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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • If I am not mistaken, the difference was that the Internet Archive was distributing books with a DRM that would make the PDF unusable after a certain time. You could relate it to how a physical library offers books for a limited time, for free. Now, of course, one could bypass the DRM or copy the contents differently, but so can another person photocopy a book they borrowed physically. Meanwhile, other physical libraries are allowed to distribute e-books, but I’m not sure if that’s made possible due to licensing fees.

    I’m not saying that they approached this well, especially given the copyright laws in the US, but it was indeed a good thing for the normal person at the time. Too bad that the judicial system in the US is biased towards leeching companies. I really can’t wait to see the AI vs publishers fight, though. Let’s see who has deeper pockets and better plants in the courts :D



  • Good luck! You can try the huggingface-chat repo, or ollama with this web-ui. Both should be decent, as they have instructions to set up a docker container.

    I believe the Llama 3 models are out there in a torrent somewhere, but I didn’t dig to find it. For the 70B model, you’ll probably need around 64GB of RAM available, but the 7B one should run fine with just 8GB. It will be somewhat slow though, compared to the ChatGPT experience. The self-attention mechanism can be parallelized, which is why you will see much better results on a GPU. According to some others that tested it, if you offload some stuff to RAM, you could see ~10-12 tokens per second on an RTX 3090 for certain 70B models. But more capable ones will be at less than 1 token per second, all depending on the context window you use.

    If you don’t have a GPU available, just give the Phi-3 model a try :D If you quantize it to 4 bits, it can apparently get 12 tokens per second on an iPhone haha. It should play nice with pooling information from a search engine, or a vector database like milvus, qdrant or chroma.


  • What db2 already said. Microsoft just released Phi-3 mini, which could, allegedly, run locally on newer smartphones.

    If I understood correctly, the Rabbit thingy just captures your information locally and then forwards it to their server. So, if you want more power, you could probably do the same by submitting the same info to a bigger open source model than Phi-3, like Llama 3, hosted on your homelab. I believe you can set it up with huggingface/gradio, which sort of provides an API that you could use.

    That way, you don’t need a shitty orange box, and can always get the latest open source models with a few lines of code. There are plenty of open source frameworks in the works at the moment, and I believe that we’re not far off from having multi-modal LLMs running on homelab-level hardware (if you don’t mind a bit of lag).




  • Yeah, it’s the Osaifu-Keitai. Apple has it enabled for all phones on the market, while Android phone manufacturers avoid adding it to theirs outside Japan because they would have to pay fees to Sony for it. The funny part is that Sony itself doesn’t enable it for phones outside Japan, even though FeliCa is a subsidiary of Sony :D Another funny bit is that some phones, like the Pixel, are capable of running it on phones made for other markets. Some users were able to force the Osaifu-Keitai app to think the phone was made in Japan, and that was all it took to enable it (although you’d have to root your phone + the manufacturer should have released their phones in Japan, to ensure the chip is capable). So, yeah, although a few years ago it might have been a specific chip being needed in the phone, nowadays it’s mostly software that doesn’t allow you to use the one you have while in Japan.

    All in all, PASMO/Suica/etc is basically a very limited debit card company haha. I guess Japanese people enjoy using it mainly because it puts a cap on how much they can spend (iirc, about 100 euros allowed at once on the card). Japan is a highly consumerist society, so this format was probably adopted (instead of credit/debit cards) mainly to combat it somewhat :D




  • The idea of “off-grid” here is that you do not require any networking from your usual provider. You set up two devices with meshtastic and you can have connectivity over great distances.

    For the decentralized part, I think they mean that you can communicate with any access point in an area without relying on a third party (i.e., make an account on their platform?).

    So, off-grid means not relying on existing infrastructure and decentralized implies not having a central figure to relay your data. That’s what I understood from this at least.







  • I’ve looked into this before, and it really depends on the type of RFID they use. Older versions have been cracked, but newer ones can’t be copied over (easily or at all).

    If your company is serious about security, you will not be able to put the content of the card on your phone. What newer, more secure versions of RFID do is receive a code from the reader system, replies to it internally, and then sends back the answer. Even if you try to copy this over, you will not be able to open the doors of your facility.

    I think the first step should be to use one of these apps that can read RFID and see what protocol your card uses. If it’s an unsecure one (i.e., only pushes out a code and checks it in their database that it’s yours), you could probably try to copy it over. However, if it’s not, you could also just dissolve the card with some acetone and place the resulting wires in your phone’s case, near the bottom. Like that, it shouldn’t interfere with your phone’s NFC, as that one is usually next to the top area of your phone.