Thank you. Enjoyed this read.

AI slop videos will no doubt get longer and "more realistic" in 2026.

I really hope social media companies plaster a prominent banner over them which screams, "Likely/Made by AI" and give us the option to automatically mute these videos from our timeline. That would be the responsible thing to do. But I can't see Alphabet doing that on YT, xAI doing that on X or Meta doing that on FB/Insta as they all have skin in the video gen game.

How did you tweak and fix it? I suffer with Windows 11 at work and everything is just so slow. Alt+Tab often gets stuck and clicking icons on the taskbar don't register about a fifth of the time. Take a screenshot with Shift+Win+S? That's gonna take at least 10 seconds for the snipping app to even load, after which what I wanted to screenshot is probably gone. Open a tab in Explorer? Five seconds, during which individual parts of the UI update. Delete 50k files from some image analysis? That's gonna crash explorer.exe and take down the whole shell. I suppose they rewrote the Windows shell in React, and every basic interaction is a major undertaking. At home I have a 12 year old PC, with Linux and the Gnome DE. It is absurd how much faster it is, everything is snappy and instantaneous. To me, there is nothing to fix in Windows 11 - they have failed horribly.

On a related note, has anyone found a good local LLM option for working with Excel files?

Here's my use case: I have a set of responses from a survey and want to perform sentiment analysis on them, classify them, etc. Ideally, I'd like to feed them one at a time to a local LLM with a prompt like: "Classify this survey response as positive, negative, or off-topic...etc".

If I dump the whole spreadsheet into ChatGPT, I found that because of the context window, it can get "lazy"; while with a local LLM, I could just literally prompt it one row at a time to accomplish my goal, even if it takes a little longer in terms of GPU and wall-clock time.

However, I can't find anything that works off the shelf like this. It seems like a prime use case for local models.

This is chilling (from https://www.jlwranglerforums.com/forum/threads/2024-4xe-loss...):

> On my drive home I abruptly had absolutely no acceleration, the gear indicator on the dash started flashing, the power mode indicator disappeared, an alert said shift into park and press the brake + start button, and the check engine light and red wrench lights came on. I was still able to steer and brake with power steering and brakes for maybe 30 seconds before those went out too. After putting it into park and pressing the brake and start button it started back up and I could drive it normally for a little bit, but it happened two more times on my 1.5 mi drive home.

If that happened on the highway I could easily see people being killed.

Having just visited South Korea last year, one thing that sort of caught me off guard was the lack of Google Maps or other major direction system. I wasn’t aware but turns out anything considered “detailed mapping” infrastructure has to be ran stored and on South Korean soil, probably lots of other requirements. So you’re stuck with some shotty local mapping systems that are just bad.

There may be a point in time it made sense but high resolution detailed satellite imagery is plenty accessible and someone could put a road and basically planning structure atop it, especially a foreign nation wishing to invade or whatever they’re protecting against.

Some argument may be made that it would be a heavy lift for North Korea but I don’t buy it, incredibly inconvenient for tourists for no obvious reason.

Yes this shift to React is really annoying. Github also stopped working on older browsers.

My leisure laptop is an older macbook with firefox 78.15.0esr and a little over a year ago I stopped being able to view github files and issue discussions with it. I can still view READMEs most of the time but now I have to use chromium or another computer to actually read code without cloning the repo.

I know they could easily generate JS for older browsers if they cared to set the esbuild target.