The way I see it, I am committing more time and hassle to setup my homelab now to save time, money, and hassle later when the SaaS alternate's inevitably do something hostile to me as the user.
Even before AI coding I did not trust big tech companies to make updates that have my best interests in mind. Many of these examples are weird feature or ux changes - like how spotify treats liked songs as a playlist (requiring more taps to like a song). Not the end of the world. But on the more extreme side, my gaming PC's windows installation has died via bad windows update twice now. I don't use it for anything important anymore. It's insane that my claude code driven homelab stack has allowed me to have better uptime than github.
Now in the AI coding era, its obvious to me that alot of the tools I am forced to use on a day to day basis are frequently shipped with slop, causing more bugs and all around jankier UX's. With my claude max subscription, im suddenly able to make tools perfectly tailored to what I want, and I can rest assured I wont wake up and find the equivalent of a bad IOS update.
yes makes sense but don't you think that risk will also extend to OSS? I get there's more freedom and people can always fork but I have experienced several open source projects go to garbage as well and forced me to switch to another service.
And yes Google had gotten progressively every year that I have been a paying customer as well so I am not against your point either. All I am saying is sometimes cloud makes sense financially as well even though open source allows you to do it for free technically. Enshiftication is the word of our age for everything imo unfortunately
It definitely can, but Its easier than ever to fork an older version and modify with claude, or just switch to a different OSS provider. With commercial tools there's no rolling back. In fact, I would pay money to go back to the pre Allen Dye liquid ass IOS update.
What's ironic about this is, afaik there's no programmatic way to get a screenshot of a PowerPoint on windows other than opening up PowerPoint and screenshotting it. I only discovered this when I first tried out Anthropics official PowerPoint skill when it came out this winter.
If anything happens from this, I hope it forces Microsoft to address some of its long standing hostile to power users issues so they can stay relevant in the world of AI tooling.
This can absolutely be done programmatically. I just added the ability to do that using PowerPoint for Windows yesterday in my uv/python tool `markdown-pptx`. Codex added the functionality in less than 5 minutes.
For those that are interested, this inspired me to create a tool just for exporting images and PDFs of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. Check out the repo below, or if you have uv installed just run `uvx office-export skill install` or `uvx office-export --help` to check it out.
It uses Office for Windows, so it is Windows only. I don't currently have access to a Mac machine, so I can't build in Mac support yet.
Thanks for sharing, now im wondering if they did in fact grant my wish since I messed with this in January. Im lucky my job does not require me to make any pptx presentations.
Cool project! I'm playing around with some similar stuff, but via uv/Python. Impressive you aren't leveraging any other existing libraries for OpenXML parsing, editing, or rendering. Any especially tricky gotchas you've run into for this tool?
Yeah thanks to LLM hill climbing and PPTs being easily available and they being nothing more than just xmls this did not involve any gotchas, just a about a weeks worth of goal chasing with manual verification. I did have to stop LLM into hardcoding a lot of times trying to escape the actual goal.
But based on this I thought I could make something similar for cad files, and they turned out to be an entirely different monster. the cad spec is like 1000x bigger than ppts, cad files themselves were hard to gather for test targets. 70-80% of their spec is public and remaining is driven by private vendors. the format itself is in binary. The LLM has been chasing that goal since about 2 months now and its nowhere close.
I am subsidizing data centers via my power bill, all so they can over clock them more than really necessary. I use 1 billion claude tokens a month and understand the usefulness of AI, but id wager over 80% of AI spend comes from unsolicited interactions like on google searches, or AI summaries on emails, shitty AI videos on instagram and facebook, endless garbage youtube reels they love shoving down my face...
That is the visible part that leads most people to being anti data center. The average Joe thinks "why is my community, water supply, and money going to this thing I dont want"
Good point! My argument was that the upside is invisible but the costs are visible. You're saying that the downside is visible and the costs are visible. Those hypotheses are in tension -- do people connect data centers to their upsides and downsides or not? -- but now I'm inclined to think that we're both right and it's a bit of both.
School start times should be pushed back an hour anyways. Students learn better, especially middle school + highschool age. The only reason we don't is because it conflicts with parents working schedules.
One of my biggest criticisms of DOGE that I have not heard elsewhere is - why can't we have a "Department of Government Transparency". Giving Elon the ability to judge, jury and executioner any congressionally approved spending he wants has its own legal issues, but I do think there is a lot of value in having a massive publicly available dataset on where the money goes.
I envision something similar to a massive sankey diagram like dataset in a public git repo that anyone could access and audit. There is certainly lots of waste, but there is also loads of government spending where the value is not obvious.
We already have that in the GAO. We also have personnel who's job is to root out fraud: inspector generals. The budget is constantly audited scrutinized for excess and waste, except 2 departments: defense and Medicare. The former is pork for the politicians' home states. The later is so complex it relies on the healthcare industry to help write the rules. And they can't help making sure they get paid the most.
Yes, the GAO exists. But under the current administration, it's basically like a security guard that just sits there and watches crooks do bad shit, reports it, and then nothing happens.
And the Trump administration would similarly hamstring any newly created transparency organization. Not that the current congress would ever pass such a thing. And anyway, the Supreme Court has made sure that even if congress passed a law to make a(nother) government transparency agency, they can't make that agency truly independent and protected from presidential interference.
