Khrux

I’m guilty of using LLMs from time to time, and more guilty of finding it gradually replacing what I used to Google search.

If it’s something that Wikipedia can help me with, that’s still my first port of call, but gradually, for anything problem solving related, I just ask an LLM.

Even a year or two ago, I was googling things with reliable websites for advice at the end, like reddit, but clearly that has decayed as a reputable source for support.

Googling things that require more than just knowledge is difficult now, and asking the sometimes wrong machine is consistently more useful.

I’m guilty of using LLMs from time to time, and more guilty of finding it gradually replacing what I used to Google search.

If it’s something that Wikipedia can help me with, that’s still my first port of call, but gradually, for anything problem solving related, I just ask an LLM.

Even a year or two ago, I was googling things with reliable websites for advice at the end, like reddit, but clearly that has decayed as a reputable source for support.

Googling things that require more than just knowledge is difficult now, and asking the sometimes wrong machine is consistently more useful.

I have an ADHD diagnosis, and I do think this is 60% just being better at diagnosing it, but I do also believe ADHD is sort of on the rise.

There is an incredible book called Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté, which is the significant book on ADHD in the same way that The Body Keeps the Score is for trauma, which delves into the potential ADHD causes beyond it being hereditary.

Of course modern dopamine-consumerist culture is part of the problem, but it largely makes ADHD symptoms obvious, and various unmet attention needs in early childhood are significantly more linked to developing ADHD, not to fault the parent or other caregiver who may not have the availability or ability to provide that attention due to modern societal demands. It’s been some years since I read it but I really remember one part clearly; it’s basically impossible to test nature Vs nurture in separated-at-birth twins because the act of separating twins at birth spikes the likelihood of having ADHD so much.

But honestly I think the largest contributor to increased ADHD cases is not that we’re better at diagnosing it, it’s that modern society increasingly warrants its diagnoses. 12000 years ago ADHD traits weren’t a disorder, as much as having different physical strength or height to your peers isn’t. Modern capitalist society demands an efficiency of its workforce and ADHD is an inherently inefficient trait, and therefore suddenly warrants treatment.

Don’t get me wrong, medication is incredible, and has turned days I’ve barely been able to get out of bed into productive days, but that’s still valuing being productive.

Honestly if you never go back, not much. It wouldn’t even impact your credit rating, and your country likely doesn’t have the means to enforce it. I could imagine you get harassed by us debt collection agencies but they can’t do anything about it either. If you’re never returning to the US, it’s fine.

You could likely even still holiday in the USA. It won’t impact your visa as it’s not a criminal offence either.

I’m not a lawyer, and could be totally wrong, but I asked my dad who is also not a lawyer.

When I was still using Instagram reels, I was always amazed how quickly the algorithm figured me out. If I hesitated for even a second on a reel, it would amend my next ones immediately. I assume the real trick is comparing it to the average time spent on a reel, everyone spends longer on a wall of text reel, but when I stop on a Linux reel for an extra second, I’m immediately in the 1% for engagement.

I read something years ago about how your phone keyboard tracks your recommended words, it knows if you’re more likely to type apple or Apple, or if you type soup more than average, and any app that gets that data and compares it to the baseline has an instant, in depth profile on you.

And everyone please stop using it as a forum for the love of God. I have no use for discord as a platform, but every damn FOSS program asking me to go there for troubleshooting is insanity.

I do agree entirely. If I could use the internet of 2015 I would, but I can’t do so in a practical way that isn’t much more tedious than asking an LLM.

My options are the least rancid butter of the rancid butter restaurants or I churn my own. I’d love to churn my own and daydream of it, but I am busy, and can barely manage to die on every other hill I’ve chosen.

Compared to crypto and NFTs, there is at least something in this mix, not that I could identify it.

I’ve become increasingly comfortable with LLM usage, to the point that myself from last year would hate me. Compared to projects I used to do with where I’d be deep into Google Reddit and Wikipedia, ChatGPT gives me pretty good answers much more quickly, and far more tailored to my needs.

