Greg's recent activity
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Comment on White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt now has a family connection to a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest in ~society
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Comment on Want to get a 3D printer for miniatures that work well with open source software in ~hobbies
Greg Link ParentI was thinking I probably should have said in my post that I was talking specifically about FDM there and I know next to nothing about resin printing! (For anyone who doesn’t have the background:...I was thinking I probably should have said in my post that I was talking specifically about FDM there and I know next to nothing about resin printing! (For anyone who doesn’t have the background: it’s a whole different ecosystem, different brands, different slicers, different support generation algorithms, etc. - you don’t just select “resin” as a material option in the software).
As I understand it some brands (and yeah, I think Elegoo in particular) are front runners in the resin space but mid tier for FDM, some are the opposite, and I even seem to remember someone suggesting that Creality are better at laser cutters than they are at either kind of printer. Pretty much just ignore any preconceptions I’ve given outside FDM, basically!
On the question of whether to go resin or FDM at all, I’ll defer to the people who know both. I will say I’ve been surprised and impressed with the detail you can get with a good slicer and a 0.2mm nozzle, but I’m generally printing mechanical parts rather than minis and I know that the miniatures side of the hobby does tend to lean towards resin, so I’m very much just info dumping about FDM based on the question rather than explicitly recommending it.
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Comment on Want to get a 3D printer for miniatures that work well with open source software in ~hobbies
Greg LinkThree bits in the toolchain to think about: the slicer (actually interfaces with the printer), the printer firmware (affects which slicers are supported, and how the printer itself works), and the...- Exemplary
Three bits in the toolchain to think about: the slicer (actually interfaces with the printer), the printer firmware (affects which slicers are supported, and how the printer itself works), and the CAD software (only relevant if you’re making your own models, and largely agnostic to which slicer and printer you’re using - they pretty much all support importing and exporting at least a couple of common formats).
The most relevant part to your question is the slicer - the software that takes an existing 3D model, slices it into layers, and creates the g-code that tells the printer how to physically move when printing it. Orca is becoming a bit of a de facto standard nowadays, although Prusa Slicer and Bambu Studio are still commonly used too - if you look at installing the slicer on your distro of choice, and using it with the printers you’re considering, that pretty much covers the “does it work with Linux?” question.
Printer firmware doesn’t have to be open to work with an open source slicer, but some people consider that a nice to have for philosophical reasons or if they’re interested in really diving into the fine details of printing technology. Klipper is the starting point to look at there, but it’s not a requirement for Linux support at all - more something to consider if you’re looking for the whole toolchain to be OSS.
Finally, modelling and CAD: I’m very, very amateur on this part. If you’re looking to print existing minis, at least to start, this probably doesn’t matter to you - and there are an absolute ton of great models out there, so that’s a very reasonable possibility. I mostly use existing models and occasionally make blocky functional parts, so I use OpenSCAD if I need to put something together based on measurements, but that’d be terrible for artistic modelling. As I understand it, Blender is a pretty well respected option when designing more artistic prints, as well as its more usual CGI uses. But again, this is all kind of separate from the printing part of the question - any CAD or 3D software will export in at least one format that your slicer can then import.
Very quick overview of hardware and brands, just so you know where the market currently is:
- Multi-tool and multi-nozzle printers in general are just now becoming accessible to the mainstream market. These are important if you care about using separate support materials or directly printing in multiple colours (previous multi colour systems like the Bambu AMS and its many clones were too slow and wasteful to be worthwhile, although they are still nice for filament storage and auto-feeding). For miniatures, assuming you’re planning to paint them, I doubt a multi-head or multi-nozzle setup is worth the cost for you.
- Bambu makes solid, well priced, beginner-friendly printers that print extremely well. But they pissed off the community by making their devices significantly more proprietary with a firmware update last year. They’ve walked it back a bit, and they have a “dev mode” setting now, but people are a bit more wary of them in case of potential future enshittification.
- Prusa are the old guard and make high-quality, mostly-open-but-not-quite-as-much-as-they-used-to-be printers, firmware, and slicer all in-house in Europe. They cost a lot, have some quirks, but do also have a genuine philosophy behind them and are known as rock solid platforms for print farms and enthusiasts.
