[Request For Comments] Can you recommend any groups/books/papers/blogs/keywords/etc on the topic of UN reform and global constitutionalism?
Wasn't quite sure where to ask the question in the title, or if this is even the right question to ask, but figured a Solarpunk community would be most likely to have the answers I'm looking for...
My reasoning is we are facing some global problems here, you know with all the climate change and whatnot; So we need global solutions for them; Therefore the obvious solution seems to be the United Nations 2.0, or League of Nations 3.0 if you will. Basically a global constitutional assembly, hopefully before it all devolves into total war again this time, or worse.
So I want to read up on what thought or maybe even activism there is out there specifically in this regard. Anything to read, recent or historic, you can recommend?
Any thoughts you want to share? Why can or can't this work? Am I being to naive here? Explain it Like I am 5 please!
Revealed: International ‘race science’ network secretly funded by US tech boss
Undercover filming has revealed the existence of the organisation, formed two years ago as the Human Diversity Foundation. Its members have used podcasts, videos, an online magazine and research papers to seed “dangerous ideology” about the supposed genetic superiority of certain ethnic groups.
HDF received more than $1m from Andrew Conru, a Seattle businessman who made his fortune from dating websites, the recordings reveal. After being approached by the Guardian, Conru pulled his support, saying the group appeared to have deviated from its original mission of “non-partisan academic research”.
Dr Rebecca Sear, the director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University, described it as a “dangerous ideology” with political aims and real-world consequences.
“Scientific racism has been used to argue against any policies that attempt to reduce inequalities between racial groups,” she said. It was also deployed to “argue for more restrictive immigration policies, such as reducing immigration from supposedly ‘low IQ’ populations”.
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Forgejo v9.0 is available
Forgejo v9.0 is the first version to be released under a copyleft license, after a year of discussions. Among the motivations for this change is the realization that a pattern emerged over the years, exemplified by Redis, CockroachDB, Terraform and many others. They turned proprietary because people chose their own financial gain over the interest of the general public. Forgejo admins no longer have to worry about this sword of Damocles: relicensing it as a proprietary software is not allowed.
The removal of the go-git backend is part of a larger effort to make Forgejo easier to maintain, more robust and even smaller than it already is (~100MB). When presented with go-git as an alternative to Git, a Forgejo admin may overlook that it has less features and a history of corrupting repositories. It would have been possible to work on documentation and new tests to ensure administrators do not run into these pitfalls, but the effort would have been out of proportion compared to the benefits it provides.
The Forgejo localization community was created early 2024 with the ambitious goal of gaining enough momentum to sustain a long term effort. A daunting task considering there are over 5,000 strings to translate, verify and improve. There has been many calls for help in the past and the community keeps growing steadily. Fortunately, the translation hackathon (translathon) organized by Codeberg in October was exceptional. It attracted an unprecedented number of participants who improved or created thousands of translations.
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Forgejo v9.0 released
Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge.
Easy to install and low maintenance, it just does the job.
Forgejo v9.0 is the first version to be released under a copyleft license, after a year of discussions. Among the motivations for this change is the realization that a pattern emerged over the years, exemplified by Redis, CockroachDB, Terraform and many others. They turned proprietary because people chose their own financial gain over the interest of the general public. Forgejo admins no longer have to worry about this sword of Damocles: relicensing it as a proprietary software is not allowed.
The removal of the go-git backend is part of a larger effort to make Forgejo easier to maintain, more robust and even smaller than it already is (~100MB). When presented with go-git as an alternative to Git, a Forgejo admin may overlook that it has less features and a history of corrupting repositories. It would have been possible to work on documentation and new tests to ensure administrators do not run into these pitfalls, but the effort would have been out of proportion compared to the benefits it provides.
The Forgejo localization community was created early 2024 with the ambitious goal of gaining enough momentum to sustain a long term effort. A daunting task considering there are over 5,000 strings to translate, verify and improve. There has been many calls for help in the past and the community keeps growing steadily. Fortunately, the translation hackathon (translathon) organized by Codeberg in October was exceptional. It attracted an unprecedented number of participants who improved or created thousands of translations.
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Has anyone have personal experience moving off of gitea and using forgejo
I'd love to do this but it's hard to find any written experiences yet.
;Edit: I will probably just try it
if i remember correctly, i just replaced gitea with forgejo for image: in my docker-compose, and it just worked
it was a couple of versions back, so i don't know if that still works
Check their website for migration info. There are some caveats in special circumstances but most people can just change the docker image from gitea to forgejo.
I did exactly that with no issues.
For me, it was literally as easy as (this is basically my upgrade process too):
`
systemctl stop gitea.service
cd /home/git/
wget codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/r…
mv forgejo-* gitea
chmod +x gitea
systemctl start gitea.service
`
I did it soon after the "split up" though, but it was super easy since they were still basically the same applications.
