remember when JLCPCB became popular a few years ago and completely flipped hobby electronics upside down? I don't know how possible it is but it would be really cool if that happens in a few years with semiconductors. it's kind of mad that they've dominated our lives since the 1970s but you can only make them if you're a large company with millions of dollars (or several years, a big garage and lots of equipment as seen here). or tiny tapeout.
This is an absolutely vital development for our computing freedom. Billion dollar industrial fabs are single points of failure, they can be regulated, subverted, enshittified by market forces. We need the ability to make our own hardware at home, just like we can make our own freedom respecting software at home.
Still relevant today. Many problems people throw onto LLMs can be done more efficiently with text completion than begging a model 20x the size (and probably more than 20x the cost) to produce the right structured output. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1859qry/is_anyo...
I used to work very heavily with local models and swore by text completion despite many people thinking it was insane that I would choose not to use a chat interface.
LLMs are designed for text completion and the chat interface is basically a fine-tuning hack to make prompting a natural form of text completion to have a more "intuitive" interface for the average user (I don't even want to think about how many AI "enthusiasts" don't really understand this).
But with open/local models in particular: each instruct/chat interface is slightly different. There are tools that help mitigate this, but the more you're working closely to the model the more likely you are to make a stupid mistake because you didn't understand some detail about how the instruct interface was fine tuned.
Once you accept that LLMs are "auto-complete on steroids" you can get much better results by programming the way they were naturally designed to work. It also helps a lot with prompt engineering because you can more easily understand what the models natural tendency is and work with that to generally get better results.
It's funny because a good chunk of my comments on HN these days are combating AI hype, but man are LLMs really fascinating to work with if you approach them with a bit more clear headed of a perspective.
The "solutions" provided to me so far for my primary issue (using Ableton Suite DAW) has not worked. There is no practical solution that allows this software to function in a Linux environment successfully. I can open the app, but that's the extent of it. It's not usable.
> I so badly want to jump ship entirely, but there's several things holding me back. I do music production as a hobby and Ableton Live doesn't play nice with Linux. In fact it seems anything that is resource intensive without native linux support has some issues. I'm also an MS stack developer, so things like Visual Studio Pro aren't available (although I've been using Cursor IDE more and more these days). Lastly I have some games acquired through "the high seas" in which a work-around doesn't exist for compatibility.
> The responses I got were to switch to different software. No, no, and no. I paid a lot of money for Ableton Suite and poured many many hours into learning how to use it; it's the DAW I prefer to use, I don't want to switch.
> Having said this, I did try to dual boot recently with Linux Mint, and once again ran into headaches getting my Logitech mouse buttons to work.
Adobe products, for example. Or any of other of miriad of other products which have only Win/MacOS and no Linux support.
And, no, Wine cannot run anything.
You see, I don't need OS at all, I need applications. Some of these applications are "universal" (FireFox, for example), some has good equivalents, and some are unique to OS.
And, no, DarkTable, or RAW Therappe are not equivalent to Lightroom or Capture One. And no, there is no equivalent to foobar2000 among music players.
Nope, UI for mpd shows that there is 11093 albums in my collection, but first several screens of Albums is all sequences of `?`. Very useful. Number itself doesn't looks right, my estimation is at least half of this number, maybe less.
On the other hand same client shows only 6391 files, which is waaaay to small number if 1 file = 1 track. Ok, there is a lot of image + CUE albums, I wonder, is it 2 files or one?
So it is useless, unfortunately. foobar2000 allows me add folder / file set to playlist and start listening. With system "Artist/Year - Album" on the file system it is easy and convenient. Tags could be broken, but all mys music is here and I always know where to look for what I want to listen now.
When I've tried MPD last time (about 2 years ago, to be honest) it failed to play wv.iso format, and I have this abomination in my collection.
Also, it is not very good with broken tags, MP3 tags in local codepages (different for different albums!), etc.
You cannot imagine what can be seen in the wild when it is musical collection started in 1995!
Heck, I'm downloading mpd for windows right now and I'll try to add my collection into it. But I'm not holding my breath, all previous attempts to import my collection in any software failed for 15-20% of collection (different ones for different software).
One reason is that Linux has no backwards compatibility and to maintain each piece of software in the repos, you need people. It is linear: more software requires more maintainers, otherwise the software stops to compile in a year or two.
