Radeon RX 7600, but yes, you’re right, it’s relative. It’s good enough for any gaming I do, which is not an awful lot. I think it’s considered mid-range for its generation, I guess I was just thinking of the GPUs I see people mention they have which seem much beefier than mine lol.

I’m no AI expert but when I looked into it, it seemed that VRAM was the biggest factor being mentioned in discussions of GPUs, hence why I mentioned it.

Not much, but you can use it for basically anything people use frontier models for, it’ll just be somewhat dumber. I occasionally run LLMs for proof-reading important things that I’ve already hand-written and edited. Sometimes for bouncing off ideas. Sometimes for the kinds of questions I’d normally chuck at a forum but I can get a quicker answer if I ask an LLM. No, I don’t “trust” the answers; anything where I can’t just use my own judgement, the LLM will have given me enough to perform my own research to fact-check it.

I have a lower-end GPU (8GB VRAM) and I can still run smaller models on it with decent performance.

IVPN or AirVPN (depending on whether or not you need port-forwarding) is my VPN recommendation.

desire to keep out of commercial cloud providers

I’m afraid that GitHub is run by Microsoft and I would consider it pretty thoroughly corporate these days.

Fair enough if you want to get more familiar with git (although using it as a cloud service is basically just gonna be add all and then commit, surely? you’re not practising any other git operations if only using as cloud storage?), but people normally do this with programming projects, which you should have no shortage of as a CS major.

Is there a reason why you don’t use conventional cloud storage? The only reason I can think for someone to use a git forge for generic cloud storage is the version history, which you’ve said you don’t need. Something like your OP problem wouldn’t happen for a conventional cloud provider.

Divinity: Original Sin 2. Combat system isn’t perfect (my main criticism is that you can unchain your characters to set your party members up in advantageous positions and then trigger combat, which feels cheaty) but it has some cool mechanics. A lot of elemental interactions, interactions with and creation of different surfaces, factoring in high ground for an advantage, etc. I know BG3 is highly acclaimed also by Larian but I haven’t played it so can’t attest to that combat system.

I thought China didn’t allow dual citizenship, so getting another citizenship would cancel out your Chinese citizenship?

It’s cool to see so many Geany users. How is it for an IDE? I use Gram atm and am quite happy, but it’s not really a fully-fledged IDE. I used to like JetBrains products but they’ve enshittified a lot, have always been slow memory hogs, and aren’t fully FOSS. Something like the power of JetBrains IDEs when they were good, but running natively instead of in the JVM, and fully FOSS, would be my ideal.

It would likely have to have a large pool of accounts and randomly pick one per request, to avoid Reddit noticing a too-high volume of requests from one account.

Yes, I don’t have a very beefy graphics card but I can run LLMs locally. I use them for things like proof-reading. Look into llama.cpp. If you have an Nvidia card then look into using CUDA so your LLMs don’t run slow as fuck using only your CPU.

Check how much VRAM you have and then do some research into the open-weight models. The best models require quite a bit of VRAM, but there are models that work well on cards with less VRAM.

It’s energy-intensive, but on a level that most people already find acceptable. I’d say it’s comparable to playing a AAA video game for a few minutes to generate an answer.

Local LLMs aren’t slower if you pick a model well-suited for your GPU, but they are dumber. But that doesn’t make a difference for me as I wouldn’t use LLMs for any particularly cerebral tasks e.g. programming. They can work fine for things like bouncing off ideas, proof-reading, making suggestions for things like writing and debugging, etc, the kind of thing where you can read their response and just discard it if it’s stupid. Whether or not that’s “useful enough” for you is down to you. You can just give it a go and uninstall things if you don’t find them useful.

Well, if they don’t, you’ll just have to wait until you both get somewhere where you can pass? The other option is running them over, which, whilst them blocking you is a dick move, running someone over is more unethical.

If you’re cycling and passing a pedestrian? I ding the bell with enough time to let them step to one side, and then I go through the gap they create. The gap can be on whatever side they want.

What kind of data is it? If it can be printed, you can just print it and store it somewhere safe, or print multiple copies and distribute it around. Plenty of 80 year old books are perfectly readable. That’d only be books printed in 1946 so nothing crazy. You can pay for professional printing so they can do it on good quality paper and so on.

It’s convenient when there’s no mouse. Moving around on a trackpad can be slow and annoying. But not super necessary for me.

IVPN has been working well for me. Heard AirVPN is good if you need port forwarding too.

“Their names are both Trevor” would sound the most unambiguous to me.

It doesn’t help. I think I’d probably qualify for a vaginismus diagnosis. Just never pursued one as it never causes problems for me—I’m not interested in being penetrated, so it only causes problems during exams.

I’ve had a hysterectomy before where they went through the vagina so it must be physically possible to insert something up there. I guess they could only do it when I was asleep so I couldn’t complain lol.

Yes, they do.

Of course not.