Make backups, update the above to use your paths and the new download link you should be good to go. Mine is in a VM , so I was willing to just YOLO and give it a go since I could easily roll back.
sorry for the formatting. on my phone and did my best!
Was this the git hosting service that wanted to have things like federated (in this case im talking about cross instance) cloning, searching and issue hosting?
I may be mistaken in general but iirc there was a hosting service like this that I found super interesting, especially in light of things like DMCA abuse against projects hosted on github and gitlab.
EDIT: seems like it is one of two, forgefed is a protocol it will use, activitypub one, very interesting.
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You do realize git is federated right? That's how it came about.
As for Forgejo itself they are working on instance to instance federation. I think it is Activity pub based so theoretically it could be compatible with Lemmy.
yes bare git works just fine. if you ever want a web GUI and/or issues and Pull Request you want such a tool.
A web GUI can be very nice to share your repository publicly. You can also use codeberg.org if you can't or don't want to self host.
PS : I'm kinda shocked (not that much) by the downvotes or your legitimate and polite comment. Still looking for better communities/system.
How long does it take for the new features in Forgejo to appear in Codeberg? I suppose it's possible they're already there.
Edit: Codeberg is still on v8.0.3-53, but code.forgejo.org is on v9.0.
Edit2: Codeberg is now on 9.0 too.
Ah, nice. Had been experimenting with using my Raspberry Pi 3B as my home Git server for all my personal projects - easy sync between my laptop and desktop, and another backup for the the stuff that I'd been working on.
Tried running Gitea on it to start with, but it's a bit too heavy for a device like that. Forgejo runs perfectly, and has almost exactly the same, "very Github inspired" interface. Time to run some updates...
My workplace is a strictly BitBucket shop, was interested in expanding my skillset a little, experiment with different workflows. Was using it as a fancy 'todo' list - you can raise tickets in various categories - to remind myself what I was wanting to do next in the game I was writing. It's a bit easier to compare diffs and things in a browser when you've been working on several machines in different libraries than it is in the CLI.
Short answer: bit of timesaving and nice-to-haves, but nothing that you can't do with the command line and ssh. But it's free, so there's no downside.
I also read the announcement (and FAQ, and other pages) but was still hoping someone would comment on what it is exactly.
(I did guess along the right lines at least, but wasn't really sure)
Any idea how forgejo compares to radicle?
I'm trying to decide what to install on my home server. I want something easy to start with but reasonably extensible and federated would be nice
forgejo is like github copy, and is a fork of the relatively known gitea. so far there are no federation features
radicle is something similar, but as I understand, with distributed repo management. I don't know the implications of this.
radicle also has an own cryptocurrency, and is entangled with web3.
while not all cryptocurrencies are scams, and probably the same applies to web3 projects, almost all of them are either scams, or useless for the purpose of using it as a currency. I don't know how the radicle currency fares, but it made me distrust them somewhat when they started talking about that in their announcement channel, and the fact that since then the channel did not post much else did not help to gain back this trust
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radicle also has an own cryptocurrency, and is entangled with web3.
And that's where it breaks the rule of "Do One Thing Well".
And while it's super popular to spread and consume everything like a big sticky blob - oh hello, systemd - doing many things poorly (yes, we see you, systemd) needs a lot of diplomacy and help from others - hi, Kay - to keep the code flowing. It's often not worth it, as we've seen but don't want to admit ... with systemd.
(if you'll excuse me, I need to go change the location where I look for static nic config files and use a reader more complex than '.' because the windows format is way better and I'm old if I think otherwise)
forgejo.org/docs/latest/admin/…
‘They will vote against Harris’: Arab Americans in Michigan desert Democrats over Gaza
Mon 14 Oct 2024 11.00 EDT
‘They will vote against Harris’: Arab Americans in Michigan desert Democrats over Gaza
Hamtramck, population 28,000, has new Trump campaign office weeks from election in hopes of gains in swing stateStephen Starr (The Guardian)
I'd recommend doing a search on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad, or hexbear on that. The only countries that have been pushing this line, are the countries that bomb muslims, and refuse to visit the region.
Muslim countries themselves, and the rest of the world, all of whom have sent delegations, deny that a genocide is occurring.
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Being from a country that is essentially a dictatorship and where rivaling factions have been competing over who gets to govern and who are the good / bad guys depending on whether they’re backed by Russia or the US I came to realize they’re all full of shit.
Whether it’s the USA, UK, Germany, France, Russia, China, Iran, they’re all led by psychopaths who instrumentalize suffering for their own political gain.
I don’t know where you’re getting that bit about Arabs from because in Xinjiang they’re Uyghurs, not Arabs. And just because China poses a much needed counterweight to Western imperialism I won’t ignore that they’re the same murderous psychopaths just with a different agenda.
To me, any kind of nationalism is a cancer and if you ask me, the concept of nations and borders should be abolished, because I haven’t ever seen a functioning nation that is actually for the people instead of a ruling class.
