AI fearmongering probably produces a lot of clicks if upscaling gets labeled as "might bend reality". YT shouldn't just be doing it without user's input, but pearl clutching is unproportiona.
Readit Newsfloppyd commented on YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without warning or permission bbc.com/future/article/20... · Posted by u/jakub_g
floppyd commented on The beauty of a text only webpage albanbrooke.com/the-beaut... · Posted by u/speckx
While I do agree — using at least a non-monospaced font would be a choice that's nicer to the reader.
This is a very weird sounding pretense. Why does it matter if Africa in particular is bigger on the map compared to other countries and continents? How does area matter in general? It's not like we can infer anything useful from area comparisons. Also the map that is proposed (with the kinda-oval shape) is a map that I've seen a lot in school right next to now more common Mercator, and I'm from now here close to Africa.
floppyd commented on Blurry rendering of games on Mac colincornaby.me/2025/08/y... · Posted by u/bangonkeyboard
Am I the only one who finds screens with rounded corners and notches really stupid? We had to struggle for decades with CRTs and their funky geometry, and when we finally get displays with perfect geometry, we botch them again to make them look... cooler?
I don't have a notched laptop screen, but I do like rounded corners, makes screens feel just a little bit more natural. My MacBook is older and doesn't have rounded corners, but I got used to them so much that I ended up simulating them in software.
floppyd commented on Abogen – Generate audiobooks from EPUBs, PDFs and text github.com/denizsafak/abo... · Posted by u/mzehrer
I tried Kokoro for voicing blog posts and articles and wasn't impressed to be honest. Right now Gemini 2.5 Flash TTS is a much more capable system with generous free limits (about 10 minutes per generation and about 90 minutes per day). Voices are not very consistent between generations, but for shorter pieces it's not a big deal (but will obviously be for books)
I checked out the Wired article. Not recommended seems to mostly be about the fact that it's a tiny display, which some people (like the reporter) will have trouble to read. That the screen degraded didn't help of course. The reporter doesn't want to use a web dashboard to check out the readings on his indoor air monitor. I think that's a fair comment, maybe just a bit harsh to put it in the not recommended bucket. I understand that this can affect sales quite a bit for a small supplier like AirGradient.
It's linked in the article but here it is. https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-indoor-air-quality-monito...
> However, the reviewers logic is difficult to follow when you compare it across products:
> - Our monitor: Downgraded due to a faulty display (a warranty-covered hardware issue).
> - Another Monitor: Recommended, despite having no display at all.
> - Another Monitor: Also recommended, despite lacking a CO2 sensor—one of the most critical metrics for assessing indoor air quality and ventilation.
Anybody had similarly good experience with Gemini CLI? I'm only a hobbyist coder, so paying for Claude feels silly when Gemini is free (at least for now), but so far I've only used it inside Cline-like extensions
floppyd commented on Detached Point Arithmetic github.com/Pedantic-Resea... · Posted by u/HappySweeney
floppyd commented on Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS theregister.com/2025/07/2... · Posted by u/beardyw
Linux desktop in general suffers from not having good "default" options. I can't really recommend any single distro, can't recommend even a single desktop environment as good for most people. Mint is very good, but it looks painfully dated in many places. Fedora is very good, but Gnome Shell is not for everyone in the slightest and debian base is just too wide-spread to ignore. Ubuntu is very good, but actually it's not that good in 2025 because canonical spent 15 years reinventing the wheel and not finishing any.
floppyd commented on Prompting LLMs is not engineering dmitriid.com/prompting-ll... · Posted by u/Bluestein
This article is just gatekeeping the word "engineer" for no reason. When I was developing an agent recently I picked a model (thus fixing most of the "uncertainties" mentioned) and started to construct the system prompt, from simpler to more complex, sometimes back to simpler, discovering that to this particular model the name choice means a lot, observing how often I was or wasn't getting desired results, etc etc. I think it would be challenging to find a definition of the word "engineer" that wouldn't include this process, even if it, obviously, wasn't as complex as some other engineering projects.