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I wouldn't say these are "basic bugs". The first is specific to using 'rrsync', and the second is when using the rsync daemon, and I can't remember when I last saw a system using that one (yes, I'm aware there are still use cases for using the rsync protocol, but I would consider it pretty obscure nowadays).

You could argue that he should've bumped the version more and should've done a longer beta test, but on the other hand, these were mostly security fixes, and I can understand he wanted to get them out there rather sooner than later (also "doing a beta test" is easier said than done - how do you get people to run a test version of rsync?).


Nice post and technically impressive work. I agree we need to understand the build pipeline and be able to do things locally. However, depending on your electricity cost, it might not make sense financially. These old servers are not energy efficient at all (I'm guessing that old Xeon server will easily pull 200W on load), and that model is currently at 0.1$/0.3$ per 1M tokens (with 76 tps and 262k context) in Openrouter (also, these servers are LOUD).

EDIT: I stand corrected, 200W is apparently way too high of an estimate. I used to run a bunch of old Xeon servers and they slurped watts like crazy, but I can't remember which ones exactly those were.


2620v4 is not a power slurping beast. Depending on the server board, it might not be either. Servers are often loud, but it depends.

There's a lot of budget hosting built around chips like these, and they're suprisingly power efficient.


It should be closer to 85W on load. And it's incredibly silent on even a low end cooler. I rarely get above 50° Celcius.

OK, then you're in luck. I had a bunch of old 1U rack servers and even in the next room it was too annoying to run them (they had a bunch of 40mm fans which always ran at full speed, because in a server room, no one can hear you scream).

Could it just be really bad cooling? Looking at 9800X3D, it seems like it's running in a similar range wrt TDP unless you really push the 9800X3D. I'm comparing with desktop cpu's because that's what my workload is. cpu governor is set to performance (no schedutil). No audible change in fan speed during heavy compilation or gaming (very silent humming), and i don't have any fans beside cheap intake, cpu and exhaust fans (1 each) + an excessive amount of dust.

These servers had no fan control whatsoever, they always ran full blast. That's not untypical for rack servers, because as written: they are designed for server rooms, and you're supposed to wear ear protection there anyway... Yes, I could've modified them, but I ditched them because running them simply made no sense (especially the high idle power consumption was ridiculous).

Yeah, 1u is gonna do that. Get something that can accommodate a big tower air cooler such as the Hyper 212 and your airflow will be quieter than the disks.

I don't run it anymore but my old server was a dual xeon (with two of those coolers crammed in) and I rarely heard a peep out of it.


Small fans need to spin faster so these can be very high pitch even if you stuff some Noctua 40mm fans into it.

Only when you remove it from the original server or enable low fan mode (if available). Most 1U/2U cases will happily blow at full speed well over 90db.

You likely need to replace the flow-through server chassis system with an active "normal" cooler to achieve a bit of silence.

85W might be about right. My old server CPU is in the same ballpark and compiling kernels it reached about 90w in power usage. If you want to keep it running: idle is not very low power unless you have one of the "low power" L versions, keep that in mind.


Get a 4U case, many options if you want to combine it with a NAS. Not hard to cool and keep somewhat quiet. If you can store it in a closet or something that helps too.

Well, you can use it for lots of other things as well.

Compared to the cloud you can probably save up to buy a new server every month. And don't underestimate the gains of having something to experiment on and play with.


85W for the whole system?! The specifications for the CPU mention a TDP of 85W [1].

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/92986/i...


But for LLM work the CPU is mostly idle, waiting for new data - so the CPU itself might not pull much power at all.

These servers are loud if you're trying to fit them into a 1U or 2U, which requires high speed fans to generate the necessary static pressure to push air through the case. I run a similar setup in a 4U case with slow 120mm fans and it's fine.

Well, if Apple killed it, Lenovo killed it even more. I recently was looking for a laptop for a student. The Lenovo E14 Gen7 is 800 Euros here in Germany (where prices are always higher, the MacBook Neo is 700 Euros), it has 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, a 2.8k IPS display, a Intel Ultra5 12core CPU, and it has a repairability score of 9/10 from ifixit. Framework doesn't even come close to that package.

Same thought, as an owner of a similar Lenovo, that's top bang for the buck. Also, matte screen and hinge that opens 180 degrees is something the Neo and most Macs doesn't have.

Though I assume the Apple clientele is always different than those shopping for PCs, and doesn't care about specs, they just want MacOS and the Apple ecosystem, most likely they already have an iPhone or are planning to get one anyway so then a Macbook is the only thing on their radar. Those people aren't really shopping for PCs anyway unless they need some Windows/Linux exclusive apps like CAD/CAE.

But if you want to run linux and game then that Lenovo would be a good deal.