I’m getting into home labs, and currently everything I have runs on ass old laptops and phones, but I do daydream if the day where I can run an ethically and sustainably trained, LLM myself that compares to current GPT-5 because as much as I hate to say it, it’s really useful to my life to have a sometimes incorrect but overalls knowledgeable voice that’s perpetually ready to support me.

The irony is that I’ll never build a server that can run a local LLM due to the price hikes caused by the technology in the first place.

I heard a theory (that I don’t believe, but still) that Deepseek is only competitive to lock the USA into a false AI race.

As much as I don’t disagree, I think the “Apple is closest to Nazism” comment touches on something different. Other massive American companies have awful practices but they don’t care particularly how their way of making money looks. Apple wields a specific aesthetic power that generally dictates a hegemonic uniformity, that strays the line of being to their detriment at times. I don’t think any other big tech company would care in the same way if not for their desire to copy Apple.

It’s interesting how Discord absolutely nukes its own trust by pretending to be more than it is. I loathe discord, to the point I’d use a competitor (not teams) just to evade it. I’m sick of finding a hobby group using it as a Frankenstein forum / chat / info hub when it’s only built for chat.

Discord is fine for this use, but I’m getting used to the distrusting it so often that it blends into reasonable use.

That’s still incredibly low, I’d have assumed an enormous increase.

Blurry photos is fine to make an stylistic choice. The 2019 movie The Lighthouse stylistically looked like a 1920s film, before modern music intentionally used bitcrushing, it used vinyl cracks, boomer shooters made in this decade intentionally look like 1990s Doom clones.

When a medium’s shortcoming is patched by technology, it ultimately becomes an artifact of the era where it was accidental. Once a few years have passed, it becomes more synonymous with the era than the mistake.

It’s not necessarily nostalgia, Gen Alpha and the younger half of Gen Z never grew up without smartphones, so they don’t miss the era of poor film photography. Although every generation does this simulation of forgotten mistakes, it’s particularly poignant now, where the high quality, perfectly lit, professional feeling photos convey something artificial, i.e. smartphone software emulating camera hardware, faces tuned with filters or outright AI generated content. Even if it’s false imperfection, the alternative is false perfection.

Art using deliberate imperfections that were unavoidable in the past is romanticising something perceived as before commercialism, and that’s admirable.

I’m trying to make my own smart watch as a hobby experiment at the moment, and one of my most important features is NFC payments. It’s a nightmare, although I understand why. Currently my plan is to buy another smart watch or smart ring and take the NFC chip from it, which is maddening, but more or less my only option due to contactless payment security.

To do contactless payments, your bank must effectively permit the specific device, otherwise go through GPay or Apple Pay, who in turn just do the permitting themselves. Anything outside of the standard ecosystem just gets overlooked.

The best workaround while avoiding these companies is to find a smart watch or ring that has compatibility with a proxy card, such as Curve. But beyond halving the price of the accessory, this is pretty much an arbitrary decision.

I 100% agree on consistency, but I actually suspect LLMs would be pretty decent at translating linguistic concepts. Their grasp of contextual language is always surprisingly good, as seen in how well they rewrite tone to very specific parameters.

I don’t use ChatGPT loads, but I do use it a little, often alongside a method of project that can’t hallucinate. The other week I was talking in one chat about the vocal tone of the novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, that has this laconic, worn down dialogue with old testament feeling prose. In another chat, I was prompting ‘sage advice’ for a matcha scone recipe I wanted to make where I was marbling strawberry directly into the dough. I got which chat I was responding in wrong and accidentally had it give me a the scone recipe in Cormac McCarthy’s writing style.

