|
|
Alpaca
I’ve just done some experiments running ChatGPT type programs. The first one I tried was Alpaca [1] (because I saw an alphabetical list of such systems). Here’s the 4GB data file [2]. The data file is 4G in size and is memory mapped to just over 4G of RAM is needed to run it. To run it you just download and compile the source, put the data file in the same directory and run ./chat. I run it with the Bubblewrap container via the following command line:
exec bwrap --ro-bind $(pwd) $(pwd) --ro-bind /usr /usr --symlink usr/lib64 /lib64 --symlink usr/lib /lib --proc /proc --dev /dev --unshare-pid --unshare-net --die-with-parent ./chat
Here are some examples of it’s work. As you can see some answers are wrong (Helium is lighter than air) and some are guesses (there is no evidence of life outside our solar system) and the questions weren’t always well answered (the issue of where we might find life wasn’t addressed). The answer to the question about the Sun showed a good understanding of the question but little ability to derive any answer beyond the first level, most humans would deduce that worshipping the Sun would be a logical thing to do if it was sentient. Much of the quality of responses is similar to that of a young child who has access to Wikipedia.
> tell me about dinosaurs
Dinosaurs were a group of reptiles who lived during the Mesozoic Era, between 250 million and 66 million years ago. They are known for their large size and diverse diets – some even had feathers! Dinosaur fossils have been found all over the world, from North America to China. Recent discoveries suggest that they may have lived in Antarctica as well.
> are hydrogen or helium balloons better?
Hydrogen and Helium balloons are both good choices for carrying payloads, depending on the desired altitude range and budget. Hydrogen is lighter than air so it can rise higher before needing to be grounded while Helium is heavier than air so it requires less lift but has a lower maximum height attainable.
> is a 486 a good cpu?
Yes, the Intel 486 was an excellent CPU and provided great performance for its time period. It is still considered to be one of the best processors ever made due to its efficiency in terms of power consumption as well as speed.
> where will we find life outside the Earth?
Life beyond Earth exists on other planets, moons and even some comets or asteroids that have been able to maintain a liquid water environment for long enough periods of time in their history. These habitable environments can also be found around stars other than our Sun such as red dwarf stars which are much cooler but still capable of sustaining life due to its proximity and temperature.
> how do I write a good blog post?
Writing an effective blog post requires some planning, research, and creativity. Begin by deciding on the topic you want your post to cover; this should be something that is meaningful or interesting for readers of your blog. Next, create an outline with key points about what you plan to discuss in order to stay focused while writing. Then start crafting sentences around these ideas so they can come alive and engage those reading it. Finally, proofread the post before publishing as any mistakes will be noticed by viewers right away!
> if the sun was a sentient being how would that change life on earth?
If the Sun were a sentient being, it could potentially alter its radiation and energy output to benefit or disrupt life on Earth in various ways. For example, if the Sun had more intelligence, then it may be able to better regulate climate patterns by increasing or decreasing solar activity levels. Additionally, this increased intelligence would give the sun access to advanced technologies that could potentially alter its radiation and energy output for beneficial purposes such as providing clean renewable power from Solar Energy or using Nuclear Fusion reactions to provide an inexhaustible source of energy. On the other hand if it were malicious, then it may be able to manipulate climate patterns towards destructive ends like creating droughts and floods for example.
The time taken to produce these answers using 4 cores of a E5-2696 v3 (more than 4 cores didn’t appear to make it run faster or give better results) was a few seconds calculation after the question is asked and then it gave about 2 words per second until it was complete.
Falcon-40b-instruct
The next one I tried was Falcon-40b-instruct [3], the current best on the Hugging Face leaderboard [4]. It has a 90G set of data files. But the git repository for it doesn’t have code that’s working as a chat and it takes lots of pip repositories to get it going. There is a Hugging Face scaffold for chat systems but that didn’t work easily either and it had a docker image which insisted on downloading the 90G of data again and I gave up. I guess Falcon is not for people who have little Python experience.