Similar to the Framework, it has its own niche clientele who values the company motto, tinkering and repairability aspects way more than the value proposition. Most likely they run Linux too.

There's something for everyone.


It is funny how Mac OS is a draw for some, when it is the main reason I don't use a Mac. Their hardware is excellent, but when I've tried using a Mac as my main machine, my productivity suffered. The only part of the Apple ecosystem I wish I could get on Windows is iMessage, and maybe FaceTime.

I’m way more productive on a Mac.

Different strokes.


> The only part of the Apple ecosystem I wish I could get on Windows is iMessage, and maybe FaceTime.

It annoys me that these are such a draw. There are a dozen other viable messaging and video call apps, but there's always someone who feels like spending two minutes to install and activate one is a major imposition.


I like Apple hardware. I like the Apple integration. I like the hardware quality. I LOVE the silence of the M series machines.

But for me you’re right. More than anything, I’m not giving up Mac OS. Despite Tahoe, which I do severely dislike, I’m still far happier using it daily than Windows or Linux.

Until that changes, or the hardware gets bad enough (it’s going in the other direction), I’m not leaving. I don’t even look at other options for my real computers.

“Toy” computers that I want to throw Linux or BSD or something on just to play with, yeah of course. But not what I want to use all day every day.


Framework is definitely premium-priced, but I don't think most people are cross-shopping the Framework 12 (a 12" convertible tablet) and the Thinkpad E14 (a 14" dedicated laptop).

so it's competing with Framework 14?

No such model exists. The Framework 13 comes closest, but a 13" screen and a premium shell would compete more directly with the Thinkpad X13.

Direct price comparisons get tricky because different buyers care about different details. I really like the Thinkpad's Trackpoint, for example, but I also like the Framework's 3:2 aspect ratio. I'd have a hard time choosing.


Ymmv but the 16:10 screen on the framework punches a bit above its weight compared to 16:9 screens with a similar diagonal measurement

The Framework 13 has an aspect ratio of 3:2, not 16:10. The Thinkpad X13 has an aspect ratio of 16:10.

Dammit. I got an IdeaPad of similar price in december 2024. It didn't have one of the fancier displays from the era but still a decent option, it has 16Gb and I thought I'd try a Ryzen mobile thing that time. Wish I'd gone for the Thinkpad E series had I known about it then : that lower-end IdeaPad feels like trash.

SSD IO is sluggish, fans always spin when plugged in, audio crackles if I so much as scroll a page while a youtube video is playing, the keyboard might be the worst I've touched in many, many years, the 3.5mm audio jack wore out into intermittent connectivity within a couple of months. At least the display still looks good. Went through the windows optimization motions with it too. My x230 with an i5 still has lower and more stable DPC latency and has remained my DJ laptop.


> and it has a repairability score of 9/10 from ifixit

Do you mean a 6/10? The only score I saw for the neo on iFixIt is here: https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-r...

I checked the "Laptop repairability scores" page and the Neo doesn't appear to be listed. https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/laptop-repairability-sc...


They mean the Lenovo laptop has a 9/10 repairability, not the Apple Neo.

Ah, my mistake. Thanks!

This is what I keep telling, Neo outside US isn't a good deal, given the price/hardware combo.

16GB of RAM? Good for browsing the internet and nothing else.

Looking at all the unmerged pull requests in ripgrep, you can see what's going on. I will not link him here, but for instance, there's a "Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft", whose agent created 260 PRs in 211 repos with trivial typo fixes in code comments(!). Almost all of them are rejected (including those in ripgrep), but of course, a few get merged and he now boasts he "contributed" to sqlalchemy, Nim and others... What a time to be alive.

I used my human eyes to submit updates to Redis and Git, fixing typos in comments.

Sure it's low-hanging fruit, but if you're looking at the code it's good to have the comments be readable and not full of typos.

(That said this was a few years ago, and there were no LLMs at that point. I didn't go out of my way to make trivial contributions, but I figured since I saw the "problems" I should submit a patch to fix them.)


Drive-by PRs have been an issue before, but with AI it's just getting disrespectful

You can't release this under MIT license, as it contains a ton of various different things under various different licenses, from GPL to proprietary.


The project itself is MIT, meaning the scripts/docs I wrote. Everything else remains under its respective upstream license, GPL, vendor/proprietary blobs, debian packages, firmware, etc.

I did mention this in the license section, last line of the README.


But it's also plug&play for anyone stealing your laptop, see for instance

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39941021


Oh well, they really do their best to alienate people as well. They just completely overhauled their UX, and after that update, people at my company were so confused, they couldn't even open new issues anymore, because everything was somehow renamed to "work items". I kid you not, literally two decades of UX people were used to, just thrown out the window, it's absolutely mind-boggling. The feedback to this is devastating:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/work_items/590689


> Nicholas Carlini, a researcher at Anthropic, orchestrated 16 parallel Claude agents to write a production C compiler in Rust.

