tal

For the US, my experience:

• Way more smoking (which people also mentioned last time this was asked). Cigarette butts everywhere.

• Government was more dignified.

• Houses were smaller.

• Cars were smaller. And more colorful -- the last decade or so has really favored colors between white and black. Oh, and a wider variety of interior upholstery.

• Telecommunications were much more expensive.

• People smashed trees into pulp, bleached it, rolled it into sheets, and then put their messages on them.

• Libraries were more important.

• Store selection was way, way more limited, and if you lived somewhere rural, even more so. Amazon and similar let you have anything delivered anywhere today.

• I kinda miss some of the styles, like 1980s denim jackets, but there were also things that I disliked compared to today. Oh, yoga pants were not typically worn in public. Or flannel pajamas pants

that seems to be a thing where I am now. If you were female, you were a lot more likely to be waring a skirt or dress than today. Clothing was more formal, in general.

• On that note, the necktie was still a thing. It's pretty dead today.

• Carpeting in houses was more popular.

• People spent a lot more time staring at the TV, which I think is a lot more mindless than Internet use today. Oh, and you had far fewer channels than you do on a TV today.

• Lighting was yellower, because of the use of incandescents. Nighttime in houses was darker and yellower.

• The logistics of communication and navigation were more complicated without GPS-equipped smartphones. One typically kept maps in the car. Asking for directions was a thing. You might even have a car compass. Finding payphones was a thing.

• Much less omnipresent surveillance, like the security cameras and automated license plate readers of today.

• If you had a computer, it was much more likely not to be connected to a network, so software couldn't rely on network access. It couldn't phone home or transmit information about you.

• Video games were much less mainstream, especially before the 1990s. Not many adults playing them.

• Way more handwriting done. The fancy pen was more of a thing.

• Flashlights and penlights were more prominent, since everyone wasn't carrying a smartphone that could act as a flashlight.

• I'd say that probably the majority of people wore a wristwatch.

• Computers were much more expensive than they are today, and became obsolete far faster. The rate of computation speed increased such that about every 18 months, computers ran software twice as fast as before. This has a huge impact on other industries, since that constantly made new things viable.

• Lots of devices with disposable batteries.

• Dedicated portable music players with far less battery life were much more common. You carried around much less music.

• Cars, IMHO, looked more interesting. Certainly more varied. Mileage was worse.

• You certainly didn't omit spare tires in cars. Much harder to get roadside assistance.

• I'd say that woodworking skills were more common. A lot of guys could and would do basic projects.

• People spent more time outdoors.

• People were thinner.

• Motor noise was more obnoxious along roads. Cars are quieter today.

• Airline security was way less obnoxious. Didn't have all the security screening stuff that 9/11 spawned. Air travel was more expensive.

• More casual conversations with strangers that one sat near, I'd say. Smartphones severely degraded the custom of chatting with strangers.

• Magazines and newspapers were much more common.

I've done some maps in GNU R.

Here's a (cropped) choropleth map I did for a discussion thread about legislative representation in Europe:

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/b6f28602-ab94-4901-b5e1-158061624c75.png

page <- read_html("https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_legislatures_by_number_of_members&oldid=1010580360")

df <- html_table(html_node(page, xpath = "/html/body/div[3]/div[3]/div[5]/div[1]/table"))

df$per_capita <- df$"Population/\nLower house seats" %>% parse_number()
df$name <- df$Country

europe <- df %>% mutate(continent = countrycode(Country, origin = "country.name", destination = "continent")) %>% filter(continent == "Europe")

shapes <- ne_countries(scale = "medium")
shapes_merged <- sp::merge(shapes, europe, by.x = "name", all.x = TRUE, by.y = "name")

map <- tm_shape(shapes_merged, projection =  "epsg:3035", bbox = bb(c(-8, 34.5000, 43, 72))) +
    tm_fill(col = "per_capita", palette = plasma(256), title = "persons", legend.reverse = TRUE) +
    tm_borders(col = "black") +
    tm_scale_bar() +
    tm_layout(bg.color = "#e6f7fe", outer.margins = 0, legend.outside = TRUE,
              legend.outside.position = "bottom",
              legend.position = c(0,.9),
              main.title = "Persons per Lower House Legislative Seat",
              attr.outside = TRUE)

tmap_save(map, width =  1920, height =  1080, dpi =  96, "map.png")

And if so, what would you tell someone who is contemplating such a thing with no prior practical experience of such systems?

