VariousPrograms

Guy with the most DRAM in the world thinks it's terrible he doesn't have all of it.

It would be more efficient to ban cars in favor of mass transit. It would be more efficient if people only lived in apartment complexes rather than standalone houses. Tons of things can be more "efficient" if you take away people's desire for privacy and ownership.

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.

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!