Diverse Conversations and Tech Updates

Corporate AI is a hot mess, but open-source alternatives can be open-ended chaos. We’ll test some of the best ways to get local AI tools under your control.

Sponsored By:

• Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!
• Warp Terminal: Warp - the re-imagined terminal now available for Linux with multiple distributions available including Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and Arch Linux.
• FlakeHub.com: FlakeHub.com is the all-in-one platform for secure, compliant, and transformative Nix development. Bring Nix to work the way you always wanted with FlakeHub.com. Register for the private beta and get a secure, compliance-friendly Nix and all the support you need.
• Kolide: Kolide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn’t trusted and secure, it can’t log into your cloud apps.

Support LINUX Unplugged

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
• 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
• First NixCon North America!
• Southern California Linux Expo 21
• 🍔 Lunch at SCaLE 🍇, Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 1:30 PM
• Yard House Menu
• Fountain.fm
• Google halts Gemini image generation to fix White balance — Google has suspended availability of text-to-image capabilities in its recently released Gemini multimodal foundational AI model, after it failed to accurately represent White Europeans and Americans in specific historical contexts.
• Stable Diffusion 3 — The Stable Diffusion 3 suite of models currently ranges from 800M to 8B parameters. This approach aims to align with our core values and democratize access, providing users with a variety of options for scalability and quality to best meet their creative needs.
• Deedy on X — Stable Diffusion 3 launched today and may be the best image gen alternative to Gemini! (with examples)
• AI doomsayers funded by billionaires ramp up lobbying
• Google goes “open AI” with Gemma, a free, open-weights chatbot family — Developed by Google DeepMind and other Google AI teams, Gemma pulls from techniques learned during the development of Gemini, which is the family name for Google's most capable (public-facing) commercial LLMs, including the ones that power its Gemini AI assistant. Google says the name comes from the Latin gemma, which means "precious stone."
• ollama release v0.1.27 adds Gemma
• gemma.cpp — Lightweight, standalone C++ inference engine for Google's Gemma models.
• InvokeAI — InvokeAI is an implementation of Stable Diffusion, the open source text-to-image and image-to-image generator. It provides a streamlined process with various new features and options to aid the image generation process.
• Nixified AI — The goal of nixified.ai is to simplify and make available a large repository of AI executable code that would otherwise be impractical to run yourself, due to package management and complexity issues.
• NixOS-WSL
• Texas LinuxFest 2024
• TXLF Hotel Group Rate Link
• LFNW2024 - Ready or not… — April 26 - 28, 2024 • Bellingham Technical College
• LinuxFest Northwest 2024 Schedule Posted
• LINUX Unplugged Membership
• ryantm/agenix — age-encrypted secrets for NixOS and Home manager
• Mic92/sops-nix — Atomic secret provisioning for NixOS based on sops
• Pick: Hugging Face Daily Papers