I don't even need today's frontier, give me a local model I can run on my Mac comparable to Claude 4.5 as of December last year and I'll probably lose any interest in new hosted LLM advancements altogether.
If you're on macOS you can try the built in LLM which I think is similar in size. There's a project called Apfel that wraps it in a CLI. Also Chrome ships with a web API called Prompt API that gives you offline access to Gemini Nano which can do both text and images at the input. Also tiny. I've integrated these into my workflows where a tiny but non zero amount of reasoning is needed in between the otherwise fully deterministic steps.
I have a personal, fully offline and local version of Windows Recall basically, but good, made using macOS built-in OCR and LLM. The reasoning requirements are tiny (just interpret the screen based on the OCR, do rolling de-duplication and summarization), but they are non-zero. The tool is valuable to me and it being dep-free and fully offline and local just gives me a good feeling.
2. Bun.$ (Bun Shell) to execute the macOS command to take a screenshot (I do this for all connected screens at that moment)
3. Bun.Image to downscale everything to 1x in case some of the screenshots are 2x
4. Bun Shell again to run a JXA AppleScript thing to use the Vision Framework or whatever it is called to OCR the image into a file
5. Bun Shell to run the Swift compiler in the one-off eval mode with inline Swift helper that runs the Foundation Models Framework built-in LLM with a system prompt that tells it what the OCR said and instructs it to glean what may be on the screen (can't do this with JXA because the models are not exposed with ObjC APIs)
6. For each screenshot, continuously, take the previous day summary file and the last OCR/context results and produce a new summary of the day
I plan on adding extra information from the OS like the currently opened windows, currently focused window, time of day etc. into the mix, but so far it hasn't been needed. It produces reports of a good enough quality for me.
I `grep` these daily summaries whenever I need to recall a link I saw or a find what channel a message I spotted was in or take another look at that one tab I already closed, maybe re-open it by its OCR'd URL etc.
I think Last.fm might have been a better friend finding and dating app than any of its contemporaries or anything that came after. Seems like everyone in this thread or anyone I know IRL has a story of making a good connection with someone via it. I know I'll always cherish the people I got to know on there.
This is a satisfying way to deal with frustration. Unfortunately, it also gets spit all over whatever device you're speaking toward. Sometimes worth it for sure, though.
Oh you can direct the stream a bit to the side or just raspberry softly. The important thing is to make sure the prrffftt sounds are Gaussian-distributed.
Sometimes yelling fuck shit piss bitch cunt fuck ass whore etc works. They have them setup to detect swear words to figure out when youre pissed off and need to talk to a human lmao
Xfinity/Comcast automated support has swear word detection. I eventually picked up on this after the 4th or 5th time they sent out a non-technical 'technician' in response to my concerns over SNR causing connection instability.
(Me: "here is a comprehensive analysis of modem logs over the past 7 days and clear indication of the cause"; Xfinity: "Let's turn off the wifi router for 30s! It didn't work the last 50 times but it's the only thing we can do.")
That honestly is just the worst when it happens. It sucks for both the rep on the phone and you since it's just a waste of both of your time (though at least they get paid for it).
Had a similar back and forth over multiple days where I spent hours on the phone with them. On the third day they finally sent me to a different call center with someone in the US that was authorized to go off script and actually solve my problem. Took five minutes.
I just don't understand how it makes sense. Considering just how much these companies limit the utility of customer service, it's no wonder they want to switch to LLMs. It's likely no worse than the service they are already providing 99% of the time.
When I had Concast (with Sonic now) I remember hating having to call them. Their CSRs can be really terrible. I once said “are you fucking kidding me?” or similar and that was their legit way out of having to help and they hung up.
Depending on the company, you sometimes get routed to the angry people recovery section when you do this. And so then, the Comcast agent on the other end is in stern counselor mode ready to de-escalate what seems to the robot to be a fuming, angry customer and gets completely thrown off when you’re super chill with them (or at least, you hopefully are chill with them!)
There is basically no support to speak of. Scaling a zero is not hard. You can be paying 200 USD a month with barely any chance of ever hearing back. Your best chance of getting support from Anthropic is the same as with any other big tech company: have a Twitter following or know someone who works there.
I stopped checking failure emails from GitHub Actions unless they happens half a dozen times or so a day because I get more false negatives (GitHub Actions issue not my workflow issue) than legitimate notifications I can act on. I'm from Europe too.
Funnily enough, most of the young people I know fall somewhere between those two sides of the spectrum.
I know some actual luddite-tier AI haters that believe it's ontologically evil, and another majoring in Data Science that went to the most recent career fair and told a recruiter "AI will replace you" (I uh don't think he's getting that internship)
And of course many, many, others that fall between the two extremes.
The one thing we can all agree on, is it makes homework a hell of a lot easier :) (well, except the luddite-types, they refuse to use it in any capacity)
I'm a member of a political action committee, where I was brought in as an expert in professional media applications of AI. I've got extensive experience using AI tools in the production of well known entertainment properties (think VFX for film and animation.) Anyway, within the political action committee where is a diverse mixture of people, with about 1/5th of them under age 30. The entire under age 30 set are so AI negative, to such an irrational degree, I have been asked to do nothing and offer no advice that incorporates any technology at all. They are so paranoid. In a not really emotional discussion, a bunch of them erupted in tears, they are so irrational about it.
Are you able to share whether the PAC was Democratic Party or Republican Party aligned? When I first came to America, the headlines were about how Obama’s campaign embraced tech successfully. By now, tech is considered right-wing. If the young ‘uns who burst into tears were on a Republican aligned PAC that would be interesting. It would mean cross-political tech angst.
The biggest irony with telling a recruiter they'll be replaced, is how much easier a data scientist is to replace with LLMs. With their sycophantic nature, execs will eat up whatever "data" the LLMs make up, too.
Young people love AI when it helps them cheat homework, or when used for roleplay and memes. Generating "content" with AI - is generally more hated, especially art and video.
That is a bad counter-example, because its just a poorly conceived statement. You apparently don't hate knives. You hate killing people, which isn't remotely similar.
Using AI to cheat at academics and then hating on people who use AI to cheat on media creation is absolutely hypocritical. Its qualifying hypocritical stupidity like this results in shoving a single vendor's LLM into the browser.
Do they really? Hating on AI slop is a common sentiment on social media, but remember that the opinions you see on social media are often not representative of what the general population thinks at all.
I keep hearing stories about how homework is now useless because every student just gets ChatGPT to do it for them, and from personal experience, I'm inclined to believe them.
I don't believe every student uses a calculator to solve their math homework, so what makes ChatGPT unique here? For certain subjects the ability to cheat has been trivial for a long time, yet there was no crisis.
When I was in high school a classmate did their chemistry homework by buying the teachers edition of the textbook, which had the answer key. The whole class knew this trick existed, but most of us slogged through the work manually. I knew another group who divided up the homework problems and then combined. Students have always known how to cheat on homework, but enough students actually do it anyway.
I asked it about designing a 12 V solar system for a garden shed and it got everything but the broadest of strokes wrong. It figured out there should be a solar panel, a solar charge controller, a battery and some loads, but the wiring was non-sensical and when I drilled in on the solar charge controller settings etc. it completely fell apart. Absolute non-starter for any information you plan on depending on, but good entertainment value and impressive execution.
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