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cptskippy

Re:MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @09:22PM (#50283314)
They aren't. If you ever had a convertible laptop, it would enbiggen the UI in tablet mode and reduce it in laptop mode.

I rarely used tablet mode but genuinely miss having a touchscreen.

I think we'll eventually get to the point where folks will have a local AI agent but I think people need to temper their expectations to a degree. You aren't going to have data center level tok/s from a box sitting under your desk and you don't need instantaneous responses for many workloads. Having a local agent that can execute tasks over a couple days with your supervision that might otherwise take you weeks is perfectly acceptable.

However I also think that Agentic AI is very much not an out-of-the-box solution, local or otherwise, and it takes a high level of technical knowledge to create an effective AI agent. And there's a problem now where most orchestration is fixed on what models are used for what tasks with no ability to weight constraints like cost, speed, and security.

Re:HuggingFace: Security.txt on Friday September 11, 2026 @03:38PM (#49664190)
https://emojipedia.org/hugging-face#technical

The official URL is "hugging-face" and the technical page lists the Unicode Name as "Hugging Face" while calling it "Smiling Face with Open Hands Emoji". The original proposal was called "Gmail HUG FACE".

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14174r-emoji-additions.pdf

Re:HuggingFace: Security.txt on Friday September 11, 2026 @01:23PM (#49661998)
Without context, I agree, but Hugging Face is the name of the emoji added to Unicode 8.0 and Emoji 1.0 in 2015.
Re:GMails custom domain "send as" discontinues January 2027 on Friday September 04, 2026 @11:23AM (#49566001)
Further clarification here: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/17101213

It seems like they're removing POP/IMAP support from the web client?

Re:GMails custom domain "send as" discontinues January 2027 on Friday September 04, 2026 @11:22AM (#49565977)
> This change does not affect Google Workspace aliases or other Gmail addresses you own.
Re:Hacking IKEA Furniture on Sunday August 30, 2026 @01:14PM (#49500608)
What is the device at the end that looks like a laser engraver sans laser module?
Re:Hacking IKEA Furniture on Sunday August 30, 2026 @01:13PM (#49500590)
> In Europe a CNC, or at least good and repeatable saw is available at large hardware stores. You can get any product cut to any shape precisely as long as it's a rectangle. I've not noticed one that offers more than this such as drilling holes.

That's not the case in the US.

The big box hardware stores have a large track saw vertically mounted that can cut full sheets of wood, but there usually isn't someone working who is trained to operate it. They also have a rickety cart with a hand saw and tape measure attached with too short cables that you can try to use to make your cuts of dimensional lumber.

Looking at photos of the OG iPod, the control looks a lot like a modern Apple TV remote which is a D-pad. But if you've ever held one you know instantly that it isn't a D-pad. And there was so much hype and advertising about it at the time, I'm not sure anyone would expect D-pad behavior from it.

I want to say that Apple invented that particular design language, and prior to the original iPod nothing resembled that UI but I'm not sure.

It seems to me that the OP was either too young or not alive when the OG iPod came out, and so they're looking at it like a modern man trying to figure out caveman tools.

> And the competition still couldn't do it for almost a decade

There were a couple things Apple had in their favor but it certainly didn't take 10 years for folks to catch up. They mostly one because they captured people's hearts and minds.

The key things Apple did right was a high speed connection and owning their software. The Creative Nomad Jukebox used the same HDD as the iPod and beat Apple to market by a year, but Creative didn't own the software. The iRiver H series of players showed up around 2004 and were comparable to iPods in terms of quality and capability, though their aesthetic wasn't polished minimalism. Their UI wasn't as good but it was still very good. Their crux was Windows and Mac support wasn't great. I had an iRiver in 2007 and was running an opensource (rockbox?) firmware to get around some of those issues.

Apple has always been good at innovating around the problem which is usually the UI or software at large. This comes in part because of their vertical integration and being able to make minor tweaks to other parts of the ecosystem (e.g. desktop OS) to dramatically improve the experience of their product. The iPods are another great example where they made minor tweaks to iOS Bluetooth that magically made the experience of using wireless headphones dramatically better.

Re:Where Did All the Public Bathrooms Go? on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @12:24PM (#49436603)
> Nothing has been improved in this process.

It isn't about improving things or fixing the problem, it is about mitigating cost.

Public sex, shooting up drugs, and vandalism still occur; but the owner/operator of the bathroom no longer has to maintain the bathroom or deal with individuals complaining about the poor state of the bathroom as a result of the behavior.

I feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good.

When the iPod came out you largely had two options for carrying your music collection on the go. You either carried a binder of CDs, or you had some niche player like Mini-Disc or an MP3 player. Both alternatives were expensive and had limitations similar to a CD in terms of number of tracks you could carry.

I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality.

Creative's Muvo was a weird form factor that was larger than an iPod. It had a horrid interface both on device and for loading music. It's only grace was that it was slightly cheaper than an iPod and didn't need a Mac with FireWire. Although iircc this was pre USB 2.0 so not having FireWire would mean loading music took forever and a day.

The iPod allowed you to carry most, if not all, of your music collection in a package slightly larger than a deck of playing cards. And it had a fantastic interface for navigating music on the device.