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Its more that you have internalized an pessimistic imperialist talking-point: your own country is run by sociopaths, and they tell you that every other country is too (whether they justify it being the natural order of things, realpolitik, or anything else. You should be even more skeptical when US leaders point at all their enemies and call them psychopaths, considering how many innocent people the US has and continues to murder. Essentially this meme:
In reality there are very few countries that exploit others, most want to work together politically and economically to better the lives of their people. Even the poorer capitalist countries, which are the majority, often have earnest leaders who are trying their best to escape the low-wage trap the imperialist countries have forced on them.
I tried giving you the benefit of the doubt but you’re making no sense if you believe that China isn’t an imperialist empire itself. It’s also an ethno-state where Han Chinese are over everyone else and minorities need to assimilate or get rekt. And do I really need to mention that it’s a fucking dictatorship?
They are against the US but that doesn’t make them the good guys. Same ridiculous shit that the West tried to do with people like Navalny, they tried portraying him as hero because he was against Putin when in reality he was another right wing nationalist fuck.
If you really believe one Imperialist is better than the other just because they’re not the US then you’re taking a shortcut, because the logical conclusion has to be to reject the notion of imperialism itself, instead of just Western imperialism.
Is China Imperialist?
- Debunking the claim that "China is Imperialist"
- The demeanor of Chinese leaders (Xi Jinping) vs Western leaders (Nancy Pelosi) towards African nations. One of the reasons why African nations favor China instead of the West. Full video here
- An African leader on the hypocrisy of those saying China is imperialist.
- China africa panel: if you want actual infrastructure, you go to China, not the west.
- Is China really imperialist? What's the difference between what Europe did to Africa, and what China is doing?
- Five imperialist myths about China's role in Africa.
- Evo Morales - Why China and Russia aren't imperialist, but the US is.
- US air force veteran Bill Brown breaks down the history of anti-chinese propaganda, and why China is not colonialist like the west.
- Yanis Varoufakis on China's foreign policy dealings with Greece and Africa.
- Vijay Prashad and Qiao Collective - Is China imperializing Africa?
- Danny Haiphong from BlackAgenaReport interview with Anya Parampil from thegrayzone: on the new cold war, and a myriad of lies about China.
- The Belt and Road Initiative: the antithesis of Colonialism.
- The war on China : and geopolitical significance of the belt and road initiative.
- China has forgiven over $10B in debt, over half to Cuba, but also including > 20 African nations, Pakistan, and Cambodia.
- After covid, China suspends debt repayment for 77 countries, promises > $2B USD and medical supplies as aid to help developing countries fight covid.
- President Xi pledges coronavirus vaccine to Africa first, helps fund African CDC headquarters.
- The chinese debt trap is a myth.
- China writes off $6M in debt to rwanda, provides another $60M in grants.
- China forgives over $78M in Cameroon debt.
- China writes off $36m Mozambican debt.
- China writes off substantial amount of Angola debt.
- After a group of Guangdong landlords evicted a group of Africans, the CPC arrested them, apologized to the African Union, paid for hotels for the migrants, passed a series of anti-discrimination laws, and spent weeks going to all the restaurants, landlords, and taxis to warn them of the law.
- Nato's new enemy: the CPC.
- The western media's China hysteria.
Last Week in the ATmosphere – Oct 24 week 3
Chatting comes to the ATmosphere with Picosky, X is unbanned in Brazil, and a significant group of Brazilians moved back, and a deeper dive into aviary.domains.
Picosky
Picosky is a new chatting service build on top of atproto. Picosky was created by Juliet, and started as an experiment with building an simple chatting app on atproto, originally limited to just 12 characters per message. It was a demonstration of making an AppView for chatting on atproto that utilises the existing infrastructure of the network: You log in with your Bluesky/atproto account, messages are stored on your PDS, and the PicoSky AppView listens to all the messages on the Relay and displays them. The direct connection of your Bluesky account made it a fun place for atproto hackers to hang out, which expanded the scope of Picosky quickly to a serious project.
Over the last week or so Picosky has undergone rapid changes by the developers Juliet and Elainya: you can log in with OAuth, the character limit got increased multiple times, now at 2048, you can edit and delete your posts, and UI updates where it is now a clear and minimalist proper chat UI.
The simple structure of Picosky, and the way that it integrates with the atproto infrastrucuture, makes Picosky an attractive place to further build on by other developers: one of the first Picosky-compatible projects to make it available via IRC. This is a separate AppView, that reads the same posts as the Picosky AppView does, and that can fully interact (federate) with each other. Other projects in the works are an iOS client or one for the terminal.
Meanwhile, the Lexicon structure (which determines the format of the messages) has had a major update the other day: there is now support for creating separate rooms on Picosky. Anyone can create rooms, and the owner of the room can set moderation to be based on a deny-list or an allow-list. The frontend has not been updated yet to take advantage of this however, but I’m sure we’ll get back to Picosky next week.
