IgorPartola

They include an LLM response with every single Google search, whether it is warranted or not. That scale is, my guess, many orders of magnitude higher than what OpenAI and Anthropic serve. And for Google none of these are paid interactions since their LLMs do not (YET) insert ads into the responses.

So my guess is that Google will continue having compute shortages until the Gemini enshittification starts.

To be fair Microsoft was always shitware. I don’t remember a time when using a Windows machine just worked, didn’t take up gigabytes of space, didn’t crash, and didn’t get messed up by simply using it requiring a yearly or semi-yearly reinstall.

Lots of programs report progress when you send SIGUSR1 or SIGUSR2.

https://sbaproject.org/ has the same thing. Sometimes visiting a website can have very real and very violent consequences. Thankfully these folks know what they are doing.

My thesis on that is just that AI generated content is generally viewed as worse than human-generated content, but it is a lot cheaper. There is a lot of (financial) incentive to create and post a lot of cheap AI generated content and trying to pass it as higher quality human-generated content than to be honest about it.

It’s the same reason recipe websites don’t honestly label that they ripped off other recipe websites: it would train users to go to the source.

What upside is there to labeling your content as AI generated (except when you are showing some novel way to use AI)?

Similar to the era of when people could calculate logarithms on paper or remember exact years of when each Roman emperor ruled? Or is that different?

Nobody wants to label their stuff as AI generated because they removed credibility. Communities can flag posts as AI generated based on speculation and telltales but it won’t be 100% and will take extra work.

I think the era of the blog is simply dead now and that’s mostly ok. Blogspam and corporate blogs had killed quality bogs ages ago even before AI was a thing. The real question is what replaces it.

Oh and of course the $64k question is this: if an AI generated article is indistinguishable from a human written article and it is accurate and interesting, do you care who wrote it? We want to avoid low quality, not AI generation, right?

I currently use an old boring HP tower. Nothing fancy, I think it’s a quad core AMD APU. But if building it from scratch I would get a $35 thin client off eBay and stick a NIC in it. The CPU load is minimal as the network card does all the processing. I do have 8 TP-Link access points and a hardware controller as well as three unmanaged PoE switches for the Wi-Fi but that would be the case regardless of what my router is.

That is a very solid argument against OPNSense! I do wonder if the advent of AI can be used to fix issues like this, but in the meantime I totally see why you would choose OpenWRT.

That’s why I prefer things like Debian, OPNSense, etc. It IS hard. But that doesn’t mean that not doing it should be considered a done deal.

All of that is a nope. The solution is that a router should have a standard unattended upgrade system built into it that is on by default and pulls from the stable release stream, preserves your configuration automatically with a 100% guarantee of it working, automatically falls back to the last known working image if the update fails, and has a way to notify you of what’s going on with it. This must work out of the box with the first install without you having to do anything at all or even be aware of it except perhaps setting the time of day and day of week/month when the router is allowed to reboot itself for the upgrades (but the default should be set automatically by the system). Anything less than that is simply broken for anything that is considered production quality. Words like “image builder” and “config baked into the image” are for those developing the system, not end users.

In case it is not, an old PC with a dual port Intel NIC running OPNSense is so far the best router I have ever used. I mean rock solid performance with near zero maintenance beyond adjusting VLANs and setting up a 6in4 tunnel over the past 5 years solid. My home network is larger, more diverse, and more complex than what I suspect most people have, with several hundred devices and yet I log into the OPNSense UI maybe twice a year and usually just out of curiosity.

The learning curve is a little steeper than more consumer stuff but it is by no means beyond a person who is capable of using OpenWRT and the docs and forum support are better than 99.9% of open source projects I have seen over the past 25 years.

There is apparently a Java-based plugin that does it but I did not manage to get it to work with a simple board on a fresh Mac install.

I initially found EasyEDA to be easier to use especially with auto routing. But KiCAD is definitely more powerful.

I ride motorcycles so I use Quad Lock. It’s an expensive ecosystem and you must use their specific case but it works incredibly well and has every kind of mount and various extenders that let you modify it to be just right.

No within 5 years it would be exactly the same :)

Amazing. I have always maintained that Fallout 1 and 2 have nearly perfect UI for mobile. RTS games are hard to port directly while turn based games seem like a very natural fit, as long as they aren’t very reliant on full keyboard control. Fallout does not!