Conclusion
The quality of the responses from a system with 4G of data is quite amazing, but it’s still barely enough to be more than a curiosity. It’s a long way from the quality of ChatGPT [5] or the phind.com service described as “The AI search engine for developers” [6]. I have found phind.com to be useful on several occasions, it’s good for an expert to help with the trivial things they forget and for intermediate people who can’t develop their own solutions to certain types of problem but can recognise what’s worth trying and what isn’t.
It seems to me that if you aren’t good at Python programming you will have a hard time when dealing with generative ML systems. Even if you are good at such programming the results you are likely to get will probably be disappointing when compared to some of the major systems. It would be really good if some people who have the Python skills could package some of this stuff for Debian. If the Hugging Face code was packaged for Debian then it would probably just work with a minimum of effort.
A problem with a lot of the purchase of peripherals is that they don’t match the needs of the users and often get thrown away long before they wear out.
At many companies when a new employee starts they are given a laptop (expensive corporate asset), a cheap headset for video calls, and optionally a keyboard and mouse for people who don’t like the laptop keyboard and/or touchpad.
When an employee leaves the company their laptop can be assigned to someone else if it isn’t too old. Headsets and mice often show signs of wear if they have been used for a year or two and while keyboards often have a long service life they will be dirty after a couple of years and they are cheap to replace. So every time someone leaves and returns all company hardware there will be a headset and mouse owned by the company that ends up as e-waste and sometimes a keyboard too. Often people leave and just keep the headset, mouse, and keyboard expecting that no-one at their former employer will demand them back – this is a reward for dishonesty.
Buying the keyboards, mice, and headsets in bulk allegedly makes it easy to support them, but supporting such devices isn’t difficult and the IT staff end up fielding complaints because the devices they issue don’t match the preferences of the workers. These devices have the worst ratio of value to complaints of anything a typical company supports.
I believe that the best solution to all these problems is to not buy those items for employees but to instead give them a sum of money sufficient to buy cheap items in each category (EG $60 for keyboard, mouse, and headset) and let them buy whichever they choose. If they want something more expensive (Bose headset, split keyboard, or gamer mouse) them they can spend their own money to do so (and claim a tax deduction). Then when people leave the company they can take those items with them and save the company the expense of waste disposal while also not rewarding dishonesty. An additional benefit for the company is that it can reduce the issues of complying with disability legislation, anyone who already owns such hardware can just keep the money.
The current situation is bad for morale, a waste of time for IT workers, and contributes to the waste problem.
The BOINC distributed computing client in Debian (Bookworm and previous releases) can check the idle time via the X11 protocol and run GPU jobs when the interactive user is idle, so the user gets GPU power for graphics when they need it and when it’s idle BOINC uses it. This doesn’t work for Wayland and unfortunately no-one has written a Wayland equivalent of xprintidle (which shows the number of milliseconds that the X11 session has been idle in milliseconds.
In the Debian bug system there is bug #813728 about a message every second due to failed attempts to find X11 idle time [1]. On my main workstation with Wayland it logs “Authorization required, but no authorization protocol specified“.
There is also bug #775125 about BOINC not detecting mouse movements [2], I added to it about the issues with Wayland. There’s the package swayidle in Debian that is designed to manage the screen-save process on Wayland, below is an example of how to use it to display output on 5 seconds and 10 seconds of idle.
swayidle -w timeout 5 'echo 5' timeout 10 'echo 10' resume 'echo resume' before-sleep 'echo before-sleep'
The code for swayidle has only 7 comments and isn’t easy to read. I looked in to writing a Wayland equivalent of xprintidle but it would take more work than I’m prepared to invest in it. So it seems to me that the best option might be to have BOINC receive SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 for the start and stop of idle time and then have scripts call xprintidle, swayidle, a wrapper for “w” (for systems without graphics) or other methods. To run swayidle as root you can set WAYLAND_DISPLAY=../$USER_ID/wayland-0.
