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some-guy

2,048 karma · joined March 10, 2015

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some-guy··on Deezer says 44% of songs uploaded to its platform daily are AI-generated
A lot of people thought the same thing with everything going from analog -> digital. Or heck, even learning an instrument when MIDI was first introduced.

Even before generative AI, there is a long-going debate in audio circles around simulated guitar amplifiers. The truth is, the simulations of them have gotten so insanely good that now one could simply purchase an all-in-one pedalboard and have basically all of guitar history at your toes.

My rule-of-thumb is this: "does this tool I'm using in particular take away from the authenticity of my performance or songwriting?" Example: I am very keen on performing vocals and guitar at the same time, and I don't have an expensive studio setup, and my office has background noise. I use these tools, and yes even some open source AI ones, 1) remove background noise of the individual tracks and 2) do a final master against a recording I want to target (using something like Matchering or similar [0]). It still sounds like me, my voice isn't perfect, my beat isn't consistent, but it sounds like I rented some studio space. So for me it was a cost-saving measure.

[0] https://github.com/sergree/matchering

some-guy··on Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead
Not to be "that guy that just says to use LLMs", but writing out how you want these things to work on your computer to something like Claude, or heck even Google AI mode without logging in with an account, allows you to describe your ideal "home server as a docker-compose.yml file" and for me it did a damn fine job doing it. I had done this all with a previous server manually, and with a new server I simply had provided that I was a Fedora Linux box, with these hard drives, with these containers, and these are the locations of the files, etc. It worked the first try.

This wasn't something that I didn't want to learn myself, but I have so little time with children and gardening on top of my super busy work at this point that I didn't have time to simply google everything. I did know enough about it beforehand to provide a general idea of what I want, so YMMV.

some-guy··on I quit editing photos
This is how I use my Canon t3i. Once in awhile everything will align perfectly, require very little editing and I feel a huge sense of accomplishment.
some-guy··on Our commitment to Windows quality
I'm at a large enterprise outfit, and "shoving things in your face" has been a problem with large software suites for a long time, long before the AI craze. I keep telling my skip level leadership that we need more User-Experience "mob goons" that have authority across product domains to (metaphorically) beat the living daylight out of bad "PM-brained" ideas.
some-guy··on MacBook Neo
My work 64GB M1 Max Macbook Pro is consistently out of memory. (To be fair my $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_EMPLOYER reserves about half of it to very bad Big Brother daemons and applications I have no control over)
some-guy··on Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation
I lived a block away from a hydrogen fuel station in Oakland, and in the ten years I was there I maybe saw two different Mirais use it.
some-guy··on Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation
I have only purchased Toyota vehicles (currently in the market for an EV) and it baffles me that Dodge created a Charger in EV form and Toyota hasn’t made even an EV Corolla or Camry.
some-guy··on An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review
> Yes, while I use Fedora on my laptop, I also know Fedora is generally not a good option for a server.

Why is Fedora not considered good for a server?

some-guy··on AI made coding more enjoyable
I generally agree with you. As a recent father with a toddler, and two parents with a full time job, I’ve found that the only way I can make time for those personal side projects is to use AI to do most of the bootstrapping, and then do the final tweaks on my own. Most of this is around home automation, managing my Linux ISO server, among other things. But it certainly would be more fun and rewarding if I did it all myself.
some-guy··on Claude Sonnet 4.6
I’m at $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_SAAS and I agree. There is a mass psychosis going on around what these LLM tools (which I use daily) are capable of *at scale*. The amount of business processes and tasks these software suites can, and must perform at near 100% correctness every time is massive, across an insane number of domains, accounting for an insane number of laws, countries, languages, browser configurations, business requests, legal teams. The list goes on, and while you can bootstrap a front end that appears to do 80% of a large dinosaur competitor like ours, the reality is it can’t, and the context windows to get there are in the orders of magnitude larger than they are today.

The weird part is that people at our company also fail to see this. “This vibe coder is going to recreate 20+ years of code, use cases, business processes and integrations for thousands of companies across hundreds of domains!” is uttered every day and just simply isn’t true.

some-guy··on Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died
Now that you mention it, maybe I'm thinking more of the dual analog sticks than the shoulders. But yeah, Gamecube at least had a Z trigger in addition to the shoulders.
some-guy··on After 800 episodes, 'The Simpsons' creators look back and ahead
I haven't read much into it, but The Simpsons to me became terrible around the same time Family Guy came out. I don't know if trying to be like Family Guy made the show worse, or if the type of humor The Simpsons championed for so long became unfashionable.

