This is it right here, at least for me personally. I’m a huge Dragon Age fan (played through DAO and DA2 before Inquisition’s release) who has always been vaguely interested in Larian’s Divinity Original Sin games but never made them a priority in my backlog. Seeing the cinematic cutscenes and the 3rd-person voice acted dialog for BG3 made me immediately interested and now I’m 10-ish hours deep into Baldur’s Gate and loving it!

Also slowly resigning myself to DA4 not even coming close to matching BG3 in quality given the circumstances of its development.

I’ve had good success using it to write Python scripts for me. They’re simple enough I would be able to write them myself, but it would take a lot of time searching and reading StackOverflow/library docs/etc since I’m an amateur and not a pro. GPT lets me spend more time actually doing the things I need the scripts for.

sick! do you think you’ll ever print these physically? I’d love to pick up a copy if you ever do. :)

sick! do you think you’ll ever print these physically? I’d love to pick up a copy if you ever do. :)

degree in Visual Art, work in digital asset management for a marketing (blech) studio. I’d love to get into a DAM position at somewhere less ethically awful, like a symphony or museum or something, buuut my position pays really well relatively speaking to other similar similar jobs I’ve looked at, so that’ll have to wait until I feel more established in life.

took a couple basic comp-sci classes in college, though, and went to a coding bootcamp before I got my current position. running linux on my laptop, might switch to it on my desktop. I make use of bash for renaming files a lot at my job.

there’s a lot about tech-heavy areas that interests me, but it’d drive me crazy to be around too much of it. I think there’s a lot of good in the liberal arts that tends to get missed by the sort of hard rationalists that tend to hang out in tech spaces.

Thinking about reducing plastic fucks me up and it’s been on my mind a lot lately. Noticing every single time we bring new plastic into the household, and how hard it is to avoid. Chicken comes in plastic wrap, and even if we got it at a butcher counter, they still toss it in a plastic bag before wrapping it in brown paper. Bags of potting soil, our toothpaste tubes, peanut butter jars… it’s endless.

At least the majority of my clothes are cotton or wool, but another source is carpet and there isn’t anything I can do about this apartment carpet.

I don’t know anything about GPU design but expandable VRAM is a really interesting idea. Feels too consumer friendly for Nvidia and maybe even AMD though.

very cool! loving these low-res rices - there’s something really appealing about them. this also reminds me of my chromebook that I’ve done a similar thing with (turn into a writing-focused machine).

I’m not usually a fan of cursors outside of the regular black & white, but that cursor goes perfectly with the whole theme here!

I completed all of the shrines before I beat the game, and found it enjoyable. I also really enjoyed running around the depths collecting all the lightroots. I enjoy exploring caves and wells too, so that’s next on my list to complete. Grinding for armor sets is tedious to me so I’m skipping it…

Nice, thanks! I haven’t tried customizing the default KDE bars yet; it’s cool to see they can be changed a decent amount.

Nice, thanks! I haven’t tried customizing the default KDE bars yet; it’s cool to see they can be changed a decent amount.

What are you using for your top bar?

My high school and college journals are filled with so much angst about crushes and “do they like me? don’t they like me?” that it’s physically difficult to re-read them now, hah.

I had a crush on a redhead from about 10 until I left for college (it was a small town), then crushed on the various guys in my dorm and friend group (and one hot artist girl in a philosophy class) until I decided I needed to practice dating in junior year and actually went on a few thanks to Tinder. Though I didn’t escape entirely as I had a couple crushes on regular customers when I worked in an art supply store after graduating.

Now I’m happily partnered and do not miss the mental anxiety of crushes, though there’s a twinge of excitement in the idea of having a crush that will always be nostalgic.

Really clean! Now you just need to theme that pihole dashboard to Nord too ;)

Yup; hopefully there are some advances in the training space, but I’d guess that having large quantities of VRAM is always going to be necessary in some capacity for training specifically.

Yup; hopefully there are some advances in the training space, but I’d guess that having large quantities of VRAM is always going to be necessary in some capacity for training specifically.

So I’m no expert at running local LLMs, but I did download one (the 7B vicuña model recommended by the LocalLLM subreddit wiki) and try my hand at training a LoRA on some structured data I have.

Based on my experience, the VRAM available to you is going to be way more of a bottleneck than PCIe speeds.

I could barely hold a 7B model in 10 GB of VRAM on my 3080, so 8 GB might be impossible or very tight. IMO to get good results with local models you really have large quantities of VRAM and be using 13B or above models.

Additionally, when you’re training a LoRA the model + training data gets loaded into VRAM. My training dataset wasn’t very large, and even so, I kept running into VRAM constraints with training.

In the end I concluded that in the current state, running a local LLM is an interesting exercise but only great on enthusiast level hardware with loads of VRAM (4090s etc).

Using it to separate work from other uses makes sense to me - I think if I worked from my desktop rather than the company laptop, I’d be more inclined to use the virtual desktops.

Wanting to pin a floating window was always something I wanted on Windows, so I was excited to see that being natively supported by KDE.

Agree on disliking alt-tab because it’s non-deterministic! Cycling through a whole list of apps has always felt clunky to me so I never use it.