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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • CVEs are constantly found in complex software, that’s why security updates are important. If not these, it’d have been other ones a couple of weeks or months later. And government users can’t exactly opt out of security updates, even if they come with feature regressions.

    You also shouldn’t keep using software with known vulnerabilities. You can find a maintained fork of Chromium with continued Manifest V2 support or choose another browser like Firefox.




  • Mostly via terminal, yeah. It’s convenient when you’re used to it - I am.

    Let’s see, my inference speed now is:

    • ~60-65 tok/s for a 8B model in Q_5_K/Q6_K (entirely in VRAM);
    • ~36 tok/s for a 14B model in Q6_K (entirely in VRAM);
    • ~4.5 tok/s for a 35B model in Q5_K_M (16/41 layers in VRAM);
    • ~12.5 tok/s for a 8x7B model in Q4_K_M (18/33 layers in VRAM);
    • ~4.5 tok/s for a 70B model in Q2_K (44/81 layers in VRAM);
    • ~2.5 tok/s for a 70B model in Q3_K_L (28/81 layers in VRAM).

    As of quality, I try to avoid quantisation below Q5 or at least Q4. I also don’t see any point in using Q8/f16/f32 - the difference with Q6 is minimal. Other than that, it really depends on the model - for instance, llama-3 8B is smarter than many older 30B+ models.


  • Have been using llama.cpp, whisper.cpp, Stable Diffusion for a long while (most often the first one). My “hub” is a collection of bash scripts and a ssh server running.

    I typically use LLMs for translation, interactive technical troubleshooting, advice on obscure topics, sometimes coding, sometimes mathematics (though local models are mostly terrible for this), sometimes just talking. Also music generation with ChatMusician.

    I use the hardware I already have - a 16GB AMD card (using ROCm) and some DDR5 RAM. ROCm might be tricky to set up for various libraries and inference engines, but then it just works. I don’t rent hardware - don’t want any data to leave my machine.

    My use isn’t intensive enough to warrant measuring energy costs.









  • I’m using local models. Why pay somebody else or hand them my data?

    • Sometimes you need to search for something and it’s impossible because of SEO, however you word it. A LLM won’t necessarily give you a useful answer, but it’ll at least take your query at face value, and usually tell you some context around your question that’ll make web search easier, should you decide to look further.
    • Sometimes you need to troubleshoot something unobvious, and using a local LLM is the most straightforward option.
    • Using a LLM in scripts adds a semantic layer to whatever you’re trying to automate: you can process a large number of small files in a way that’s hard to script, as it depends on what’s inside.
    • Some put together a LLM, a speech-to-text model, a text-to-speech model and function calling to make an assistant that can do something you tell it without touching your computer. Sounds like plenty of work to make it work together, but I may try that later.
    • Some use RAG to query large amounts of information. I think it’s a hopeless struggle, and the real solution is an architecture other than a variation of Transformer/SSM: it should address real-time learning, long-term memory and agency properly.
    • Some use LLMs as editor-integrated coding assistants. Never tried anything like that yet (I do ask coding questions sometimes though), but I’m going to at some point. The 8B version of LLaMA 3 should be good and quick enough.