"how does a smart car compare to a ford f150? its different in its intent and intended audience.
Ollama is someone who goes to walmart and buys a $100 huffy mountain bike because they heard bikes are cool. Torchchat is someone who built a mountain bike out of high quality components chosen for a specific task/outcome with the understanding of how each component in the platform functions and interacts with the others to achieve an end goal."
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1eh6xmq/comment...
Longer Answer with some more details is
If you don't care about which quant you're using, only use ollama and want easy integration with desktop/laptop based projects use Ollama.
If you want to run on mobile, integrate into your own apps or projects natively, don't want to use GGUF, want to do quantization, or want to extend your PyTorch based solution use torchchat
Right now Ollama (based on llama.cpp) is a faster way to get performance on a laptop desktop and a number of projects are pre-integrated with Ollama thanks to the OpenAI spec. It's also more mature with more fit and polish.
That said the commands that make everything easy use 4bit quant models and you have to do extra work to go find a GGUF model with a higher (or lower) bit quant and load it into Ollama.
Also worth noting is that Ollama "containerizes" the models on disk so you can't share them with other projects without going through Ollama which is a hard pass for any users and usecases since duplicating model files on disk isn't great.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1eh6xmq/comment...
So you can also run on any LLM privately with ollama, lmstudio, and or LLamaSharp with windows, mac and iphone, all are opensource and customizable too and user friendly and frequently maintained.
Probably if you have any esoteric flags that pytorch supports. Flash attention 2, for example, was supported way earlier on pt than llama.cpp, so if flash attention 3 follows the same path it'll probably make more sense to use this when targeting nvidia gpus.
It would appear that Flash-3 is already something that exists for PyTorch based on this joint blog between Nvidia, Together.ai and Princeton about enabling Flash-3 for PyTorch: https://pytorch.org/blog/flashattention-3/
Olamma currently has only one "supported backend" which is llama.cpp. It enables downloading and running models on CPU. And might have more mature server.
How well does it run in AMD GPUs these days compared to Nvidia or Apple silicon?
I've been considering buying one of those powerful Ryzen mini PCs to use as an LLM server in my LAN, but I've read before that the AMD backend (ROCm IIRC) is kinda buggy
What package managers are people using in other languages to make sure that software "always works the same as when you first wrote it, without asterisks"? I'd like to understand how they solve the "package no longer exists in a central registry" problem.
This is not as much about a package manager as it is about conventions and necessary dependencies.
Standards ensure that going forward language semantics and syntax don't change. Having minimal dependencies ensures program longevity. Package manager cannot solve these problems, no matter how good it is at its job.
Python doesn't have a standard, it's heavily reliant on dependencies which are very plentiful and similarly unregulated. A program written in C that uses only functionality described in some POSIX standard will endure decades unmodified. Even Python helloworld program went stale sometime ago, even though it's just one line.
> I'd like to understand how they solve the "package no longer exists in a central registry" problem.
This is, of course, an infrastructure/maintenance issue as much as a package manager design issue. But in Nix's case, the public 'binary cache' (for Nixpkgs/NixOS) of build outputs includes not only final build outputs but also the source tarballs that go into them. As Nix disallows network access at build time, all dependencies are represented this way, including jar files or source tarballs, or whatever— Nix itself must be the one to fetch your dependencies. Consequently, everything you fetch from the Internet for your build is a kind of intermediary Nix build that can be cached using the usual Nix tools. The Nix community's public cache has a policy of retaining copies of upstream sources forever (there is recently talk of limiting storage of the final built packages to a retention period of only 2 years, but sources will continue to be retained indefinitely. So far the cache reaches back to its inception around a decade ago.)
Taken together, these things mean that when a project disappears entirely from GitHub or Maven Central or whatever, people building against old versions of it with Nix/Nixpkgs don't even notice. Nix just fetches those upstream sources from the public cache without even reaching out to that central repository from which those sources have been removed.
For private use cases where your project and its dependencies won't be mirrored to the public cache of Nixpkgs builds, you can achieve the same effect by running your own cache or paying a hosted service to do that.
For builds outside the Nix universe, you can make special arrangements for each type of package your various builds fetch, and mirroring those repos. Then configure your builds to pull from your mirrors instead of the main/public ones.
Dotnet uses Nuget[1]. Packages in the system are immutable, & never changing. They can be unlisted, but never deleted (except in limited & extreme cases, like malware), which means even if a package maintainer stops publishing new versions to the repository, existing packages will continue to be publicly available for as long as Microsoft continues to exist.
Often a package says it works with OS version X, and not X+1. It may be true or false. But what you described does not solve either version of that problem.
I think you're referring to vendoring dependencies? In python/pip for example, you can download the source for a package and point to the folder directly as a dependency instead of the version or a git URL. Most package managers/languages support some version of that. I suppose if you wanted to vendor all dependencies by default, keep them updated etc it would take a little more scripting or extra tools.
Using the GitLab calculator: If you are a developer in Medellín you are paid 3x less than if you are living in the Bay Area. If you are a customer in Medellín you pay the same as a customer in the Bay Area. In this case, "cost of living"[0] only applies to employees and not customers, which in my opinion says a lot about how much the company values their staff.
