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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 6th, 2025

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  • There’s really only two programs that make moving to Linux very problematic for me, that’s Photoshop, and Word.

    At least with word I can ultimately just sequester that into a VM, or learn a different document program if push comes to shove (RIP all my workflows for citations and templates).

    But PS is pretty much non-negotiable, it needs GPU acceleration of a native environment to run well, and there just aren’t any alternatives that can do what PS does — I need real channel support (painting on channels, copying between them per layer, actual alpha support instead of naive transparency) and more. As much as I hate Adobe, PS is one of those tools that I just know intuitively, all the texture or photo manipulation work feels entirely natural, and I just don’t think I’m going to find that ever again.

    So, if Linux people can get it working through Wine, it’s a huge relief that I can finally leave the Microslop ecosystem.






  • I typically just specify the height of the video and let the browser figure out the width and aspect ratio. The most annoying layout shift is the vertical kind anyway, so that solves it to my satisfaction.

    That said, I also use the poster feature of the video tag and set preload to none, this produces vastly faster page loading, as images are a fast-path compared to browsers loading a video chunk and then decoding it just to display a cover image. I have a set of scripts that generate the poster images for me, I just specify the frame number I want to use in the video and ffmpeg produces an avif.



  • For the vast majority of these companies, probably not.

    If the company is AI-only, then if/when the bubble bursts, I suspect it’ll go under too. Only the biggest players will survive that, like OpenAI, since so many other services call out to their API.

    Companies that can pivot back to core markets will be fine, Google, Microsoft. Shovel sellers will mostly be okay too. What that’ll look like for them is a period of huge overvaluation and then a return to sanity, you can see similar histories if you look at the stock price of still extant dotcom bubble companies.

    And then the hype will be over, there will be a huge crater left in GDP, retirement accounts, and the larger economy, but some “AI” technology will remain — stuff that is actually useful, like transcription, natural speech, noise removal, automated rotoscoping. But the fantasy of replacing information workers and artists will not come to pass, though they probably won’t differentiate for the next several years, as the jobs market is decimated all the same by speculation hangover.






  • It will take a prompt, then run multiple web searches to get relevant info, recursively if needed, and then give a meaningful response with citations.

    Do you have an example of this you can provide verbatim?

    I’m just curious; I think the one application LLMs might actually be viable for is exactly this kind of connection finding in a large corpus, and since I’m doing lots of research, I might actually find personal utility.


  • The AI assistant is backed by several different models which IIRC just call out to those providers (Op*nAI API, etc) and rack up tokens in the billing system: image You might be right that the AI cost is included when below the plan price — to that I have to say, give me a fucking cheaper plan that doesn’t implicitly include the cost of AI.


  • As far as I can tell, you have to completely disable all keyboard shortcuts or else when you press A anywhere that isn’t the search box you get dumped immediately into their AI assistant prompted with whatever you already had in the search bar.

    It didn’t track me more than a few pennies, but on principle the several times that happened made me angry.

    Apparently some of the news views in search are also easy to dump you into AI land. There’s community CSS add on that hides all that stuff now, but I wish the company would let me just disable the AI traps.


  • I use Kagi because the truth is all other corporate alternatives at this point are unusable swill.

    That said, I do not like the company and disagree with their choices in many aspects.

    For one, while they don’t force you to use AI features, there isn’t a way to explicitly turn them off for your account, there always the opportunity to rack up token costs if you accidently hit one of the AI buttons.

    They still don’t run their own index, instead complacent to just pay the other search providers. Additionally, if you’re trying to escape Google… Kagi runs on Google Cloud Services.

    There’s more complaints, and I’m sure others will chime in, but that’s my take.


  • It’s funny because I’ve had this one particular issue with two Asus routers that I manage for family…

    They use this plunger power button design, you push the button in and it toggle locks in to place, the problem is that after a few years whatever mechanism retains the plunger fails and it always springs back and keep the device from staying on. So far the solution has been to cram a paper clip down the housing to hold it in. I just find comedy in having to apply that fix twice.