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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • cudatext as a notepad replacement. It’s closer to a full featured text editor, but is very quick to startup with no extensions installed.

    I have no idea about replacing paint, but irfanview for simple viewing, cropping, resizing, swapping formats, etc.

    For calculator stuff I sometimes just open the Python REPL. If you know the language (even a little bit) it does all the things and more. Every time I try to use the Windows calculator it annoys me trying to find the right button and them accidently putting another operator instead of equal or vice versa.



  • The one thing I wouldn’t agree with is ffmpeg.

    It does not do one thing. It does a thousand things. The way different functionality works is inconsistent. In some cases you need to read the source code to understand how or why something is happening, as it’s not generated in the already expansive documentation. To me, it’s the antithesis of the UNIX philosophy.

    That said, it’s a brilliant piece of software.








  • I know you said consumer GPU, but I run a used Tesla P40. It has 24 GB of vram. The price has gone up since I got it a couple years ago, there might be better options in the same price category. Still, it’s going to be cheaper than a modern full fat consumer gpu, with a reasonable performance hit.

    My use case is text generation, chat kind of things. In most cases, the inference is more than fast enough, but it can get slow when swapping out large context lengths.

    Mostly I run quantized 8-20B models with the sweet spot being around 12. For specialized use cases outside of general language, you can run more compact models. The general output is quite good, and I would have never had thought it was possible 10 years ago.

    ETA: I paid about $200 USD for the P40 a couple years ago, plus the price for a fan and 3d printed shroud.


  • I would do FDE yeah. My current laptop setup is with systemd-boot and a special initramfs that allows me to unlock it with a yubikey, with fallback to password. Fair warning, this exact configuration is not particularly easy to setup.

    There are also modules which enable early network connectivity along with a SSH server, meaning you login and unlock it remotely. I have not tried this.

    Debian does not frequently require rebooting under normal circumstances. Kernel updates are not that frequent, and you can usually put it off for a bit if you don’t want to deal with it.