I mostly agree with you. However, I think there are some caveats to upscaling; there are so many lazy “4K AI UPSCALE BEST QUALITY” videos online that just don’t look good and were clearly put there just to get views.

However, I’ve also found they have their uses; for instance, I wanted to laser cut a TMBG Flood logo once, but there were very few good images online that traced well in Inkscape. I ended up doing an AI upscale of the least terrible one with a white background, and that traced pretty well in Inkscape.

I was messing around with HomeAssistant the other day, which uses the same speech recognition engine, and I found it to be decent.

I think including the word “OpenAI” in the post name is somewhat a misnomer that implies an encrapification not really happening to the FFMPEG project.

Yes, it is true OpenAI originally developed the Whisper model, and I hate OpenAI; however:

• Whisper is actually open source, unlike most OpenAI crap.
• FFmpeg isn’t even directly using the OpenAI version, written in Python - they’re using a port to C++ called Whisper.cpp
• We’ve been able to use speech recognition for decades, so unlike other AI models, I don’t think a speech recognition model that does it better is problem.
• You don’t even necessarily have to compile FFmpeg with Whisper support.

I get the dislike of AI, but the idea of association with OpenAI is overblown and not really reflective of reality. Now I can get not wanting to use open source projects whose developers don’t reflect your principles; however, I think this ethical issue is more indirect than may initially appear and is not a strong reason to quit using what is still the most effective media conversion tool.

No need to panic in this case. While I hate OpenAI, there’s two things to note here:

• Whisper is an open source library for speech recognition rather than generative AI, run entirely locally. It’s just using ML to do something we could already do with computers (speech recognition), but better.
• They aren’t even directly using the OpenAI version - they’re using whisper.cpp, a port of the model.

I use this image, which mostly just works (other than the need to throw model info and a made-up serial into a config.plist.

https://github.com/thenickdude/KVM-Opencore

I can’t say for 15.6, but mine is currently running 15.2 just fine; I usually fall a bit behind on updates since these days, I only really use it to upload They Might Ne Giants rarities to my cloud library via Apple Music.

The only annoyance with the VM is iPhones can’t connect over USB easily.

I don’t use Proxmox, but since it’s all libvirt anyway, I’ve frequently found someone doing something on it that helps me with my VMs.

For instance, my GPU passthrough Hackintosh VM is part based on some dude who made a tutorial for Proxmox that applies elsewhere.

True! I guess I don’t mean that many implementations are inherently bad.

I guess the web browser analogy brings up the point that even though there’s many major behavioral differences between Wayland implementations right now that can make life a bit miserable, there’s hope that standardization could improve and make it easier to make sure applications work anywhere. I’m just a little sad a lot of important thinks weren’t standardized from the beginning/

I mean, at least systemd is one(-ish) program with one API that everyone can target like xorg. There’s so many different Wayland implementations that it gets rather mind-boggling.

Of course, I don’t hate Wayland - I just currently use XFCE. If XFCE ever switches, I’ll go along with it. If applications end xorg support before XFCe switches(or if XFCE becomes unmaintained), I’ll consider jumping ship to something that uses Wayland.

Sounds nice overall, but the UI changes make me worry that we’re on the way to making a bunch of tutorials obsolete yet again.

It has run on them for several years - a lot of stuff just hasn’t been mainlined yet and is only in custom patches for Asahi Linux right now. This is part of the process of mainlining.

Personally, I believe there barely is such a thing as “good AI” - I have a dislike of image and audio generation; while I avoid LLMs, I admit they have their occasional uses.

I mean, at least it’s not an AI slop Tux on a clickbait article that says, “Forget Windows 11 - [INSERT OBSCURE, BORDLINE USELESS DISTRO THAT WON’T LAST TWO YEARS] cured my cancer”.

Like, I love Linux, and obscure distros have their place (I’d be cool with a review), but then there’s those horrible articles that mirror the overall devolution into soullessness that the internet has become.

On another note, those same sites with articles like, “Forget Windows 11 - Windows XP 2025 Classic Edition Ultimate is what we need”, with UI mockups where I’d rather cut off my right hand with a circle saw than use them if they were real.

The actual transition happened ages ago - 2024 or so. A bunch of transitional packages in Testing and Sid had -t64 appended for a while.

I spent 4-6 hours the other day trying to figure out the equivalent of Hello World for a MediaWiki parser function extension.

In theory, they have a quick start guide, but that documentation has so many errors, and I spent ages jumping between PHP and a JSON configuration file I barely understood.

At least it’s working now. Now time to figure out how the heck to properly interact with the MediaWiki database!

(Perhaps once I’m a bit more confident in MediaWiki development, I’ll see if I can tidy up some that documentation.)

Yeh. They really did C++ unnecessarily dirty.

I use the Chicago95 XFCE theme, which modifies the bash prompt.

C:\home\dexcube\Development\piper\build> python3
Python 3.13.2 (main, Mar 13 2025, 14:29:07) [GCC 14.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> from decimal import Decimal
>>> Decimal('0.1') + Decimal('0.2')
Decimal('0.3')

Why does that lock oddly like the iOS 10 default background?

Why do we even bother with data at all? Let’s just not exist - humans greatly increase attack surface.

Why does it feel like if Ron had a computer at all, he would would a Libreboot Thinkpad running one of those weird FSF-approved distros with no firmware?