When I connect my Desklab USB-C monitor [1] (which has been vastly underused for the last 3 years) into a Linux system the display type is listed as “DO NOT USE – RTK“.
One of the more informative discussions of this was on Linux Mint forums [2] which revealed that it’s a mapping for an code that shouldn’t be used. So it’s not saying “don’t use this monitor” it’s saying “don’t use this code”. So the Desklab people when they implemented a display with an RTK chipset should have changed the ID field from “RTK” to something representing their use. On Debian the file /usr/share/hwdata/pnp.ids has the IDs and you can grep for RTK in that.
Also for programmers, please use more descriptive strings than “do not use”, when I was trying to find this on Debian code search [3] it turned up hundreds of pages of results which was more than a human can read through. If the text had been something that would make sense to a user such as “OEM please replace with company name” it would have made it very clear to me (and all the other people searching for this) what it meant and the fact that Desklab had stuffed up. So instead of wondering about this for years before eventually finding the right Google search to find the answer I could have worked it out immediately if the text had been clearer.
Hardware
I received my PinePhone Pro [1] on Thursday, it seems in many ways better than the Purism Librem 5 [2] that I have previously written about. The PinePhone is thinner, lighter, and yet has a much longer battery life. A friend described the Librem5 as “the CyberTruck phone” and not in a good way.
In a test I had my PinePhone and my Librem5 fully charged, left them for 4.5 hours without doing anything much with them, and then the PinePhone was at 85% and the Librem5 was at 57%. So the Librem5 will run out of battery after about 10 hours of not being used while a PinePhonePro can be expected to last about 30 hours. The PinePhonePro isn’t as good as some of the recent Android phones in this regard but it shows the potential to be quite usable. For this test both phones were connected to a 2.4GHz Wifi network (which uses less power than 5GHz) and doing nothing much with an out of the box configuration. A phone that is checking email, social networking, and a couple of IM services will use the battery faster. But even if the PinePhone has it’s battery used twice as fast in a more realistic test that will still be usable.
Here are the passmark results from the PinePhone Pro [3] which got a CPU score of 888 compared to 507 for the Librem 5 and 678 for one of the slower laptops I’ve used. The results are excluded from the Passmark averages because they identified the CPU as only having 4 cores (expecting just 4*A72) while the PinePhonePro has 6 cores (2*A72+4*A53). This phone definitely has the CPU power for convergence [4]!
Default OS
By default the PinePhone has a KDE based GUI and the Librem5 has a GNOME based GUI. I don’t like any iteration of GNOME (I have tried them all and disliked them all) and I like KDE so I will tend to like anything that is KDE based more than anything GNOME based. But in addition to that the PinePhone has an interface that looks a lot like Android with the three on-screen buttons at the bottom of the display and the way it has the slide up tray for installed apps. Android is the most popular phone OS and looking like the most common option is often a good idea for a new and different product, this seems like an objective criteria to determine that the default GUI on the PinePhone is a better choice (at least for the default).
When I first booted it and connected it to Wifi the updates app said that there were 633 updates to apply, but never applied them (I tried clicking on the update button but to no avail) and didn’t give any error message. For me not being Debian is enough reason to dislike Manjaro, but if that wasn’t enough then the failure to update would be a good start. When I ran pacman in a terminal window it said that each package was corrupt and asked if I wanted to delete it. According to “tar tvJf” the packages weren’t corrupt. After downloading them again it said that they were corrupt again so it seemed that pacman wasn’t working correctly.
When the screen is locked and a call comes in it gives a window with Accept and Reject buttons but neither of them works. The default country code for “Spacebar” (the SMS app) is +1 (US) even though I specified Australia on the initial login. It also doesn’t get the APN unlike Android phones which seem to have some sort of list of APNs.
Upgrading to Debian
The Debian Wiki page about Installing on the PinePhone Pro has the basic information [5]. The first thing it covers is installing the TOW boot loader – which is already installed by default in recent PinePhones (such as mine). You can recognise that TOW is installed by pressing the volume-up button in the early stages of boot up (described as “before and during the second vibration”), then the LED will turn blue and the phone will act as a USB mass storage device which makes it easy to do other install/recovery tasks. The other TOW option is to press volume-down to boot from a MicroSD card (the default is to boot the OS on the eMMC).
