Just a stranger trying things.

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  • 16 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • I don’t understand in what circumstances anyone would like to use link shorteners? I can only find reasons why not to use them:

    • subject visitors to surveillance
    • destination under the control of a third party (potential for ransom for the author, like we see here, and potential of ads for visitors like we see here)
    • obfuscation of the actual destination
    • how long will the redirect be valid for? It could be deemed unviable for the company to continue support of the redirect, thus rendering the destination inaccessible from all places where the shortened link is used.
    • more…?


  • One thing which I find useful is to be able to turn installation/setup instructions into ansible roles and tasks. If you’re unfamiliar, ansible is a tool for automated configuration for large scale server infrastructures. In my case I only manage two servers but it is useful to parse instructions and convert them to ansible, helping me learn and understand ansible at the same time.

    Here is an example of instructions which I find interesting: how to setup docker for alpine Linux: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Docker

    Results are actually quite good even for smaller 14B self-hosted models like the distilled versions of DeepSeek, though I’m sure there are other usable models too.

    To assist you in programming (both to execute and learn) I find it helpful too.

    I would not rely on it for factual information, but usually it does a decent job at pointing in the right direction. Another use i have is helpint with spell-checking in a foreign language.



  • They have to know who the message needs to go to, granted. But they don’t have to know who the message comes from, hence why the sealed sender technique works. The recipient verifies the message via the keys that are exchanged if they have been communicating with that correspondent before or else it is a new message request.

    So I don’t see how they can build social graphs if they don’t know who the sender if all messages are, they can only plot recipients which is not enough.



  • and requires phone numbers (meaning your real identity in the US).

    This gets shared a lot as a major concern for all services requiring a phone number. It is definitely true that by definition, a phone number is linked to a person’s identity, but in the case of signal, no other information can be derived from it. When the US government requests data for that phone number from Signal, like they occasionally do, the only information Signal provides them with is whether they do have a signal account and when they registered it last and when they last signed in. How is that truly problematic? For all other services which require a phone number, you would have much more information which is where it is truly problematic, say social graph, text messages, media, locations, devices etc. But none of that is accessible by Signal. So literally the only thing signal can say is whether the person has an account, that’s about it. What’s the big deal about it? Clearly the US government already has your phone number because they need it to make the request for Signal, but they gain absolutely no other information.




  • The interface called open-webui can run in a container, but ollama runs as a service on your system, from my understanding.

    The models are local and only answer queries by default. It all happens on the system without any additional tools. Now, if you want to give them internet access, you can, it is an option you have to setup and open-webui makes that possible though I have not tried it myself. I just see it.

    I have never heard of any llm “answer base queries offline before contacting their provider for support”. It’s almost impossible for the LLM to do it by itself without you setting things up for it that way.


  • whats great is that with ollama and webui, you can as easily run it all on one computer locally using the open-webui pip package or in a remote server using the container version of open-webui.

    Ive run both and the webui is really well done. It offers a number of advanced options, like the system prompt but also memory features, documents for RAG and even a built in python ide for when you want to execute python functions. You can even enable web browsing for your model.

    I’m personally very pleased with open-webui and ollama and they both work wonders together. Hoghly recommend it! And the latest llama3.1 (in 8 and 70B variants) and llama3.2 (in 1 and 3B variants) work very well, even on CPU only, for the latter! Give it a shot, it is so easy to set up :)