I appreciate the openness from GitLab on this matter though, they're pretty up-front about it so if you don't like it don't apply.
[0] When the word "cost of living" is mentioned but it's not reflected in the price for final users then you know you're about to get fucked.
It seems to me there is a lot of VIM vocabulary that is very different from what is common on the desktop today. I don't know what yank means. I don't think I have a desktop app that has a yank function.
In most Unix systems you should be able to go to the beginning of a line, press Ctrl-k and then Ctrl-y to yank. At the very least your browser and terminal should understand those two commands.
Funny, after reading the article I decided to go to Coinbase to see the Bitcoin prices, and this is what I find:
We have reason to believe you reside in a country in which Coinbase is prohibited by law from doing business (Iran, Islamic Republic Of) per the sanctions imposed by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control. As a result, we’ve unfortunately had to close your Coinbase account.
I'm not Iranian and I'll comply with their KYC requests, but every day Coinbase feels more and more like PayPal. I thought this is what we were trying to avoid in the first place.
PS: Happily, I had no funds on the account. I hope this helps as a reminder to others: keep your money in your own private wallets.
> Coinbase is prohibited by law from doing business
The premise that bitcoin frees you from normal legal requirements is the problem here. Or the US attempts at global jurisdiction for KYC, take your pick.
Paypal is not gratuitously bad. Every annoying decision they make is because they're backed into a cost-minimising corner by fraud and compliance problems.
The bitcoin community believe that purchases should be fully caveat emptor, and as a result there's a high level of fraud and theft which is going to put off non-ideological adopters.
> The bitcoin community believe that purchases should be fully caveat emptor, and as a result there's a high level of fraud and theft which is going to put off non-ideological adopters.
> The premise that bitcoin frees you from normal legal requirements is the problem here.
This is misleading, because majority of coinbase's job, the part that is their most difficult task, is to deal with correctly handling fiat currencies (dollar, euro.)
Try using something like shapeshift.io (which doesn't handle fiat currencies) and you'll find a much more pleasant end user experience there than with either paypal or coinbase.
> The premise that bitcoin frees you from normal legal requirements is the problem here.
I'm not expecting Coinbase to do illegal things and I'm happy to provides documents when needed (as I mentioned in the original post). They also have my ID, passport and bank statements on file, so they could've checked that. Instead, I was perma-banned when I contacted their support to see how I could unlock the account.
Please be careful when dealing with this company, there are better alternatives whether you live in the US or not.
> The bitcoin community believe that purchases should be fully caveat emptor, and as a result there's a high level of fraud and theft which is going to put off non-ideological adopters.
The site you've linked seems to be talking about thefts, similar to losing your credit card and someone running rampant with it, not purchase fraud.
In the case of credit cards, someone's still paying for it, it's just not you. There's no reason why this same system can't be applied to Bitcoin, without having to change anything in the protocols. It's just an extra intermediary in the middle who suffers the loss instead of you.
Got any sources that relate to purchases per your original?
What fraud or compliance problem did Paypal face when they banned the Wikileaks account? They did it because they "violated terms of use" in that they "encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity”. But as far as I can tell, Wikileaks itself didn't do anything illegal, and didn't operate any differently than any other journalistic enterprise.
> I thought this is what we were trying to avoid in the first place.
Well, yes. Doing anything with USD (or most other currencies) is a complete nightmare, especially including converting them to other currencies.
The goal is that eventually you might want to accept some or all of your pay as bitcoin, which would've been paid to your employer as bitcoin, and thus the loop is closed and nobody has to implement any KYC procedures. Converting from <currency> to bitcoin to pay somebody for them to turn it back into <currency> suffers from all the legal issues that affect <currency> - which should be obvious.
Also obvious is that this will pretty much never happen on any large scale, rendering bitcoin near-worthless for most people.
I should clarify I was not looking for fiat money at any point, I just wanted to check the Coinbase price at that moment. I don't think I have used the account since I last referred a friend a couple of months ago.
Now, even if I wanted to use their wallet or vault, I can't. That's not a bad thing in my mind though.
The issue is that you need a large amount of people to be using bitcoin - enough that some significant amount of them will pay your company in bitcoin - before you can start offering to pay your employees in the bitcoin you receive... and significant amounts of people are unlikely to use bitcoin until they're being paid in it.
Update: I tried to contact support to see what was the best way to send them the documents they needed for unblocking my account. This was their response:
Thank you for your interest in Coinbase. Our primary goal is to make our platform safe and secure for our customers. Coinbase is a regulated Money Services Business under FinCEN (FinCEN.gov), and as part of our responsibility, we are legally obligated to implement regulatory compliance mechanisms.
We regret to inform you that we are no longer able to support your Coinbase account as well as any other accounts you may have created. Please note, we have not blocked access to the balance currently in your Coinbase account; while we can no longer process brokerage orders via our banking relationship, you may still send your balance offsite to an external address.
Please be careful when dealing with this company, and remember that even if you're in the US there are many alternatives (LocalBitcoins, Circle and Gemini come to mind).
