Looks in approval at use of antimicrobal bronze handles.

Every time I get an Android update, my first reaction is “what workflows that had been working am I going to need to relearn?”

I’ve had some similar comments about Windows in the past. Like, a lot of the lock-in value that Microsoft enjoys isn’t anything special that they’ve done — it’s because people are expert in using their platform. If you make them change their workflow, you throw that out. And people profoundly dislike changing their workflow, once they’ve put the effort in to become accustomed to one.

I don’t know if I know all that much about it, but National Geographic did an article on the growing elver smuggling issue in the US a while back, and that inspired me to read some more material about it.

This is also a big deal for commercial and environmental reasons.

Eels are extremely popular as food. China has aquafarms to grow them, but the problem is getting ahold of young eel to grow, because we can’t get them to breed in captivity. They catch wild ones, then raise them in farms. At first, the Japanese eel got clobbered.

Then what had been happening is that people would catch young wild European eels (“elvers”) then export them illegally to be raised in Chinese aquafarms:

Moreover, the effort is increasingly urgent due to the dramatic decline in European eel populations since the 1980s, marked by a staggering drop of over 95% in the number of glass eels arriving at European coasts. The species is now highly endangered, facing multiple threats that complicate conservation efforts.

https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/law-enforcement-casts-net-over-256-eel-smugglers

Law enforcement casts net over 256 eel smugglers

Europol-led operation finds 25 tonnes of trafficked eels worth EUR 13 million destined for Asia

Then after European eels got depleted, baby eel smuggling started happening in North America.

https://apnews.com/article/business-europe-china-smuggling-nyc-state-wire-baab790064d148b72dc5b1752fab7d39

Baby eels are among the most lucrative fish species in the seafood world. The U.S. fishery for American eels is based almost entirely in Maine. The baby eels are often worth more than $2,000 per pound at the docks.

https://vifreepress.com/2024/03/boaters-caught-trying-to-smuggle-over-110000-live-eels-out-of-puerto-rico-feds-say/

SAN JUAN — Two people are facing charges after the United States Coast Guard found them trying to take over 110,000 eels out of Puerto Rico without proper paperwork, prosecutors said.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials noticed a “suspicious” boat about 40 miles off the northern coast of Puerto Rico on the morning of February 21, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico said in a March 1 news release.

The boat was described as “flagless and outfitted for smuggling.” The U.S. Coast Guard approached the boat and, when it refused to stop, had to “neutralize” it, prosecutors said.

Once onboard, officials found two people with 22 bags of live American eels, prosecutors said. Each bag held “over 5,000 eels”, officials said, totaling at least 110,000 eels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshwater_eel_poaching_and_smuggling

Freshwater eel poaching and smuggling have emerged in recent years as a direct response to the sustained popularity of eels as food combined with the eels’ low population, endangered status, and subsequent protections. Freshwater eel are elongated fish in the Anguillidae family of ray-finned fish. The three most commonly consumed eel species are the Japanese eel (A. japonica), European eel (A. anguilla), and American eel ( A. rostrata).

The life cycle for eels has not been closed in captivity on a sustainable level, and any eel farms rely entirely on wild-caught elvers (juvenile eels). These elvers are caught from their native ranges in North America and Europe and are smuggled into East Asian eel farms, where they are often relabeled as the native Japanese eel to subvert legislation. The eels are smuggled disguised as other cargo, such as luggage[1] or other meat products.[2]

If we could figure out how to get eels to breed in captivity, which we currently don’t know how to do, it could resolve the eel shortage. That probably involves a better understanding of their sexual habits.

I think that if you aspire to regulate the political positions that AIs should recommend, you…okay, I think that that’s probably not a great idea, but setting that aside, it seems pretty odd that you’d want to do that, but not regulate the political positions of webpages that search engines return or the political positions that news media may take, which would be what I’d consider alternate information sources.

Oh, come on. It’s late at night, you’re really craving some mouthwatering chicken-fried steak and syrup-drenched waffle. You find yourself falling deeper and deeper into the mental image, and then suddenly you feel the world twisting around you and a sharp dropping sensation and, bam, there you are, in a booth at Waffle House. We’ve all been there, at one point or another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understatement

Understatement is an expression of lesser strength than what the speaker or writer actually means or than what is normally expected. It is the opposite of embellishment or exaggeration, and is used for emphasis, irony, hedging, or humor.

