VariousPrograms

Thanks for at least sometimes choosing to keep the humans alive, Jev. It means a lot to us meatbags.

This feels like a hobby or special interest rather than a list of genuine software recommendations, unless you're running CoffeeBSD and browsing the web with Netsurf.

I have a website, git, and syncthing relay hosted on a bargain basement VPS. Lowendbox lists some providers for like $1-2/mo.

No one cares. There’s little serious pushback to privacy invasions by big tech. Flock cameras have been a rare exception. Half the people “have nothing to hide” and half aren’t willing to give up the convenience that the popular app or gadget gives them.

You should probably get a head start on waiting a couple years to bite your tongue and assume everything you type into a computer is summarized and sent to your boss, government, advertisers, political actors, insurance companies, worst enemy, etc. With phones, Alexas, and little AI tamagotchis, you probably shouldn't say much in person either.

I know fellow stargazers who keep local dark spots secret for fear of drawing attention to them because they are that rare. Places that are dark and legal to be all night are even rarer (public boat ramps are a good place to look). It might be different on the US west coast where there's a lot of public land.

I've got the best results with BreezeTTS, Higgs Audio v3, and Fish Audio S2 Pro. audio.cpp (https://github.com/0xShug0/audio.cpp) is an easy way to run a lot of different models.

Different models have different strengths. If you throw an entire ebook at a model you're going to get a different result than if you craft a perfect 10 second sentence with a model that supports voice direction and emotion tags, so you should try a bunch depending on your use case.

GLM 5.3 Flash for personal hobby stuff. It's the first local-ish model that feels capable enough to be a default model to me (and it's very cheap). I'd rather get addicted to an open weight LLM in a class I can theoretically run if consumers ever get access to RAM again and can't get taken away from me. Locally I use Deepseek Flash, Qwen3.8-Next-Flash, or Gemma 4 depending on how slowly I want my slop to generate.

Whoever does need it, I give you permission to throw out all your old cables, power adapters, and routers. Yes, on the off chance you do decide you need a Palm III dock, Linksys WRT54G, or Sony PSP charger that means you'd have to buy one on Ebay, but you can cross that $10 bridge if it actually happens.

If you don't need an ebook gadget right now, Boox is about to release the Boox Picco as a direct competitor to this. It's in between the X3 and X4 in size, but has a front-lit and potentially higher resolution screen.

I have an X4 Pro (219 ppi) and I use 14pt font because letter widths are pretty uneven at 12pt and on a screen this small I wish I could use my preferred tiny font size. Other than that, it's great.

What is the realistic endgame for people who want to pause AI development?

Ban OpenAI, and crown Anthropic as a golden child of safe AI development? Surely no company is "trustworthy" with this power and all future AI capabilities are dangerous, so all AI research needs to be paused everywhere, requiring the equivalent of a nuclear non-proliferation treaty between the US and China. So post-treaty we're trusting the US and Chinese governments, their military, and the billionaires closed tied to them to not to continue developing the magic thinking machine that can solve any problems, wins every battle, and is the crux of the economy? With the US track record of breaking much less significant treaties?

I'm not pro or against pausing AI development. I just don't understand what the theoretical stop button looks like.

I'll know we've reached AGI when they don't release an API for the model selling access for a few bucks per task. Seems like AGI would be worth more than that.

I don't think everyone having a middle class lifestyle where prices go near zero is what AI bros mean when they say AI will create a "permanent underclass".

Water flossers with handheld tanks are already unwieldy. I can't imagine using one with the head vibrating, water coming out of my mouth, and I'm trying to view the inside of my mouth in an app. Replaceable battery though. $20 Sonicare can't do that!

I’m also not pro and just need an editor for Youtube or work. I think open source editors like Openshot and Kdenlive are generally underrated and easier to use than they used to be but even for just cutting together clips, adding text, and using keyframes it’s hard to beat how nice Resolve is.

The effort required to do most jobs has gone down and so has the output quality. Rather than doing the same quality work with less effort, some people use LLMs to produce minimum-quality work at minimum effort.

LLMs are a cool tool but we’re over-encouraging use in every domain, even tasks they’re not good at. Every tech company in the world seems to be getting rich though how can I possibly say things would be better without it?

It's early days, but GLM 5.3 Flash is the first local model that feels good enough to me to be a "main" model without debating whether each problem needs to be sent to a stronger model. DS4 Flash is good enough at implementing given a plan, but I wasn't always a fan of what it came up with when asked to plan something.

The good news is it can only get better from here.

I am enjoying the recently trendy Xteink e-readers that can't do anything but read books. An app store and the internet would just make an e-reader feel like a "worse phone" to me.

Many traditional machines where you put in 2-4 quarters and a real penny have been phased out for credit card readers now that just drop a penny from inside the machine. It does kind of ruin some of the charm.

The people in support of these bans generally aren't interested in "good vibe coded" software. They oppose LLMs altogether on various grounds, not just the output quality.

FWIW, if an LLM is writing significant code, I'd consider it vibe coding regardless of your understanding of the code or expert guidance and almost certainly ban-AI people would too. The scale people seem care about when this comes up is code percentage that's LLM-written to hand-written, not code ignorance to full understanding by the author.

I support physical media and doing whatever you want with said physical media. If you want to overpay for a copy of Sharepoint 2007 For Dummies and destroy it, knock yourself out. Just because media has been printed and is "rare" doesn't mean it has any practical value.

You could easily write an article about how Goodwill and the Salvation Army dump millions of "rare" books that no one would ever buy for $0.50. And thrift stores will dump multiple copies of said books. AI companies would only ever need one!

The only thing I disagree with is AI companies feeling entitled to freely use every piece of copywritten work without restriction, but that applies just as much to web scraping, pirated books, etc.

There are some all-timer not X but Ys in this tweet.

"A pair of 3090s, a Mac Studio, a DGX Spark, an on-prem rack, a cluster of rented H100s, or a fleet of consumer GPUs is not just hardware. It is a vote against subscription feudalism."

This might be the biggest Grok burn in the comments.

There was that time Grok persistently brought up "white genocide" regardless of prompt, so I'd say Elon has a big personal role designing Grok's outputs!

The very first thing in their demo shows Grok logging in with the user's username and password to a website, presumably so it can perform actions and the human can get the blame for them. Apparently this is marketing and not terrifying to people.

The inaccuracy of our omniscient AI surveillance network isn't why I'm against it. The conclusion of this article is that we need more humans in the loop for a successful police state.

Unless you can block illegal unsolicited scam/marketing calls, the medium of phone calls is dead to me.

If it had 25% unsolicited calls, it would be a bad way to communicate, and in the US it's more like 95%. You could cut the majority of spam calls and I'd still associate phone calls as mostly a waste of time.

Your competitor has a $100m self-implosion in what must be an all-time slam dunk marketing moment and you spend 7 cents generating a marketing blog post instead of having someone write it.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/244/

Their number one concern is about the the commies perpetrating deep repression of their own people! How noble! This whole time I thought it was because they wanted more money and power. I guess we should probably ban these open weight models.