The News
It is now a week since X has been unbanned in Brazil, and a significant part of the Brazilian user base that joined Bluesky has gone back to X. Daily Active User count dropped by half, from 1.2M to 600k. This number was around 300k before the ban, indicating that a large number of Brazilians did stick around: Portuguese is still the most popular language of the platform; 45% of posts are in Portuguese, compared to 32% English posts. It shows that social networks are extremely sticky, and people have very high switching costs. In that context, Bluesky has done well with the number of Brazilian who stayed around after X became unbanned.
Bluesky is hiring, and they are looking for a Feed Algorithmics Engineer. The job is to “design and implement machine learning models to improve personalized content recommendations, spam detection, labeling, and more.” As the network grows, so do the challenges of providing algorithmic recommendations for feeds and spam detection.
Threads struggles with moderation on their platform, and Bluesky is seizing the opportunity by creating an account on Threads to promote the platform as an alternative on (and to) Threads.
Altmetric, which tracks online engagement with academic research, is looking for people that are willing to help with feedback sessions for their Bluesky attention tracking roll-out.
Bluesky has updated their app (v1.92), with some new features: you can now pin a post to your profile. There are also design improvements, including new font options. You can also now filter your searches by language.
TOKIMEKI, an alternative client for Bluesky, now supports showing your atproto-powered Linkat and WhiteWind profiles.
Threads struggles with moderation on their platform, and Bluesky is seizing the opportunity by creating an account on Threads to promote the platform as an alternative on (and to) Threads.
Frontpage, a link-aggregator platform build on atproto, is now open and available for everyone to use. The developers say that they’ll work on notifications first, and that decentralised and self-sovereign sub-communities are coming later.
For the protocol-people: what happens when there are clashing lexicon fields? Nick Gerakines publishes his thoughts on how the Lexicon system can evolve, with some additional thoughtsby Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold.
Deep dive: Aviary.domains
Aviary.domains is a new service that helps managing domains for Bluesky and the ATmosphere, that recently launched in early access. Aviary makes it easy for people who have a domain name to share that domain name with other people as their handle.
To place Aviary in a larger context, a short explanation: It helps to understand as the central offering of the ATmosphere being a single digital identity. When you first sign up for Bluesky, two things happen:
- You join the ATmosphere, by creating a digital identity (a DID) that works with all other products that are build on atproto.
- You log in with this newly created identity into Bluesky, and use Bluesky with this digital identity.
This digital identity, a DID (Decentralized IDentifier) is a unique string of letters and numbers that can never change, which is good for computers because it is unique, but very unpractical for humans to use. That’s why you have a handle, which corresponds behind the scenes with your DID. The idea of atproto is to use a website domain name as your handle. You can always change your handle to a different handle if you want, as long as you have a website domain you can use. Most people do not have their own website domain, so when you first join the ATmosphere and your DID gets created, Bluesky also gives you one of their sub domains you can use: yourname.bsky.social.
The goal for Bluesky is that people use their website domains as their handle, as it gives an easy way to verify ownership: the owner of the website is also the owner of the account. One problem however, is that many people do not have their own website domain. This is both an opportunity for Bluesky (which now sells domain names to people), but also still a challenge: a significant group of people are simply not interested in paying money for what amounts to a better user name. Even if you have your own website domain, having to change DNS settings is still a technical barrier that is too high for a large group of people.
This is the part where Aviary.domains comes it, as it tries to find an audience for people who have a domain name, that they want to share with their community. It has created a system where an owner of a domain name can invite other people to use a version of that domain as their handle on Bluesky. So as the owner of laurenshof.online, I can log in with Aviary, and generate a subdomain for, lets say my cat. Aviary generates a link that my cat can click; they log in on Aviary with Bluesky’s OAuth, type in their name, press accept, and their handle is now changed, without them having to change settings.
What makes this different from projects like swifties.social, which also hand out subdomains for people to use as handles on Bluesky, is that it does not require the final step, changing settings in the app. It also gives the owner of the domain control over each subdomain, with the ability to subtract subdomains as well. This makes Aviary more useful for people who want to have more control over who identifies with the domain, and can show they are part of the community.
The Links
- A new FAQ for Blacksky.
- A minimal OAuth browser client implementation for atproto.
- Post to Bluesky with PHP.
- Post to Bluesky with the date of the post set to any arbitrary date in the past.
- Lexicon design techniques (in Japanese).
- Introduction to the AT Protocol: Understanding the ideas behind the protocol (also in Japanese).
- Audio spaces app Bluecast now can show your broadcasting history.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to receive the weekly updates directly in your inbox below, and follow me on Bluesky @laurenshof.online.
Hey @LaurensHof, I love reading your fediverse reports so much I've subscribed this account. But thanks to your reporting a few weeks ago, I learned that BlueSky is not really decentralised and effectively never will be. Due to their centralisation of the identity layer. So I'm don't really interested in the nitty gritty about their project.