- Snapmaker are talked about a lot right now because they just released the first affordable tool changer and really shook up the market. Looks to be a solid option if that’s of interest, although others are already catching up quickly.
- Sovol are interesting - they basically make prebuilt hardware based on the fully open source Voron printer designs that you’d otherwise need to build from scratch. All the openness of a fully OSS platform, all the control of a fully OSS platform, all the jank of a fully OSS platform until you dial in every little thing yourself. But amazing if you’ve got the skill and patience to learn how to do so.
- Creality, Elegoo, and a bunch of others are basically copying Bambu and Prusa’s homework and making it cheaper. Some decent options there, but all with their own respective drawbacks. You’ll want to look more carefully at compatibility and potential drawbacks at this end of the market, but there are some potential good deals.
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Comment on New X/Twitter feature revealed many MAGA influencers to be foreigners in ~society
Greg Link ParentIt’s truly, truly insane to me that the Russian government does genuinely appear to have the cartoon villain goal of “make the world worse, so that more of some finite supply of ‘not worse’ must...It’s truly, truly insane to me that the Russian government does genuinely appear to have the cartoon villain goal of “make the world worse, so that more of some finite supply of ‘not worse’ must necessarily flow to Russia”. Like, even if that were somehow going to work it would still be literal evil, but in reality it’s both evil and absurd.
It’s exhausting, because people like Putin are clearly a special kind of competent and capable - if he wasn’t he’d be long dead - and they could still even be chasing money and power in a million ways that at least build up something. But no. Just destruction.
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Comment on GPT-5 has come a long way in mathematics in ~tech
Greg Link ParentThis is an interesting one, actually! I’m not fully up to date on it (did a bit of work with a team who were competing for the AIMO prize, but that was last year, so basically a lifetime ago in...This is an interesting one, actually! I’m not fully up to date on it (did a bit of work with a team who were competing for the AIMO prize, but that was last year, so basically a lifetime ago in this field), but the balance between tool calling and LLM parsing actually skews (or did skew, at least) pretty heavily towards the latter for mathematical problems.
Most successful approaches absolutely did use code generation and a python interpreter for the actual arithmetic - but basic arithmetic, and even not-too-complicated symbolic algebra, are pretty much solved problems for computers. For a problem to be challenging at all to an LLM with tool calling abilities, you’re inherently testing its capacity to parse, “understand”, and reformulate the conceptual problem in order to use those tools effectively.
It’s similar to allowing calculators in an exam: we could spend time doing long division on paper, and similarly we could spend time training LLMs to do accurate arithmetic and symbolic manipulation internally, but for most real-world tests it’s fair to assume that tools will be available to assist. The questions are then formulated to test understanding rather than mechanical skills: did you, or did the LLM, select the right numbers to put into the calculator (if there are numbers in the answer at all)? The only way to do so is to interpret the question correctly, which puts the onus on the human or LLM rather than on the calculator or python runtime.
One of the unexpectedly tricky bits is actually getting decent questions to benchmark with, though! LLMs generally have an extremely good ability to recall things from their training data, and it’s natural to train a mathematically-focused LLM on any question-answer pairs you can find, but that means if you’re testing at the high school or early university difficulty level you’re going to have to write and test with completely new questions that have never been seen or published on the internet if you want a baseline of how well the model can actually generalise concepts. If you don’t do that, you’re likely to end up testing recall more than generalisation - which is worthwhile in itself, as long as you’re aware that’s what you’re doing, but will fall off a cliff once it hits something it doesn’t have a close example for encoded in the training data.
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Comment on Google must double AI serving capacity every six months to meet demand in ~tech
Greg Link ParentAh, I see where you’re coming from - I still think of NVIDIA hardware all being GPUs of one type or another (or NICs, but that’s a whole other thing), because they are still a bit more...Ah, I see where you’re coming from - I still think of NVIDIA hardware all being GPUs of one type or another (or NICs, but that’s a whole other thing), because they are still a bit more general-purpose than pure coprocessor boards, but it’s fair to say that the B200/300 are a lot heavier on the CUDA cores than anything else. Blackwell in general is the architecture, so you do have the 50 series gaming cards included there too, but in fairness even those are a bit more CUDA-focused than previous gaming cards - hence the kind of unpopular push for DLSS as a more important part of the graphics pipeline too, because that benefits more from what NVIDIA are really working on now.
