#open source tool

[cyle]

still confused how to make any of these LLMs useful to me.

while my daughter was napping, i downloaded lm studio and got a dozen of the most popular open source LLMs running on my PC, and they work great with very low latency, but i can't come up with anything to do with them but make boring toy scripts to do stupid shit.

as a test, i fed deepseek r1, llama 3.2, and mistral-small a big spreadsheet of data we've been collecting about my newborn daughter (all of this locally, not transmitting anything off my computer, because i don't want anybody with that data except, y'know, doctors) to see how it compared with several real doctors' advice and prognoses. all of the LLMs suggestions were between generically correct and hilariously wrong. alarmingly wrong in some cases, but usually ending with the suggestion to "consult a medical professional" -- yeah, duh. pretty much no better than old school unreliable WebMD.

then i tried doing some prompt engineering to punch up some of my writing, and everything ended up sounding like it was written by an LLM. i don't get why anybody wants this. i can tell that LLM feel, and i think a lot of people can now, given the horrible sales emails i get every day that sound like they were "punched up" by an LLM. it's got a stink to it. maybe we'll all get used to it; i bet most non-tech people have no clue.

i may write a small script to try to tag some of my blogs' posts for me, because i'm really bad at doing so, but i have very little faith in the open source vision LLMs' ability to classify images. it'll probably not work how i hope. that still feels like something you gotta pay for to get good results.

all of this keeps making me think of ffmpeg. a super cool, tiny, useful program that is very extensible and great at performing a certain task: transcoding media. it used to be horribly annoying to transcode media, and then ffmpeg came along and made it all stupidly simple overnight, but nobody noticed. there was no industry bubble around it.

LLMs feel like they're competing for a space that ubiquitous and useful that we'll take for granted today like ffmpeg. they just haven't fully grasped and appreciated that smallness yet. there isn't money to be made here.

[shikai-the-storyteller]

🤔

[queriesntheories]

Wondering if anyone would like a dedicated website (like a neocities/Carrd type deal) for my Internet Trinkets tag?

It’s mainly just internet tools, games, guides, resources, books and all kinds of links I’ve found to make the internet experience much more useful and fun, i.e, away from the nightmares of subscriptions, paywalls, hate and fear, as much as possible!

I’d want it to be like a little cornershop with the stuff you’d need, like milk and eggs and bread! Except in this context, it’s internet essentials and some stuff you didn’t think you needed, but do!

@good-morning-czernobog ‘s carrd as well as the likes of masterposts and websites like FrogLand have contributed to this idea, but I’d like some definite input from where this all started.

TLDR:

Want a website full of internet tools to make your life nicer?

Reblog are appreciated but no pressure ^^

[httpdss]

🚀 Introducing STRUCT: Automated Project Structure Generator!

Organize your projects effortlessly with Struct. From CI/CD pipelines to Docker setups, Struct ensures your repo follows best practices.

🔗 Check it out on GitHub and start contributing today! No one needs to know this, but it was build from ground up with ChatGPT-4o

[frog707]

Overnight

Last night I downloaded the new release (26) of the Apache NetBeans development environment, intending to try it out. I noticed it wasn't seeing a few of my projects. Further investigation revealed it wasn't recognizing any projects with a particular combination of build files.

Opening an issue on NetBeans seemed like a daunting task, so I procrastinated it to today. And when the time came, I couldn't reproduce the bug at all.

I may never know whether the issue was solved by rebooting my laptop or by getting a good night's sleep!

[borealopelta]

honestly it's really awesome that 2 of the most used advanced digitising tools in qgis, "split feature" and "merge feature" are so broken they're practically unusable. makes your life so easy

[pyrosomatic-metamorphosis]

once again furious at how AI has been implemented and fucking. hyped up and goddamn bullshit. the way its being used to steal creative works and fuck with artists and create porn of real people is fucking NASTY. but god fucking damnit it could be so useful. fucking. ai voice reader for my stupid incomprehensible textbooks where the voice isn't datamined against the person's will. ai npcs that didn't steal their fucking data. ai routine builders that can learn a person's typical day and preferences and help build checklists for people who struggle w tasks. they could be SO USEFUL. but no. no. we can't have useful things. improving lives??? nahhhhhh we've gotta make Pretty Pictures and Steal Fucking Everything to do it

[lonepower]

my dad has been a linux nerd for as long as i can remember, and for as long as i can remember he has had all sorts of problems with it, mainly relating to wanting to tinker something but not fully understanding how ([/glances at my 8 consecutive brickings of mass effect] surely that's not hereditary or anything), so i was sort of braced for it to be A Process. but... and, not to quote todd howard or anything, but... it... just works? like protondb said all of my games could be made to run with custom proton or dxvk or whatever (some of which I'd already been using to spoof win10 games on 7), but the ones I've tried so far haven't needed any tinkering, they just... go right on? wack.

anyway i'm a linux convert now i guess

[ms2253]

[use] bypass paywalls clean for chrome | github

"Extension allows you to read articles from (supported) sites that implement a paywall. You can also add a domain as custom site and try to bypass the paywall. Weekly updates are released for fixes and new sites."

[yddaw]

Sometimes it’s unfortunate seeing that a lot of people are anti [insert technology here]. It makes sense of course, but it seems like the idea being shared is that the technological tool itself is “bad” but not the company using it.

Like Chromium is not the same thing as Chrome itself. And AI is not only for stealing content and reselling it. But having so many companies do this and use these tools with little to no regulation (specifically on privacy) paints such a nasty image for the tool that has so much potential 😩

[nhaneh]

funny thing is I don't really have any interest in hoarding knowledge or resources for myself in any way, I'm just bad at publishing stuff because I feel like that'd require a bit more stringent quality control than what I might expect of something made largely for my own use.

sometimes I think maybe I should set up something like a google drive or a git or something to just throw my personal- and work-in-progress stuff for people who are interested, but I dunno what limits for space or bandwidth or anything are like.

like I'm sure some people would possibly find the ColorSet unpacker python script useful?? It kinda sucks through and I want to make a better version of it and maybe one that could work as a standalone executable instead? and possibly a packer counterpart to the unpacker?? But also I keep thinking like "would this even be useful to anyone lmao??"

in theory you could probably make some kind of art program plugin that does all of this for you - even the bit with loading actual colorset information into layered colorset pairs, but I mean that's a lot of effort and I still largely use a 20+ year old version of Paint Shop Pro myself so...

[lottieratworld]

personal nitpick completely unrelated to the winrar vulnerability itself, but.

the way this person wrote this pisses me off (probably more than it should), theres hundreds of reasons why a developer wouldnt want to implement self-updating in software, especially since implementing connecting to the internet to auto-install updates could open it up to even more potential security holes, plus it just sucks to develop. my web browser of choice, librewolf (a fork of firefox,) excludes self-updating and requires manual updates (or updates from a package manager) for these sorts of reasons. put your big boy pants on and manually download updates from developers websites and shut up

anyway. regarding winrar specifically just use 7zip instead, its free and open source, back when i used windows it served me well.

it does use unrar code to support decompressing rar archives but from what ive read the vulnerability in winrar shouldnt affect 7zip or any other programs using unrar, only winrar itself

[frog707]

NetBeans 25

Yesterday I downloaded Apache NetBeans IDE 25. Today I'm trying it out for the first time. No trouble so far, and it appears the issue I had (in v24, with the layout of the "Search Results" window) has been solved.