Would it be possible to set up a separate account for posting the ATmosphere report?
Open-sourcing of WinAmp goes badly as owners delete entire repo
Open-sourcing of WinAmp goes badly as owners delete entire repo
As badly as the later development of WinAmp itself, reallyLiam Proven (The Register)
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1. It wasn't open source, it was proprietary but you can see the source code.
2. Their custom license didn't even allow forks, which is against GitHub TOS
3. The codebase apparently contains proprietary code from third parties that they don't have the right to relicense.
4. The codebase apparently contains GPL code from third parties that they probably didn't have the right to make proprietary in the first place
Wait, there's GPL code there as well???
I'd heard of all the others but this ome kinda snuck under the radar with all the larger issues at play here
The article on theregister stated
Also inside the uploaded source code was some GPL 2 source code, which renders the not-very-open WCL moot.
Did they comment on why it was deleted? I didn't see anything in the article. I recall the consensus was that they made so many mistakes the only way to fix it was deletion of the repo.
I also saw in one of the comments of the Arstechnica article that the one who pushed for open-source wanted to clean up the code before publishing. Management said no, the entire team got fired/left, and suddenly the code got published with all that commercial stuff left in. Sounds about right.
Based on the article, this is a train wreck of cosmic proportions. My guess is, the CEO panicked and went into damage mitigation mode.
Sounds like they’re trying to put out a titanium fire using only a bucket of water. What could go wrong.
Sounds like they’re trying to put out a titanium fire using only a bucket of water.
I have a new phrase to use in the future.
ohhh nooooo, who could possibly have seen this coming
not like that repo was getting constantly vandalized as people realized it contained copyrighted code that the winamp owners didn't have the rights to which the project managers were halfheartedly playing whack-a-mole with
For starters, it was never "open source"...
From your link:
Instead, as Winamp CEO Alexandre Saboundjian said, "Winamp will remain the owner of the software and will decide on the innovations made in the official version." The sort-of open-source version is going by the name FreeLLama.While Winamp hasn't said yet what license it will use for this forthcoming version, it cannot be open source with that level of corporate control.
If I upload the source code for my project on Github/Forgejo/Gitlab/Gitea and license it under and open source license, allowing you to fork it and do whatever you want (so long as you follow the terms of my copyleft license), and I diligently ensure that code is uploaded to my repository before being deployed, but I ignore all issues, feature requests, PRs, etc., is my project open source?
Yes.
Likewise, if Winamp had been licensed under an open source license, it would have been open source, regardless of how much control they kept over the official distribution.
Winamp wasn’t open source because its license, the WCL, wasn’t open source.
France bans Israeli companies from top naval warfare show
PARIS — France has decided to ban Israeli companies from the Euronaval trade show that kicks off in early November, one person with first-hand knowledge of the issue told POLITICO.
Israeli delegations will be able to attend the event but contractors cannot showcase their military equipment at booths, the person added after being granted anonymity to discuss a matter that isn't public yet.
The French Euronaval ban is the latest row in a series of diplomatic fallouts between President Emmanuel Macron and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as Israel's military ramps up its attacks in Gaza and Lebanon.
France bans Israeli companies from top naval warfare show
Euronaval decision comes amid escalating fallout between French President Emmanuel Macron and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.Laura Kayali (POLITICO)
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But also the weapons industry is Israel’s main business.
And also one of France main business, after Russia stopped much of their arms exports due to Ukraine war, France became second biggest arms exporter in the world. So while it isn't much, it's not completely insignificant.
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Not being invited to a trade show isn't quite the same as blockading all arms sales & suspending all diplomatic relations.
It doesn't even qualify for "the bare fucking minimum"
Why can't I install fedora KDE to a specific partition on HP desktop
I've never installed fedora specifically but...
Anyway I created a free 900GB ext4 partition
It's either ext4 or free, can't be both. Now, if it was ext4, Fedora would for sure detect it as such, so I'm not sure what it is.
I assume you would want to click on sda6 in the installer, then the "-" button to delete whatever is there, and then it would recognize it as available space.
What did you use to create the partition? Free space that is listed would be space that is not formatted or allocated in the partition table at all, it doesn't really know if that space is available to take or is being used.
Also, having the partition (probably the entire drive actually since you'll need to edit the partition table) mounted while you are trying to edit the partitions can cause issues.
How to choose the best Linux hardware for PC Building?
I see the raise of popularity of Linux laptops so the hardware compatibility is ready out of the box.
However I wonder how would I build PC right know that has budget - high end specification. For now I'm thinking
- Case: does not matter
- Fans: does not matter
- PSU: does not matter
- RAM: does not matter I guess?
- Disks: does not matter I guess?