Creative Cloud and DAWs. Those are my only reasons and basically the only reasons I ever hear from people. A Linux port of Photoshop would probably put a small dent in Windows' market share at this point.
what do you mean by "heavily structured output"? i find it generates the most natural-sounding output of any of the LLMs—cuts straight to the answer with natural sounding prose (except when sometimes it decides to use chat-gpt style output with its emoji headings for no reason). I've only used it on kimi.com though, wondering what you're seeing.
Yeah, by "structured" I mean how it wants to do ChatGPT-style output with headings and emoji and lists and stuff. And the punchy style of K2 0905 as shown in the fiction example in the linked article is what I really dislike. K2 Thinking's output in that example seems a lot more natural.
I'd be totally on board if cut straight to the answer with natural sounding prose, as you described, but for whatever reason that has not been my experience.
Interesting. As others have noted, it has a cut straight to the point non-psychophantic style that I find exceptionally rich in detailey and impressive. But it sounds like you're saying an earlier version was even better.
> I find it generates the most natural-sounding output of any of the LLMs
Curious, does it do as well/natural as claude 3.5/3.6 sonnet? That was imo the most "human" an AI has ever sounded. (Gemini 2.5 pro is a distant second, and chatgpt is way behind imo.)
I've had an idea to try to write a sort of high-level-ish VT220 emulator that pokes and patches the ROMs and the system to let you control it with the mouse, paste and stuff, lets you just doubleclick it to get a terminal, etc... I forgot about that until seeing this. Nobody would use it for more than 5 minutes but it would be funny.
Forget MAME; I'd love a forked project for this minus the shaders for old machines.
Where you just get the terminal emulation with a good TTF font and that's it.
There are similar projects for the Altair 8800 where they scrapped their code from SIMH
(now I prefer simh-classic) to just emulate a CP/M 2.2 Altair machine and that's it, because
these people don't need to emulate PDP10's with ITS, old BSD's, current VAX NetBSD releases or
the rest of the DEC machines...
Can you? The last I looked at it (a year or two ago), the vt220 in MAME was just the beginning skeleton of an implementation, and it doesn't seem to have been touched much since then. A shame, because AFAIK no "terminal emulator" implements vt220-style sixels (which are different than than the widely-implemented vt4xx-style sixels).
If MAME could support the VT525 (nearly the last terminal DEC made and unlike the previous DEC models it supports ANSI color) people might use it a bit more. It would be very useful for compatibility testing as there aren't many people with a real VT525! Last I looked someone had dumped the ROMs but there wasn't any support code.
VT5xx was the budget line with limited functionality, that's why only 525 among them supports ANSI color. The only fancy stuff was multisession (TD/SMP if you have all bits to support it) and "desktop accessories" like clock and calculator.
The really interesting ones are VT340 variants with ReGIS and full SIXEL graphics
The VT3xx ones that were color did not support ANSI SGR to set them. I don't think VT5xx was a budget line, it has more escape sequences than the previous ones (including interesting ones like changing cursor shape, which modern terminals implement too). It's more that they never made a graphical version of the VT5xx (this was the early 90s, whether physical VTs made sense anymore is debatable, but terminal graphics likely didn't).
VT340 is definitely interesting and if someone were to emulate one that would also be great! (there's been some good research, e.g.: https://github.com/hackerb9/vt340test, which you might be surprised to learn has been used to make Windows Terminal one of the more conformant terminals...)
The references to "budget line" were from contemporary sources, and that it was heavily reduced in cost - while terminal sequences were more of "simple matter of programming" ;-) My understanding that some of the features like changing cursor shape were related to the rudimentary custom font feature which was retained from more expensive 3xx line and which accepted IIRC sixel-encoded bitmap fonts.
Funnily enough, the one VT510 I had for some time actually came from a VHS rental place that for reasons unknown to me ran Blockbuster Video customized VAX 6.1 on Alpha (which I also grabbed). BBV was not very well known in Poland, but this specific machine had unwiped disks and logs showing it was used from 1996 to 2000, then it was found lying in a corner when a moving service was asked to clean out a location after a tenant that came in after the video rental.
There was probably a DECserver missing somewhere in the pile before I got my hands on it ;)
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