No he didn't. The compiler is bascially useless as it produces vastly inferior code than gcc/clang.


Oh the irony: "They Live", a movie famously about alienation and dehumanization, and you let AI do all the coding.


People have jobs and lives, let them make things quick with the tools available if its for fun.


Interacting with a computer in natural language is much more human than typing in special codes and punctuation.


So telling someone to make a table for you is more human than making it yourself, because you're using natural language instead of saws and hand planes?


I would say yes, conversing between two humans, maybe even collaborating, is more human than a solitary human using inanimate objects.


Basket weaving is more human than conversation. Language is entry level artificial man.


Even if the table collapses down badly instead of doing a proper one with a good set of tools?


But the extension works, not "collapses down badly."


I can't know how To hear anymore about tables


Have you seen me work?


Yes, I build furniture for my wife’s designs. Without her my furniture wouldn’t exist. I’m the LLM in this case, capable of building things but not furniture design.


> telling someone to make a table for you is more human than making it yourself

That's a bad comparison. You have to compare crafting a table manually to doing it via CNC.


Commissioning a craftsman you respect to make custom furniture to your taste and specifications sounds human enough to me.


The human world is full of special codes and obscure gestures that only have meaning if provided in the right sequence to the right people. Computer programming being documented and formalized makes it more accessible than many social circles.


Imagine writing this comment on 2013 Hacker News with a straight face.


I once built a Chrome extension to play this audio (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8itH10OFc8), encoded as base64 in the extension, on certain UI interactions on a sports site. I did it all by my big self. Should I be proud of that? Because I think we both know the answer is no.


Are you writing code in a computer instead of using pen and paper? Preposterous!


What if it wouldn't get done otherwise?

(Genuine question as we're all trying to figure this shit out)


It wouldn't have. I put this off for 11 years, the joke wasn't worth the manual effort required

AI is amazing at jumping into an unfamiliar codebase, it was probably 20 mins total work


I think this is false dichotomy. It's been a while since actually empowering and encouraging humans was considered normal and attempted at scale. But not that long. How quick we forget. I think it's worth getting back to.


I think we can agree that this is not something anybody will actually use, but rather an homage to "They Live", and IMHO, letting this be done by AI is in contrast to the basic premise of the movie.


The joke wasn't worth 10+ hours manual work


That argument could be taken to any extreme at the end of the day. They Live, at its core, is a commentary on unrestrained capitalism. You could fault OP for using a Google browser. You could fault OP for using a Microsoft cloud repository. The line may be blurrier than one thinks...


Any argument can be taken to any extreme. This is why it's a popular rhetorical tactic, called "appeal to extremes".


So, why did you use it in this case?


So you consider calling something "ironic" an extreme position? On a more general note, you will find that many people are uncomfortable with the idea that AI will replace human work, especially when it relates to art, which this project in question references.


But there are many more tech things we take for granted that could be seen as ironic as well. I think I never saw this movie but being a young adult and an Internet nerd in the late '90s early -00s I remember perfectly how many people were negatively discussing it because it was dehumanizing, destroying personal relationships in flesh and a long etc. And while the future turned out to be not so good as some early adopter thought, it also never turned into something so bleak as detractors said it would.

And I think the same will apply here, with GenAI.


What's the premise of the movie? I thought it was about psyops.

(Also interdimensional shapeshifting reptilians.)


We'd all be better off for it. I don't want you to take a shit on the table and call it dinner. Even if you don't cook.


That sounds like you're denying that anything valuable can be produced with these tools. That would be an extreme position.


When people burn down their neighbor's houses to roast marshmallows, I think that it's worth taking a strong position against them.

If you listen to what effects the companies building this claim their products will have, you conclude that either they're going much farther than burning a few houses, or they're lying through their teeth. Neither of which lead me to thinking that the harm of empowering them is outweighed by having more low-effort software.

So, yes. As someone that has to live in the world those assholes are building, they can go fuck themselves. I want nothing to do with their creepy, infantilizing, bleak, dystopian future.

Maybe that's an extreme position, but I'm very glad I don't have children; I don't think I could look them in the eyes and tell them they had a bright future.


Why should anybody be interested in using software nobody was interested in making?


This is the labor theory of value

Why should anybody be interested in using software nobody was interested in...

Writing their own assembly for? manually allocating their own memory for?


By that argument no software would ever exist.


Google is fine with everything if it's their service. I've completely blocked *.bc.googleusercontent.com, because it's basically used as a spam farm for years now, but Google couldn't care less as they apparently can't be bothered to even slightly inconvenience their compute engine users.


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