tal

Meta helped fuck over the global economy.

What?

EDIT: You mean them spending a lot of money on VR stuff without it really generating a return?

I don't know if you're in the US, but if so, it's probably not that anyone purchased those rights, but rather that under, as I recall, Western US water right conventions, where land is more arid, if someone is a pre-existing user of water, you can't go upstream from them and block off water from flowing to them (which people would probably tend to do, otherwise).

kagis

Yeah. Apparently the legal term is "prior-appropriation water rights".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior-appropriation_water_rights

In the American legal system, prior appropriation water rights is the doctrine that the first person to take a quantity of water from a water source for "beneficial use" (agricultural, industrial or household) has the right to continue to use that quantity of water for that purpose.[1][2] Subsequent users can take the remaining water for their own use if they do not impinge on the rights of previous users. The doctrine is sometimes summarized, "first in time, first in right".

Prior appropriation rights do not constitute a full ownership right in the water, merely the right to withdraw it, and can be abrogated if not used for an extended period of time.

Origin

Water is very scarce in the West and so must be allocated sparingly, based on the productivity of its use. The prior appropriation doctrine developed in the Western United States from Spanish (and later Mexican) civil law and differs from the riparian water rights that apply in the rest of the United States. The appropriation doctrine originated in Gold-Rush–era California, when miners sought to acquire water for mining operations. In the 1855 case of Irwin v. Phillips, Matthew Irwin diverted a stream for his mining operation. Shortly afterward, Robert Phillips started a mining operation downstream and eventually tried to divert the water back to its original streambed. The case was taken to the California Supreme Court, which ruled for Irwin.[3]

EDIT: Oh, though they do say that the rights can be sold, so maybe someone did purchase them.

They're all right, I suppose, but it wasn't dissatisfaction with search results that caused me to want to use Kagi. Rather, that I wanted to use a search engine that has a sustainable business model that didn't involve data-mining me or showing me ads.

If Google or whoever offered some kind of comparable commercial "private search" service with a no-log, no-data-mining, no-ad offering, I'd probably sit down and to compare the results, see what I think. I kind of wish Google would do that with YouTube, but alas, they don't...

Kagi does have a feature where they will let you search the complete Threadiverse that I make use of, since I spend a lot of time here; there isn't really a fantastic way to accomplish this on Google or another search engine that I'm aware of. They call that their "Fediverse Forums" search lens; that's probably the Kagi-specific feature that I get the most use out of.

They have other features, like fiddling with the priorities of sites and stuff like that, but I don't really use that stuff. They do let you customize the output and stuff. You can set up search aliases and stuff, but I can do most of that browser-side in Firefox.

They have the ability to run a variety of LLM models on their hardware, provide that as a service. I have the hardware to run those on my own hardware and have the software set up to do so, so I don't use that functionality. If I didn't, I'd probably find some commercial service like them that had a no-log, no-data-mining policy, as it's more economical to share hardware that one is only using 1% of the time or whatever.

I dunno. They have some sort of free trial thing, if you want to see what their search results are like.

Black.

I want someone to prove his LLM can be as insightful and accurate as paid one.

I mean, you can train a model that's domain-specific that some commercial provider doesn't have a proprietary model to address. A model can only store so much information, and you can choose to weight that information towards training on what's important to you. Or providers may just not offer a model in the field that you want to deal with at all.

But I don't think that, for random individual user who just wants a general-purpose chatbot, he's likely going to get better performance out of something self-hosted. Probably it'll cost more for the hardware, since the local hardware isn't likely to be saturated and probably will not have shared costs, though you don't say that cost is something that you care about.

I think that the top reason for wanting to run an LLM model locally is the one you explicitly ruled out: privacy. You aren't leaking information to someone's computers.

Some other possible benefits of running locally:

• Because you can guarantee access to the computational hardware. If my Internet connection goes down, neither does whatever I'm doing with the LLM.

• Latency isn't a factor, either from the network or shared computational systems. Right now, I don't have anything that has much by way of real-time constraints, but I'm confident that applications will exist.

• A cloud LLM provider can change the terms of their service. I mean, sure, in theory you could set up some kind of contract that locks in a service (though the VMWare customers dealing with Broadcom right now may not feel that that's the strongest of guarantees). But if I'm running something locally, I can keep it doing so as long as I want, and I know the costs. Lot of certainty there.

• I don't have to worry about LLM behavior changing underfoot, either from the service provider fiddling with things or new regulations being passed.

I'm gonna bet that you're going to get a much-more-economical return there by powdering whatever iron is used in building that thing and then dumping said iron powder into the ocean at an appropriate point.

kagis

https://liquidtrees.org/team

Nine Indians, four Spaniards, and a German, apparently.

You can bioengineer algae to do pretty much anything.

They are psychologically calming for people as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocnide_moroides

Dendrocnide moroides, commonly known in Australia as the stinging tree, stinging bush, or gympie-gympie, is a plant in the nettle family Urticaceae found in rainforest areas of Malesia and Australia.[3] It is notorious for its extremely painful and long-lasting sting.

Depends on the tree.

Let's tie him up and sneeze on him.

As I recall, at least under US law, you can't copyright genetically-engineered life, just get a twenty year biological patent. So I don't think that FOSS status would be directly germane other than maybe in how some such licenses might deal with patent licensing.

Just give me a 4U tank somewhere where someone else can deal with harvesting the algae and a webcam aimed at it and I can enjoy it just fine from here. For me, selfhosting is mostly about the privacy, not principally about needing to be resistant to loss of Internet connectivity or the like.