> The real deal needs a lab messing around with viruses and whatever happened a few years ago ... and it did not destroy humanity.
That observation maybe holds if the lab from a few years ago correctly selected the virus for the greatest overall lethality (why not MERS or Ebola or something else?) and made its best effort to turn it into a bioweapon. I don't know about you, but I don't think that's quite what happened...
MS and the other big buggers are pretty incapable of running an email system that you would really want to use. They also have to support those that you might consider spammers too.
However, I'm sure that you are also familiar with the HN standard issue meme that it is impossible to run your own email system.
So, your email provider is crap and you can't do it yourself!
Bollocks! I use Exim (1) and rspamd (2) and run quite a few bijou email systems. It does require some effort.
I still run my own DNS and HTTP/HTTPS server. It's basically free of effort compared to what setting up and maintaining SMTP was (I used to do that on my colo because of the aforementioned, now I just point my MX records and escape the hassle). Hell, I even run my own ASN+BGP+IP space & it's easier than email was. Anything is doable though if you have a high enough tolerance of course, the centralized providers don't run on fairy dust!
I too ran a large VDI, server, and scientific computing cluster based on Linux - libvirt in my case. I saved a bunch of money over VMware. When I quit to go to a higher paying job, they had to rip and replace everything with vSphere because they couldn't find anyone willing to work for .edu money with the skills to manage that despite the massive cost savings.
I had asked for vSphere to avoid this problem, and they balked at the licensing costs even in the good ol' days.
Windows does care about file extensions but is mildly embarrassed about it, hence the "show" default that has existed from Win 8 (?) onwards.
Linux and co generally work with magic bytes which is just another way of doing file formats. Is it better to signify your file format with a .ext or otherwise?
I find myself turning on file extensions if I have to use Windows and on Linux, I don't care and it just works.
I think the UIs for Linux are better. I think that MS are hung up on trying to suggest their stuff so it gets in the way a bit. On Linux, you just get the best option based on what is installed.
I have gone and ticked the “stop hiding file extensions” since they were introduced in ~98 (or was it Windows 95?)
When antivirus weren’t widespread, having a person click on a virus was just so easy: create a program with the icon of an image file. God forbid people learn that .exe means executable program. Learning new stuff is scary!
> I have gone and ticked the “stop hiding file extensions” since they were introduced in ~98 (or was it Windows 95?)
I think Windows 95, although even selecting that option still hides some file name extensions (such as ".lnk"). However, I have found that it is possible to use the registry editor to force all file name extensions to be displayed.
But even on system where they aren't needed they're useful IMO, for me as a user. Magic bytes mean you have to seek into each file, and if you care about file types, it means anything that lists files has to do that.
Personally, I'm not against file extensions, and I like to see and use them, however when something (i.e. magic bytes of a file) is used a lot system-wide, the underlying mechanisms optimize towards the use case as a natural tendency.
The interesting, or more accurately neat thing about EXT family of filesystems is, the file header is always one pointer away from your inode structure for that file.
With NVMe disks or SSDs in general, this is a very cheap operation, even when done en-masse. Even when we were using HDDs, anti-fragmentation features of EXT3/4 kept that one seek pretty cheap.
As a test, I fed my whole documents folder (~3500 files) into "file" tool to see what it does (via "file -f $filelist"). It finished in ~1,5 seconds. I redirected the output to /dev/null to eliminate the overhead incurred by printing things over SSH, though.
While everything is fast for small n, the consideration of small for this operation goes a long way, AFAICS.
A cheap operation is still infinitely more costly than no operation at all though. And not everything is on a local SSD, even just with a NAS, not to mention FTP, I really wouldn't want there to be no file extensions.
How would webdev look like? At first the HTML goes into "document", the style into "style", and before you know it, you're re-inventing extensions as prefixes or suffixes anyway, and I prefer users.sqlite to users_db. I honestly don't even see a problem to solve, so even the "cheapest" solution seems needlessly costly to me.
I don't see file extensions as a problem to be solved, either. My point is, it's nice that Linux (esp. Desktop Environment) ecosystem embraced magic byte parsing as a solution where having no extension creates problems.
I'm just happy to have the option around, I don't want to deprecate or against file extensions.
If you're interested, I can run some benchmarks on NFS and FTP as well, however.
I personally am of the opinion that both make sense and should exist. Extensions are for a first pass filtering/displaying, while magic bytes should be the source of truth, which is extra important when parsing a file anyway. Linux's binfmt_misc[0] even supports matching on either.
I (we) run Qwen3.8-27B-FP8 on a DGX Spark box - that's roughly £4000 of hardware.
I did benchmark it in various ways and it runs quite well but it is a quantised jobbie and 1.5k t/s is also rather faster than anything I can possibly hope to achieve.
To run that model at those sorts of speeds is going to need some serious investment and you are going to have to pay for it.
The problem is most providers hit tok/sec limits really fast. 1m/min is the default and the only place I can get 10m+ is from first party providers without a lot of upfront cash.
Thank you, always nice to see real world performance figures.
We run a pretty large rig, 10 GPUs right now (this goes up and down with various experiments, getting this many GPUs to play nice at x16 GEN4 with any motherboard is a challenge), 240G VRAM in total. 256G RAM and a TR PRO. For small models the comms overhead is larger than the gains so there I have to reduce the number of active GPUs. On this machine I'm getting between 150 and 200 tg/s with FP8, but it took a lot of time and tweaking to get to that, and not all of the improvements held up when combined with other improvements. I've been playing with this stuff for a while now and it is interesting how fast the frontier is moving and how much you can now do on your own hardware. For larger models the communications overhead is low enough that we can run them on bigger groups of GPUs, and using hacked drivers to give us p2p capabilities on some of our GPUs also boosts performance considerably once you start to hit communications limits. Typically we get 50G/second in p2p mode (full duplex, half that one way).
From a cost perspective running locally is not interesting, but it allows us to do experiments that model providers would likely balk at, gives us censorship free access and allows us to work with data that we would not want to share with model providers (or can't share due to NDAs).
I will look into running ninfer, I was aware of them but had not yet gotten around to using it.
Mate ... How many people are engineers, technicians, mildly interested, not fussed or call the internet "Facebook"?
IPv4 without NAT was fucked at the design stage. To be fair: Who knew?
I was asked by my employer a while back to investigate this new www thing that has hit the internet (in around 1994 or 5, it took a while to notice) and I said it was a bit crap and no better than WAIS and GOPHER. I was using telnet on a Windows 3.1 PC and telnetting madly via a VAX and a X.25 PAD and what I now know was close to magic!
No one had any idea how things would turn out back then.
I'm actually quite impressed how long IPv4 has managed to work and without NAT (which I do mildly despise, given 30 years messing with this stuff), it would be stuffed.
> no better than WAIS and GOPHER. I was using telnet on a Windows 3.1 PC
I had a corporate internship in the late 1990s and they blocked external web access.
They did, however, allow external Telnet access. This meant that whenever I had free time and/or was waiting for new projects, I would telnet back to my college server and use lynx to go read my favorite websites.
The real deal needs a lab messing around with viruses and whatever happened a few years ago ... and it did not destroy humanity.
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