And now you can do all of that locally with qwen3.6:35b.

>We hear about a few big famous ones in the news here, but most of it goes completely unenforced.

So much for "Hacker" "News".

Ah hahah yea. Not too much need about hackers being prosecuted going around. Lot more news about hackers breaching companies though. Closure rate of law enforcement & prosecutors vs hackers has gotta be way under 1% lol.

Without Musk, they wouldn't have squandered their market advantage with high-profile failure after high-profile failure. They would have released a good enough pickup truck in 2017. They wouldn't have spent a whole decade gaslighting everyone about self-driving cars.

The real reason Tesla was remarkable, and why Musk bought into it, was that they released a mass-market electric car that didn't look and perform like a vacuum cleaner and that got an okay range for commuting. That was the value proposition. China can now exceed those design parameters at a wholesale price of about $8k USD.

They're motivated not by the actual loss, but the checkmark of having attestation for a compliance framework.

So the fact that Microsoft let remote hands-on-keyboards in the PRC fix problems on GCC-High Azure nodes used by DoD contractors doesn't matter, since they're too big to censure in any meaningful way without impacting tens of thousands of businesses that rely on them to get a letter that satisfies a compliance assessor.

Actually knowing what you're doing, or being able to critically assess the risks of using a specific provider, doesn't matter.

I use local remotes all the time for testing as a form of "local CI".

Check it out from '/tmp' and make sure it still builds.

For a single-dev or small team, it beats having to do github runner epicycles to accomplish the same basic goal. Add in Firejail if you want environment isolation.

Would git worktrees be useful in that use case? It just adds a new checkout in a different directory without duplicating the git data (blob storage).

I do the same sometimes, but a one-off clone is not quite the same as maintaining a "local remote" and pushing refs to it.

If it fails, you fix the clone and push it back.

Qwen3.6:35b is good enough for a lot of stuff.

I just used ollama with a shell script to tackle my directory of papers/literature. I converted the first 6 pages of each document to PNG, handed them off to Qwen, and told it to spit out BibTeX, including the abstract. Two days later it was done, and I didn't spend anything on "tokens."

Why PNG? Isn’t an image format more expensive to process?

Not really. The model is good/fast at OCR, and preprocessing it actually makes it worse because academic paper formatting is very complicated. Sizes, positions, and equations are important.

what a strange world we live in where robots are WORSE at handling formatted stuff. I wonder what this means for the importance of semantic HTML to screenreaders

A bookshelf can have books that are 100s of years old.

And people who just like to learn new things in general.

Newspapers think their archives are worth money, and that people who are interested in genealogy will pay for newspapers.com subscriptions.

I think I'll be getting a Kagi subscription.