Most public access unix servers offer free email upon registration. The oldest example is SDF.org, some newer servers include tilde.team and envs.net

Hey @brucethemoose hope you don’t mind if I ding you one more time. Today I loaded up with qwen 14b and 32b. Yes, 32B (Q3_KS). I didn’t do much testing with 14B but it spoke well and fast. Was more excited to play with the 32B once I found out it would run to be honest. It just barely makes the mark of tolerable speed just under 2T/s (really more like 1.7 with some context loaded in). I really do mean barely, the people who think 5t/s is slow would eat their heart out. However that reasoning and coherence though? Off the charts. I like the way it speaks more than mistral small too. So wow just wow is all I can say. Can’t believe all the good models that came out in such a short time and leaps made in the past two months. Thank you again for recommending qwen don’t think I would have tried the 32B without your input.

The linked paper was a good read. Thank you.

Thanks for the recommendation. Today I tried out Mistral Small IQ4_XS in combination with running kobold through a headless terminal environment to squeeze out that last bit of vram. With that, the GPU layers offloaded were able to be bumped up from 28 to 34. The token speed went up from 2.7t/s to 3.7t/s which is like a 50% speed increase. I imagine going to Q3 would get things even faster or allow for a bump in context size.

I appreciate you recommending Qwen too, ill look into it.

Thanks, I shouldn’t have said I felt sad about it thats a little hyperbolic, just a little bothered. Im much more happy about finding a model that pushes my AI to its maximum potential while still being usable in real time.

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So, did it never occur to you that you can manually add custom search engine into Firefox?

Settings>search>manage alternate search engines>add search engine

Wow reading through these comments makes me a little sad. Most people still don’t know jack about search engines or how they differ under the hood, or eve just how to add them into your browser search bar. Looks like all the effort I put into that that simple search engine guide was in vain.

Tire dust? Tires are generaly made from a kind of rubber, not plastic. A great majority of micro plastics that end up in enviroment and in your body are shed from plastic fabrics. If you’re really worried about limiting plastic consumption check your clothing tags for polyester and nylon. Return to cotton, hemp, and linen.

If all computers are on local network you can use warpinator.

Believe it or not its the opposite for me. I help take care of my elderly parents keep them independent and they both do this. I am compelled to physically take dishes out and rearrange them to reclaim like a second loads worth of wasted space. Some days I’m also tempted to disown them!

Koreader has a plugin to sync with calibre local server and its a REALLY good ereader software

Amazon can’t make TVs or ereades without filling them to the brim with ads and spyware like the greedy shits they are, I dont want to think about how screwed up their OS would be. As much as I sneer at Microsoft and windows BS as a snobby Linux user I get the impression amazon would be way worse and make Ol Gatey boy say ‘have a little class, would you?’

Glad to have helped you out. Whatever you decide to get, I highly recommend you give Linux Mint a try next. I started with ubuntu, went to mint and haven’t looked back since. Its been my daily driver for half a decade now and has worked absolutely perfectly with every laptop and desktop ive ever owned. My elderly parents use mint without issue every day.

A quick cheat sheet for understanding computer spec lingo:

Ram:

4gb = bare minimum

8gb = pretty good

16gb = awesome

Intel CPU cores:

duo/two cores = bare minimum

quad core/four cores = pretty good, most common

more = awesome

Intel CPU processor

i3 = bare minimum

i5 = pretty good

i7 = awesome

Intel CPU processing speed measured in gigahertz ghz

2.x ghz = average

3.x ghz = awesome

hard drive

HDD = Slower and more limited lifespan but ok, tends to be higher storage space than SSD for cheaper

SSD = Faster and much longer lifespan, usually only goes up to 256GB but its possible to find 512GB. More expensive than HHDs

Harddrive Storage Space

100GB = bare minimum

256GB = average

512GB = pretty good

1TB = Awesome

Upgrading

You can have a computer shop upgrade harddrives to a multi terabyte SSD as well as replace the batteries for you if you do your research and provide it for them.

Another big win for thinkpads is theres lots of documentation on upgrading, and you can order official parts right from lenovo vendors through their website Which is huge for replacing batteries when they degrade to the point of annoyance. Thinkpads have an external battery and an internal one both you can replace to get supposedly about 10 hours of battery life. I get like 3 at this point so I may be considering this option soon. The Linux command TLP can help you get a good estimate on how degraded your batteries are.

Anyways Good luck!

It depends on what you expect your laptop to do. 8gb ram and a 2.4ghz i5 quad core processor is acceptable for almost any computing task out side of playing heavier load video games or specialty IT stuff like LLMs or cryptomining. If your main concern is video games go with the base model steam deck. Also, when you go check out listing for used think pads you will find they contain wildly different specs even if they are the same series. This is because the companies that bought them new X years ago spend some sweet corporate cash on decking them out with the at-the-time highest end options ordered custom from lenovo, and then they throw them in the literal trash a decade later. Some people who dig them out and resell on facebook don’t know a thing about computers and think they are only worth the base options used price.

Old thinkpads are the golden standard of Linux compatible laptops, far superior build quality compared to the crap they put out today. Cheap and durable, if a little outdated in specs. TLP is a popular battery management tool that have specific built integration with thinkpads. I managed to snag a couple thinkpads through FB marketplace pre covid for under 200$ each, my daily driver being a t460 made in 2015. i7 quad core processor, 16gb ram, its weakest link is the Intel onboard GPU. The newer thinkpads let you use thunderbolt 3.0 to plug in an external GPU but there’s a trade off between how new a thinkpad is and its build quality. The old ones could be used as body armor plates and probably stop a 50 cal bullet and boot up fine afterwards, the new ones not much

Zorin OS has a really good MacOS themed variant last I heard

Its quick and easy to install a flatpak which is the latest stable which is a godsend when the versions available through package manager are years out of date. Not everyone can compile from source or add an additional source repo. My only big issue is how bloated flatpaks are size wise and where stuff gets installed in my file system.

The biggest concern is how much ram and how fast a processor of the older computer. Most modern distros use about a gig of ram on startup and prefer a processor made in the last 20 years. If your computer has 500mb ram and a single core 1ghz pentium its gonna choke trying to run linux mint.

Instead certain Linux distributions are specifically tailored to work on extremely old and underpowered computers such as puppy Linux. These are modern distributions with updated kernels but are extremely minimalist in nature.

Thanks for the clarification!