• Pi - plain and simple - run inside firejail.
• lamma.cpp w/ vulkan backend

That’s it.

I’m done. This is a pointless exercise. You’re refusing to engage on the core point and keep dancing around on semantics. None of this makes an LLM like a compiler.

I think there’s another question you need to keep in mind. “Am I finding it harder to convince myself to do the work when it’s important enough?”

Even with the small amount of LLM dabbling that I do on low importance tasks, the hump I have to get over to actually write code myself is getting higher. I’m considering a blanket exclusion of the tech because of it.

Everybody understands what you’re saying. Yes, the source of randomness in a computer is deterministic (unless you have a physical source of entropy). Every computer program is deterministic.

Nothing about the operation of LLMs relys on that determinism or views it as useful. LLMs are probabilistic in nature and require randomness (emulated or real). When people are saying it’s not deterministic they are stating that there are multiple outputs possible for a single input (excluding the seed to the RNG because it’s not necessary to use a deterministic source of randomness).

That is fundamentally different to a compiler, which is the overall point being made.

Nearly all evaluation steps for an LLM I produce some level of entropy. Yes you can evaluate an LLM model deterministically, but we don’t. We even tune the levels to get good results. Model cards have sampling parameters supplied to give “the best” results. For example, Qwen 3.8 flash next gives

We recommend using the following sets of sampling parameters for generation:

Thinking Mode: temperature=1.0, top_p=0.95, top_k=20, min_p=0.0, presence_penalty=0.0, repetition_penalty=1.0

Instruct (or non-thinking) mode: temperature=0.7, top_p=0.80, top_k=20, min_p=0.0, presence_penalty=1.5, repetition_penalty=1.0

Replaying the seed will only get you the same result using a particular engine and a particular random number generator. Run it on llama.cpp Vs Strata and you can get different results. Different libc, different results.

A compiler is systematically deterministic. No calls to rand()

AI is not a tool. Its an addiction

I totally agree. I’m watching people lose their drive to create and it’s so sad. They’re getting high off the satisfaction of “creating” without the work.

…and then they lose access to their wündertool and they can’t do anything.

I’m finding the allure of AI is particularly strong for people who have risen to positions of power where they had to stop doing the work themselves. Instead, they had to work through other people to get bigger projects done.

The allure is that you can just say what you want done, and it does it. If it’s done it “wrong” you can just tell it it’s wrong and not have to worry about arguing the technical differences. As such you feel like you get closer to what you wanted, rather than somebody else’s take on what you wanted.

The things is, when you are removed from the code, you can only work at a high level. That person you asked to do something is considering 10 other low level concerns that you didn’t consider. I think Linus’s recent patch series is a good example. He saw a potential optimisation, did a proof of concept but missed a race condition. He’s now handed it over to the person that normally works in that area and knows the details. Can the optimisation actually work? Who knows?

This isn’t necessarily bad,

I’m of the opinion that it is bad, from the perspective of the user. They are now locked into that company. It not bad from the perspective of the authentication provider, and the service provider may get a positive outcome of it from fewer breaches due to bad passwords.

The problem is the authentication provider isn’t trust worthy.

Which most people don’t do.

Well if that’s possible, it doesn’t sound like a good basis for security.

I wouldn’t count “behind a VPN” as “open to the internet”.

So we’re taking that code out of systemd, right?

No, they’re in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.

LTS! The stablest of the stable releases.

It’s news because despite there already being a number of issues caused by Ubuntu transitioning to poorly done Rust ports common utils, they continue the practise.

So your statement that it’s easier to write safe code in rust is only (arguably) true for one aspect of safety.

Memory safe!

Not any other kind of safety.

The problem isn’t the language. It’s the cargo cult that surrounds it.

do you have any overall recommendations?

Go to a Hifi shop and buy a separate amp and speakers. It’ll do more for your enjoyment of the music than anything else.

Why is chrome a blocker? For the pre-game UI?

Surely it’s the game window that matters.

Honestly, if an attacker has shell access you’re toast regardless. I know you shouldn’t be able to escalate privileges, but better to never let them on the machine.

Most security in industry only holds because employees have no interest in attacking, or knowledge how to attack, their employer.