Understatement also merges the comic with the ironic, as in Mark Twain’s comment, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

Reporter: “Hello, I’m from the New York Times, and I’d like to ask whether you’re aware of anyone who has teleported to this Waffle House?”

Waffle House employee: Thinking “there are some real weirdos who come in here”. “Uh, no.”

Yes this works when I’m having issues.

Okay, gotcha. In that case, my guess is that the most-likely issue is with the DNS daemon that OpenWRT is using, which is most-likely dnsmasq.

You could confirm that your DNS configuration on the LAN hosts is actually using OpenWRT as the DNS server if you wanted — I could walk through that, if you’re not sure. But from a test-when-it’s-happening situation, I’d probably:

• Install dig on the Mint box, if it’s not already installed. That’s a DNS diagnostic program that doesn’t use your system resolving mechanism, talks directly to DNS, so it cuts out any other factors. It’ll be in the bind9-dnsutils package.

    $ sudo apt install bind9-dnsutils
  

• Install dig on the OpenWRT box.

    $ opkg update
    $ opkg install bind-dig
  

• Confirm that you can successfully run it on both the OpenWrt box and your laptop when there are no problems (your router’s LAN address probably being something like 192.168.1.1):

    $ dig @your-router-LAN-address www.google.com
  

• Confirm that you can successfully run it on both the OpenWrt box and your laptop when there are no problems using whatever outside DNS server you have the OpenWrt box set to use (assuming 1.1.1.1 here):

    $ dig @1.1.1.1 www.google.com
  

• Next time you have problems, repeat the above. If both the dig on your OpenWrt box and on your laptop using the OpenWrt DNS server now fail, then it’s probably pretty safe to say that it’s the DNS server on the OpenWrt box at fault. If just the one on your laptop fails, then it’s going to be a communication issue between your LAN box and the OpenWrt DNS server.

Assuming that the problem is the OpenWrt DNS server, and assuming that it’s dnsmasq, to troubleshoot further, I might try looking at its logs, or installing tcpdump on the OpenWrt box and running that, something like $ tcpdump -nvvv -i any udp port domain. That should let you see both the incoming DNS queries going to the OpenWrt DNS server as well as the queries that it is sending upstream (the -n will prevent tcpdump from itself sending DNS queries to look up IP addresses, which would generate more noise, the -vvv to show all possible information about the packets, and the -i any to show all packets on all interfaces). That’ll let you see whether it’s getting flooded with DNS queries and to see what queries it’s sending to the upstream DNS server out on the Internet.

That won’t alone solve your problem, but it’d be the next step I’d try to narrow down what’s going on.

I am still having a gaming rig here with rx6900xt as well but way too big to get it wife approved into the living room and have no man cave to run it 24/7.

It’s pretty trivial to make use of an LLM compute box remotely; in fact, most of the software out there is designed around doing this, since lots of people use cloud-based LLM compute machines. I use the Framework Desktop in this fashion — I leave it headless, just as an LLM compute node for whatever machine is running software that needs number-crunching done. So if your gaming machine is fine for you in terms of compute capability, you might want to just use it remotely from the living room with another machine being in the living room.

Another benefit of sticking the compute box elsewhere is that while my Framework Desktop is very quiet (single large fan, about 120W TDP, and is notable for being rather quieter than other AI Max-based systems), keeping my 7900 XTX loaded will spin up the fans. You may not want to have a heavy-duty number-crunching machine in the living room from a noise standpoint.

[email protected].

@[email protected] would be a user named “localllama” rather than a community named “localllama”.

I use a 128GB Framework Desktop. Back when I got it, it was $2,500 with 8TB of SSD storage, but the RAM shortage has driven prices up to substantially more. That system’s interesting in that you can tell Linux to use essentially all of the memory as video memory; it has an APU with unified memory, so the GPU can access all that memory.

That’ll get you 70B models like llama 3-based stuff at Q6_K with 128K of context window, which is the model max. Speeds with that level of model are okay for chatbot-like operation, but you won’t want to run code generation with that.

For some tasks, you may be better-off using a higher-bandwidth-but-less-memory video card and an MoE model; this doesn’t keep all of the model active and in video memory, only loading relevant expert models. I can’t suggest much there, as I’ve spent less time with that.

If you don’t care about speed — you probably do — you can run just about anything with llama.cpp using the CPU and main memory, as long as you have enough memory. That might be useful if you just want to evaluate the quality of a given model’s output, if you want to get a feel for what you can get out of a given model before buying hardware.