Depends pretty much entirely on what it is that you want to do and what software you're using.

It's not so much the individual guy that I'm aiming to highlight. It's just...here was Russia's plan. A lightning strike, and victory (ignore the inset):

And four-and-a-half years in, here is what Russia is creating new government ministries to try to defend:

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/83d767a3-1b07-435c-8bcb-2f959e5cb03c.png

https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/_/id/48707727/fifa-triples-best-available-world-cup-final-ticket-33k

FIFA tripled the price of its best available tickets to the FIFA World Cup final, making $32,970 seats available Thursday for the July 19 match at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

Soccer's governing body listed those seats as front category 1 on its sales site on a day that saw members of Congress question the pricing structure for World Cup tickets and ask FIFA for more transparency on asking prices.

FIFA previously had a high price of $10,990 for category 1 at the final. However, that ticket was now available Thursday night only as wheelchair and easy access amenity category 1.

Tickets for the July 14 semifinal at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, were listed at $11,130, $4,330, $3,710 and $2,705. Seats for the following day's semifinal at Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium were at $10,635, $3,545 and $2,725.

More expensive than for NFL tickets!

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/super-bowl/2026/01/21/super-bowl-60-ticket-prices-purchase-cheapest/88274794007/

Face value for tickets to Super Bowl 60 range from $950 to $8,500, according to Friedman, who provided USA TODAY Sports a screenshot of a seating chart with ticket prices.

Personally, the idea of “extending the life” by installing Linux is foreign to me because I immediately put Linux on any hardware I get anyway.

Well, that's still sort of extending it past 0, so...

The Nazis wouldn't have qualified by the standards at the time of the American Revolution in Benjamin Franklin's eyes. Nor even the Italian side of Bovino's family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_Concerning_the_Increase_of_Mankind,_Peopling_of_Countries,_etc.

https://www.profmarkbaker.com/blog/2017/6/3/whiteness

I recently read derogatory comments a prominent political leader made about non-white immigrants swarming into our towns and cities and ruining our way of life. It was not Donald Trump, but Benjamin Franklin. And the threatening masses were not Latinos from south of the border, but immigrants from Germany—my ancestors.

“Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.” – what follows is an excerpt from the 1751 original by Benjamin Franklin

[W]hy should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.

I have always been labeled as white—by myself and others. Yet not according to Ben Franklin. My ancestors are the exact people he sees as a threat to whites. They came from Germany and swarmed into Franklin’s beloved Pennsylvania. My father is a 6th generation German-American. And even after five generations in Pennsylvania they still spoke German. My grandfather did not learn English until he went to school. According to Franklin I am not white, but a swarthy German—a threat to the ways of whiteness.

It is common place to observe that most of those who complain about immigrants today are part of ethnic groups that once were slandered and scorned in similar ways. Franklin’s comments reinforce that important observation. Important, but not new for me. What was new for me was the realization that there was a time when some people would not have seen me as white.

"White" is a surprisingly mutable term over time as social norms change.

EDIT: I'd also add that you can also watch, over the course of America's history, "Protestant" morph into "Christian" and then morph into "Judeo-Christian" in political speeches and the like among people complaining about traditional American values being under threat.

Glad to hear it. Just out of curiosity, and for anyone who might run across this in the future trying to accomplish something similar, is your copy of Termux running rooted? I wouldn't have thought that it'd be possible without root privilege. You did mention Magisk above.

The key change will be the creation of a new executive body, the Ministry for the Protection of Facilities of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast.

I see that the Three Day Special Military Operation is going swimmingly.

