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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • If not vanilla Ubuntu, I’d still suggest trying an Ubuntu derivative like Linux Mint or POP! OS. Ubuntu has a huge community, so in the event you run into issues it’ll be easier to find fixes for it.

    What you’ll find is that Linux distros are roughly grouped by a “family” (my term for it anyway). Anyone can (theoretically, anyway) start from a given kernel and roll their own distro, but most distros are modified versions of a handful of base distros.

    The major families at the moment are

    • Debian: A classic all-rounder that prioritizes stability over all else. Ubuntu is descended from Debian.

    • Fedora: Another classic all-rounder. I haven’t used it in a decade, so I won’t say much about it here.

    • Arch: If Linux nerds were car people, Arch is for the hot rodders. You can tune and control pretty much any aspect of your system. … Not a good 1st distro if you want to just get something going.

    There are many others, but these are the major desktop-PC distro families at the moment.

    The importance of these families is that techniques that work in one (say) Debian-based distro will tend to work in other Debian-based distros… But not necessarily in distros from other families.



  • I wanted to disagree with you, but checking the data almost all of the best action flicks I could have sworn were fairly recent actually came out in the early-mid noughts. Seems like after The Matrix blew up the genre, nobody ever figured out how to put it back together.

    Even if I wanted to quibble and argue for the best my personal favorite action flicks within a precise “2 decade” window… it’s a depressingly short list:

    • 2004

      • Hellboy (technically a comic movie, but I’m keeping it because Doug Jones and Ron Perlman just rocked)
      • Kill Bill Vol. 2 (Vol 1 missed the cutoff)
    • 2006

      • Crank
    • 2007

      • Hot Fuzz
    • 2009

      • The Bourne Ultimatum
      • District 9
    • 2017

      • Baby Driver

    … Almost every single other action flick I thought of came out between 1998 and 2004. (Also, 2000 was a weirdly good year for action fans in retrospect)

    Sigh. I’m gonna go bemoan the world getting lame and shake my cane at the kids out on my lawn.

    Edit: JOHN WICK! How TF did I forget those? But yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s it now.









  • a quick web search uses much less power/resources compared to AI inference

    Do you have a source for that? Not that I’m doubting you, just curious. I read once that the internet infrastructure required to support a cellphone uses about the same amount of electricity as an average US home.

    Thinking about it, I know that LeGoog has yuge data centers to support its search engine. A simple web search is going to hit their massive distributed DB to return answers in subsecond time. Whereas running an LLM (NOT training one, which is admittedly cuckoo bananas energy intensive) would be executed on a single GPU, albeit a hefty one.

    So on one hand you’ll have a query hitting multiple (comparatively) lightweight machines to lookup results - and all the networking gear between. One the other, a beefy single-GPU machine.

    (All of this is from the perspective of handling a single request, of course. I’m not suggesting that Wikipedia would run this service on only one machine.)