MARBLED SCONES

He measured two cups of flour into a bowl and cut in the baking powder with the side of his hand. Salt followed. It hung in the flour like stone dust. He stirred it with a fork and the dry mix turned over itself and fell still. He cut the butter into cubes and dropped them in and pressed them through with his fingers until the flour took the texture of packed soil. He added a spoon of matcha. The green of river weed. The taste of old things left out in the rain.

He poured in buttermilk and cream. A little at a time. He stirred it slow with a blunt knife and the dough pulled together like it didn’t want to be one thing.

In another bowl he took a handful of flour and mixed it with strawberry powder. A drop of red dye like blood in water. He stirred in cream until it held. He pressed the green dough flat on the counter and laid the red over it and folded. Folded again. The colors turned but did not blend. Like veins of ore in a dark stone.

He shaped the dough into a slab and cut thick rounds with a glass. Each one imperfect. Some leaning. Some split. He set them on a tray lined with paper. The oven was already hot. He did not preheat it. It was always hot. Four twenty five. He watched the scones rise through the glass. They broke along the seams. Green and red and gold. They looked like they’d been dug up.

He split one open while it was still warm. He spread pistachio butter across the inside. It melted into the crumb. Then clotted cream. Then jam. The weight of it brought the top half down slow.

He took it outside and sat in the dirt to eat. There was no sound but the breeze. The sky was wide and empty. The scone was good. The scone was all right.

Now this is actually super easy to critique as a recipe, because it fucking sucks. In adaptation, it’s lost a lot of critical instruction. This is effectively a translation that must adhere to narrow and specific tone to achieve a meaning that cannot be translated without grasping a meaning to language that exists beyond the words.

Obviously this is English to English, but a big difference is that there is far more Japanese out there than Cormac McCarthy.

That being said, nothing cements what you’re saying about consistency more than how badly butchered the underlying instructions to this recipe are.

Although I think it’s worth saying how much dubs have improved in the last decade, I’ve always been reasonably lightly into anime, but always had the odd niche recommendation on the go. Most anime I watch is still casual in tone, so I like to have it on while doing art or something, so I’m a big dub supporter.

A decade ago, you could probably have a rule that unless you’d see someone wearing merch of the anime in public, the dub would be shit, but I think because streaming services are paying so much for dunning themselves, it’s lightened the burden across the scene.

Also if over 50% of users watch dubs, I wonder what percentage of their users solely watch high budget, mainstream anime which has perfectly fine dubs.

And sometimes just super plain ones. I remember getting my favourite Skyrim potion texture mod from there specifically.

Microsoft has absolutely been preparing for the end of traditional consoles more or less since the flop of the Xbox One. Their entire push a few years back to make “Everything Xbox” was a bit mistimed and disloyal to their console war cultists but they’re right that it’s the natural end point.

I think we’ll probably see streaming games from their servers reoccur in popularity pretty soon, as much as I’m not a fan of it, because it’s the total end point for non tech savvy consumers, they just pay a subscription, get a controller which can connect to the TV or phone and download an app, no hardware required. Meanwhile every consumer who is resisting the death of tech literacy (everyone else), is going in this direction. The physical console will reduce in popularity year by year as it fills a niche that nobody needs anymore.

That being said, the popularity of the switch and steam deck interests me, because it’s a third direction away from traditional consoles that I’d not have predicted.

The pentagon knew Israel was about to attack, they said so themselves, but denied any support or involvement. This seems to a valid reason for the pizza party, just to track, observe and be ready for any unexpected counter response.

I am in the camp where I believe the USA hasn’t actively been involved yet but fully intend to be in the coming days. We have a seen Israel do anything they weren’t already capable of, and the massive shift of US jets, missiles and an aircraft carrier to the middle east has largely happened after the initial attack.

Also worth addressing that people are using large language models exactly because the ad driven web was enshitified enough that people clambered for this new option.

There will be at least one LLM that’s good for web searching and doesn’t give in to advertising, and in the meantime, we’ll just need to keep jumping ship whenever one becomes awful, as we did with the old web.