- CPU: AMD / Intel - does not matter but I would prefer AMD
- GPU: AMD / Intel / Nvidia - for gaming and Wayland - AMD, for AI, ML, CUDA and other first supported technologies - Nvidia.
And now the most confusing part for me - motherboard... Is there even some coreboot or libreboot motherboard for PC that supports "high end" hardware?
Let's just say also a purpose of this Linux PC. Choose any of these
1. Blender 3D Animation rendering
2. Gaming
3. Local LLM running
If you have some good resources on this also let me know.
Basically the only thing that matters for LLM hosting is VRAM capacity. Hence AMD GPUs can be OK for LLM running, especially if a used 3090/P40 isn't an option for you. It works fine, and the 7900/6700 are like the only sanely priced 24GB/16GB cards out there.
I have a 3090, and it's still a giant pain with wayland, so much that I use my AMD IGP for display output and Nvidia still somehow breaks things. Hence I just do all my gaming in Windows TBH.
CPU doesn't matter for llm running, cheap out with a 12600K, 5600, 5700x3d or whatever. And the single-ccd x3d chips are still king for gaming AFAIK.
Basically the only thing that matters for LLM hosting is VRAM capacity
I'll also add that some frameworks and backends still require CUDA. This is improving but before you go and buy an AMD card, make sure the things you want to run will actually run on it.
For example, bitsandbytes support for non-CUDA backends is still in alpha stage. huggingface.co/docs/bitsandbyt…
For local LLM hosting, basically you want exllama, llama.cpp (and derivatives) and vllm, and rocm support for all of them is just fine. It's absolutely worth having a 24GB AMD card over a 16GB Nvidia one, if that's the choice.
The big sticking point I'm not sure about is flash attention for exllama/vllm, but I believe the triton branch of flash attention works fine with AMD GPUs now.
VRAM and RAM I think. Still AMD seems always slower than Nvidia for some reason for this purpose. Same for Blender benchmarks.
Ah I use my AMD GPU with Bazzite and it is wonderful.
CPU does not matter when GPU matters. Otherwise small models will do fine on CPU especially with more recent instructions for running LLMs.
Yeah, AMD is lagging behind Nvidia in machine learning performance by like a full generation, maybe more. Similar with raytracing.
If you want absolute top-tier performance, then the RTX 4090 is the best consumer card out there, period. Considering the price and power consumption, this is not surprising. It's hardly fair to compare AMD's top-end to Nvidia's top-end when Nvidia's is over twice the price in the real world.
If your budget for a GPU is <$1600, the 7900 XTX is probably your best bet if you don't absolutely need CUDA. Any performance advantage Nvidia has goes right out the window if you can't fit your whole model in VRAM. I'd take a 24GB AMD card over a 16GB Nvidia card any day.
You could also look at an RTX 3090 (which also has 24GB), but then you'd take a big hit to gaming/raster performance and it'd still probably cost you more than a 7900XTX. Not really sure how a 3090 compares to a 7900XTX in Blender. Anyway, that's probably a more fair comparison if you care about VRAM and price.
Great read, thanks!
About the Blender: opendata.blender.org/
There is this site so you can compare CPU and GPU and its scores.
These days, there are amazing "middle sized" models like Qwen 14B, InternLM 20B and Mistral/Codestral 22B that are such a massive step over 7B-9B ones you can kinda run on CPU. And there are even 7Bs that support a really long context now.
IMO its worth reaching for >6GB of VRAM if LLM running is a consideration at all.
Is there even some coreboot or libreboot motherboard for PC that supports "high end" hardware?
As far as I know, the highest-end motherboard that supports Libreboot is an Opteron -- not Epyc, Opteron -- dual-socket server board from about a decade ago.
A key list of compatible/incompatible components to look for:
- GPU
- Network Interfaces (Ethernet and Wi-Fi)
- Audio Interfaces (not that much of an issue anymore)
- Disks
- Motherboards
- CPU (excluding x86 ecosystem)
- Peripherals
The explanations for this are pretty long, but are meant to be fairly exhaustive in order to catch most if any pitfalls one could possibly encounter.
GPU:
A big one is the choice between AMD, Intel, and NVidia. I am going to leave out Intel for compute as I know little about the state it is in. For desktop and gaming usage, go with AMD or Intel. NVidia is better than it used to be, but still lags behind in proper Wayland support and the lack of in-tree kernel drivers still makes it more cumbersome to install and update on many distros whereas using an AMD or Intel GPU is fairly effortless.
For compute, NVidia is still the optimal choice for Blender, Resolve, and LLM. Though that isn't to say that modern AMD cards don't work with these tasks. For Blender and Davinci Resolve, you can get them to use RDNA+ AMD cards through ROCm + HIP, without requiring the proprietary AMD drivers. For resolve especially, there is some serious setup involved, but is made easier through this flatpak for resolve and this flatpak for rocm runtime. ML tasks depend on the software used. For instance, Pytorch has alternate versions that can make use of ROCm instead of CUDA. Tools depending on Pytorch will often have you change the Pytorch source or you may have to manually patch in the ROCm Pytorch for the tool to work correctly on an AMD card.
