the internet has become a psychotic corridor of mirrors. where truth and fiction, humans and bots, propagand and anecdata can no longer be told apart. what am i still doing here?
And it’s probably useless at the end of the day because everything will reduce down from a centralized location to your desktop/laptop/tablet/phone. OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Oracle dreams of a centralized computing location will not hold up.
> The only software I tend to use today is a terminal and a browser
i'm exactly in the same situation. for this reason i run on dwm and no DE. but i'd like to phase out some of my web browsing, for the same reasons you mentioned. could you please elaborate on your local LLM setup and how you use it to substitute web browsing?
"Can you setup a daily job to monitor and download youtube videos from any channels listed in subscriptions.txt"
"Can you setup a daily job to search for any articles on supply chain attacks, format them as normalized markdown files and store them under Research/supply-chain ?"
"Can you go find me a good price on some used DDR5 ram from a reputable seller?"
Etc etc.
Use agents to bring the internet to you.
Can do basically anything with a Strix Halo board at home.
interesting. i can definitely think of similar use cases. but can all of this be accomplished with local LLMs? do you run it on expensive hardware? are there specific models, agent frameworks and other tooling you recommend?
btw as another strategy to avoid web browsing i've been relying a lot on content being delivered as email newsletters. seems like it would also be easy to process that using LLMs
too bad. i wish they would go closedsource so that maybe everyone would stop using it. it's dogshit for countless reasons. including:
- refuses to even load on browser engines older than 2 years. for a webforum that's absolutely appaling. there's a barebones non-JS version. but it only loads for individual threads (not the forum homepage or anything else), so they must be linked to directly (e.g from a websearch engine)
- every single page navigation triggers the circle animation which blocks the view for up to 3 seconds. how is this not an obvious regression on webforum software that has existed for decades?
- various nonsensical functionality suggests an incoherent code base. like the input element for the searchbox disappearing if the browser window loses focus. if you switch tabs midway for whatever reason, you need to reopen the searchbox every time you get back. and you can't use an external editor to fill in the input. because as soon as you've focused the editor, the element that the editor hooked into no longer exists
- search results are crammed in a narrow responsive list with 5 entries. you need to press 'More' to see the rest of the results as yet another responsive list. you never know how many results there are in total. only that there are more than ones that loaded so far
- long threads are never rendered fully. only as incomplete chunks. so it doesn't work to set positional markers in the scroll buffer to jump back and forth. as soon as you scroll past the boundaries of the currently loaded chunk, the old content gets destroyed and replaced. it feels like having alzheimer's
- you can reply to any specific post in a thread and there will be a visual indicator about which post you replied to. except if you reply to the most recent post in a thread. so someones who reads a post has no way of knowing in advance whether it is being addressed to the post just above it, or to the thread as a whole
i hate discourse so much. i'll never understand why it got so much adoption by FOSS communities. it must be the virtue signalling
These are various reasons why I also opted to not use it when it was finally time to retire vBulletin 3. We never did adopt vB 4 or 5, because while I'm sure the code was "better" from a software engineering perspective (using classes/OOP etc), it was also noticably slower, and the original developers had either been ousted or sold out.
The original vB developers built Xenforo, which is still in the spirit of vB 3 but with some modern amenities like live updates and the like.
I also found Discourse to be... challenging to self-host.
> I also found Discourse to be... challenging to self-host.
Made a completely different experience. Every once in a while you have to run a command. Over the last 10-12 years there were I think 2 problems where this did not work out of the box.
I hate most of all the information black hole that is discord. I am member of several communities, where difficult issues are being solved using complex new software releases, but if you do not sit and watch the stream for the specific things you want, forget about finding anything useful you want.
Discord is bottomless sea of the same question being asked over and over and over, and the original question poster never seeing their replies. If there was not a notification when your own messages are replied, Discord would be 100% worthless.
over the past 20 years technology has become more and more catastrophic for children. i suspect a large number of grownups who oppose child safety legislation don't really grasp the bleakness. they project their idea of a technology that they grew up with. they don't get to see the kind of data that policymakers, healthcare providers and LEAs see. i'm not saying the proposed legislation is justified. but i don't think the people behind it are necessarily draconian
ultimately it will depend on their opsec. i do think it shows that opsec strategies and tech can have a use case that is not morally bad (at least not in a straightforward way). so the good research done in this field is actually justified
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