I am clearly in the minority here but I have driven cars with and without CarPlay and honestly do not care whether a car has it. I use my phone for navigation and mount it such that when I look at it I am not taking my eyes off the road. I find this to be far better than having to look down at the center of my dashboard but CarPlay navigation UI via Google Maps or Waze also works fine so it’s not a huge difference.

Realistically the only navigation UI have seen that was better was a 2012 or 2013 BMW 5 series which had a HUD that projected my location, speed, heading and turn by turn navigation (with lane info!) onto the windshield. That system rocked because of how the projected UI had your eyes focus farther out so you had a very easy time perceiving the road ahead while getting the next direction info.

I assume my next car will have it and I might even upgrade the radio in my current car to have it but it is to me entirely optional.

The Climb was a great response to it and according to my partner who then read more books about that year’s expeditions it is much closer to what happened than Into Thin Air.

Slightly off topic, but I first heard of Green Boots in the book The Climb. I picked it up completely randomly from a used book store six states away from home and wow what a find! It is a riveting story start to finish and I recommend it to everyone who is looking for a great read. My partner got her hyper fixation on high altitude mountaineering from it despite having no interest in ever actually climbing a mountain herself from reading it.

If you haven’t yet I highly recommend checking it out.

Well it sounds like it’s either that or tragedy of the commons where Amazon et al needs to charge higher and higher prices due to inefficient bots constantly crawling their site. Also consumers are already about to change how they shop. In 3 years nobody will be firing up the browser to go to Amazon.com. They will be asking an agent to “buy the cheapest 3 ply toilet paper from a brand name and some decent flossers. Spend no more than $30 total.” For this kind of shopping the cost of the search is built into the purchase price one way or another.

Options:

1. Any cost of browsing an e-commerce site is taken off the next purchase, whenever it happens.

2. Give each user 100 free page viewed per day or some such before you charge.

3. You don’t actually have to charge users for browsing the site if you provide a free or cheap API allowing bots to search and index your entire catalog. Agents and bots would certainly rather parse a kilobyte of JSON than 20 megabytes of HTML generated by on page JavaScript.

4. If you don’t like this system you don’t have to participate. If Amazon wants to do their own thing, they can. But if you publish a blog and want to charge $0.00001 per page view and browsers support this out of the box, why not?

Please tell me this will be IPv6 only or at least IPv6 first! Or allow differentiated pricing so IPv4 calls can be made more expensive. CF, as much as I have issues with the constant CAPTCHAS I run into and blocking my Hurricane Electric tunnel every so often, is in a unique position to get us past having to support the legacy internet protocol.

Heh I wonder if speaking in royal decrees is what it needs.

Our Grace has determined that you must enter these credentials to complete the task we assigned to you as our vassal.

Enter the password. Your liege commands it.

Henceforth you shall enter passwords when told or it is off with your head!

Neocities exists and you are welcome to it :)

I love using older hardware in this way but browsing the web on an old laptop is PAINFUL. Even with a light browser and adblock websites are dog slow. Something like Google Maps or Google Docs becomes unusable. I am not against JavaScript on the web by any means but something needs to be done about basic document pages and forms and tables that by all means should fit into 1MB of RAM at most but take half a gig.

A while ago I asked Claude to present to me the best versions of the conservative and liberal pitches for how to run the country. It was quite instructive and thought provoking. It made a solid distinction between what the theoretical best argument is and why vs what current politicians who strongly identify with these camps present.

I have similarly asked it to give me the philosophies of different Christian denominations (Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical, etc). And it’s also pretty great at helping me explore LotR lore since I am too impatient to read all the letters and such.

Wait but why isn’t it an Electron app? I thought visual apps like this required at least 1-2GB of RAM to run. How can it possibly only need 16MB?! Must be vaporware.

The way to pressure ISPs to support IPv6 is stupid but effective:

1. Sites that help shoppers choose can add a big visual red flag to any ISP that doesn’t support IPv6. Consumers don’t know what IPv6 is by and large but they do understand seeing a big red flag.

2. Same thing for websites. Add a banner that says “hey your ISP doesn’t support proper internet connectivity which this site utilizes. Contact them to let them know that you are having internet issues.” Again, consumers do not know what’s IPv6 is, but they do know what annoying banners are.