I think it’s better to think about what swap is, and the right answer might well be zero. If you try to allocate memory and there isn’t any available, then existing stuff in memory is transferred to the swap file/partition. This is incredibly slow. If there isn’t enough memory or swap available, then at least one process (one hopes the one that made the unfulfillable request for memory) is killed.

If you ever do start swapping memory to disk, your computer will grind to a halt.

Maybe someone will disagree with me, and if someone does I’m curious why, but unless you’re in some sort of very high memory utilization situation, processes being killed is probably easier to deal with than the huge delays caused by swapping.

Edit: Didn’t notice what community this was. Since it’s a webserver, the answer requires some understanding of utilization. You might want to look into swap files rather than swap partitions, since I’m pretty sure they’re easier to resize as conditions change.

You have to enjoy a hobby in itself, if you’re too focused on results then you’ll have problems with the gulf between your ability and your aspiration. Is there anything you’ve tried doing that you just enjoy doing? Like do you just enjoy banging on a piano or drawing or writing, regardless of the output?

At the moment I’m trying https://gpt4all.io/index.html, a big part of the problem is that I just haven’t had a lot of time to deal with it, and the model parameter files are large downloads.

I’ve used it a bit to try and work on my Spanish. That is, using it as a sophisticated chatbot. Unfortunately it’s still quite frustrating for that: I figured I’d ask it to play un juego de rol (a roleplaying game), and it kinda sucks at it. I’m gonna give it a go with an open source alternative, hopefully they’re less aggressively calibrated toward being tedious and awful. It’s just, getting an open source language model running takes a decent amount of time and effort, so I’m sorta midway through that.

Don’t forget: congress checking the power of the supreme court is an unacceptable violation of the principle of checks and balances, at least if you ask John Roberts about it. Luckily he’s totally unbiased on this issue.

It’s older, but The Longest Journey is good. Unfortunately, the final game in the series kinda sucks.

While it’s an ensemble, most people would agree that the main character of Final Fantasy VI is a woman—they just might disagree about which woman is the lead.

I also liked the first Xenosaga game, but again, it’s a series that goes pretty badly downhill.

I guess there’s a sense in which all computer science is table lookups, but if you want a nauseatingly technical summary of deep learning—it’s high-dimensional nonlinear regression with all the methodological seatbelts left unfastened.

The only thing this says about us is that philosophical illiteracy is a big problem in the sciences, and that computer science is the most embarrassing field in all STEM. Otherwise, you know, people find beauty in randomness (or in stochasticity, if you prefer) all the time. This is no different.

This is the curation effect: generate lots of chaff, and have humans search for the wheat. Thing is, someone’s already gotten in deep shit for trying to use deep learning for legal filings.

I guess the important thing to understand about spurious output (what gets called “hallucinations”) is that it’s neither a bug nor a feature, it’s just the nature of the program. Deep learning language models are just probabilities of co-occurrence of words; there’s no meaning in that. Deep learning can’t be said to generate “true” or “false” information, or rather, it can’t be meaningfully said to generate information at all.

So then people say that deep learning is helping out in this or that industry. I can tell you that it’s pretty useless in my industry, though people are trying. Knowing a lot about the algorithms behind deep learning, and also knowing how fucking gullible people are, I assume that—if someone tells me deep learning has ended up being useful in some field, they’re either buying the hype or witnessing an odd series of coincidences.

I understand that, but the amount of money that gets fed into political campaigns already generates staggering amounts of spurious text. It’s hard to remember what happened the day before yesterday, but “fake news” originally meant sites that were set up to vaguely look like news sites, all for the purpose of pushing one or two entirely made-up propaganda pieces. Yes, deep learning can partly automate this, but automation isn’t necessary in this case.

There comes a point of diminishing returns with spurious text, and I feel like we’re already past that point.

The only thing deep learning has done is make forgery more accessible. But Stalin was airbrushing unpersons out of photos sixty years ago, so in principle this is nothing new.

When it comes to politics, there’s already enough money floating around that you don’t need deep learning to clog the internet with shit. So personally I’m not expecting anything different.

I owned an Alfa Romeo Spider for a while, which was Italy’s answer to a question nobody asked: where else could I get an MG?

Plus being small, low to the ground, and with even weight distribution, it’s like driving a slow moving cloud.

But isn’t it such a weird coincidence that “apolitical” always happens to be the same as “whatever is best for moneyed interests?” Like being able to take free software and repackage it for sale?

I don’t really like driving, but it is necessary. My (main) car is a 1993 Mazda Miata, which is currently being repainted bright yellow, and I’m gonna put a new top on it next. It isn’t fast, but it handles extremely well and it’s fun to drive. Or at least, it makes driving as fun as it can be.

I think anyone who’s driven a Miata understands.

Free as in freedom has been political since, like, the 1970s. I think the more important question is, when did people come to believe that free as in beer is apolitical?

Then you should head on over to 4chan.org, where you can be an obnoxious child to your heart’s content.

We’d need to see their financials, which is tricky since they aren’t public yet. There’s also the issue, Steve lies about everything, so should we believe he’s telling the truth?

But my guesses would go like this:

Since they’ve been spending other people’s money, they probably haven’t been watching expenses closely. Their P&L is probably dominated by payroll and rent. I can’t help but feel that programmers are drastically overpaid, which is a symptom of the same issues, that there’s a lot of other people’s money chasing a finite supply of techbros.

The reason I think programmers are probably overpaid, by the way, is the number of man-hours they allegedly put in, versus the quality of their output. Reddit is a particularly shocking example of this.

In any case, the other people’s money doctrine is to grow into profitability, which means burning money on spurious shit until some magic happens. Not exactly a winning business model.

There is a kind of subtle technical problem with karma, which is (technical) problem of trust. I haven’t looked at the Lemmy spec, much less the source, but decentralized systems always have an issue of, who can you trust?

Let’s say I want to have a user account with inflated karma for some reason. I can spin up an instance and simply assert what my karma is—and if I need to, I can create a bunch of fake accounts on my instance and create a bunch of fake posts and comments and assign fake karma scores to them, so that it can be audited.

Now if other instance owners get wise to what I’m up to, they can defederate me. But this creates a few immediate problems, including the problem of adding more administrative load to instance owners generally. The bigger problem is the witch hunting that could ensue, if a culture of karma were to develop as it has on Reddit.