The images linked from the Debian wiki page are designed to be installed with bmaptool from the bmap-tools Debian package. After installing that package and downloading the pre-built Mobian image I installed it with the command “bmaptool copy mobian-pinephonepro-phosh-bookworm-12.0-rc3.img.gz /dev/sdb” where /dev/sdb is the device that the USB mapped PinePhone storage was located. That took 6 minutes and then I rebooted my PinePhone into Mobian!
Unfortunately the default GUI for Mobian is GNOME/Phosh. Changing it to KDE is my next task.
After determining that the Philips 43″ monitor was too large for my taste as well as not having a clear enough display [1] I bought a Dell 32″ 4K monitor for $499 on the 1st of July 2022. That monitor has been working nicely for almost a year now, for DisplayPort it’s operation is perfect and 32″ seems like an ideal size for my use. There is one problem that both HDMI ports will sometimes turn off for about half a second, I’ve tested on both ports and on multiple computers as well as a dock and it gives the same result so it’s definitely the monitor. The problem for me is that the most casual inspection won’t reveal the problem and the monitor is large and difficult to transport as I’ve thrown out the box. If I had this sort of problem with a monitor at work I’d add it to the list of things for Dell to fix next time they visit the office or use one of the many monitor boxes available to ship it back to them. But for home use it’s more of a problem for me. The easiest solution is to avoid HDMI.
A year ago I blogged about using DDC to switch monitor inputs [2], I had that running with a cheap USB switch since then to allow a workstation and a laptop to share the same monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Recently I got a USB-C dock that allows a USB-C laptop to talk to a display via DisplayPort as opposed to the HDMI connector that’s built in. But my Dell monitor only has one DisplayPort input.
So I have just bought a DisplayPort and USB KVM switch via eBay for $52, a reasonable price given that last year such things were well over $100. It has ports for 3 USB devices which is better than my previous setup of a USB switch with only a single port that I used with a 3 port hub for my keyboard and mouse.
the DisplayPort switch is described as doing 4K at 60Hz, I don’t know how it will perform with a 5K monitor, maybe it will work at 30Hz or 40Hz. But currently Dell 5K monitors are at $2,500 and 6K monitors are about $3,800 so I don’t plan to get one of them any time soon.
Laptop vs Desktop Price
Currently the smaller and cheaper USB-C docks start at about $25 and Dell has a new Vostro with 8G of RAM and 2*USB-C ports for $788. That gives a bit over $800 for a laptop and dock vs $795 for the cheapest Dell desktop which also has 8G of RAM. For every way of buying laptops and desktops (EG buying from Officeworks, buying on ebay, etc) the prices for laptops and desktops seem very similar. For all those comparisons the desktop will typically have a faster CPU and more options for PCIe cards, larger storage, etc. But if you don’t want to expand storage beyond the affordable 4TB NVMe/SSD devices, don’t need to add PCIe cards, and don’t need much CPU power then a laptop will do well. For the vast majority of the computer work I do my Thinkpad Carbon X1 Gen1 (from 2012) had plenty of CPU power.
If someone who’s not an expert in PC hardware was to buy a computer of a given age then laptops probably aren’t more expensive than desktops even disregarding the fact that a laptop works without the need to purchase a monitor, a keyboard, or a mouse. I can get regular desktop PCs for almost nothing and get parts to upgrade them very cheaply but most people can’t do that. I can also get a decent second-hand laptop and USB-C dock for well under $400.
Servers and Gaming Systems
For people doing serious programming or other compute or IO intensive tasks some variation on the server theme is the best option. That may be something more like the servers used by the r/homelab people than the corporate servers, or it might be something in the cloud, but a server is a server. If you are going to have a home server that’s a tower PC then it makes sense to put a monitor on it and use it as a workstation. If your server makes so much noise that you can’t spend much time in the same room or if it’s hosted elsewhere then using a laptop to access it makes sense.