A lot of people say Family Guy copied the Simpsons, but in reality I actually found that the Simpsons tried to copy Family Guy's style of humor and did a very terrible job at it.

some-guy··on Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died
Looking back and playing my Dreamcast again, I also believe the lack of dual shoulders (only one L and R) hurt because some games simply couldn’t be easily played with the standard controller (and not everyone is buying the keyboard and mouse)
some-guy··on Wine-Staging 11.1 Adds Patches for Enabling Recent Photoshop Versions on Linux
If anything Microsoft will give up their advantage by making Windows 11 a UX dumpster fire. If Windows 11 had an official way to turn off all of the garbage and opt out of their monopolistic PM-brained “features” a lot of us who switched to Linux probably wouldn’t have happened.
some-guy··on US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it
I’m not from Europe but those sentiments I think are changing with the recent intensity and frequency of heat waves.
some-guy··on Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales
Even cheaper than SUVs are used minivans. My 2005 Honda Odyssey was an amazing “truck” with a good amount of towing capacity for most cases.
some-guy··on Self-hosting is being enshittified
I run quite a few services with a used Dell Wyse 5070 thin client PC from 2018 with 4GB of ram.
some-guy··on Quake's Player Speed (2017)
I actually find that Quake’s running speed is still quite fast by modern standards.
some-guy··on Scaling LLMs to Larger Codebases
I can vouch for this as someone who works in a 1.6 million line codebase, where there are constant deviations and inconsistent patterns. LLMs have been almost completely useless on it other than for small functions or files.
some-guy··on Backing up Spotify
The private trackers are just as much about the community as they are about the content they host. Of course there are trade offs because communities can be very insular.

I’ve noticed in the past 10 years or so private trackers have become less strict because the economics of ratios only works if either a) everyone is equally uploading new material and b) there are more and more signups. So now there is value in the amount of time you seed your content which lowers your “required” ratio.

some-guy··on I can't upgrade to Windows 11, now leave me alone
My boomer mother in law could handle Linux whether it be GNOME or KDE. What she cannot handle is not being able to put in a DVD of Turbo Tax 20xx and double click the install button. Nor can she handle not having the native Outlook client, or Microsoft Word.

Yes there are alternatives, and possibly even good enough web versions of these tools, but most of the world isn’t like you and me.

some-guy··on I can't upgrade to Windows 11, now leave me alone
> Win 10 improved NOTHING over 7. Win 11 improves NOTHING over 10.

You had me up to this point. The problem is that there are actually quite a few improvements under the hood over those upgrade paths, but they are unfortunately hidden under all of the bullshit. I was an early adopter of Windows 11 specifically because of their efficiency core support over Windows 10 when I upgraded my CPU.

some-guy··on Backing up Spotify
I’m still using the “successor” to what.cd and I usually discover artists through random lists, “related artists”, among other things on the platform.

One interesting way of discovering artists is finding an artist that I already like on a compilation CD, and then seeing what else is on the CD.

some-guy··on Backing up Spotify
Redacted.sh is a worthy successor, but the average person just doesn’t care about “which release is best” anymore. I use YT Music as a backup but Redacted is my main source of music these days.
some-guy··on LG TV's new software update installed MS Copilot, which cannot be deleted
I am actually surprised at how well our second TV (Samsung) still looks [0] after 17 years. We inherited from my sister who bought it for some ridiculous amount of cash for the time. It’s heavy and runs hot, but doesn’t look any worse than cheap TVs of the same size today.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/samsung-touches-lcds...

some-guy··on Is it a bubble?
One thing I don't hear people talking about very is about how AI is going to make money in any other way other than cutting employment.

With the internet, and especially with the internet being accessible by anyone anywhere in the world in the late 2000s and early 2010s globally, that growth was more obvious to me. I don't see where this occurs with AI. I don't see room for "growth", I see room for cutting. We were already connected before, globalization seems to have peaked in that sense.

some-guy··on Is it a bubble?
There are a few areas where I have found LLMs to be useful (anything related to writing code, as a search engine) and then just downright evil and upsetting in every other instance of using it, especially as a replacement for human creativity and personal expression.
some-guy··on DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says
Not only am I not shocked, I am in no way offended as to who is doing the "stealing"
some-guy··on Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux
Are they rejecting the driver because of it being open source? There are specific modules I use in my AMD card that require closed proprietary driver add-ons for example such as AMF.

Not defending the HDMI forum here, but perhaps Valve / AMD have a way of including a proprietary blob in SteamOS (I don't think most gamers would care)

some-guy··on Apple's slow AI pace becomes a strength as market grows weary of spending
I work in UI in enterprise, where slight color shade differences between releases can cause uproar. I cannot imagine the thought process behind liquid glass in any sense.

OSX's Aqua was also an insanely bold UI with a lot of gimmicks, but was still usable for the most part. I'm so very curious about the internal discussions around this.

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