Owlbear

Home account for my adventures in creative tinkering, art, music, gamedev, photography, retrocomputing, software preservation, criticism and any commissioned and commercial stuff that isn't (a) NDA'd to to death or (b) excessively dry.

Interests include contraption-making, dungeon synth, odd computer games and weird fiction.

Websites: https://mightyowlbear.com/ ⛧ https://mightyowlbear.itch.io/
Age: Hurtling towards middle age, whan Ich can speak lǒve hider
General chatter account: 13 barn owls in a trenchcoat (npub12dx…h7z7)

Last Notes

2025-02-03 13:54:11 UTC

If you enjoy reading vast swathes of data about consumer VPN providers, have you perused the many years of archived test results I keep at https://www.vpndatatracker.com/ ?
I don't run any affiliate sponsorships at all, which is at least a novelty.
#VPN

2024-09-30 09:23:51 UTC

Seeing a few people casually playing around with LLM chatbots from the usual big tech suspects, so if you're just trying to get a handle on this stuff, here's a document by and for machine learning / "AI" users and developers about their environmental impact.
"There is currently little transparency on the energy demands of specific AI applications, although a recent estimate has put the amount of energy used for a ChatGPT query to be anywhere between 6-10 times more than a traditional Web search (0.3 Wh vs. 2.9 Wh)"
"Overall, the growing energy demand for AI is significantly outpacing the increase in renewable energies – entailing substantial new GHG emissions and squeezing an already tight renewable energy market."
Source: https://huggingface.co/blog/sasha/ai-environment-primer
Other research indicates that a ChatGPT query uses somewhere in the region of 60x the energy of a conventional web search.
Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.16894
It's worth remembering that the limitations and structural characteristics of LLMs make their results less useful for most purposes than those of a conventional search, as well/
If you're interested in understanding how machine learning works and what results it produces, I would strongly recommend using local tools and models, which work effectively and in privacy on devices including Raspberry Pi 5s, old laptops and servers, and your PC.
You're not going to reverse the environmental impact of model training, but power consumption as a user is in line with general purpose PC use.
For LLMs:
Ollama - https://ollama.com/
Llama.CPP - https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp
For voice synthesis and transcription:
SpeechNote (Piper + Whisper) - https://flathub.org/apps/net.mkiol.SpeechNote
Whisper.cpp - https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp
For non-copyright infringing text to image diffusion:
Mitsua Diffusion One: https://huggingface.co/Mitsua/mitsua-diffusion-one
Here's a script for it: https://codeberg.org/MightyOwlbear/Raspberry-Pi-5-Diffusion
Image description:
Blip - https://huggingface.co/Salesforce/blip-image-captioning-base
Captioner script: https://codeberg.org/MightyOwlbear/blip-image-description-tool
You'll find my Strongly Worded Opinions on AI trends, plus step-by-step guides on using some of these tools at:
https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/issues/141
The PDF is free to download. No idea what the "roll your own models" cover line is in aid of, we don't do that in this.
I hesitate to call any of this harm reduction, because the training costs of most models is horrific in environmental terms, and to use them is to encourage their development, but at very least, you don't have to use live service LLMs like Copilot, Gemini, and ChatGPT if you're looking to understand what's going on with this stuff.
#AI #chatbots #LLM

2024-09-27 12:12:20 UTC

It's not available as a free PDF download for four weeks or so (still in time for Halloween!), but if you want a print copy, you can read my Retro Horror Classics emulation special in the October issue of The MagPi, available now!
Lots of DOS stuff in here, via @npub1k7x…ceaf and [@DOSBox_Staging](https://corteximplant.com/@DOSBox_Staging )
(I wonder if there was sufficient room for the entirety of my extensive content warning for Phantasmagoria in the end?)
https://magpi.raspberrypi.com/issues/146
#RetroGaming #Emulation #DOS #RaspberryPi #HorrorGames
https://twoot.space/system/media_attachments/files/113/209/430/802/015/397/original/da7584176f28bca9.png