• 21 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Firstly, it depends on how illegal it is. Is it illegal like you shouldn’t do it and we will try to block you? Or is it illegal like if we catch you do it, you can get arrested or worse?

    Scenario A:

    • just try shit out, try different VPNs. Some of them provide certain obfuscation. You can see if they work. If they don’t work, you’ve got some more dedicated VPNs such as Tor with all kinds of Tor bridges (obfs4, snowflake, etc) Or psiphon

    Scenario B:

    • The risk is real and you might consider not doing it at all, but if you do, obfs4 is the only thing I can recommend, Psiphon is easily detectable (it’s just good at bypassing blocks)


  • Simple answer is no but…

    Stock android, like all commercial OS is inherently spyware. Google does have access to it and in theory could do anything, but that is only “in theory” because as far as we know stock android does not come with keyloggers and data exfiltration tools, it spies on you in the way of “telemetry” meaning that Google decided that certain data is useful and so they “anonymize” it and collect it, this data can be: wifi networks, location, phone usage, and more.

    So in theory it is possible that stock android either already has spyware to collect personal app data that no one ever noticed (very unlikely) or that google will push an update with such software (somewhat unlikely)

    Now if you use other Google apps, especially gboard and google assistant, you are definitely sharing SOME amount of peesonal text with google.

    The reality is that you should consider your threat model, which means to consider what kind of risk you are willing to take and what kind you are willing to make a change to avoid. It is perfectly reasonable to say that you are not willing to use gboard or google assistant, but you are willing to use the stock android, understanding that you are sharing some data with Google, but most likely no app data (such as your texts in Signal)

    Same thing about choosing a messenger. WhatsApp is made and managed by Meta, a company that lives off of user data. So even though WhatsApp claims (and seems to really be) end to end encrypted, you can still be sure that Meta is collecting everything they can, which probably means: who you are texting, how much, at what time, how much you use the app, location, and much more. Signal is open source and managed by a non-profit that does have a good track record, and because ut is open source you can also choose a different client (like Molly) which further reduces the Signal Foundation’s hold on your chats (if you fear that) So you could say that because all of your friends use WhatsApp you are willing to accept that Meta will collect a bunch of data on you, or you could decide that you are not okay with that data collection and therefore choose Signal. It is up to you. In any case, E2EE is a must as it protects you from unauthorized access from hackers.





  • Buying new: Basically all of the integrated memory units like macs and amd’s new AI chips, after that any modern (last 5 years) gpu while focusing only on vram (currently nvidia is more properly supported in SOME tools)

    Buying second hand: not likely to find any of the integrated memory stuff, so any GPU from the last decade that is still officially supported and focusing on vram.

    8gb is enough to run basic small models, 20+ for pretty capable 20-30b models, 50+ for the 70b ones and 100-200+ for full sized models.

    These are rough estimates, do your own research as well.

    For the most part with LLMs for a single user you really only care about VRAM and storage speed(ssd) Any GPU will perform faster than you can read for anything that fully fits on it’s VRAM, so the GPU only matters if you intend on running large models at extreme speeds (for automation tasks, etc) And the storage is a bottleneck at model load, so depending on your needs it might not be that big of an issue for you, but for example with a 30gb model you can expect to wait 2-10 minutes for it to load into the vram from an HDD, about 1 minute with a sata SSD, and about 4-30 seconds with an NVMe.



  • It’s very very unlikely that your TV and your device connected to it both support and enable ethernet over HDMI by default. But if you are unsure you can test it by connecting and seeing if the TV is getting a connection.

    Personally I also opened my TV and disconnected the wifi card since in theory the TV could also just try to connect to any open wifi in the area without me knowing, but to each their own threat model.