When you interact online, you fundamentally are interacting with only yourself. It is a solipsistic endeavor. You fundamentally choose which comments to respond to; unlike the real world, where a conversation occurs between two people, you can instantly drive into a conversation whenever you see fit, and leave whenever you wish also.
Therefore, the choice of which conversation, which comment, is entirely yours. And since the comments available are literally never-ending, you have the ultimate choice as to which you are responding. Therefore, every conversation you have is with a version of a person you have constructed in your head.
This is what enables people to be mean and rude on the internet. It's because they are talking to a construct which is fundamentally in their own head, often times with their own nasty internal conflicts applied.
This is also the fundamental mistake people make about the online world being a place where "discourse" can change anyone's internal landscape. It cannot, because it every discourse on the internet is by definition completely a subset of the ego of the single individual.
I didn't love Peripheral (although that was Amazon). I disliked Foundation. I disliked WOT, and Amazon LOTR. I don't think I will watch this.
I would consider all of Gibson's books as must reads, if anyone is interested my reading order is:
1. Pattern Recognition
2. Neuromancer
3. Burning Chrome
4. rest of Nueromancer trilogy
5. rest of Blue ant
6. and then take your pick on the last 2 trilogies (Jackpot #3 is not out yet though)
Neuromancer is one of the coolest depictions of the "metaverse" I've ever read, one that still inspires me to think about today!
I've said it before and I'll repeat it here - as someone who lives in the UK the thing that bothers me the most about it is a complete apathy from everyone I know, and I work in IT. People just go "meh what are you going to do", or recently very common "I don't have strength to be angry at this government all the time over everything, I just carry on forward and hope things improve". And of course the fact that this is getting 0 coverage from mainstream media doesn't help.
It depends on your needs. For instance, do you want to host an API or do you want to have a front end like chatGPT? Chances are, text-generation-webui [1] should get you pretty close to hosting it yourself. You simply clone the repo, download the model from huggingface using the included helper (download-model.py) and fire up the server with server.py. You can connect to it by SSH port tunneling on port 7860 (there's other way like Ngrok but SSH tunneling is the easiest and secure).
As for hosting, I found that runpod [2] has been the cheapest (not affiliated, just a user). All the other services tend to add up more than them when you include bandwidth and storage. There's some tutorials online [3] but a lot of them use the quantized version. You should be able to fit the original 70B with "load_in_8bit" on one A100 80GB.
I thought I'd add a data point to this discussion.
I'm in the UK and the traditional dev/tech job route was via something like JobServe, Indeed etc., where you see a role advertised via an employment agency and you send your CV hoping for a callback.
I'm in a stable contract so I'm not looking but two weeks ago, I was contacted by two agents, one day apart, both unrelated to one another, completely out of the blue.
The first agent was more like a headhunter-type in that he arranged to "interview" me the following day via Teams to drill into my background and skillset. It lasted about 40 mins. Now, I can say, hand on heart, that in all my 20+ years of work that has never happened. Ever. He didn't have a role in mind, just that he wanted a few good candidates to pimp around to his contacts (CTO's and such).
My experience in the UK has been that you apply for a role you find on JobServe, you phone and chase the agent, and you hope to get through the cattle market, not this US-style agent-works-for-me stuff.
The other agent had a role in mind but he also grilled me extensively. Again, never happened before... they usually ask you about the keywords they're looking for and that's it: call done in 2 mins. This call took over 30 mins.
I asked the first guy what was going on as his style was more like the US system where a recruitment agent will work for YOU, and try to get you a role somewhere, whereas the UK model (unless headhunted!) was very much that the agents worked for the companies in question and acted like a CV-buffer to filter out the crap.
One of the agents hinted that there are a lot of average candidates out there at the moment looking for a smaller number of roles so they are aggressively filtering them before handing over to the clients.
I suspect that there have been a bunch of rejected CV's sent to the clients and they're now wanting better candidates... either that or agencies are indeed swamped in average candidates (not pissing on them, but if you have avg candidates and good candidates, the avg ones will lose out).
Anyway, things are a bit weird in the UK at the moment so I thought I'd chime in.
"Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.
It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.
It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.
It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."
I forget which famous Unix personality the quote / story comes from, but it amounts to "The perfect program is the one you write after you finish the first version, throw it in the garbage, and then handle in the rewrite all the things you didn't know that you didn't know."
That rings true to my experience, and TDD doesn't add much to that process.
Not that long ago someone posted this beautiful Banksy quote about it on HN:
> “People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”
- Banksy
I’ll damn well block all shitty ads on every site.
You’re a newspaper site and want to block me for using an ad blocker? Feel free, I’ll leave your site.
You’re an advertiser who refuses to bid on ad space as too many people block the ads anyway? Please stop bidding then.
But don’t pretend that by offering your site for free and me using it for free somehow requires me to see shitty ads.
If you want my money, ask for it. If your content is worth it I’ll pay for it.
Therefore, the choice of which conversation, which comment, is entirely yours. And since the comments available are literally never-ending, you have the ultimate choice as to which you are responding. Therefore, every conversation you have is with a version of a person you have constructed in your head.
This is what enables people to be mean and rude on the internet. It's because they are talking to a construct which is fundamentally in their own head, often times with their own nasty internal conflicts applied.
This is also the fundamental mistake people make about the online world being a place where "discourse" can change anyone's internal landscape. It cannot, because it every discourse on the internet is by definition completely a subset of the ego of the single individual.