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Comment Gnome a contender? (Score 1) 105

by Kili (#65284977) Attached to: Forget 'Snow Sequoia'. Now I'm Cheering for Better Linux Hardware

I guess if you like all your options taken away, being told what you like, how your desktop should behave, and have all your add-ons broken one by one, release after release, as they prevent you from using them to fix their broke ass decisions.

Then I guess you liked MacOS "back in the day".

The killer for me was when they took away the option to disable putting my display to sleep sometime around 2015ish I think. My video card would not resume displaying video without me having to SSH in from another machine and run some reset command. I needed the nvidia drivers for certain applications to work and as we all know, it was buggy AF when it came to sleep/resume/wakeup, and hell, sometimes even initial boot.

Nothing in computing has ever pissed me off more than Gnome removing control over basic functions of my PC just because they "think" they know best.

I switched to KDE back then. I've used Cinnamon, mate, and others over the years, but I keep going back to KDE.

Comment Where they won't get community fact-checked... (Score -1, Troll) 158

(Thing that is not X) is where radical leftists are going because they keep getting community fact-checked into oblivion.

Ever since X became a platform that lets users point a posts inconsistencies, lack of context, or most importantly, missing facts usually left out by someone trying to spin a narrative, I find myself going there to find out the truth of whats going. Yes, it still takes a good BS filter, but at least you can see the context and facts other users have pointed out are missing.
AI

Were DeepSeek's Development Costs Much Higher Than Reported? (msn.com) 49

Posted by EditorDavid from the never-count-your-chips dept.
Nearly three years ago a team of Chinese AI engineers working for DeepSeek's parent company unveiled an earlier AI supercomputer that the Washington Post says was constructed from 10,000 A100 GPUs purchased from Nvidia. Roughly six months later "Washington had banned Nvidia from selling any more A100s to China," the article notes.

Remember that number as you read this. 10,000 A100 GPUs... DeepSeek's new chatbot caused a panic in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street this week, erasing $1 trillion from the stock market. That impact stemmed in large part from the company's claim that it had trained one of its recent models on a minuscule $5.6 million in computing costs and with only 2,000 or so of Nvidia's less-advanced H800 chips.

Nvidia saw its soaring value crater by $589 billion Monday as DeepSeek rocketed to the top of download charts, prompting President Donald Trump to call for U.S. industry to be "laser focused" on competing... But a closer look at DeepSeek reveals that its parent company deployed a large and sophisticated chip set in its supercomputer, leading experts to assess the total cost of the project as much higher than the relatively paltry sum that U.S. markets reacted to this week... Lennart Heim, an AI expert at Rand, said DeepSeek's evident access to [the earlier] supercomputer would have made it easier for the company to develop a more efficient model, requiring fewer chips.
That earlier project "suggests that DeepSeek had a major boost..." according to the article, "with technology comparable to that of the leading U.S. AI companies." And while DeepSeek claims it only spent $5.6 million to train one of its advanced models, "its parent company has said that building the earlier supercomputer had cost 1 billion yuan, or $139 million.") Yet the article also cites the latest insights Friday from chip investment company SemiAnalysis, summarizing their finding that DeepSeek "has spent more than half a billion dollars on GPUs, with total capital expenditures of almost $1.3 billion."

The article notes Thursday remarks by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that DeepSeek's energy-efficiency claims were "wildly overstated... This is a model at a capability level that we had quite some time ago." And Palmer Luckey called DeepSeek "legitimately impressive" on X but called the $5.6 million training cost figure "bogus" and said the Silicon Valley meltdown was "hysteria." Even with these higher total costs in mind, experts say, U.S. companies are right to be concerned about DeepSeek upending the market. "We know two things for sure: DeepSeek is pricing their services very competitively, and second, the performance of their models is comparable to leading competitors," said Kai-Shen Huang, an AI expert at the Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology, a Taipei-based think tank. "I think DeepSeek's pricing strategy has the potential to disrupt the market globally...."

China's broader AI policy push has helped create an environment conducive for a company like DeepSeek to rise. Beijing announced an ambitious AI blueprint in 2017, with a goal to become a global AI leader by 2030 and promises of funding for universities and private enterprise. Local governments across the nation followed with their own programs to support AI.
AI

Police Use of AI Facial Recognition Results In Murder Case Being Tossed (cleveland.com) 50

Posted by EditorDavid from the losing-face dept.
"A jury may never see the gun that authorities say was used to kill Blake Story last year," reports Cleveland.com.

"That's because Cleveland police used a facial recognition program — one that explicitly says its results are not admissible in court — to obtain a search warrant, according to court documents." The search turned up what police say is the murder weapon in the suspect's home. But a Cuyahoga County judge tossed that evidence after siding with defense attorneys who argued that the search warrant affidavit was misleading and relied on inadmissible evidence. If an appeals court upholds the judge's ruling to suppress the evidence, prosecutors acknowledge their case is likely lost...

