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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Millennial here. I’ve been consuming Reddit, and now Lemmy, almost exclusively on my phone and for me it’s card view all the way. Often the graphic content is more important than the title and opening posts only to find out it’s not funny or interesting feels like a waste of time. Only when I find a post interesting enough that I want to comment or see the comments, I open it. Instances or communities that I don’t like go on the blocklist.

    If I really need to use Reddit, I open old Reddit in the browser with an extension that turns it into a mobile friendly site with card view. The new design has always felt sluggish and bloated to me, but not because of the card view.


  • Exactly. Same as with sleeping data. When it says that you’ve been awake 3 times last night, it doesn’t really mean much. That kind of data shouldn’t be presented as being accurate. However, it could still be made accessible behind a button er menu option. For example, it might show you that the signal is intermittent because your watch band isn’t tight enough, or other anomalies. And of course you’re right: they won’t tell you that the data is of low quality and as a user you don’t necessarily know that, so in that sense it can be very misleading.





  • Sure, but I’m just playing around with small quantized models on my laptop with integrated graphics and the RAM was insanely cheap. It just interests me what LLMs are capable of that can be run on such hardware. For example, llama 3.2 3B only needs about 3.5 GB of RAM, runs at about 10 tokens per second and while it’s in no way comparable to the LLMs that I use for my day to day tasks, it doesn’t seem to be that bad. Llama 3.1 8B runs at about half that speed, which is a bit slow, but still bearable. Anything bigger than that is too slow to be useful, but still interesting to try for comparison.

    I’ve got an old desktop with a pretty decent GPU in it with 24 GB of VRAM, but it’s collecting dust. It’s noisy and power hungry (older generation dual socket Intel Xeon) and still incapable of running large LLMs without additional GPUs. Even if it were capable, I wouldn’t want it to be turned on all the time due to the noise and heat in my home office, so I’ve not even tried running anything on it yet.


  • The only time I can remember 16 GB not being sufficient for me is when I tried to run an LLM that required a tad more than 11 GB and I had just under 11 GB of memory available due to the other applications that were running.

    I guess my usage is relatively lightweight. A browser with a maximum of about 100 open tabs, a terminal, a couple of other applications (some of them electron based) and sometimes a VM that I allocate maybe 4 GB to or something. And the occasional Age of Empires II DE, which even runs fine on my other laptop from 2016 with 16 GB of RAM in it. I still ordered 32 GB so I can play around with local LLMs a bit more.



  • WSL 1 is a compatibility layer that lets Linux programs run on the Windows kernel by translating Linux system calls to Windows system calls, so in that sense I understand the name: it’s a Windows subsystem for Linux [compatibility]. It doesn’t use the Linux kernel at all. With WSL 2 they’re using a real Linux kernel in a virtual machine, so there the name doesn’t make much sense anymore.


  • I’m not sure, it depends on your configuration and blocking list. I don’t use native tracking protection, and my blocklist (oisd) prioritizes functionality over blocking, so in my case everything just works and I don’t have anything special added to my whitelist. I don’t like DNS blocking to be in the way and I also share my configuration with some family members, so that’s why I’ve made this choice, but if you prefer a stricter approach you might have to do some whitelisting.


  • If the iCloud Private Relay ODoH DNS server is used it will show up as a DNS leak, even if the IP address from its response isn’t used for browsing. For privacy it doesn’t matter, as with ODoH the DNS resolver doesn’t know your IP or identity, the most important thing is whether it will bypass the NextDNS blocklist. In my testing I couldn’t visit any website that was blocked by NextDNS, meaning that the iCloud DNS resolver wasn’t used as the primary DNS resolver, which matches with their documentation (that page 10 that I linked to earlier). Note that Apple will only use a custom DNS resolver if you’re using the native DoH option, so for example the configuration that you can get from https://apple.nextdns.io/.

    You can easily test it yourself: block a hostname in NextDNS that you haven’t visited recently (due to cache) and try to visit it in Safari.

    I don’t know why Apple still uses the Cloudflare DNS resolver even if it seems to be ignoring its responses. Maybe they use it for some custom metadata that’s sent along with the request which somehow is important for the relay. All I know is that I’ve never seen it bypassing the NextDNS blocklist, which again is exactly how it’s documented by Apple.


  • So for some reason Apple keeps using their DNS resolver even with a custom DoH resolver configured, but in my testing it didn’t affect the blocking capabilities of NextDNS at all, meaning that the answers from their resolver are just ignored (or used for some other purpose). The way NextDNS knows that you’re using another resolver is by letting the browser resolve some unique hostnames, so that way it will show up even if the answers from that resolver aren’t used. As to why Apple does this I don’t know. In theory it could be the case that Apple just used whichever answer arrives first and that NextDNS just happened to be faster in my testing, but that doesn’t match with how it’s documented in their PDF.

    Which one to pick (if you don’t just want to use them at the same time) depends on what your goal is. I use iCloud Private Relay + NextDNS + AdGuard, but nowadays I mainly use another browser with a built-in adblocker, so iCloud Private Relay and AdGuard aren’t used in that case.

    I use NextDNS everywhere I can and use a list that prioritizes not breaking anything. It’s a nice backstop. It’s not a replacement for an in-browser adblocker in my opinion, unless you don’t care that it’s less effective.


  • Contrary to common believe, iCloud Private Relay and NextDNS are compatible and can both be enabled at the same time, see page 10 of https://www.apple.com/icloud/docs/iCloud_Private_Relay_Overview_Dec2021.pdf. When you try to visit a blocked hostname in Safari, you’ll see that it won’t work. This is something that I’ve personally confirmed.

    What NextDNS solves and iCloud Private Relay doesn’t, is blocking hostnames system wide, thereby completely blocking some ads and tracking. What iCloud Private Relay solves is hiding your browsing traffic a bit better within your local network and from your ISP, as well as hiding your IP from trackers and hiding your identity from their DNS resolver (not from NextDNS, though).

    Some background information why using HTTPS together with encrypted DNS doesn’t fully hide which websites you visit (yet): https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-encrypted-client-hello.

    If I had to choose, I’d go with NextDNS for system wide blocking and I’d add an adblocker browser extension to block trackers and ads that can’t be blocked with DNS based blocking. But you don’t have to choose and can use both at the same time.