• 6 Posts
  • 58 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2023

help-circle




  • Look, AI/LLMs are the scourge of the internet and I wish the bubble would pop already. Heck I downvote people using AI to answer questions online myself.

    But there is a qualitative difference between a plain LLM being forced down your throat, hallucinating left and right based on outdated training data, and the RAG that Kagi uses.

    First of all, it’s not rammed down your throat, you chose if you want it by appending a question mark to the end of your query, the default is to not show any AI content.

    Second, it being RAG, the generation is is based on real documents fetched from regular search and it has actual citation links to which page the information came from (these are not hallucinated but based on the search results). If you’d bothered to read my post you’d have seen me mentioning that you still can’t trust it’s output (it is still LLM technology and makes shit up), but it does work really well as an initial filter on which of the search results might be relevant to your query, and then actually read those pages by picking the one that fits what you actually want the most based on the summary.

    I don’t usually turn this on for regular searches, but for technical programming things it is helpful, especially when searching for things where there’s little information. There’s really two cases, sometimes there’s 5 different ways of solving something and it will enumerate them with a short summary, making it faster to know which stack overflow or blog post to read for a likely solution.

    The other, much more useful scenario imo is for those problems where there’s little information. For instance I’m currently building a bluetooth touchpad to attack to my keyboard. For this, I need to specify USB HID usages and usages pages so the OS properly picks up the device. Bluetooth touchpads are almost non-existent, especially DIY ones, so there’s not really any information on them out there. So I’ll do a search like “bluetooth hid usage for a touchpad?” and I’m immediately faced with bland, generic LLM garbage not relevant to my problem:

    This immediately tells me that my query isn’t specific enough, that none of the top results contain relevant information and that I should try again. I didn’t have to waste time wading through the results.

    So I do another search, a bit more specific and get

    That looks more like what I’m looking for. Notice though, that the result is wrong in this case. 0x0A is not Generic Desktop, 0x01 is. I picked this specifically because it’s one of the recent examples where the output was just wrong. But I don’t care about the AI summary itself. But what it says tells me immediately that the actual search results themselves are much more relevant to what I’m looking for, and the two links it cites are actually relevant to my query, they’re documentation of bluetooth hid profiles. In the search results themselves, these are results 4 and 5. So I read those, and it takes some more queries, to realize there just isn’t a specific code for HID touchpads, they’re just generic pointer devices.

    So did the AI answer my question? No. Does is sometimes answer my question, sure, but I still need to double check. Does it allow me to iterate on my searches faster and to guess if the answer is within the top 5 results? absolutely.


  • JustTestingAtoTechTakes@awful.systemsGoogle Search is getting worse and worse
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    11
    ·
    edit-2
    27 days ago

    I’m super happy with Kagi search. Even the AI summary is quite good as it’s based on the search results, not just made up from training data. Of course, it’s still a stupid LLM, so double check everthing. But i find it quite useful to get a grasp on the overall content of the results.

    And search itself works well, haven’t had a moment where it was worse than one of the big providers. The dedicated forum, programming and other serchas are cool and i love being able to adjust the priority of pages or even blacklist them.





  • You misunderstand, the first two commands are just one time setup to install a specific python version and then to create an env using that version. After that all you need is `pyenv activate myenv´ to drop you into that env, which will use the correct python version and make sure everything is isolated from other environments you might have.

    You can also just create an env with the system python version, but the question was specifically about managing multiple versions of python side by side and this makes that super easy.

    You could also combine it with direnv to automatically drop you into the correct environment based on the folder you are in, so you don’t have to type anything after the initial setup.



  • JustTestingAtoLinux@lemmy.mlYour Most Frustrating Configuration Experience?
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv together solves this for me. Virtualenv with specific python versions that work together well with other tools like pip or poetry.

    It boils down to something like

    $ pyenv install 3.12.7
    $ pyenv virtualenv 3.12.7 myenv
    $ pyenv activate myenv
    

    and at that point you can do regular python stuff like pip installing etc.





  • Slavery in the US before the civil war didn’t happen in a vacuum. There were slaves in the south that didn’t consume anything, producing goods that in a large part were exported to britain. And the money from that was used to buy more slaves and land. But some of it was used to buy goods and expertise from the north that the slave economy was lacking, which in turn drove industrialization in the north.

    But i stand by my point that over time the artificially low prices due to slave labor causes outflows of money from the rest of the world, depriving workers in other countries of money/wages and causing them to spend less. So all those slaves would overproduce things that there isn’t demand anymore and it’s still worse for the rich fucks than if they had paid slaves a fair wages.

    Just to be clear, I’m not saying such a system can’t exist or work, just that in the long run it’s worse for everyone, even the rich who thrive on exploiting poor people.

    Sadly the billionaire class don’t seem to understand this and there’s not much to do other than teaching them by force every 50-150 years.


  • Well, profitable in the short term. If the lowly peons don’t have money because you took it all, they cant spend it on stuff from your factories and your profit goes down and everything grinds to a halt. of course you can try to sell it to other countries, which fucks over their economies and makes them more susceptible to populism/facism (well after an initial phase of excitement over those sweet cheap imports) and then it’s facism all around and everyone is fucked. You just need to plan it well enough so you’re on your private island/mars colony with robot butlers by that point



  • ‘Programming from the ground up’ the main idea of this one is to teach programming in a bottom up way, so very low level.

    it’s mostly about teaching (linux) assembly to beginners, so in a way it is just learning a new language. But it’s mainly about understanding low level how a computer works, like registers, kernel calls, how function calls are handled, all for beginners. It’s really easy to pick up.

    Knowing those fundamentals can go a long way in understanding other computing concepts.

    Others that come to mind are :

    • Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems
    • A Philosophy of Software Design
    • Software Architecture: The Hard Parts"