rozodru

when I was in college I worked at a Best Buy. this was in the early 00s. when I worked there in the media department they had just transitioned the tech bench over to geek squad. Yeah none of those dudes were trained in any of it. Most were just guys they pulled from other departments who essentially knew how to turn on a PC and swap out ram. that's it. There was all of ONE dude who actually knew what he was doing but the rest had no clue. I remember buying a graphics card from the PC dept cause I got a decent discount, they offered to install it for me. that was a hard pass.

Also because commercial landlords demanded it. In Canada the biggest push for it was from Oxford Properties. They even managed to get the Mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow, who is about as liberal as we're gonna get up here to push for it. Never voting for that corporate shill again.

wow thanks for these sites! I knew of neocities but never really spent time looking at the various sites, i'm actually starting to build one now. also Marginalia is great. saved all three to my startpage.

wow thank you! I absolutely LOVE wiby.me and I had no idea it existed. I've just been clicking on surprise me over and over all day. it's great. reminds me of old webrings. easily my new favourite site/search engine.

as a former web developer, you nailed it.

I essentially taught myself how to build sites from Geocities. Back then the internet was awesome because finding a new site that was cool was like finding buried treasure. Things weren't condensed. there was no central hub for news, media, socializing, etc. it was all spread out. you had webrings of similar interests, different forums you'd go to for different topics. different chat rooms like IRC, or The Palace, or Yahoo/AOL chat. It was better. it was easier to make friends online.

now it's all condensed and boring. you go to less than a handful of sites a day, maybe only one or two, to get content. Forums are all but dead and social media killed them. We know too much about each other now, the "penpal" aspect is gone. blogs and livejournals don't provide interesting and personal content anymore...they all have hidden agendas of essentially the author trying to get a job. Webapps killed creativity.

The internet is boring now and you really have to dig and dig deep for that "old school" content. because regardless of what search engine you use be it DDG, Kogi, Startpage, Google, whatever NONE of them are going to point you to someones Neocities or SpaceHey or blog anymore. They need to sell you something instead.

it's like sites like this: https://www.manuelsweb.com/ THIS is what the internet used to be like. personal sites that just had links and posts about whatever was special in someones life.

bingo. and unfortunately the lazy and inexperienced are using it more than others, or using it at a much higher degree. Linus even says it himself. they file a report and then "vanish" because they can't answer follow up questions or clarifications because they don't know how. if you deal with LLMs and the people that use them as much as I do for my job you see this constantly. daily even. they "build" something and when it's reviewed and questioned the answers are just no where to be found because the "coder" can't answer them.

Like the other day there's this guy on Youtube who is a huge advocate for Omarchy for whatever reason. older guy but he's always going on about how great Omarchy is. he posts a video about how "we" built some application for Omarchy but the entire video is him putting prompts into Claude Code and then walking away. never touches it, never writes a line of code. but there were glaring bugs with the build so I reached out to him, asked him how he was going to address these things and hoping he wouldn't put this app out there because it's clearly broken. works on a surface level but it WILL break. he essentially told me to "fuck off".

you're right an LLM is a tool but one that should be in the hands of those that know what they're doing. you wouldn't hand a hammer to a child and tell them to build a house. you wouldn't hand a gun to a junkie and tell them they're now a cop. I wouldn't hand Vim to my mother and tell her to build a website. I feel LLMs should require human training just like any other tools we use. If you want to allow LLMs into your open source project, sure, have at it but it should be YOUR responsibility to vet and interview each individual that wishes to contribute utilizing said tools.

it's only as good as it's training data and how it interprets it. thus you can never have an LLM in any kind of leadership or major decision making role simple because of GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out.

they're painfully easy to manipulate or simply by feeding it bad data. In this case it fucked up it's time keeping thing which shouldn't surprise anyone who has done any sort of coding with an LLM and then an idiot human being prompted it to make a decision based on garbage data. It's like asking a hammer why it failed to manage the construction crew building a house. doesn't work like that and should never work like that.

always used to be like this even back in the PHP BB forum days. Except back then it was something like "all threads eventually lead to Hitler"

If a forum thread was long enough, several pages in, eventually it would get to a hitler reference for something and then you knew that thread was done.

I've been using Qobuz for the past few months and it's pretty good. The playlist limitation sucks but they recently made it easier to shuffle tracks marked as favourites. I also find it easier to discover new and indie artists on there. I wish someone would make a TUI player for it an I imagine i'll eventually just make my own (haven't looked at their API yet so not sure if it's possible) but there is a Linux GUI player called QBZ.

they really are horrible laptops, especially the ROG ones. Those things on day one you turn it on are like "alright, time to start killing myself". you can keep all the fans constantly clean, repaste them every few months, and they'll still cook themselves alive. and the AC adapter will die on you faster than the laptop itself. I had to replace the AC adapter on mine 3 times in 2 years.

Friends don't let friends buy Asus laptops.

I got 3 6+ year old thinkpads that are all chugging along just fine. got them all for dirt cheap.

But as another person said keep that shit for as long as possible and learn how to properly maintain it. New stuff is absolutely horrible. I recently had an ASUS laptop that fried itself after 3 years. was getting really wonky 2 years in.

I always found AI art easy to spot. washed out/dull colours with usually heavy lines. That's all I look at. So looking at this artists work it's clear it isn't AI to me at least.