Creating an executive agency to investigate the executive would be pretty stupid. It'll likely lead to "we've investigated ourselves and found nothing", even if the president wasn't vested in all executive power, as the executive branch consolidates.
However, creating an agency in the legislative branch is another story. One of the duties of the legistive is to investigate the executive, is it not? (not that this matters when both the executive and legislative are controlled by the same party)
> massive publicly available dataset on where the money goes.
That existed! The links the various DOGE apparatchik kept posting as 'evidence' were from publicly available databases of spending, contracts, etc. The 'receipts' site was just a poor, partially-understood scrape of that data!
no no, they mean some other thing, which is different in totally unexplainable ways and – most importantly – doesn't make one feel stupid for not knowing it existed
People don't pick up pitchforks because they don't understand something; people pick up pitchforks because they're told to pick them up. The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency.
>The issue is bad-faith reporting like what happened with Mamdani and the NYC enclave map, not government transparency.
What was bad faith about it? As someone who literally only heard of this drama because of this comment, so far as I can tell the controversy is that they omitted some white immigrant neighborhoods (eg. little italy), and Mamdani backtracked on it?
To what end? Won't a dataset with no actionable items just be a sensationalist headline generator? What if someone did find something funny with the money? What's the process for acting on it? Do they go to the press? What about all the false positive of people who interpret the data incorrectly, then fire off (essentially spam) to the news outlets?
I'm struggling to see an upside to that one (but I'd like to).
This was discussed pretty widely back when this all started. Creating a new department has a ton of overhead (government inefficiency) so they wanted to sidestep the process. The common narrative is that Trump didn't get anything done in his first term because he was hamstrung by all of the bureaucracy, hence why he is aggressively "shortcircuiting" things now, e.g. through executive orders.
The general public has no idea how to evaluate government spending, and because of this people are incredibly susceptible to being manipulated and lied to. That’s what we’ve seen with DOGE, people who have no idea how scientific research work cancelling funding based on vibes. It turns out the shrimp treadmills that do sound ridiculous at first glance are in fact made for a very good reason
A while ago I was driving a loaner car - a brand new top tier Accura rdx and the infotainment system was truly the worst and most dangerously designed I had ever witnessed. It was essentially a lenovo thinkpad type touchpad by the cup holder, and the screen was far away. The first time I tried to use it, it was so distracting that I would of crashed the car if it weren't for the safety features.
My car is a 2018 with car play and physical scroll knobs and buttons, while awkward, I can operate it with my eyes on the road (realistically I can do everything I need from the steering wheel). This weird middle ground carplay was somehow the worst combo of buttons and touchscreen.
I test rode an electric pedal assist bicycle yesterday that has a little operating system by the throttle, basically just a speedometer + toggle the level of power assist from eco to turbo. Even it has a "avoid distracted driving" popup that I had to fiddle with to dismiss while riding this bike for the first time.
Executives will be more afraid of being sent to prison for criminal charges, than having someone else's money get spent on fines. We can do both - increase the fines and set a precedent of arresting executives when their company does criminal things.
In a large enough organization with many layers to it, it very well may be that executives were neither involved nor aware of criminal wrongdoing, and even when they are, you'll never find sufficient evidence to charge them. That's largely the point behind performing criminal acts as a business and why there's so much white-collar crime.
At least if you set fines to a level that such crimes are rarely if ever profitable, you can both remove the incentive for the organization to commit them as well as introduce a passive internal mechanism to prevent them in the first place.
I have no moral objection, but it would just change the composition of CEOs as a group. Instead of just selecting for sociopaths, we'd start selecting for sociopaths with high pain tolerance.
Would you be open to sharing or open sourcing the underlying data source? I think there are some very powerful things you could do with this.
For example, I recently discovered this site https://bomwiki.com/ which attempts to make a giant dependency graph of all the parts used to make large machines. This would not be possible without it being a wiki.
There are already mechanisms in place to hold SUV and Truck drivers accountable and track them down (via their license plate).
The problem with ebikes is any unlicensed driver can get one, and go 40mph on a sidewalk without any practical way to hold them accountable.
I live near one of the busiest biking + walking trails in the country, and the egregious disrespect and recklessness of ebike's and scooters is insane to me. Even on the parts of the trail that are split into two or three sections (walking, running, and biking sections) I see people going 20-30mph weaving in and out of walkers. What's crazy is it would be safer if they were operating gas motorcycles, because atleast you could hear them coming.
Those mechanisms don't work. Unless the driver was a hit and run or DUI, even fatal crashes almost never result in any charges if the driver claimed they "never saw them", especially so against pedestrians.
Large vehicles are killing people, even with sober drivers and nobody is being held responsible. This is well investigated at this point. Only recently are we finally getting some traction on the awareness front of how bad it is getting.
Even before AI coding I did not trust big tech companies to make updates that have my best interests in mind. Many of these examples are weird feature or ux changes - like how spotify treats liked songs as a playlist (requiring more taps to like a song). Not the end of the world. But on the more extreme side, my gaming PC's windows installation has died via bad windows update twice now. I don't use it for anything important anymore. It's insane that my claude code driven homelab stack has allowed me to have better uptime than github.
Now in the AI coding era, its obvious to me that alot of the tools I am forced to use on a day to day basis are frequently shipped with slop, causing more bugs and all around jankier UX's. With my claude max subscription, im suddenly able to make tools perfectly tailored to what I want, and I can rest assured I wont wake up and find the equivalent of a bad IOS update.
reply