Lemmy account of natanox@chaos.social

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 7th, 2024

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  • Parts of me want to argue that “experienced devs” can’t seriously still ask ChatGPT for syntax correction. Like, I do that with Codestral as I’m learning Python (despite the occasional errors it’s still so much better than abstract docs…), but that should just be a learning thing… or is it because nowadays a single codebase often consists of 5+ languages and devs are expected to constantly learn all the new “hot shit” which obviously won’t make anyone experts in one specific one like back when the there just weren’t as many?



  • Interesting moral question here:

    Given the huge problems are power consumption, morals behind training data and blind trust in AI slop, do you think there is a window of acceptable usage for LLMs as locally run (on existing hardware) coding assistant (not executive tool that does it for you) to help with work on FOSS projects (giving back to where it has taken from) with no money flowing to any company (therefore not bolstering that commercial ecosystem)? While this obviously doesn’t address the energy consumption during training, it may alleviates moral issues to the point people start to think about it as acceptable tool.

    To make it abundantly clear, this is neither about “vibe coding” where it does code for you badly, and definitely not about any other bullshit like generative “art”. It’s about the question of humble, educated use of a potential useful tool in a way it might be morally acceptable.



  • Well, they arguably can also be used as one big long-term storage. Not sure who’d need to save so much data for a long time, but there surely will be at least some people who do and buy the “modern solution” over old HDDs thinking they’re better in general. As the “family backup” for example, or as cold storage solution in faculties that can be quickly accessed if needed.

    Read somewhere about a professor who used SSDs to “permanently” store important data on SSDs (perhaps in the comments of the article above) for a few years. Well, wasn’t that permanent…



  • Yeah… I’m quickly reaching the point where I’m quicker thinking and writing Python code than even writing the prompts. Let alone the additional time going through the generated stuff to adjust and fix things.

    It’s good to get a grip on syntax, terminology and as an overly fancy (but very fast) search bot that can (mostly) apply your question to the very code that’s in front of you, at least in popular languages. But once you got that stuff in your head… I don’t think I’ll bother too much in the future. There surely are tons of useful things you can do with multimodal LLMs, coding on its own properly just isn’t one of it. At least not with the current generation.




  • Yeah, same with Codestral. You have to tell it what to do very specifically, and once it gets stuck somewhere you have to move to a new session to get rid of the history junk.

    Both it and ChatGPT also repeatedly told me to save binary data I wanted to store in memory as a list, with every 1024 bytes being a new entry… in form of a string (supposedly). And the worst thing is that, given the way it extracted that data later on, this unholy implementation from hell would’ve probably even worked up to a certain point.





  • I’m currently looking for this as well. As far as my investigation went right now I’ll probably go for 2x AMD Instinct MI50. Each of them has equivalent to slightly higher performance than a P40, however usually only 16gb VRAM (If you’re super lucky you might get one with 32gb, those are usually not labeled as such though; probably binned MI60). With two of them you got 32gb VRAM and quite the performance for, right now, 200€ / card. Alternatively you should be able to run quantized models on a single card as well.

    If you don’t mind running ROCm instead of CUDA this seems like a good bang for the buck. Alternatively you might look into AMDs new line of “AI” SoCs (for example Frameworks Desktop computer). They seem to be really good as well, and depending on your usecase might be more useful than an equally priced 4090.