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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Depends on the item and your goals.

    If you’re a “car person” who always wants to have the latest model, then maybe leasing a car makes sense. Every 3 years, you get a new car.

    Phones are similar; there are some plans where you are expected to return the phone every 1-2 years. If you really want the newest model all the time, then that might be a good plan for you.

    But for a printer, that only makes sense if you’re a business with medium print volumes and no IT budget. For home use, that’s insane when a cheap last printer will last decades. We have a B&W laser from 2 decades ago and a used colour laser we got for free/very cheap (the power button is broken but it otherwise works great). I’m guessing we pay about 1-2% of an HP subsription.













  • This could be huge, but we’ll need to wait and see. The economic and ecological footprint of LLMs is problematic.

    That said, will this actually help, or will they just use 3T parameter models to outcompete competitors 1T parameter models using GPUs? Really, this is more about small-scale models competing with midsize models. Like, this could bring a model as big as GPT 3.5 down to be something you could run on affordable hardware, right?

    That would be really compelling for my sector (education) where there’s a lot of concern about student data privacy. I could definitely pitch building a local $5K-cost LLM server that could handle a dozen or so simultaneous users. That would be enough for a small school district.







  • In Canada, I’ve never bothered with a VPN. Nobody in Canada has ever been successfully sued for torrent downloading of media, and BC courts have thrown out mass John Doe cases as a waste of the legal system’s time.

    Even if it does go to court, there’s a principal in Canadian law that damages can be at most three times the value of the good (for punitive damages). For BluRay that’s, what, $50? They don’t want to go all the way to a judgement to set the legal precedent of a $150 judgement.

    Even if courts go beyond treble damages, there’s a maximum fine of $5000 for non-commercial infringement. Even that isn’t with their legal costs to pursue.

    So non-commercial piracy is de facto legal in Canada.

    (IANAL, this is not legal advice.)