shortformblog
Joined 17 years ago
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Comment · 3 days ago
I Hackintoshed a 2-in-1 with a touch screen way back in 2018. Wrote about it in a comically long how-to piece about how to put it together.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-to-make-a-hackintosh-lap...
(And yes, I know the code got mangled. I don’t run the Vice archives.)
It was fine then, it will be fine now. This is a non-issue.
Comment · 1 month ago
Hi I'm the author and yes, this.
Comment · 2 months ago
The point of the story was that I built a thing about Mechanical Turk to promote its money-making capabilities, and ironically made more money from it indirectly than I ever did directly. Considering that point was implied by my framing, you did in fact miss it.
I’m not saying that you have to like a story, but your framing felt unfair, which is why I responded that way.
Comment · 2 months ago
I see you missed the point of the story. But whatever. I'm sorry my dire financial situation didn't tie up in a nice enough bow for you.
Comment · 2 months ago
I explained the situation after the fact, and they were understanding. But certainly I admit that if I could do it again I probably would have clued them in sooner. The site had slowed down by the point this happened, so I’d describe it as a little more of a fire sale.
I learned a lot from that situation that I took to future sites.
Comment · 2 months ago
So, I have a story to share about Mechanical Turk that you might find interesting. I’ve shared it a couple of times before on Twitter and Bluesky, but I’ll share it again.
Long story short: Mechanical Turk saved my bacon.
Back in 2005, I was working a job at a small-town newspaper in a town I’d never lived before. I didn’t know anyone beyond the staff (as I was working layout rather than as a reporter), and I had gotten interested in the idea of doing Mechanical Turk for a few extra bucks. I thought there might be a formative scene of interested people doing this, so I started working on a blog for it. I briefly collaborated on it with another guy who put it on forum software because he didn’t know how to use, like Drupal.
That blog was called Turking.com, and it seemed like it was going well for a bit. We even got a mention on the AWS website. But after about two or three months, it was clear the initial excitement around the idea (and the initial work) had died down. (The work picked up later, but in clearly different ways. I don’t think folks were really “excited” about it after that point.)
If you want to get an idea of it, there was one capture on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20051124231722/http://www.turkin...
The site had started to die out in part because my iBook suffered a catastrophic GPU failure and me, being a broke small-town newspaper employee, did not have the money to replace it. Plus, the community just hadn’t emerged like we had expected.
But then I got an email out of the blue: Someone wanted to buy my domain, which I owned outright, but they didn’t want to say who. I got contacted by a broker, and the exchange took place over escrow.
(The domain most assuredly was bought by Amazon and is managed by MarkMonitor.)
I didn’t get a ton of money from the deal, but I did get enough to pay for a new laptop. I had some regrets about selling it (in part because I originally built the site with someone else), but I was in a bit of a dire financial situation which that proved to be the starting point for getting myself out of.
That domain purchase was notably more than I ever made from clicking and classifying random pictures, that said.
Comment · 2 months ago
I have one of these that was donated by a reader. I've never been able to get it to work because its battery (its infamous Achilles heel) would not charge.
If anyone has any ideas I'm all ears. I've never written about it in any depth.
Comment · 2 months ago
I got the Gigabyte 5060ti AI Box, which is good but a real pain to set up on Linux. Not enough to run Deepseek but a lot of good options.
https://tedium.co/2026/06/10/gigabyte-aorus-5060-ti-ai-box-e...
Comment · 2 months ago
FWIW, I have found Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.5-Pro to be a pretty cost-effective alternative. https://mimo.mi.com/models/en-US/mimo-v2.5-pro
While it won’t cover everything DeepSeek does, it handles sophisticated tasks quite well. I found it after spotting it on a chart of different models and it was listed as being near Deepseek v4 Flash’s price/performance levels.
I have noticed by the way that DeepSeek’s API has been pretty slow the past couple of days. This feels like a demand-driven move more than anything. Good thing I invested in an eGPU!
Comment · 3 months ago
Honestly, I found managing a Bulma codebase significantly more of a pain in the ass than Tailwind. Tailwind offers the expressiveness of actual CSS with the ability to make quick changes on the fly. As someone who has spent a lot of time working in CSS frameworks over the years, it is one of the better abstractions of its kind.
I sort of feel like this argument is trying to put a train that is already halfway across the country back in the station on the East Coast.
Comment · 5 months ago
It is so wild that this got shared, as I was working on a project that very specifically was hoping to integrate a feature like this. Psyched to try it, I’ll credit the author in the credits of the site I’m building.
Comment · 6 months ago
The problem is less the color than the weight. If it was 500 rather than 300 it would be perfectly fine.
Comment · 8 months ago
Curious to see how this worked, I tried this on Deepseek using Claude Code Router, following the author’s guide, with two small changes: Make it an emo song that uses acoustic guitar (or, obviously an equivalent), and it could install one text-to-speech tool using Python.
It double-tracked the vocals like freaking Elliott Smith, which cracked me up.
I am also a freelance journalist with a focus on technology and content strategy. Please check out my portfolio over this way: https://erniesmith.net/