This was at a time before most people had laptops and if you had a PC it was at home and used sparingly. The iPod was such a compelling mobile computing device that it drove adoption of the iMac. Apple would eventually release iTunes for Windows and USB support but that was many years later.

Re:ChatGPT Desktop (Codex Desktop) for Linux on Thursday August 13, 2026 @10:47AM (#49286836)
How would you know? It's impossible to have done a thorough analysis of all the Windows UI frameworks, five have been released since I started typing...
I have this same affliction and have used ad-blockers for as long as I can remember. People seem to associate importance or quality with clutter. The more there is going on, the better it must be. My brain has just learned that certain page elements are never going to bring value and therefore don't exist.

Very rarely I'll come across a page where valuable information is hidden in those areas and it takes someone else showing me to actually see it.

Re:llama.cpp on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @01:51PM (#49276185)
The native router matrix for llama.cpp is still pretty immature (though evolving quickly) and I plan to switch once it reaches feature parity.

Personally, I don't see the value in idle timeouts or time based eviction. It doesn't improve model load performance but does mean you're more likely to incur a load penalty for any request.

I generally use the same two models for my agentic workloads and they sit comfortably next to one another in the 32GB of VRAM on my GPU. If I need to load a larger model, llama-swap can easily eject both models if necessary.

Re:llama.cpp on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @12:51PM (#49275333)
The router mode and matrix routing in llama.cpp is still early days and it can't easily juggle multiple models as easily as llama-swap so there's still benefits if you're using 24-32GB cards that can run multiple models simultaneously.

The gulf is quickly shrinking though and it seems like the need for llama-swap will disappear soon.

Re:llama.cpp on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @12:36PM (#49275100)
There are tools like llama-swap that make this pretty bullet proof and offer an OAI style API and compatibility for local Agents. I've been running flavors of OpenClaw and Hermes exclusively on local models hosted this way.

https://github.com/mostlygeek/llama-swap

Re:llama.cpp on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @03:41AM (#49269014)
Does the A770 use the Xe driver? If so then it might work with the scripts that I've been using to build llama.cpp with SYCL support for the Arc Pro B70.

https://github.com/cptskippy/battlemage-llm-gateway

It's designed so that you can re-run the scripts to pull the latest updates. When Muse Glimmer was released the other day I just ran the 02 script to build the latest version of llama.cpp with support for it.

Re:Firefox Containers Preview on Monday August 03, 2026 @02:39PM (#49159756)
That's a tough question to answer because you haven't clearly stated your requirements. It makes it very easy for you to prove that something doesn't work while making it very difficult for someone else to prove it does.

What I meant about configuration is that the onus is on you to manage all of that. I know some people love that level of control but most people it's a burden. Containers are part of your profile and move with you if you're using Firefox Sync. You don't have to copy or maintain multiple profiles or Sync accounts.

Re:Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork on Monday August 03, 2026 @01:37PM (#49158976)
> Qwen-3.6-35B-A3B

The A3B models are super fast but I found the A3B Q4 model ran in circles a lot and ended up taking longer to complete tasks that 27B Q6 because it kept having to redo/rethink/fix something.

I was writing extensive prompts to rein it in and it would still ignore basic directives like "never force push on the repo, ask me instead". I ended up switching back to 27B after about a week of frustration and lost productivity.

Re:Europe EV Sales BEVs Jump 50% & Reach 26% Market Share on Sunday August 02, 2026 @04:30PM (#49148016)
Vehicle registrations.
Re:Firefox Containers Preview on Saturday July 25, 2026 @11:57AM (#49048710)
That sounds like a lot of configuration to carry around.
Re:Firefox Containers Preview on Friday July 24, 2026 @09:02PM (#49043488)
You can't run two profiles concurrently can you?

I have a container for finances, a container for shopping, a container for untrusted, etc... I can't imagine restarting Firefox every time I wanted to transition between those.

Re:LM Studio Bionic: the AI agent for open models on Thursday July 16, 2026 @07:12PM (#48941503)
More likely, it's going to be whether frontier models advance enough that most people would be willing to pay for them. Right now they don't, but a model you can run locally for free on hardware you already own is very compelling because, while they're not as good as Frontier Models, they're still pretty good.

Tools like Opencode demonstrate that when you box them in tightly enough they can actually be pretty competent.

Re:Voxatron on Wednesday July 15, 2026 @06:30PM (#48928008)
I think it was 2013, I bought the same Humble Bundle. It's still in Alpha...
Which is also absurd because other automakers have other less annoying options. I had Hondas that just vented outside air just to the defroster vents without disabling the re-circulator. The Tesla Model 3 can send heated or AC chilled air to the defroster by tapping the defroster button to cycle options.
Have you found any?
> Well, 100% false alert rate.

I wouldn't say the alert rate is 100%.

Many of the the alerts are technically accurate but do you really need an alert on your phone that your door is open as you're getting in/out of the car?

> I believe most newer cars do this and there are good reasons for it.

That's an incredibly vague and dismissive statement to support lazy engineering.

If the intent is something like preventing CO2 build up in the cabin then they could periodically open the mixing value when the car is set to recirculation to refresh the cabin air.

It doesn't have to be a binary control. I've owned cars with manual mixing valves to let you control the amount of outside air gets circulated into the cabin.

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