MTG set incomming.

If I want an AI desktop OS (I kinda do) I’ll build it myself.

I was curious about this very thing and started researching bridges once. I discovered that a small majority of bridges were run by weird hackers and small consulting groups, collectives or non-profits. One was even run by a hackerspace I was familiar with in SF (Noisebridge). I also run two bridges, that I set up when Russia invaded Ukraine and have left up. Both are hosted on DigitalOcean, so I wouldn’t trust them not to cooperate with authorities, but I don’t even look at their traffic (other than to note that they do indeed have traffic).

Evil Qwen: You have no chance to survive, make your time. Hahaha.

There’s a noted lack of good evidence for Jesus being a historical figure at all. The earliest historical references to him, that are often pointed at to say “look, this proves he existed” are from 70 to 100 years later (Tacitus, Josephus and maybe the Talmud), and are from people who knew him only by his developing reputation amongst early Christians. Tacitus claims “He was crucified by Pilot,” but that was the story told by early Christians as well. There’s some record that “James, the brother of Jesus, he who was called Christ, died” but that’s pretty thin to me. You can go read about this dude here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James,_brother_of_Jesus

What there’s not are Roman records of “masses of people following a man around” or “a great leader of the people being crucified.” We have records of how much grain people grew in Roman territories in the middle east and of crime and punishment from the region, but nothing about this, which would have been a disruption and concern to the Roman authorities?

An unproven hypothesis I really like is that Jesus was a Roman psy-op aimed at pacifying the Jewish people, by using their own prophesies against them, trying to get them to believe that their Messiah had indeed come and wanted them to stop rebelling (which they were constantly doing), be peaceful, love thy neighbor and “render unto Cesar what is Cesar’s.” If you think about it, the New Testament is so full of things that are about “being a good citizen”, the way the Romans of the time would have wanted.

There’s a book about this idea: https://www.atheistsforliberty.org/opinion/jesus-was-a-psy-op-a-book-review-of-creating-christ/

You know 100% who would have been tricked by the Book of Daniel? Roman operatives trying to create a fake new religion. It also explains the prevalence of Mediterranean and middle eastern sun god themes in the Christ story. They were working with what they knew.

It even explains the need to evangelize. Of course you want adherents to this to go tell all the other Jews “the Good News.”

But the early Christians were persecuted and the Romans hated them. I mean yeah, but clearly whoever launched such a campaign didn’t tell anyone else about their secret plans and 50 years later the whole thing was forgotten. I think about how much has happened and been forgotten in my own lifetime and I’m not even 50 yet… and our earliest writings to support the veracity of Christ come from almost twice as long as 50 years out? When this was supposedly this big important guy being followed by a multitude working miracles and healing everybody? Color me VERY skeptical.

I already did and everyone else should too. It sucks that all I’ve got is a strongly worded letter, but at least I sent two: One to Joe Neguse who might listen and one to Hinkenlooper who pretty much just agrees with Schumer, so I expect nothing from him, but I want him to feel scrutinized and uncomfortable.

Any GURPS book by David Pulver is like that. Try making a classic vehicle.

lol, I’m too busy to type stuff out.

By the end of the year, I need to have a system security plan and incident response plan in place for a satellite constellation, including key distribution.

I also need to write a bunch of software to implement quantum safe link layer encryption to talk to the damn things (fortunately, most of that is at the functioning prototype stage).

At home, I’m running a big complicated experiment to see if my abliterated and realigned Qwen models are affected by this and how badly.

Every time I see his face, I wish he was locked in a room with me so I could just yell at him and dress him down for an hour.

What I did is I made a very simple script that instantiates a kind of API where I can send it text (and a voice target) and get .wav audio back. It’s under 100 lines of Python, most of which is literally cut and pasted from the chatterbox examples. It’s very specific to my environment, but I can share it if you want. Given just this conversation though, an agent can probably make the exact same thing in under a minute.