What I will say is you might be surprised how much power you need to dump even into inference-focused cards. A full rack of L40s is somewhere around 30kW, which is a good bit less than some of the full on training system setups I’ve seen marketed, but that one rack is still using more power in a year than your house is likely to use in a decade.
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Comment on Google must double AI serving capacity every six months to meet demand in ~tech
Greg Link ParentAny LLM you can run locally is making massive compromises to allow you to do so - the fact they still work after dropping 90% of the parameters and quantising the rest by a factor of four is...Any LLM you can run locally is making massive compromises to allow you to do so - the fact they still work after dropping 90% of the parameters and quantising the rest by a factor of four is actually super impressive to me, but if you want to see the compute it takes to run a full fat model, just try running flagship DeepSeek in its native
bf16. And DeepSeek’s market-shaking breakthrough was its efficiency, too; the broad understanding as far as I’m aware is that the major closed source models are even more resource intensive in the interest of getting better results.As I understand it more or less everyone is still running NVIDIA chips, too? I know Google’s been pushing the TPUs for a long while, and we’re getting general tensor coprocessors in more hardware as time goes on, but there’s a reason NVIDIA’s datacenter division is basically driving the entire S&P500 nowadays.
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Comment on Google must double AI serving capacity every six months to meet demand in ~tech
Greg Link ParentOverall I agree with where you’re coming from, but I was surprised when I saw some OpenAI cost estimates recently: they’re scaling the user base to the extent that training spend is only a bit...Overall I agree with where you’re coming from, but I was surprised when I saw some OpenAI cost estimates recently: they’re scaling the user base to the extent that training spend is only a bit more than double the inference spend. So still a good amount more, for sure, but less of a gap than I expected.
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Comment on Google must double AI serving capacity every six months to meet demand in ~tech
Greg LinkHow much of this is user demand, I wonder, and how much is “we decided on your behalf to put an LLM summary at the top of every search”?How much of this is user demand, I wonder, and how much is “we decided on your behalf to put an LLM summary at the top of every search”?
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Comment on US President Donald Trump signs order to remove tariffs from Brazilian beef, coffee other food items in ~society
Greg Link ParentThat’s all fair, and to me at least, the “if demand truly outstrips supply” part pretty much inherently prevents it from being real greedflation. For what it’s worth, I’m still in favour of market...That’s all fair, and to me at least, the “if demand truly outstrips supply” part pretty much inherently prevents it from being real greedflation. For what it’s worth, I’m still in favour of market systems as a distribution mechanism in general, I just don’t like seeing them treated as inherently positive, inherently fair, or inherently natural: they’re a dangerous tool, to be managed carefully and with respect.
Balancing an actual demand increase with genuinely limited supply is a great example of where a price increase works well (mostly… the ethics get trickier if we’re talking about things like basic sustenance or medical care, or if that demand increase is going to wealthy hoarders as a luxury at the expense of people in genuine need). The “greed” part comes in if the supply is being artificially limited by a cartel, for example, or if the price is being kept high by monopolistic practices. Or, as in our starting example, where external circumstances (e.g. a genuine increase in costs) allow for a price increase that then sticks after the costs drop back down, because it’s “re-trained” the customer to expect a new price point.
I’d prefer to see cost-plus as the default starting point that regulation and incentives funnel business towards where possible. I think in a lot of people’s minds that’s how they already envisage the economy - they have an ingrained idea of business in terms of covering costs and then adding a reasonable margin for profit, rather than maximising profits regardless of any other concerns. And I’d prefer to see “what the market will bear” used as a genuine mechanism to balance supply and demand where necessary, with careful guardrails to handle situations like the one you described, rather than used to mean “companies are better off buying up competitors, undermining scientists, corrupting democracy, and spreading misinformation to customers, because all of those have a better ROI than improving the product”.
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Comment on US President Donald Trump signs order to remove tariffs from Brazilian beef, coffee other food items in ~society
Greg Link ParentI mean, the economic systems in the Western world are normally pitched as a balancing of interests between market participants, managed and guided by regulation. I think you’re closer to the truth...I mean, the economic systems in the Western world are normally pitched as a balancing of interests between market participants, managed and guided by regulation.
