bamboo

It’s work, I don’t get much of a choice here. I do get paid for the hassle though.

Debian or Ubuntu are usually the best choice if you depend on glibc. Alpine is definitely more compact but musl isn’t always an option.

I do this stuff for work, unfortunately I don’t have the flexibility to choose here.

Sorry I was way off in my assumption that the venv package is a few hundreds kilobytes. apt is reporting 6144 bytes. 6 kilobytes. Installing python on the base bookworm image is 38.3MB. If you’re already installing python, it’s a rounding error. Also they have a separate python3-minimal package (which saves a laughable 200kb), why are they de-featuring the regular python version when they also have a separate minimal version? It makes zero sense. The python3 package should contain the entire python standard library. If it were supposed to be an addon, it wouldn’t be part of the standard library.

While I can’t say any of this is wrong, you’re missing likely the single biggest component inflating the cost of US manufacturing: profit margins. Every step of the supply chain has a profit margin attached. Sometimes just a few percent, but often double digits. These compound, so a 5% margin on a simple component will see an additional 15% when sold as part of an assembly, which is then marked up another 20% when sold as part of the finished good. There’s also financialization which burdens US companies. Companies generally need to take loans to fund their operations, and end up having to pay heavy interest fees and rent which also drives up cost. Workers and environmental protections are more expensive, but in practice they are relatively minor compared to a lot of other inefficiencies US industry struggles with.

[citation needed]

This is the kind of crap that makes me glad flatpak and such exist. I don’t want a maintainer making arbitrary decisions like this, it adds unpredictability and platform inconsistency.

A similar issue I face is that on Debian the python stdlib well.. isn’t all standard. In particular they split off the venv package, and it’s an extra step that adds unnecessary complication. No other Linux distros or other OS do this, it’s so frustrating. I guess someone is super happy they saved a few hundreds kilobytes of disk space though.

I think it’s incredibly naïve to think that because we’ve hit a boundary on one particular aspect of LLMs that the technology has peaked as a whole. There are lots of ways to improve LLMs that aren’t just increasing the parameter size, for example there’s been an uptick in smaller models that are optimized to run on client devices without large GPUs. There is probably a future where we have small 3-7B models that are competitive with today’s best 70B models, but can run in real time on any smartphone. We’ll have larger context windows, allowing LLMs to work on larger problems. And we’ll have better techniques for getting high quality information out of LLMs, there are already adversarial methods where two LLMs hold a debate on a subject that have proven more accurate and comprehensive data is possible. They’ll also continue to be embedded into different places in software that make them more useful, not just like a chatbot that lives in its own world.

The 13” version actually has a larger battery than its predecessor.

All of Apple’s M series chips have the ram right on the same package as the rest of the SoC. Not upgradeable, but also much faster than traditional off-package memory.

I think it is fair to say that the hype surrounding last year’s Reddit exodus has come to an end. But, Lemmy existed for several years before then, and will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. It’s not going to grow infinitely, but there will likely be more waves in the future that see spikes of activity followed by declines, but each one will bring in new users that will build up the community slowly.

Lemmy is also part of the fediverse which does seem to be growing at a healthy rate, especially mastodon. It’s entirely possible that future software updates there will make Lemmy more visible to mastodon users and allow both communities higher levels of interaction.

That’s what cat /etc/os-release is for.