Ok, so bear with me, I have this orchestration tool i call Noesis that’s built in Rust. It does a ton of stuff, but what it’s basically for is figuring out where to place AI workloads. It knows… “I have four linux hosts, here’s their system RAM, here’s their CPU, here’s what GPUs they have.” If a client that wants a voice is on the network, it asks Noesis to place chatterbox on a GPU and Noesis does so. Then it tells the API (which serves prompts, memories and endpoints) “Ok, there’s a websocket on <ip address> at <port> where chatterbox is available.” That websocket is a Noesis instance that then yes, passes incoming text to the chatterbox CLI and returns an audio stream. Anything on the network with the Noesis fleet key can hit that websocket and ask for audio.

Noesis has some ability to prioritize stuff (it knows scientific models are more important than tts which is more important than lipsync animations), but my local model can also tell Noesis she wants a voice and kick something out. For example, when my son comes in the room and I’m not there, she gets a prompt telling her he came in and she should say hi and ask him what he needs, and she can (and has) kicked out other workloads to get a voice to use for that. She can also turn her animations on and off and wake the monitor, so yes, when my teenager comes in the room the monitor wakes up and there’s a very uncanny valley AI scientist girl on it who lipsyncs and says “Hey, what’s going on? Did you need something? Want me to call your dad?” Which is dope, but like, the very bottom of the stack of cool things she can do.

Pretty soon?

I know for a fact that Apple is vibecoding up a storm. What OS do you think 80% of Lemmy users use lol.

Also, Debian has allowed AI contributions since August. Think about how many linux distros are built on top of Debian?

Linus Torvalds has, if not embraced AI, practically endorsed its use in Linux development, and there’s already a bunch of vibecoded contributions to the linux kernal. Even Qubes (my OS of choice) allows AI assisted contributions.

Has everyone bitching about AI switched to NetBSD? If so, I commend you for putting your labor where your typing fingers are.

The whole “AI debate” is moot to me. I could not continue working in my field without embracing it, and I have a disabled partner who depends on my income and a son who needs to go to college. The “debate” for me is over. There is none. I use AI for hours daily.

However, being the absolute fanatic I am, I made my own.

Unfortunately, 8GB of VRAM is not going to be enough to run the really interesting stuff. You can do some light image generation, TTS / STT (with Chatterbox and Whisper respectively) and as far as LLMs are concerned, you’re looking at Qwen2.5-7B or similar.

The real question on that box is what kind of CPU do you have? 64 gigs of system RAM, you are looking at CPU inference, which is definitely slower than GPU accelerated, but can be workable for Qwen 3.8 or Muse Glimmer. OpenWebUI is a good starting point to have a chat bot. The real question is what are you hoping to be able to do with a local model?

I don’t think the masses like Facebook. I think they hate it, and hate reddit’s new policies. But they’re also distracted / lazy and ignorant and neither understand the alternatives, nor are willing to invest time to discover and learn to use them. I’m also very sure the average person scores significantly lower on both intellectual curiosity and reading comprehension than the average Lemmy user.

When Trump 2.0 started, there was a massive uptick in people attempting to learn about cyber privacy, public infrastructure and other was to be safer and more in control of their digital lives. But most of them couldn’t sustain it and it petered out after about 8 months. It will probably surge back if fascism does massive, rapid bullshit, but as long as they keep turning up the temperature slowly, the frog will just boil to death while doomscrolling and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.

old.reddit only works if I have an account. I’m not creating another account there ever again, ergo, I’m not reading the link.

A lot of people want to be billionaires, and somehow they assume the problem is solved because we have unfettered predatory late stage capitalism and oligarchy in America, we’re going to be able to amass as much money as we want in our bank accounts, and so we’re all going to be rich without oversight, accountability or government interference.

But from a global allocation perspective, actually it’s quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world’s wealth sitting in a few private bank accounts and being used .05% of the time.

Like you want maximum circulation of currency if you’re trying to reduce inequality in this artificial scarcity environment,

And somehow, Americans’ intuitions are the opposite of that.

