talklittle's recent activity

  1. Comment on AI content warning label in ~creative

    talklittle
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    The best proof I've seen is when artists have a video/stream documenting their work process so the audience can watch the artwork evolve. Digital artists sometimes provide (often for sale) their...

    The best proof I've seen is when artists have a video/stream documenting their work process so the audience can watch the artwork evolve. Digital artists sometimes provide (often for sale) their work assets like layered Photoshop files, which as I understand it, is difficult for AI to produce, but I'm not sure if that's still true.

    The following is tangential as it's a physical rather than a digital watermark: There is some research on light-based watermarks that can be applied in real life settings while recording a video, as one measure to protect against deepfakes. The light signatures are supposedly difficult to reproduce with generative AI available today. So if someone is recording a video on a camera they could potentially use some kind of physical watermark like that.

    3 votes
  2. Comment on Waymo has received their permit to operate at San Francisco International Airport in ~transport

    talklittle
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    Following their recent approval at San Jose airport.

    Following their recent approval at San Jose airport.

    We’ll partner with SFO to prepare our operations at the airport in phases, beginning with employee testing soon ahead of welcoming Bay Area riders. Pickups and dropoffs will initially start at SFO’s Kiss & Fly area – a short AirTrain ride from the terminals – with the intention to explore other locations at the airport in the future.

    [...] With years of experience serving riders at Phoenix Sky Harbor (PHX) and operations beginning soon at San Jose Mineta International Airport (SJC), we’re accelerating our efforts to serve more airports in more cities as we scale.

    7 votes
  3. Comment on Experiences with FarmBot or similar gardening robots? in ~tech

    talklittle
    Link Parent
    Really fascinating stuff! Thanks a lot for sharing. I'm clearly in way over my head but it's cool to read about. It sounds like farms and warehouses have things in common, as well as vast...

    Really fascinating stuff! Thanks a lot for sharing. I'm clearly in way over my head but it's cool to read about. It sounds like farms and warehouses have things in common, as well as vast differences. In common are that automation is most effective and foolproof when it comes to controlling variables of an enclosed space. And manned machinery is widely deployed to great effect. Difference is the warehouse is a cleanroom, vastly different from the outdoor environment, so mobile robots can actually work well in warehouses. Whereas locomotion is the achilles heel of the farm robot, directly contributing to breakdowns and jams.

    4 votes
  4. Experiences with FarmBot or similar gardening robots?

    This is just a random thought I had. I don't do gardening currently and not looking for advice per se. Just thinking about how the physical world feels far behind in terms of automation compared...

    This is just a random thought I had. I don't do gardening currently and not looking for advice per se. Just thinking about how the physical world feels far behind in terms of automation compared to the digital world, and wondering what kind of possibilities are out there. I was wondering how close we are to having consumer-form-factor robots to help with various things, and growing food is a natural starting place.

    I was imagining what kind of robots are needed to deal with a garden—assuming a house with a plot of land suitable for a large garden—with tasks like:

    • Fetching water, either from plumbed water or a natural water source
    • Getting seeds from somewhere. Maybe online shopping and then the robot knowing how to open the box. (Probably not by identifying existing plants and picking/stealing them.)
    • Planting the seeds in the right place
    • Watering the plants regularly
    • Maintaining temperature and sun exposure
    • Digging up the plant and bringing it indoors so I can inspect or smell it without having to go outside. Then replanting it safely.
    • Determining when food is ripe, picking it, reusing the seeds
    • Washing and cooking it

    It feels like a lot of these are already available off-the-shelf today. I searched and there is a project which I hadn't heard of before called FarmBot which seems neat and geared toward enthusiasts ("prosumers") and education, and includes open source hardware and software. To be clear I'm not affiliated with them in any way.

    FarmBot probably handles a lot of the important parts of gardening, but I'm sure it doesn't handle everything on my list. How far are we from a 100% automated experience?

    Other than that there was some recent marketing around cheap robots like LeRobot by HuggingFace (the company where basically all the open-weight AI models are hosted). It has nothing to do with farming except that they have one shaped like a hand, so it could probably be programmed to grasp and move things around.

    Sorry for the rambling post. Really curious to hear if anyone else has gone into robotics and interested in hearing your experiences and also other resources on what state-of-the-art looks like. Also I bet a lot of this is solved in proprietary solutions and by Big Agriculture, but right now I'm more curious on the consumer-grade level.

    12 votes
  5. Comment on KeenWrite 3.6.3 in ~comp

    talklittle
    Link Parent
    Nice to see your continued work on this. I forget if I asked this in the past but: have you done any outreach to universities, PhDs and graduate students? Seems like they would love this and have...