I don't think it was random, I happen to have a Colombian passport and I use VPN's on a regular basis. These two don't go well together as you can imagine.
I live between various countries (none of them embargoed by the US, which AFAIK are the only ones excluded from Coinbase) but I have a US company and a passport with those shiny stamps that could clear any doubts about me sneaking through "El Hueco". I was not given a chance to show them however, so I'm just glad I don't use them regularly.
I'm sorry I don't have a great mistery story behind this :P
Understandable, but wasn't this always going to be inevitable given people treating BTC as an investment for USD instead of as a crypto currency? Sooner or later, regardless of the Government/Country combination, you're going to get the attention of various agencies when an online currency starts to be used to store irl currency. It's why it's always been somewhat ironic to me that despite the original intent of cryptocurrency, people still listed their holdings in USD, as if BTC was their portfolio.
I understand to a degree the argument of what you do with your money should be your business, and if you want to store it in BTC and believe you can convert it to necessary currency later on, that's fine; I'm not being sardonic either, that's your choice with your money. But I don't think that BTC was really designed or intended for this purpose as it brings the exact sort of scrutiny that one would hope to avoid with a cryptocurrency, and with scrutiny, regulation. Maybe if the total value of exchanges on BTC without the injection/interaction of irl currencies grew large enough (i.e., there were enough transactions for legal goods/services), the same scrutiny "might" be applied, but I'm not really convinced that governments would care much one way or another.
Bitcoin's own reputation has also helped bring this scrutiny down - even if the level of anonymity is questionable, most government officials and agencies hear "anonymous" and "exchanges" and immediately want to have controls set in place. Even if they figure out that there is a very traceable paper trail, there's still an interest in ensuring that it's not being used to launder. Their curiosity will not be satisfied with people's assurances that "it's an online currency, that's all."
Basically, the gold rush with BTC sort of led it exactly to the state it's in, and brought the eye of government to it. As long as people treat it like gold or silver or any other commodity, the government is going to want a piece of it, or at least keep a solid eye on it.
> Understandable, but wasn't this always going to be inevitable given people treating BTC as an investment for USD instead of as a crypto currency?
Fundamentally inevitable, no — there's no inherent reason for countries to care about the movement of currency — but practically inevitable, yes. As long as we have such financial 'crimes' as money laundering (which is only against the law because it's easier to prove than the real crimes it's designed to hide), we're going to have KYC requirements and all the rest of the incumbent-protection measures which make it so hard to have a financial startup.
> there's no inherent reason for countries to care about the movement of currency
Wouldn't appropriate taxation give them reason? Say, for example, buying cigarettes in a US state with a high sin tax. Or suppose a workplace that pays employees in BTC; how do you apply holdings to that?
I would imagine that if it gain significant traction, it would warrant interest.
With an inflatable currency, a government could always just inflate its currency in order to fairly tax everyone who holds any of it.
It's also possible to build an anonymous, auditable cryptocurrency such that a government can verify that taxes on transactions have been paid, but not not know the identities of the transactors unless they don't pay. Which is pretty neat.
Fundamentally, governments don't need to tax currency movement. If they implemented a flat income tax only, or even better a flat consumption tax, it could survive off a single tax and not need to worry about income or movement.
I guess I must admit that my original statement came with an assumption of "BTC deployed in the current real world setting." I do agree that given the scenario you and the other commenter provided would not require government scrutiny as they would have no interest.
Though, also both scenarios exist as "what-ifs" of the real world and an ideal world setting for BTC, not an idea use scenario for BTC>
Of course the difference being that if you need to use PayPal for a transaction and if PayPal rejects you you have no recourse, however if you need bitcoins and if Coinbase rejects you you have many Bitcoin exchanges to fall back to. That's what a distributed system and economy is all about :)
Well, it's either Paypal or it's Mt. Gox; you pays your money and you takes your chances. The Bitcoin market, libertarian-utopian rhetoric aside, seems increasingly to prefer the former to the latter.
Yeah, I changed states not too long ago and had a bunch of money tied up in Coinbase's Exchange. After numerous emails I had to accept that my money was locked up for the foreseeable future.
Any time I purchase or sell Bitcoin on Coinbase I immediately move the funds out. I don't know whether it's Coinbase themselves or just onerous government regulations, but I don't trust them not to randomly lock my account one day with no recourse.
You could feel the same way about your bank or Paypal or your home if you have a mortgage, but I still don't feel it's unreasonable to both use these services and expect them to serve the purpose they were built for legally and ethically (the legal requirement ostensibly being what he ran into here).
I think most people would agree that keeping large amounts of cash is both fruitless (no interest) and irresponsible (higher probability of theft) and keeping your bitcoin in a personal wallet doesn't seem terribly different, except that theft can happen from anywhere not just your physical location. This isn't to say I don't understand the feeling, given the relatively unregulated, shady nature of the bitcoin economy. Additionally, money has value because it's useful, and Coinbase makes bitcoin much more useful to me (easier to buy and spend, which is the point of money).
So you're not wrong, but I also believe that's a criticism that ought to be tempered with reality.
> Nice to meet you. I'm an engineer who runs a small mobile app development company.