ravenstine

Not currently, but I probably will be in the coming weeks.

I pretty much end up hating every harness I use. Some come really close to what I'm looking for but then completely miss the mark in other ways. At the moment, I'm stripping OpenCode down to its absolute bare minimum, removing pretty much all of the vendor-specific crap and everything else I don't plan on using. Once I'm convinced that's stable, I'll identify how all the "good parts" work and reimplement the core using Rust.

And yeah, I know Pi exists, which in many ways is what I'm looking for, except even that ended up being more of a bulky mess than what I was hoping. Chose the install with Homebrew option, and for some reason it took an ungodly amount of time to install a buttload of dependencies and then compile, only to completely stall out and fail. I mean... what the fuck. Glad it works for other people, but this is the exact type of total nonsense that I'm done with when it comes to modern software.

For Pete's sake... I just want something that reads my text, contacts an LLM, and runs commands on my system. Why does this have to feel like coordinating a manned mission to the Moon? This shouldn't require even hundreds of megabytes of a runtime. It takes a fraction of the time for me to compile the Perfect Dark PC Port, a full blown FPS game, than it does for me to install some of these harnesses.

I mentioned that when I said that BSODs were way more common. Although I didn't experience PC stability from their inception, I was around since at least the Windows 3.1 days, and definitely ran into a lot of BSODs. However, I am more forgiving of that lower stability during that era for a few reasons. Firstly, mass market PC software was still a relatively young thing at the time and the amount of information available to programmers was a mere speck of what we have now. There was also a lot of pressure on firms to get software to market as fast as possible. For what was available at the time, I'd say that software could have been way worse than it was. If software today was frequently causing system crashes, then I would judge that a lot differently because that's a problem we definitely should have solved by now. From what I remember, crashes didn't occur so often that PCs became unusable. For the most part, they worked, and worked pretty well. Software back then, for better or worse security practices, was more straight forward than much of today's. I come across more bugs than I ever did even 20 years ago. Sure, operating systems are more stable now, which apparently has afforded us the ability to ship more bugs.

The argument in this article is specious. How does the fragility of CDs, disk fragmentation, cybersecurity being a relatively young and niche field, a lack of anti-cheat, the turbo button, and a lack of auto-save have anything to do with software being "horrible?" I'd say it doesn't. These are mostly gripes about the digital environment being in its infancy. I don't consider almost any of these things to be a sign of horrible software other than BSODs being way more common than they are today.

Software is bad when it's buggy, slow, bloated, annoying, distracting, anti-user, anti-consumer, anti-ownership, and rent-seeking. I pine for the days where something as simple as "wtf can't it autosave" be a reason to call software horrible.

There's always gonna be something that's better, faster, bigger, badder, stronger, thicker, firmer, etc., and terminals really aren't one of those things where I am interested in exhaustively testing all of them to find the truly greatest one. A terminal is also one of those things where if you find one that is perfectly adequate then there's little motivation to even bother using trying one. And there's the whole "devil you know" aspect. The only reason I rarely try a different terminal is if the stock terminal on whatever OS I'm using lacks some basic niceties that should be expected in the year 2026.

I like Ghostty because I find it both fast and configurable, and it's multi-platform without treating macOS like the red headed step child. I also appreciate how its configuration is text-based, which I prefer to someone's opinion of how a configuration GUI should behave, and I think it's good the developers aren't wasting a second of their time thinking about a configuration GUI.

AI is coming for everything even if it can't do any of them well. Why? Because it provides the illusion of a promise which business leaders, finance bros, and the management class struggle to resist. The idea that they can eliminate the inconveniences of relying on humans is like a Venus fly trap for corporate dollars. Deep down, these people resent needing those they consider lesser than they are, hence AI will come after accounting and bookkeeping if it hasn't already. The only thing that may temporarily save jobs like accounting (and even programming) is a total economic crashout that occurs when cash flow from shaking down the post-GenX middle class becomes too low.

I mean, it'd certainly be impressive if they manage to avoid all AI content and not respond to it. If that's really how careful your friends/family are, then props to them. I'm not trying to be combative.

> What kind of ai content do you think people are watching?

I can't think of a platform that isn't showering users with AI content no matter how much content blocking and history-disabling one does. It's at least half of everything that gets injected into feeds, especially on platforms like Instagram, and while there are many people who can recognize AI slop, enough of them continue engaging with it that it's clearly being incentivized. There are plenty of otherwise smart people I know who can't distinguish all of it from reality. Older people are especially susceptible. If you know any baby boomers who regularly use Facebook, they're almost certainly falling for AI slop all the time even if they think they're savvy enough to recognize all of it.

Don't take this the wrong way, but your phrasing of that question makes me wonder whether we're talking about two different things or if your experience with people's habits happens to be radically different from what I've seen as normative. I guess it's possible you wouldn't know what kind of AI content people tend to be watching if you've managed to distance yourself from it that much.

To answer your question now that I've rambled, tons of things are AI generated. Animal videos, dancing videos, tutorials, news, podcasts, music, etc.

Could I be wrong? Yeah, sure. My experience tells me the following:

- The vast majority of people claim to hate AI slop.

- Most people think they can reliably recognize AI slop.

- Almost everyone is getting fooled by AI in some form form at some frequency.

- AI slop almost can't be avoided without only following certain creators or content discovery, and even then it's not completely avoidable.

- I've been duped by AI slop occasionally, and I'm the guy who used to have to inform people all the time that viral videos were faking things with CGI (my family has a history in the entertainment business).

- At least half of people are more upset by the fact someone is breaking their belief in content being real than by the fact that the content intentionally fooled them.

- Most people aren't significantly changing their media consumption habits in response to AI slop.

That's why I am not particularly interested in what the average American thinks about AI. It's about as insightful as asking a woman about dating advice for men. If people overwhelmingly think AI is bad for society, then the answer would be for them to stop consuming it, yet they still do, and there's really no excuse for them to do so if they really think it's that bad.

They asserted something without an explanation, I responded with my position without an explanation, so I don't get what your problem is. It's not self-evident that pointing out hypocrisy isn't a valid refutation; if it were then I wouldn't have made the original comment. How would you even know that I'm a man? Maybe you looked me up, but I kinda doubt it.

I don't want to give away my plan so as to increase my competition, but it involves no tech and targets wealthy clients.

Sure it is.

So no one you know uses TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram?

They say it's bad for society, but look at what they choose to consume.

Organizations get in their own way when it comes to quality, almost every time.

Oh man, this makes me wish I had photos from the electric skateboard I made when I was probably ~13 years old. It didn't use a drill but a motor I harvested from an actual electric scooter. (that scooter's charging circuit was defective and nearly burned down our house) All I did was mount it to an existing skateboard as a friction drive on one of the rear wheels, with a primitive switch on a wire as the control. It was not really practical, but I was kind of surprised just how well it worked for what it was. If I remember correctly, I had to adjust my center of gravity to keep it straight, but not by as much as one might expect. I later reused that motor to build a pretty badass Van Der Graaf generator.

I really admire the wiring job on this scooter! Goes way beyond what I did for the skateboard. And I imagine the scooter would have to navigate via only left turns. :D That is unless maybe a small third wheel were added to the end of it?

Does the scooter try to stop abruptly when you completely stop the throttle? Most drills today have this behavior, that I don't know the terminology for, where they eliminate their inertia immediately upon the trigger no longer being depressed.