A generation of under investment in energy production will create all kinds of government backed environmental propaganda. Incandescent bulbs = bad. Fossil fueled AI data centers = economy.
If there was a true environmental motivation for reducing our electricity usage, our bills wouldn't be 60% network charges, they would be 100% usage based charges.
Right, but the cars here now have to have some kind of GPS tracker thing built in. And the Jeans are 1% elastacine? so that they fall to bits in the Sun after 6 months. I remember a pair of real denim jeans I picked up in the states that lasted me 10 years.
Quality has gone out of everything in the last 15+ years.
So these items, along with anything marked Smart == Ad platform, or AI == Future Ad platform, are on my 'will not buy on principle' list regardless of need or wants.
I was pleasantly surprised at the speed and power of my second hand M1 Pro 32GB running Asahi & Qwen3:32B. It does all I need, and I dont mind the reading pace output, although I'd be tempted by M2 Ultra if the secondhand market hadn't also exploded with the recent RAM market manipulations.
Anyway, I'm on a mission to have no subscriptions in the New Year. Plus it feels wrong to be contributing towards my own irrelevance (GAI).
SimonW used to have more articles/guides on local LLM setup, at least until he got the big toys to play with, but well worth looking through his site. Although if you are in parts of Europe, the site is blocked at weekends, something to do with the great-firewall of streamed sports.
Indeed, his self hosting inspired me to get Qwen3:32B ollama working locally. Fits nicely on my M1 pro 32GB (running Asahi). Output is a nice read-along speed and I havent felt the need for anything more powerful.
I'd be more tempted with a maxed out M2 Ultra as an upgrade, vs tower with dedicated GPU cards. The unified memory just feels right for this task. Although I noticed the 2nd hand value of those machine jumped massively in the last few months.
I know that people turn their noses up at local LLM's, but it more than does the job for me. Plus I decided a New Years Resolution of no more subscriptions / Big-AdTech freebies.
Kate is such a refreshing change. Super responsive and fast under Asahi. It's the best dev environment I've worked with in a very long time.
A few niggles with the switch, like it seems to assume Git but I'm using Fossil. I also haven't found a decent cheat-sheet for keyboard controls. I got duplicate block and move block working, and really enjoy the column editing, but still using cut for line delete.
I think KWrite is the same engine underneath? at least it feels much akin to Kate. I use it mainly for assembly files, since I was able to hack in an armv8 syntax file and needed a different theme than Kate.
Only takes a few clicks most days for the annoying captcha to trigger for me. I never complete it on principle, but maybe that's why it keeps coming back.
Anyway the DDG html search site is next to useless now, and I'm fed up of the AI nags, so I'll be right behind you once I have searched for my coat.
Interesting. I'm currently having great fun learning systems programming on the Allwinner A64, and never considered the option of building a board with one, assuming they are still available. Are you documentating your project somewhere?
Agreed. It's hard enough dealing with the endless stream of LLM marketing stories, please lets at least try to keep the comments a little free of this 'I asked...' marketing spam.
If there was a true environmental motivation for reducing our electricity usage, our bills wouldn't be 60% network charges, they would be 100% usage based charges.
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