I think you’re closer to the truth on how it actually works, I’d debate whether that’s how it’s intended to work in the sense of “matches what most people expected, based on what was publicly promised by the people making the decisions to manage the economy” - and I’m not even talking about the totally fictional economic policy we’re seeing now, I’m talking about the broad “truths” perpetuated over the last 50 years or so.
Honestly I don’t even think “greedflation” is necessarily a bad term just because profit maximisation is expected behaviour for companies. If you’re operating on the assumption that they are pure profit maximisers with no other considerations, it’s probably helpful to remind the consumer that the relationship is purely an adversarial one, and that any justification the company gives other than greed shouldn’t be trusted.
Or, y’know, we could question that assumption that “what the market will bear” is the only thing that should drive behaviour, and maybe try to construct incentives, regulations, and cultural pressures that balance it with the greater good.
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Comment on US President Donald Trump signs order to remove tariffs from Brazilian beef, coffee other food items in ~society
Greg Link ParentWhich may not, in fact, be superior for all participants in all situations, hence the wide array of different philosophies and implementations various governments use to guide or manage the free...Which may not, in fact, be superior for all participants in all situations, hence the wide array of different philosophies and implementations various governments use to guide or manage the free market.
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Comment on By administratively redefining 'who is a foreigner,' the Lai government is turning the constitutional 'One China' framework into a dead letter in ~society
Greg LinkThis was an interesting read as someone who only has a surface level understanding of the political situation there. My first thought was that creating a legal paradox for Taiwanese residents born...This was an interesting read as someone who only has a surface level understanding of the political situation there.
My first thought was that creating a legal paradox for Taiwanese residents born on the mainland is a shitty thing to do, but the underlying point of no longer pretending that Taiwan has any realistic chance of controlling the mainland seems sensible.
The bit I didn’t think of - perhaps foolishly - is China being more pissed off about Taiwan declaring them legally separate than about Taiwan claiming ownership over the mainland. In my mind, it would be a good thing from China’s perspective for the Taiwanese government to stop treating Beijing as illegitimate, but in retrospect it’s obvious that a move to disagreeing on what the country is is actually more fundamental than both sides agreeing on the borders but disagreeing on who should be running it.
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Comment on New ‘Stargate’ TV series ordered at Amazon from ‘Blindspot’ creator Martin Gero in ~tv
Greg Link ParentThat’s a hell of a question, actually! TNG at its best beats Stargate at its best, but if I were to pick five random episodes of each I might actually bet on Stargate winning overall…That’s a hell of a question, actually! TNG at its best beats Stargate at its best, but if I were to pick five random episodes of each I might actually bet on Stargate winning overall…
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Comment on New ‘Stargate’ TV series ordered at Amazon from ‘Blindspot’ creator Martin Gero in ~tv
Greg Link ParentThe choice to officially announce it with a zoom call between the creators and a couple of fan site admins is what gives me real hope for this one. There would’ve been nothing wrong with a...The choice to officially announce it with a zoom call between the creators and a couple of fan site admins is what gives me real hope for this one.
There would’ve been nothing wrong with a produced 30s teaser, as long as they got the tone right - but the janky, very human approach they took, with Joseph Mallozzi in the corner grinning like a kid at Christmas the whole time just felt genuine in a way that so much current media doesn’t.
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Comment on A Cloudflare outage is taking down large parts of the internet - X, ChatGPT and more affected in ~tech
Greg Link ParentYeah that was kind of my meaning - in the “supply chain” for delivering content over the internet, you’ve basically got AWS handling the servers and Cloudflare handling the networking (although...Yeah that was kind of my meaning - in the “supply chain” for delivering content over the internet, you’ve basically got AWS handling the servers and Cloudflare handling the networking (although the lines are actually getting fuzzier as they both try to expand into new offerings and eat each others’ lunch a bit), and they each own an extremely significant share of their respective markets (outside China, which is important, but its own thing in a lot of ways).
I was meaning that other players don’t come close to the dominance of those two, that’s why I mentioned a lot of sites using both in a non-redundant way. We’re a lot closer to eggs in one basket - or two baskets, tied together in a way that you can’t get to the remaining eggs anyway if either breaks - than it’d look like just by seeing how many companies operate in the space.