I'm banned in these two communities (some sort of automod script went off at some point for some reason on some comment and banned me from a bunch of places on the sh.itjust.works instance, and the admin never responded when I asked about it), so I'm not there, but some places that won't have people getting upset over people talking about it:

• !localllama@sh.itjust.works. This is probably your best bet for text.

• !imageai@sh.itjust.works. These guys deal with image generation.

Also:

• !stable_diffusion@lemmy.dbzer0.com. As with Reddit's /r/stablediffusion, these guys don't really deal specifically with just the Stable Diffusion image diffusion model

have broader technical discussion and stuff.

You can search communities on all Threadiverse instances at:

https://lemmyverse.net/communities

If you decide to start a new community somewhere else yourself, let me know. I'd be interested in joining.

and will have huge context menus you could talk to them for hours and they will remember every single detail and be able to pull it up instantly

So, the problem is that the way this is generally handled today

at least via local LLM stuff that I've looked at, haven't looked at the bleeding edge at cloud providers, and they probably don't talk about it

is via one of two semi-incompatible approaches.

Large context window

This requires a model trained for it and enough memory to work with it I use a Framework Desktop 128GB in significant part to have enough VRAM to run queries that use this approach with mid-sized models (70b) and a 128k token window, which is larger than most people working on typical GPUs can do.

The way this works is that each time you send something to the LLM, your client also resubmits the entire conversation history (or, IIRC, depending upon the API used, does something functionally comparable that only sends the most-recent message). You probably can't afford to recompute the entire conversation history, but you can cache it using K-V caching.

The problem here is that this requires video memory that scales linearly with the size of all prior conversation. It also, IME, has processing time that scales up linearly as well. You can only have a conversation get so big before you're burning a lot of compute time.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/retrieval-augmented-generation/

Here, you have some primitive, not-very-smart software that looks at the text in your message, looks through the conversation history (and potentially other sources of data) and then, in the background, builds a prompt that contains text that it thinks might be relevant. For example, if you mention the name "death" and "Superman" in your message, maybe it looks to see if there is any past text that also contains "death" and "Superman", and inserts that into the prompt.

This has some advantages. For one, it can scale up to enormous amounts of information. And it doesn't need to just look at your conversation history as a source of data, but it can also query other databases and the like.

This also has a number of limitations.

First, the software doing that retrieval is not very "smart". It isn't always fantastic at determining what is relevant.

Second, the way current LLMs work

at least insofar as I've looked

is to try to generate text that would follow subsequent to the prompt by predicting tokens that are probable based on what it's seen.

But...what it's getting, in the background, in the prompt is a bunch of discombobulated snippets of text. And my experience is that if you want to generate text in some style, like that of a novel, seeing a bunch of snippets isn't great for that, since that doesn't look much like a novel. It may be that there are techniques for dealing with that.

Third, this also doesn't work well with the K-V cache approach, since each prompt that actually goes to the LLM can look completely different from the previous one, so you'll constantly be getting cache misses and having to recompute stuff.

My own bet is that what we're going to wind up doing is having some form of new data structure

possibly a neural net, but might look somewhat different from the multilayer model used by the LLM to store static memories, IMHO. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if this is something more like a directed acyclic graph, and I'd guess that it'll also do something akin to how red-black tree rotations see constant accesses restructure the data structure to bring more-frequently-used nodes closer to each other (though I don't personally think that it'll just be doing specifically a rotation. I'm just providing an example of another datastructure that dynamically restructures itself based on use). That'll be a mutable memory, to act like the "context" that human minds have when they're working on a problem. It'll provide properties that today human minds have and LLMs don't, like where repeatedly doing something makes you better at it. Just as we mentally associate things that we've experienced in the past together, so too will future AIs.

It may also be that something like this replaces in part the multilayer neural nets that are LLMs today. My own personal bet is that ultimately, a lot of the way advanced AIs work will not be LLM-based; LLMs just don't have properties that mirror how human minds in a number of ways. Maybe advanced AIs will incorporate an LLM as a component.

But

and I haven't been following the research closely here

I don't think that that's currently something being worked on, or at least not widely.

But I do think that, yes, advanced AIs are going to need the ability to do something like that as they head towards approach human capabilities.