The company that produced the facial recognition report, Clearview AI, has been used in hundreds of law enforcement investigations throughout Ohio and has faced lawsuits over privacy violations.

Not only does Cleveland lack a policy governing the use of artificial intelligence, Ohio lawmakers also have failed to set standards for how police use the tool to investigate crimes. "It's the wild, wild west in Ohio," said Gary Daniels, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union. The lack of state regulation of how law enforcement uses advanced technologies — no laws similarly govern the use of drones or license plate readers — means it is essentially up to agencies how they use the tools.
The affidavit for the search warrant was signed by a 28-year police force veteran, according to the article — but it didn't disclose the use of Clearview's technology.

Clearview's report acknowledged their results were not admissible in court — but then provided the suspect's name, arrest record, Social Security number, according to the article, and "noted he was the most likely match for the person in the convenience store."

Thanks to tlhIngan (Slashdot reader #30,335) for sharing the news.

Submission + - MultiCortex EXO: LLM HPC for Dummies (opensuse.org)

Submitted by cabelo
cabelo writes: Many people have GPUs of 8 GB or less, which is not enough to run larger models. The EXO project brings cluster technology to your home, allowing you to create residential supercomputers. MultiCortex EXO live was developed to make this possible without requiring technical knowledge: just boot the system from a USB flash drive, and all the machines connect automatically, forming a supercomputer that can run large LLMs such as LLAMA, DeepSeek and others. Demonstration video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Comment They lost many when the UI changed (Score 1) 13

by Kili (#64895589) Attached to: JetBrains Offers Free Use of WebStorm and Rider IDEs

Intellij lost me and a lot of users when they basically made the UI/UX like vscode. Why would I pay for a shitty product that hides everything from me when I can get it for free. I liked that buttons looked like buttons and everything didn't look like a damn mobile app with rounded everything.

I want all the info and complexity of their old UI. I liked having info available to me without having to click something. And no, I don't want install a bunch of extensions by "some random internet guy I don't trust" just to get similar functionality that goes away when their life has a hiccup and the project dies

And don't get me started on the settings.json file. Last time I tried it I found that vscode removes entries that match its current default values on save. Microshit has changed the defaults in the past and I had to hunt down the setting again after having set it in that file explicitly so it would always be the value I wanted, even after an upgrade.

Again, why would I pay for a shitty user experience when I can have vscode for free?

Comment Shitty range and long charge times? (Score 2) 430

by Kili (#64757134) Attached to: What's Holding Back America's Move to Electric Cars?

If you want me to change my transportation choices the options need to be equal to or better than what is currently available. Outside of Tesla's charging network, reliability is crap-tastic, and charge times are rarely "as advertised". I have an ICE F150 and I can fill up the tank and go almost 700miles towing something I can live out of and not deal with congested, unsanitary locations for human needs. Electric vehicles can't compete. And before you lecture me about "climate change", which used to be called "global warming", and before that "global cooling" keep in mine you are trying to convince "John Q. Public". If you can't convince me, you won't convince them. And being a tyrant "for the greater good" has failed time and time and time again throughout history. Thinking you can "do it better" mandating change at "the point of a gun" (which is what government really is) without the consent of the people, has worked exactly zero times.

Comment 1Password (Score 3, Informative) 154

by Kili (#63743236) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What's the Best (Encrypted) Password Manager?

If you don't mind commercial software, 1Password is amazing. Mac, Linux, Apple, and Android phones. Oh, winbloze too. It all stays synchronized and "just works" (tm). With a family plane you can have personal and shared vaults. Its commercial software but I am happy to pay for it. It even integrates with the cli so aws or azure or gcp command line tools can get their secrets from it.

Comment Not at all accurate (Score 1) 211

by Kili (#53586715) Attached to: Creepy Site Claims To Reveal Torrenting Histories

I have downloaded several linux ISO's in the last few days just to see where things are at with several distros (I don't read reviews until I've actually tried the new versions).

I saw not one link. And I have had a torrent of one kind or another downloading or seeding at least once a week.

Comment It is now impossible to play while riding in a car (Score 1) 194

by Kili (#52755713) Attached to: Pokemon Go Daily Active Users, Downloads, Engagement Are Dropping

They made it impossible to play while riding as a passenger in a car. If you are going more than 4 Mph you cannot catch-em-all. I am pretty sure making it so kids cannot play while riding in the car killed their numbers.

I am sure it is to prevent idiot drivers from removing themselves from the gene pool via obtaining the coveted "Darwin Award."

Comment Re:It is coming... On Weekends... From Home... (Score 1) 390

by Kili (#49516663) Attached to: Why the Journey To IPv6 Is Still the Road Less Traveled

> Due to IPv6's addressing method, each unique device on your network appears as a unique device on the internet, vs the NATed IPv4 that we all know and love.

Why I hate IPV6 in a nutshell.

Because I don't want to give the advertisers and data analyzers yet another way to identify me.

Unavoidable? Probably. Will I do it willingly? no.

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