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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I’ve been using cryptpad.fr (the “flagship instance” of CryptPad) for years. It’s…fine. Really, it’s fine. I’m not thrilled with the experience, but it is functional and I’m not aware of any viable alternatives that are end-to-end encrypted.

    It’s based on OnlyOffice, which is basically a heavyweight web-first Microsoft Office clone. Set your expectations accordingly.

    No mobile apps, and the web UI is not optimized for mobile. I mean, it works, but does using the desktop MS Office UI on a smartphone sound like fun to you?

    Performance is tolerable but if you’re used to Google Sheets, it’s a big downgrade. Some of this is just the necessary overhead involved in an end-to-end encrypted cloud service. Some of it is because, again, this is a heavyweight desktop UI running in a web browser. It’s functional, but it’s not fast and it’s not pretty.






  • DNS over HTTPS. It allows encrypted DNS lookup with a URL, which allows for url-based customizations not possible with traditional DNS lookups (e.g. the server could have /ads or /trackers endpoints so you can choose what to block).

    DNS Over TLS (DoT) is similar, but it doesn’t use URLs, just IP addresses like generic DNS. Both are encrypted.



  • In my experience, this is more a problem if you are fully running your own mail servers, not so much if you are using an established email service. My MX record reflects my email provider, and my outgoing mail goes through their servers. So I’m as trusted as they are, in general. Your mail provider should have instructions on how to set up DNS for verification.


  • If you’re willing to pay money for it, you can get your own domain for $2-$15 per year, then use it with pretty much any commercial email service. That way you can change email providers without changing your address.

    This is my plan going forward. I’m going to suffer the inconvenience of changing my address, but only one more time, not every time I want to change providers.


  • But any 50 watt chip will get absolutely destroyed by a 500 watt gpu

    If you are memory-bound (and since OP’s talking about 192GB, it’s pretty safe to assume they are), then it’s hard to make a direct comparison here.

    You’d need 8 high-end consumer GPUs to get 192GB. Not only is that insanely expensive to buy and run, but you won’t even be able to support it on a standard residential electrical circuit, or any consumer-level motherboard. Even 4 GPUs (which would be great for 70B models) would cost more than a Mac.

    The speed advantage you get from discrete GPUs rapidly disappears as your memory requirements exceed VRAM capacity. Partial offloading to GPU is better than nothing, but if we’re talking about standard PC hardware, it’s not going to be as fast as Apple Silicon for anything that requires a lot of memory.

    This might change in the near future as AMD and Intel catch up to Apple Silicon in terms of memory bandwidth and integrated NPU performance. Then you can sidestep the Apple tax, and perhaps you will be able to pair a discrete GPU and get a meaningful performance boost even with larger models.