sbird

It’s kind of neat that they are going for it as well as an SBC (easier for developers to work with) and a more affordable and accessible device (the Motorola Edge 30)

Hey, that’s pretty neat! It looks like the name is based off a rock structure in Italy, representing stability :D

It’s also nice that it’s easier to pronounce for non-native English speakers (or as a matter of fact, non-English speakers!)

The new .eco URL is also interesting, from what I can tell it’s operated by a Canadian company called “Big Room”, and to register, you need to pledge that you will support positive change for the planet and you need to be transparent about your actions that could affect the environment.

We’ve already seem sites with the .org TLD get struck down by the U.S. government (e.g. Autistici/Inventati getting sanctioned as a “global terrorist organisation” for providing email and blog hosting services to “far-left antifascist terrorists”), so moving away from that is probably a good thing.

Fair enough. Good luck then!

It’s not that “AI” is incorrect, more that it’s way too broad. It’s like how “leftism” is used to group social democracies, totalitarian dictatorships, and anarchism together, even though they are vastly different ideologies. For an example that is not based on politics, it’s like how you need more information than just “fiction” and “non-fiction” to pick a book to read.

Good point on the cost of running a local model, but more efficient models exist that can run on memory capacities more typical for regular people (think 8-16GB of RAM). It doesn’t help that all the memory has been bought out for the data centres…

To separate the weeds from the worms, I would avoid the term “AI” since it has devolved into a buzzword that’s stuck on everything.

I think that if somebody has made a useful open-source project using LLMs, they shouldn’t be criticised solely for that reason. If the code produced is ass and isn’t reviewed, is hard to contribute to, and there is negligence, that would be a valid criticism. I also despise the use of the privacy nightmare of commercial LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.). If are to use LLMs, please use a local model. For you, your project, and your wallet’s sake. That’s my position on LLMs.

I trust that you are doing your due diligence in keeping your code relatively clean, and hope that your project will succeed! I personally do not use LLMs for my projects, they do not fit my usecase, probably not for most people actually. But I can see the value of having an LLM do menial tasks, as long as the code is properly reviewed and checked.

Generative models belong in the deepest circle in hell. They steal the work of creatives, are awful in the trifecta of morality, ethics, and legality, and are mainly used by scam artists (see: deepfakes) and misinformation campaigns. Nobody should use these, even if it’s a local model.

Also, a bit off-topic, but you might have heard of all the “AI has solved (big problem in science)” or “AI proved (big maths thing)” headlines, but note that these are NOT your LLMs, and certainly not any kind of generative model. They use predictive models (sometimes the papers mention “deep learning” too) that are trained on a specific set of data to do a specific task, and most of the actual science and maths is done by humans. These models certainly won’t replace scientists or mathematicians, like the Big Tech companies want you to believe, but they are a valuable tool when it comes to doing menial tasks repeatedly. That’s what computers are best at, after all!