used for browsing Reddit were Reddit is Fun (which Tildes already has with Three Cheers thanks to @talklittle) and Boost. I've been using Three Cheers from the day that it came out. The original Boost creator (Rubén Mayayo) went to Lemmy instead of here and he created and maintains Boost for Lemmy. While Tildes isn't federated, it still has most of the features that Lemmy has, and it's also similar enough to Reddit. In the past few months, a project called Morphe has spawned to patch Android apps. A user on GitHub called Breal, has been maintaining Boost for Reddit by providing patches compatible with Morphe. He himself built his patches off the work from wchill though he's been mia for a few weeks. He's been fixing issues and backporting the new features that were implemented in the Lemmy app. That gave me the idea that something could be done for Tildes.

Anyway, I got a Claude subscription for the summer and I'm trying to test its limits. I've been a programmer for 16 years and it has been blowing my mind. The more I work with LLMs the more they feel like masochists (the techniques that they use to solve various problems are truly wild). Some projects that should usually take months or years can be done in only a few days through sheer brute forcing. I got a proof of concept done the other day to see if I could connect Boost for Lemmy to Tildes. It worked within only a few hours which was promising. It turns out that implementing this well though was a lot harder than I expected. It took some really heavy modding to keep it seamless. I really wanted it to feel like native Boost while still following Tildes' way of doing stuff. After a lot of trial and errors, here it is. I was able to maintain compatibility so that it can live alongside Lemmy. Boost's account switcher lets your easily switch between Lemmy and Tildes.

To install it:

1. Download the Morphe Manager to your phone.
2. Add my repo as a source URL in Morphe:

   github.com/Apostolique/apos-morphe-patches
   

3. Select Boost and follow the instructions to patch.
4. Install the patched Boost for Lemmy.
5. In Boost for Lemmy, select tildes.net as your instance and connect to your account.

Here's to multiple more years of talking with you guys on Tildes.

Report any bugs that you find, or issues with my instructions.

Edit: Some screenshots (low battery because this took a lot of testing to get right):

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