Desktop computers for PC gaming makes sense as no-one seems to be making laptops with moderately powerful GPUs. The most powerful GPUs draw 150W which is more than most laptop PSUs can supply and even if a laptop PSU could supply that much there would be the issue of cooling. The Steam Deck [1] and the Nintendo Switch [2] can both work with USB-C docks. The PlayStation 5 [3] has a 350W PSU and doesn’t support video over USB-C. The Steam Deck can do 8K resolution at 60Hz or 4K at 120Hz but presumably the newer Steam games will need a desktop PC with a more powerful GPU to properly use such resolutions.
For people who want the best FPS rates on graphics intensive games it could make sense to have a tower PC. Also a laptop that’s run at high CPU/GPU use for a long time will tend to have it’s vents clogged by dust and possibly have the cooling fan wear out.
Monitor Resolution
Laptop support for a single 4K monitor became common in 2012 with the release of the Ivy Bridge mobile CPUs from Intel in 2012. My own experience of setting up 4K monitors for a Linux desktop in 2019 was that it was unreasonably painful and that the soon to be released Debian/Bookworm will make things work nicely for 4K monitors with KDE on X11. So laptop hardware has handled the case of a single high resolution monitor since before such monitors were cheap or common and before software supported it well. Of course at that time you had to use either a proprietary dock or a mini-DisplayPort to HDMI adaptor to get 4K working. But that was still easier than getting PCIe video cards supporting 4K resolution which is something that according to spec sheets wasn’t well supported by affordable cards in 2017.
Since USB-C became a standard feature in laptops in about 2017 support of more monitors than most people would want through a USB-C dock became standard. My Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen5 which was released in 2017 will support 2*FullHD monitors plus a 4K monitor via a USB-C dock, I suspect it would do at least 2*4K monitors but haven’t had a chance to test. Cheap USB-C docks supporting this sort of thing have only become common in the last year or so.
How Many Computers per Home
Among middle class Australians it’s common to have multiple desktop PCs per household. One for each child who’s over the age of about 13 and one for the parents seems to be reasonably common. Students in the later years of high-school and university students are often compelled to have laptops so having the number of laptops plus the number of desktops be larger than the population of the house probably isn’t uncommon even among people who aren’t really into computers. As an aside it’s probably common among people who read my blog to have 2 desktops, a laptop, and a cloud server for their own personal use. But even among people who don’t do that sort of thing having computers outnumber people in a home is probably common.
A large portion of the computer users can do everything they need on a laptop. For gamers the graphics intensive games often run well on a console and that’s probably the most effective way of getting to playing the games. Of course the fact that there is “RGB RAM” (RAM with Red, Green, and Blue LEDs to light up) along with a lot of other wild products sold to gamers suggests that gaming PCs are not about what runs the game most effectively and that an art/craft project with the PC is more important than actually playing games.
Instead of having one desktop PC per bedroom and laptops for school/university as well it would make more sense to have a laptop per person and have a USB-C dock and monitor in each bedroom and a USB-C dock connected to a large screen TV in the lounge. This gives plenty of flexibility for moving around to do work and sharing what’s on your computer with other people. It also allows taking a work computer home and having work with your monitor, having a friend bring their laptop to your home to work on something together, etc.
For most people desktop computers don’t make sense. While I think that convergence of phones with laptops and desktops is the way of the future [4] for most people having laptops take over all functions of desktops is the best option today.
Petter Reinholdtsen wrote an interesting blog post about their work on packaging speech to text for Debian [1]. The work of the Debian Deep Learning Team seems really interesting and I look forward to playing with this sort of thing after the release of Bookworm (the packages in question will NOT go in Bookworm but I’ll run at least one system on Testing after Bookworm). It would be nice to get more information on the hardware used for running such programs, the minimum hardware needed for real-time speech to text would be interesting to know.
