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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I wonder how it works with pensions. In my EU country, you get about 25% extra on top of your gross salary that goes into a private pension fund, most or all of it paid by your employer. I know that the US has 401(k), of which I don’t know the details, but I believe it requires that the employee pays half and the company matches the amount. At the end of the ride, I wonder what your options are as a foreigner to cash out. If you choose to invest in your own country, the full amount will be paid from your gross salary. This is something that you need to take into account to get a clear picture of the net benefits.

    Those net benefits should be weighed against having 25-35 paid holiday days, unlimited paid sick days, paid parental leave, social security benefits, etc. It might still be worth it, but my guess is that it’s more interesting for European countries with lower wages, as in that case the extra money might outweigh the loss of some benefits.

    Though I’m sure that US companies are in many cases required to have a legal entity in the foreign country and must comply with local law, so then most of the benefits will remain.





  • I agree. I think people might have the idea that the states dictates the contents, but that’s not at all how it works in well functioning democracies. It’s there to serve the public interest: to have a relatively unbiased news outlet that’s accessible to all and without (or with little) commercial interests. It coexists with commercial news outlets.



  • Sure, but I’m just playing around with small quantized models on my laptop with integrated graphics and the RAM was insanely cheap. It just interests me what LLMs are capable of that can be run on such hardware. For example, llama 3.2 3B only needs about 3.5 GB of RAM, runs at about 10 tokens per second and while it’s in no way comparable to the LLMs that I use for my day to day tasks, it doesn’t seem to be that bad. Llama 3.1 8B runs at about half that speed, which is a bit slow, but still bearable. Anything bigger than that is too slow to be useful, but still interesting to try for comparison.

    I’ve got an old desktop with a pretty decent GPU in it with 24 GB of VRAM, but it’s collecting dust. It’s noisy and power hungry (older generation dual socket Intel Xeon) and still incapable of running large LLMs without additional GPUs. Even if it were capable, I wouldn’t want it to be turned on all the time due to the noise and heat in my home office, so I’ve not even tried running anything on it yet.


  • The only time I can remember 16 GB not being sufficient for me is when I tried to run an LLM that required a tad more than 11 GB and I had just under 11 GB of memory available due to the other applications that were running.

    I guess my usage is relatively lightweight. A browser with a maximum of about 100 open tabs, a terminal, a couple of other applications (some of them electron based) and sometimes a VM that I allocate maybe 4 GB to or something. And the occasional Age of Empires II DE, which even runs fine on my other laptop from 2016 with 16 GB of RAM in it. I still ordered 32 GB so I can play around with local LLMs a bit more.


  • I’m not going to defend Apple’s profit maximization strategy here, but I disagree. Most people won’t end up buying a cable and adaptare because they already have one, and in contrast to those pieces made of plastic and metal, the packaging is mostly made of paper. I’m pretty confident that the reduction in plastic and metal makes up for the extra packaging that’s produced for the minority that does buy a cable and/or adapter.







  • I don’t understand the relevance of what you’re saying. Do you mean that the platform should have the right to allow biological females only (following the definitions of your law system)? Do you think that that’s implied when a platform is female only and defensible in court? Not a snarky remark, just genuinely curious what you mean. This case was all about gender identity discrimination and I don’t see how biological sex fits into the picture.

    She had sued the platform and its founder Sally Grover in 2022 for unlawful gender identity discrimination in its services, and claimed Ms Grover revoked her account after seeing her photo and “considered her to be male”.

    Judge Robert Bromwich said in his ruling that while Ms Tickle was not directly discriminated against, her claim of indirect discrimination was successful as using the Giggle App required her “to have the appearance of a cisgender woman”.

    Judge Bromwich said the evidence did not establish Ms Tickle was excluded from Giggle directly “by reason of her gender identity although it remains possible that this was the real but unproven reason”.





  • Imagine a camera with only one column of pixels, so a resolution of 1x3000, for example. You point it in a fixed direction and you keep firing extremely fast. Eventually you’ve photographed everything that has passed the camera. Paste the pixels together from right to left, and you’ve got something resembling a normal photograph, but with some distortions due to the time difference between the photos. For example, if someone put their foot on the ground in front of the camera, it will be stationary between photos and appear smeared out in the final result. Since every column of pictures is made at the exact same location, you can determine that the person on the right has finished first and the person on the left last. They apparently measure this at the level of the torso (the red lines).