You might want to ask on [email protected], as there’ll be more people familiar there (though I’m not on there myself).

EDIT: I also have a 24GB Radeon 7900 XTX, but for LLM stuff like llama.cpp, I found the lack of memory to be too constraining. It does have higher memory bandwidth, so for models that fit, it’s faster than the Framework Desktop. In my experience, discrete GPUs were more interesting for image diffusion models like Stable Diffusion — most open-weight image diffusion models are less-memory hungry – than LLM stuff. Though if you want to do Flux v2, I wasn’t able to fit it on that card. I could run it on the Framework Desktop, but at the resolutions I wanted to run it at, the poor ol’ Framework took about 6 or 7 minutes to generate an image.

EDIT2: I use all AMD hardware, though I agree with @[email protected] that Nvidia hardware is going to be easier to get working; a lot of the AMD software is much more bleeding edge, as Nvidia got on all this earlier. That being said, Nvidia also charges a premium because of that. I understand that a DGX Spark is something of an Nvidia analog to the Framework Desktop and similar AI Max-based systems, has unified memory, but you’ll pay for it, something like $4k.

Okay. It’s going to be a little harder to diagnose it since the problem isn’t immediately visible, but you’ve got all the Linux toolset there, so that’s helpful.

Is the DNS server you’re trying to use from the LAN machines running on the OpenWrt machine, or off somewhere on the Internet?

EDIT: Or on the LAN, I guess.

EDIT2: Oh, you answered that elsewhere.

I am using my routers DNS, and it’s reachable from my laptop.

Have you tried doing a DNS lookup from the router (pinging a host by name, say) when you were having the problems?

If so and it didn’t work, that’d suggest that the problem is the upstream DNS server. If that’s the problem, as IsoKiero suggests, you might set the OpenWrt box to use a different DNS server.

If so, and it worked, that’d suggest that the issue is the OpenWrt host’s DNS server serving names. It sounds like OpenWrt uses dnsmasq by default.

If not…that’d probably be what I’d try next time the issue comes up.

From my laptop I can ping outwards using IP, but not names (e.g. openwrt.org), but I can reach my DNS from my laptop

Okay, well, that’s a pretty good indication that marud’s guess is right and it’s DNS-related, if you can reach hosts by IP but not by name. Is the laptop Linux?

Ah, gotcha, cool. If it’s OpenWrt and you have shell access, that should make it easier to diagnose. When you are checking that you don’t have connectivity from your local LAN device, you tried pinging the same out-there-on-the-Internet host, and that failed?

Okay. So, I don’t know exactly what you’re doing to test that, but I’m going to assume, say, trying to go somewhere in a Web browser.

First off, I have occasionally seen problems myself where consumer broadband routers that have been on for a long time wind up briefly becoming unresponsive. Probably some sort of memory leak or something. So if you haven’t rebooted the thing and seen whether all your problems magically stop showing up, I’d probably try that. Quick and easy.

Okay. Say that doesn’t do it.

When you confirm that the router can reach the Internet during this period of outage, how are you doing that? Going to a management Web UI from a wired-LAN device and trying to ping some host on the Internet?

I’m not sure what you mean when you say that you’re seeing “periodic drops”. Like, you’re sending pings from a wired-LAN device to somewhere on the Internet and not getting a response? Inbound TCP connections from the Internet aren’t being forwarded to a device on the LAN?

“not retro enough?”

https://weatherstar3000.netbymatt.com/

That being said, I don’t think that he’s emulating the oldest format.

This was their launch video, May 2, 1982. This is July 17, 1982, so it was probably about as early as it gets:

https://youtu.be/ys1rGgm2dZA?t=9

It is a joke.

Shortage Likely

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt

OpenWrt (from open wireless router) is an open-source project for embedded operating systems based on Linux, primarily used on embedded devices to route network traffic.

OpenWrt can run on various types of devices, including CPE routers, residential gateways, smartphones, pocket computers (e.g., Ben NanoNote). It is also possible to run OpenWrt on personal computers and laptops.

OpenWrt also recommends choosing a device with a minimum of 16 MB of flash and 128 MB of RAM, preferably higher amounts.[77]

If you can install OpenWrt, you can probably get ahold of hardware that can run OpenWrt.

OpenWrt provides regular bug fixes and security updates even for devices that are no longer supported by their manufacturers.

You’ll probably also have a longer device lifetime.