Brian Krebs wrote an informative article about attacks involving supply chain compromise and fake LinkedIn profiles [2]. The attacks targetted Linux as well as Windows.
Interesting video about the Illium cameras, a bit harsh though, they criticise Illium devices for being too low resolution, too expensive, and taking too much CPU time to process [3]. The Illium cameras still sell for decent prices on eBay, I wonder if it’s because of curious people like me who would like to play with them and have money to spare or whether some other interesting things are being done. I wonder how a 4*4 array of the rectangular cameras secured together with duct tape would go. The ideas of Illium should work better if implemented for multi-core CPUs or GPUs.
Bruce Schneier with Henry Farrell and Nathan Sanders wrote an insightful blog post about how AT Chatbots could improve democracy [4].
Wired has an interesting article about the way DJI drones transmit the location of the drone operator without encryption – by design [5]. Apparently this has been used for targetting attacks on drone operators in Ukraine.
This video about robot “mice” navigating mazes is interesting [6]. But I think it became less interesting when they got to the stage of milliseconds counting for the win, it’s very optimised for one case just like F1. I think it would be interesting if they had a rally contest where they go across grass or sand, 3D mazes both in air and water, and contests where Tungsten weights have to be transported. They should push some of the other limits of engineering as completing a maze quickly has been solved.
The Guardian has an interesting article about a blood test for sleepy driving [7]. Once they have an objective test they can punish people for it.
This github repository listing public APIs is interesting [8]. Lots of fun ideas for phone apps there.
Simon Josefsson wrote an insightful blog post about the threat model of security devices [9]. Unfortunately the security of most people is way below the level where this is an issue. But it’s good to think about future steps needed for good security.
Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article “The Swivel Eyed Loons have a Point” [10] about the fact that some of the nuttiest people are protesting about real issues, just in the wrong way.
I recently test drove a Genesis GV70, but the GV60 [1] which I didn’t test drive is a nicer car.
The GV70 and GV60 are all electric so they are quiet and perform well. The GV70 has a sun-roof that opens, it was the first car I’ve driven like that and I decided I don’t like it. Having the shade open so I can see the sky while stuck in a traffic jam is nice though. The GV60 has a non-opening sun-roof with a shade that can be retracted, this is a feature I’d really like to have in my next car.
Electric cars as a general rule have good acceleration and are quiet, the GV70 performed as expected in that regard. It has a head-up display projected on the windscreen for the speed and the speed limit on the road in question which is handy. When driving in a car park it showed images from all sides which is really handy, I wish I had explored that feature more.
The console is all electronic with a TFT display instead of mechanical instruments but the only significant difference this makes in driving is that when a turn indicator is used the console display shows a video feed for the blind-spot that matches the lane change direction. This is a significant safety feature and will reduce the incidence of collisions. But the capabilities of the hardware seem under utilised, hopefully they will release a software update at some future time to do more with it.
The most significant benefit of the GV60 over the GV70 is that it has cameras instead of mirrors at the sides of the car. This reduces drag and also removes the need to adjust mirrors to match the height of the driver. Also for driver instruction the instructor and learner get to see the same view. A logical development of such cars is an expansion pack for instruction that has displays in the passenger seat to show the instructor the same instrument view as the driver sees.
The minimum list driveaway price for the GV60 is $117,171.50 and for the GV70 it is $138,119.89 – both of which are more than I’m prepared to pay for a car. The GV60 apparently can be started by fingerprint which seems like a bad idea given the poor security of fingerprint sensors, but as regular car keys tend not to be too difficult to work around it probably doesn’t matter. The Genesis web site makes it difficult to find the ranges of electric cars which is surprising. A Google search suggests that the GV60 can do 466Km and the GV70 can do 410Km which are both reasonable numbers and nothing to be ashamed of.
The GV70 was a fun car to drive and the GV60 looks like it would be even better. I recommend that everyone who likes technology take one for a test drive, but for my own use I’m looking for something that costs less than half as much.
|
|
