> I think one danger with cosmologies like this is there’s an aspect to them where people could become mistakenly convinced of their own powerlessness as a way to explain in grand terms personal failings.

This is crucial point.

I recently switched to almost exclusively using vifm with some zoxide/fzf extra commands + some custom previewers/openers.

vifm is great if you live in vim, but mc is just hardcoded into my brain at this point. totally agree on zoxide + fzf though, cant imagine navigating a large fs without them now. they're the only 'modern' additions to my workflow that actually felt worth the setup time.

Also, once you _had_ to run them. Lost my collection years ago and never found some of my favourites again after that.

If you haven't already, check out https://pouet.net/ . It's almost certainly got the demos that you're interested in.

Now, remembering the titles of these demos might be another matter, but there are people who might be able to help with that too. Do you remember some scenes/effects from the demos that you were interested in?

Compare, for example, to (beloved and useful) Sleepbot Environmental Broadcast (https://www.sleepbot.com/ambience/broadcast/) and Ambience for the Masses (https://www.sleepbot.com/ambience/).

Absolutely. This brings nostalgia and pushes for heads up at the same time.

Bitly does that, just add '+' to Bitly URL (probably other shorteners, too).

From HN guidelines: Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

You're not exactly new here, afaict...

Strange things happen when you sit without moving.

Existence-Time by Dogen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uji_(Being-Time)

http://thezensite.com/ZenTeachings/Dogen_Teachings/Uji.htm

Thx for posting this. `It was fun, but worthless. IDK, that's my life, that's my whole Being.` What a fantastic person, Ken Thompson. The way he is shows so strong in this short clip. Gonna look up some biography of him or sth.

Can you list some useful things you can do with such models which are beyond 'fancy' use, like image generation, or standard chat (which is subpar compared to frontier)? I use my RTX4070 (12VRAM/64RAM) mostly for STT, though I am having real trouble to set up working environment for any Whisper derivatives after migrating to Fedora.

I'm heavily interested into things like UX, natural language interfaces and open source / libre computing environments.

One of the things I am currently experimenting with is building out my own agentic/assisted computing environment which instead of extending into Google/Microsoft/Apple owned cloud based services, extend into services which run on my homelab environment instead.

As a simple example: A local model which can hook into a MCP service making it understand calendars and appointments which hooks into my own locally hosted Radicale CalDAV service, enabling me to quickly make a appointment through text (or possibly even STT later). I'm curious how much I can get something like Thunderbird to disappear.

A somewhat advanced example: Another thing which recently popped up as a idea, I'm quite excited about and I hope will work out is that I can teach a model the concept of a "package repository", a "package manager" and "systems", which (hopefully) means I can install, uninstall, update and track the status of software packages on my Linux systems without using the terminal or shelling into a system myself.

Summarized: I think some things Big Tech wants are pretty neat, but I would like something without heavy involvement of Big Tech (and/or subscription based computing) instead.

I understand first example. That's one of many, tiny, little things in the area of automation, say like 'advanced scripting'. Your second example is indeed advanced.

What I can see myself trying to do is some new ways of working with body of text notes. Local RAG for chatting with documents is also interesting.

And yes, with 'subscription based computing' shreds of privacy we had are gone.