Additionally, I don't have performance benchmarks, but I would have to guess all of these tasks aren't as performant if compared to closely equivalent NVidia hardware currently.
Network Interfaces:
One section of hardware I don't see brought up much is NICs (including the ones on the motherboard). Not all NICs play as nicely as others. Typically I will recommend getting Ethernet and Wireless network interfaces from Intel and Qualcomm over others like Realtek, Broadcom, Ralink/Mediatek. Many Realtek and Mediatek NICs are hit-or-miss and a majority of Broadcom NICs I have seen are just garbage. I have not tested AMD+Mediatek's collaboration Wi-Fi cards
so I can't say how well they work.
Bluetooth also generally sits into this category as well. Bluetooth provided by a reputable PCIe/M.2 wireless card is often much more reliable than most of the Realtek, Broadcom, Mediatek USB dongles.
Audio Interfaces:
This one isn't as much of a problem as it used to be. For a lot of cards that worked but had many quirks using PulseAudio (a wide variety of Realtek on-board chipsets mainly), they tend to work just fine with Pipewire. For external audio interfaces: if it is compliant to spec, it likely works just fine. Avoid those that require proprietary drivers to function.
Disks:
Hard drives and SSDs are mostly fine. I would personally avoid general cheap-quality SSDs and those manufactured by Samsung. A lot of various SATA drives have various issues, though I haven't seen many new products from reputable companies actually releasing with broken behavior as documented by the kernel. If you wish to take a detailed look of devices the kernel has restricted broken functionality on, here is the list.
Additionally, drives may be one component beside the motherboard where you might actually see firmware updates for the product. Many vendors only release EXE files for Windows to update device firmware, but many nicer vendors actually publish to the LVFS. You can search if a vendor/device is supplied firmware here.
Motherboards:
In particular, motherboards are included mainly because they have audio chipsets and network interfaces soldered and/or socketed to them. Like disks, motherboards may or may not have firmware updates available in LVFS. However, most motherboard manufacturers allow for updating the BIOS via USB stick. Some laptops I have seen only publish EXE files to do so. For most desktop boards however, one should be able to always update the motherboard BIOS fine from a Linux PC.
Some motherboards have quirky Secure Boot behavior that denies them being able to work on a Linux machine. Additionally some boards (mostly on laptops again) have either broken or adjustable power state modes. Those with adjustable allow for switching between Windows and standard-compliant modes.
Besides getting a Framework laptop 'Chromebook edition', I don't think there is much you will find for modern boards supporting coreboot or libreboot.
CPUs:
For your use case, this doesn't really matter. Pretty much every modern x86 CPU will work fine on Linux. One only has to hunt for device support if you are running on ARM or RiscV. Not every kernel supports every ARM or RiscV CPU or SoC.
Peripherals:
Obviously one of the biggest factors for many new users switching to Linux is their existing peripherals that require proprietary software on Windows missing functionality or not working on Linux. Some peripherals have been reverse engineered to work on Linux (see Piper, ckb-next, OpenRazer, StreamController, OpenRGB).
Some peripherals like printers may just not work on Linux or may even work better than they ever did on Windows. For problematic printers, there is a helpful megalist on ArchWiki.
For any other peripherals, it's best to just do a quick search to see if anyone else has used it and if problems have occurred.
I am going to leave out Intel for compute as I know little about the state it is in.
I forget which community it was posted in, but iirc, Intel just lost a bunch of their Linux devs (Fired? Quit? I forget). Arc had some dedicated dev time put towards it, but unless something has changed, it's likely still a hanging question as to what the future of Arc driver updates will be on Linux.
So you are probably safe to recommend people avoid Intel GPUs for now.
I am under the presumption that the current state of the Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs will likely remain about the same under Mesa even if support is dropped today by Intel. Am I mistaken in the amount of continued driver effort Intel has been putting in for the Mesa GPU drivers?
Obviously if this is true, one should probably remain wary of upcoming Battlemage GPUs.
I would be surprised if any modern network interface didn't work well with Linux. The only problems I have had is on hardware over 7 years of age. Also SSDs are all pretty good. As long as it has a good warranty you are fine. Just avoid the cheap Chinese brands.
You can totally get a random machine and then install Linux. It just works these days.
You need to use intel/nvidia.
You might be able to get away with amd instead of intel, but nvenc and cuda support is a non negotiable thing for your use case.
You will not encounter any problems as long as you don’t run Wayland.
Any motherboard is fine. You don’t need coreboot support to run Linux.
Just a point on Wayland - I have an nvidia GPU and have been on Wayland for a couple months now (KDE Plasma), and its been entirely problem free and I actually forgot I switched from X11 to Wayland.
Blender has support for Wayland now too.