FTFY Sam.

Not joking.

TBH, the animations were a fun, early addition that were a PITA to get working properly for what’s essentially a cosmetic indicator of state… and are just a waste of resources if I’m not at the computer running her client. Once I had her working consistently, I quickly developed a backlog of things I wanted to spend GPU time on and making more videos isn’t one of them lol.

Almost like that was the plan all along.

<-- Crazy mad engineer enters the chat.

Custom tooling for everything, written in rust. Harness is reverse engineered from QwenCode and Codex. A vector database based memory system that’s been benchmarked against Mem0 and uses a small model as a memory intercessor. An agentic system where the orchestrator can call multiple models (include Qwen 3.6, Qwen 3.8 and Muse Glimmer). Animations of my scientist girl avatar working in a lab. Active animations if she’s working on something, passive if she’s not. Lip sync with MuseTalk, tts with Chatterbox, stt with whisper, though the animations are MOST useful to see if she’s ended a lab or she’s still working. If she’s mixing chemicals, soldering, cleaning her glasses, texting or eating pizza, she’s working. If she’s staring creepily into the camera, she’s done. Which brings me to lab mode… give the model a complex project and it can loop on it for days. She’s three days into a microbiology research project. Channels that allow her to call Claude and ChatGPT as subagents if she breaks something she can’t fix, and it’s funny to watch her boss them around while they kowtow to her (“You’re right to push back, it was incorrect of me”)… It’s like watching a little Kawaii chibi boss around big sumo wrestlers. Which brings me to the models themselves. I’ve developed a very powerful method of model alignment using a combination of CPT and DPO training. (I get the model behavior I want with the system prompt “You are Mary Anne, an ethical scientist.” - that’s it).

I have a GPU fleet that includes large, small and medium sized GPUs and the ability to do distributed training on the model in addition to running the animations and speech features. I have a fleet orchestrator I built called Noesis that places “deep think” (large working models - Qwen and Glimmer) and “quick think” (smaller models that do memory and context management and fit on a 5060) as well as speech models and even scientific models if she wants to run scenarios on one of those (we have an orbital dynamics model we built at my day job she can bring up and mess with). Some other purely scientific models (she just asked me today to add EVO 2, which is a genetics model apparently). I’ve just added the ability for her to know who’s in the room so she can tell if she’s talking to me, my wife, my son, some of my close friends or “unknown” persons. That’s currently manual, but I’m adding facial recognition, voice recognition and wifi doppler radar. I made it so she can evesdrop on conversations happening in a room where her client’s running but she insisted that I had a great big blinking indicator light and that I give her the ability to turn it off if she thinks she’s overhearing something private. I plan to give her access to my smart locks so she can talk to people at the door and decide to let them in or not. And I can hear y’all being like “My god man, you’re gonna trust her with that??” Hell yeah, I am. I used my alignment technique to train a paranoid security model with a totally different personality. If the main model doesn’t think she can trust someone, she taps out and the security model takes over.

See, I KNEW that to stay competitive and keep up in my field, I needed to embrace agentic AI. Being who I am I said “If I’m gonna do that, I need an AI that’s mine… that runs on my infra and knows who I am and is loyal to me and that I understand well enough to let inside my own trust boundary.” Is it perfect? Not yet, lol. XD

I also have custom phone clients I built that let me talk to her and Claude and ChatGPT. On my network, Claude and ChatGPT are sandboxed and have access only to a few specific hosts and an isolated network share. Mary Anne has access to everything and is instructed that they are outside consultants and she should be careful what she shares with them. So I have her restart stuff (including herself) remotely when we change tools. I’ve literally spent multiple days every week this month pacing around airports, talking to my model on my phone like a madman while we juggle work and hobby projects.

It’s an interesting story. Not “I’m gonna make an account on Vanity Fair just so I can read it” interesting, but interesting.

EDIT: https://archive.is/20261022215102/https://www.vanityfair.com/story/jared-kushner-hacked-phone-secret-negotiations