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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3450 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 29, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I am not a coder. If something requires me to install dependencies, I can sometimes successfully do that with very detailed instructions, but often I fail even then.

I also do not trust anything I type into an online AI to not be either used against me, or filtered in ways I will find annoying.

So I was pleasantly surprised to discover NMKD's Stable Diffusion GUI, which allows me to more or less one-click-install (unrar, start the .exe, click the "install" button), so I could play around with this image-generating AI stuff everyone has been talking about. It has been interesting and fun, and doesn't require me to send my prompts for use or abuse by distant others.

(I recognize the possibility that the creator is essentially doing this to me anyway--I have no way of checking that on my own--but that is a larger problem and not the point of my simple question.)

Here's my simple question: I would like to have something like NMKD's Stable Diffusion GUI, but for text-based AI instead of art-generating AI. That is--a one-click-install, locally-hosted, no-expertise-required version of ChatGPT or similar. My instinct is that this should be smaller and easier than the Stable Diffusion I run on my PC, but maybe I am just super wrong about that?

Anyway, do any of you know of such a thing?

Just saying:

installing software dependencies to run it is very simple you can learn it in 15 minutes.

It depends on the environment but e.g. for the popular Javascript command line applications you need to install the Javascript virtual machine (NodeJs), it will install for you Npm, the node package manager which allow you to install dependencies.

You git clone a JS repository you find cool.

you run npm install

and to run the app it depends, could be npx run or npm run/serve, but that detail is described in the Readme file of the github repository see section how to install/run

For other programming languages, the steps are very similar and straigthforward.

installing software dependencies to run it is very simple you can learn it in 15 minutes.

I mean, you're not wrong, I've definitely done it several times. It's just that, more often than not I get some error or other that I find myself completely unable to resolve, and after a few hours of troubleshooting I give up. I guess you could say it's not the software dependencies that are the problem per se, it is my inability to troubleshoot them when they don't work the way I expect them to. And being as I make my living in other ways, it has never yet been worth my time to "get good" in this domain.

Usually things are trivial and just works, but not all technological ecosystems are equal, for example while javascript programs works fine, python programs often have dependencies issues (too old/out of sync). If the error message is a dependency version conflict yes, you can't solves them by yourself easily, often the thing to do in those cases is to look at the corresponding github issue or to open one. That way you can offload the troubleshooting on others or find out people have already shared a solution

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