I do a lot of gaming and development - ever since Nvidia made those changes for Wayland support and KDE added that explicit sync stuff its been great. Before all of that though I had heaps of issues with flickering and just general usability.
Wayland actually fixed a number of issues for me, like stuttering when notifications appear, and jankyness in resizing windows.
You can absolutely use an AMD card for LLMs. You can even use the CPU if you don't mind it being slower.
If this person is a AI researcher doing lots of LLM work it might be different but somehow I think they are just a casual user that asks questions
Both blender and every llm library I’m aware of work better and have broader support with nvidia hardware.
That’s two out of three of the ops use cases.
Gaming, the third use case, is perfectly fine using an nvidia card.
There’s nothing wrong with amd video cards, but for this user, in this case, they’re not the choice I would recommend.
Especially if they’re just a normal person who asks questions because it’s much, much more likely that someone who uses blender or llms will be able to answer their questions and address any issues related to hardware because people using blender and llm are broadly using nvidia cards.
I don’t think that’s relevant.
To employ a car metaphor, I own a small Japanese sedan. I’ve installed an aftermarket tow hitch and have used it to haul small trailers. I have a pair of toolboxes in the trunk and I live up a road that after recent events would be considered a technical driving course. I’m able to get home just fine in my small, low clearance car with a four cylinder engine and touring tires.
If a person asked me: “what vehicle should I get for towing, working in trades and off roading on the weekend?”, I’d absolutely never suggest a Honda accord.
While the experience of owning a diesel truck is more complex and requires some fiddling around, for example, remembering to use the green pump, understanding when to use the fuel cutoff switch, using a block heater when it’s cold outside, saving up more money for repairs and generally actually operating the vehicle differently under almost any comparable conditions, it’s the right tool for the job at hand and dealing with those differences is part and parcel not just of handling the tool, but completing the job.
I don’t know of any msi or asus boards with problems. Of course, I rejected coreboot as a requirement so that plays into it.
My personal experience is: don’t overclock and everything will run fine for at least ten years.
Blender works faster with nvidia and it’s been the optimal hardware for maybe two decades now. There’s just so much support and knowledge out there for getting every feature in the tool working with it that I couldn’t in good faith recommend a person use amd cards to have a slightly nicer Wayland experience or a little better deal.
If you’re only doing llm text work then a case could be made for a non cuda (non-nvidia) accelerator. Of course at that point you’d be better served by one of those coral doodads.
Were you only doing text based ml work or was there image recognition/diffusion/whatever in there too?
That website is not really useful as the information is wrong or out of data
Petty much all modern hardware works with Linux. There are a few exceptions but that's very rare.
Extinction Rebellion is Planning to Cause Chaos in the City of London Again
City of London to face major disruption from Extinction Rebellion
The action is similar to that taken by Insure Our Future in the City of London earlier in the year, of which Extinction Rebellion was a partThe Canary
"Op continues to recruit people rightfully angry about climate change into organization that accomplishes nothing and gets them arrested, news at 11"
no shit?
qupada likes this.
The extraordinary ‘warring states’ history of the global west
The extraordinary ‘warring states’ history of the global west
Yes, the west IS addicted to war. We may think that all nations or regions have a similar propensity to conflict - think of China's "warring states" period.fridayeveryday.com
China claims silicon photonics breakthrough to overcome chip hurdle
China claims silicon photonics breakthrough to overcome chip hurdle
A Wuhan lab claims a major silicon photonics breakthrough, potentially overcoming limitations in traditional chip-design technology.Bojan Stojkovski (Interesting Engineering)
China claims silicon photonics breakthrough to overcome chip hurdle
China claims silicon photonics breakthrough to overcome chip hurdle
A Wuhan lab claims a major silicon photonics breakthrough, potentially overcoming limitations in traditional chip-design technology.Bojan Stojkovski (Interesting Engineering)
solarpunk.rizz.pill
in reply to Muehe • • •I have no suggestions of groups, books, papers, blogs and etc regardin global constitutionalism, but I have an opinion.
Creating bigger and stronger governments will only lead to the protection of an elite that is way too irresponsible with their powers.
Right now the vibe is against oil, gas and pollutants and in favor of sustainability mostly globally. It’s genuinely very hard to find someone that says: “I don’t care about microplastics, “I have no issue with air pollutants causing cancer” and “I don’t care we are trashing the ocean”.
And this is sort of where solarpunk fits extremely well in. I don’t know if governments and corporations will solve the climate crisis, but goddamn I’ll do my part and help businesses and others do their part too.
Under A Tree
in reply to solarpunk.rizz.pill • • •The necessary change must come from the grassroots. Never before in history have those in power taken the initiative and done what was necessary. It is up to us to make it happen.
Radically boycotting the overconsumption and inspiring change is a powerful tool. Not to say that putting pressure on lawmakers isn’t important too, but what greater pressure than if millions of people peacefully stop supporting the madness?