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Comment on A Cloudflare outage is taking down large parts of the internet - X, ChatGPT and more affected in ~tech
Greg Link ParentI mostly agree with your broader point - I think the overall uptime is pretty damn good, and the impact of an outage actually is mostly the fault of the companies using these services without...I mostly agree with your broader point - I think the overall uptime is pretty damn good, and the impact of an outage actually is mostly the fault of the companies using these services without creating a fallback or failover on a second platform - but by market share we basically have two players: AWS and Cloudflare.
And for a lot of sites, they’ll be using both in the worst-case way, with different components from each so failure of either one takes the site down, rather than redundancy so that only a simultaneous failure of both would be a problem.
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Comment on AGI and Fermi's Paradox in ~science
Greg LinkIf you haven’t read Asimov’s short story The Last Question, I think you’d enjoy it! Also, to echo @tauon’s point a little, They’re Made of Meat comes to mind too. I think if we are ascribing...If you haven’t read Asimov’s short story The Last Question, I think you’d enjoy it! Also, to echo @tauon’s point a little, They’re Made of Meat comes to mind too.
I think if we are ascribing human-ish motivations to the hypothetical AGI - because yeah, we don’t really have another frame of reference for sapience to work from - I’d question the assumption about desiring true immortality. Plenty of people are happy enough to close out their life’s work over the century, more or less, that we’re given. Plenty more desire another century, or a maybe a millennium, but I haven’t seen a lot of people who’ve really thought about it in depth say they’d want 10,000 years, or 100,000.
Maybe AGI sees timelines an order of magnitude or two longer than that, but a million years is still an unfathomably long time - more than enough for even an artificial life form to potentially be thinking of that in terms of its “natural” lifespan as limited by things like radioactive decay, likelihood of planetary cataclysm, physical limits of data storage (all electrons used within a range reasonable for sublight communication, for example). And if I’m off by an order of magnitude, or perhaps even two, above and beyond that million year baseline we’re still well within the boundaries of a single planet or solar system’s “working lifespan”.
I think it’s at least reasonable to entertain the possibility that an artificial life form could find contentment, enlightenment, purpose, nontrivial achievement, or similar without ever wanting or attempting to reach galactic-scale near-eternal scope, and choose to see its own existence as bounded (looking at you, Mr Data). I also think that even for artificial life, “indefinite” is actually a very big concept, and I’m inclined to believe that physical limitations still kick in to give some expected boundaries, even if they’re much much longer ones that could theoretically be overcome. As the boundaries of organic life theoretically could be, for that matter.
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Comment on How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers in ~science
Greg Link ParentThis is fascinating - I can’t conceptualise coming across an unknown word in text and trying to parse it without being able to hear it in my mind. From everything you’ve said, I wonder if the...This is fascinating - I can’t conceptualise coming across an unknown word in text and trying to parse it without being able to hear it in my mind.
From everything you’ve said, I wonder if the better effectiveness of phonics is partly because it makes it harder to hide an inability to read? If the teacher is focusing on phonics, the “bone doesn’t start with an M” conversation kind of has to happen, it can’t just be left to slide. Tie that in with the issues around class sizes, lack of resources, etc. etc. and I wouldn’t be surprised if “more effective” often translates to “makes mistakes easier to spot” rather than “makes learning easier” per se.
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Comment on Matching mouse dpi and acceleration across Mac and Linux? in ~tech
Greg LinkThis is a bit oblique, so feel free to ignore it if anyone has a more direct answer, but there's a decent amount of info about normalising HID drivers between OSes in these build videos for a...This is a bit oblique, so feel free to ignore it if anyone has a more direct answer, but there's a decent amount of info about normalising HID drivers between OSes in these build videos for a desktop smooth scroll wheel (second, third). They focus on scroll behaviour rather than tracking, for obvious reasons, but it's also clear the creator has done the kind of near-obsessive deep dive that it takes to get these things right, so the libraries and drivers he's using might be helpful to you?
Side note: this is what I love about open source! A profit motive will rarely get you better than "eh, good enough" - it takes someone who cares about the work they're doing to spend that much time getting it absolutely dead on, and I'm always happy to see more of that in the world
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