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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 2nd, 2023

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  • The question is always: What do you want to use it for?

    When raspberry started the landscape was very difficult. Small computer boards were expensive, now there’s the N100 if you need a tiny cheap computer. Microcontrollers were really dumb and unconnected, now there’s the ESP32 which has WiFi and Bluetooth and decent performance. Right in the middle of this wide spectrum is the raspberry pi and its clones.

    This is a very different situation than in the introduction era where PCs were heavy and expensive and microcontrollers were dumb. There was a much wider niche for the raspberry then. For a small server I would now get a $100 N100 from aliexpress. For embedded electronics I would grab a $10 ESP32. Only in the middle is the raspberry pi, but the problem is, it’s only in the middle in terms of performance, not price. A raspberry pi with case, PSU, storage etc costs more than a decked out N100, while actually being slower.

    The only remaining usecase I see for a pi 5 would be an electronics project where you need some more compute than a microcontroller can provide, like some machine vision project. Otherwise:

    • Do you want to make some electronics IoT thingy: Get an ESP32
    • Do you want a small light computer or server: Get an N100





  • I don’t think it will.

    Microsoft’s endgame is being the lord and master of AI. AI thrives on knowing more data about the user. What good is an assistant if it doesn’t know your habits, your wishes and desires, your schedule and your attitude towards each person in your life?

    This is not really a feature primarily aimed at helping the user directly (even though it’s currently marketed as such), but to have the AI build up a repository of knowledge about you. Which is hopefully used locally only. For now this seems to be the case, but knowing Microsoft, once they have established themselves as the leading product they will start monetising it in every way possible.

    Of course I’m very unhappy with this too. I’d like to have an AI assistant. But it has to be FOSS, and owned and operated by me. I don’t trust microsoft in any way. I’m already playing around with ollama, RAG scripting etc. It won’t be as good as simply signing up to OpenAI, Google or Microsoft but at least it will be mine.


  • Oh it works great for me. In fact a lot better than the Rift did with its dedicated trackers.

    It’s also handy to just pop it on and not have to set it up. I often bring it to the office and I’ve given a demo for friends, it’s much harder with lighthouses.

    And the cost of them is just insane. If they were 100 bucks for a couple it’s fine.









  • Hmmm weird. I have a 4090 / Ryzen 5800X3D and 64GB and it runs really well. Admittedly it’s the 8B model because the intermediate sizes aren’t out yet and 70B simply won’t fly on a single GPU.

    But it really screams. Much faster than I can read. PS: Ollama is just llama.cpp under the hood.

    Edit: Ah, wait, I know what’s going wrong here. The 22B parameter model is probably too big for your VRAM. Then it gets extremely slow yes.



  • And the longer the time between episodes, the smaller the chance it would generate new sales because existing users lost interest.

    True, but with that particular game what didn’t help either was that there were many years between episodes, it was pretty awful. It’s one thing I really hate about episodic gaming. But Valve already proved it to be a failure, only Telltale And Dontnod still do it (and they do it consistently right, to be fair).

    The rest of the gaming industry has gone on to “Early access” which is even more awful. Rather than buying the first part of the story for a lower fee, you now pay top dollar for a game which isn’t even finished and never might be because once you pay them there is no real incentive to actually finish it :)

    But really, most categories of mobile games don’t interest me. Arcade and other simple crap like angry birds never interested me even in the 80s. Adventures yes but they’re few and far between on mobile and if they are they’re almost always desktop ports anyway. FPS really really sucks on mobile for me, the input is just too crappy and the screens too small.