    Nice to see your continued work on this. I forget if I asked this in the past but: have you done any outreach to universities, PhDs and graduate students? Seems like they would love this and have a nice feedback loop of feature requests and usage. I could imagine Markdown being adopted very quickly by word of mouth. But I guess a major speed bump is the journals generally require the original source document in LaTeX?

    4 votes
  6. Comment on Humble Choice - September 2025 in ~games

    talklittle
    Link Parent
    Thank YOU for all the great topics you come up with on Tildes. It's been said countless times but the community is really lucky to have you, kfwyre! Re: the browser extension I mentioned: I think...
    • Exemplary

    Thank YOU for all the great topics you come up with on Tildes. It's been said countless times but the community is really lucky to have you, kfwyre!

    Re: the browser extension I mentioned: I think it was last month when the seed was planted that this Humble Choice topic is a pain to post, and @cfabbro graciously posted it that month. When I looked at it I decided it needs some of the drudgery taken out of it. The extension is ready now! It's still awaiting approval on the Firefox Add-ons site—I hope you use Firefox—but the code is open source and the extension can be installed from https://github.com/talklittle/humble-choice-info-table under the Releases section.

    It's not a one click thing: it still takes a dozen clicks to fill in the info per game—a hundred clicks for 8 games—and a human has to be involved to steer it. But better than having to do manual typing and searches and copy-paste of URLs. I didn't go so far as writing a one-click scraper, which would have felt a bit distasteful given how AI scrapers are overloading sites today, which is why it's a browser extension instead.

    I hope it ends up being useful for you. Or if you have reservations about installing yet another browser extension just for this, that's fine too: I can run it each month and hand the markdown table over to you or whomever's posting.

    8 votes
  7. Comment on Humble Choice - September 2025 in ~games

    talklittle
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    Also it's pretty much a monthly tradition now for @kfwyre to go "wow, look at how well all these Windows games work on Linux!" But like, well, just look at that chart! Seven Windows-only games;...

    Also it's pretty much a monthly tradition now for @kfwyre to go "wow, look at how well all these Windows games work on Linux!" But like, well, just look at that chart! Seven Windows-only games; six games with great Proton reports.

    Say it with me everyone: PROTON IS MAGIC.

    19 votes
  8. Comment on Save Point: A game deal roundup for the week of August 31 in ~games

    talklittle
    Link Parent
    I gotchu: https://tildes.net/~games/1pz0/humble_choice_september_2025 Was a good opportunity to make a browser extension. I'll see if I can iron out a few bugs and publish it. Still requires some...

    I gotchu: https://tildes.net/~games/1pz0/humble_choice_september_2025

    Was a good opportunity to make a browser extension. I'll see if I can iron out a few bugs and publish it. Still requires some manual work but hopefully will save time on data entry in future months.

    3 votes
  9. Humble Choice - September 2025

    September 2025's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games. Steam Page OpenCritic Steam Recent/All Operating Systems Steam Deck ProtonDB WWE 2K25 80 79 / 67 Win 🟨...

    September 2025's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

    Steam Page OpenCritic Steam Recent/All Operating Systems Steam Deck ProtonDB
    WWE 2K25 80 79 / 67 Win 🟨 Playable 🎖️ Platinum
    Destiny 2: Legacy Collection (2025) 84 56 / 79 Win ❌ Unsupported 🟥 Borked
    The Plucky Squire 82 75 / 82 Win ✅ Verified 🎖️ Platinum
    SpellForce: Conquest of Eo 77 73 / 81 Win ✅ Verified 🎖️ Platinum
    Return to Monkey Island 87 81 / 90 Win, Mac, Linux ✅ Verified ✅ Native
    Eastern Exorcist 76 63 / 86 Win 🟨 Playable 🎖️ Platinum
    Warhammer 40,000: Speed Freeks 70 -- / 85 Win 🟨 Playable 🟨 Gold
    Grapple Dog 78 71 / 89 Win ✅ Verified 🎖️ Platinum

    Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

    22 votes
  10. Comment on Tildes' Colossal Game Adventure: Inauguration and nominations in ~games

    talklittle
    Link Parent
    Text-based interaction in games like Zork will be interesting to dissect in the age of LLMs. See how far we've come in how computers can misinterpret what you're saying or require you rephrase...

    Text-based interaction in games like Zork will be interesting to dissect in the age of LLMs. See how far we've come in how computers can misinterpret what you're saying or require you rephrase many times until you get your point across! Eventually the computer can do some cool stuff with the right commands.

    Along those lines classic Sierra games like King's Quest deserve some exposure. Frustrating puzzles and text inputs, and Dark Souls-esque falling off cliffs. But great storytelling and could possibly be considered an educational series if played by kids, referencing classic fairy tales and legends and requiring decent English skills (for a kid) to get through. The writing is good though and certainly has jokes written for older players too.

    While I'm at it I have to mention Quest for Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness which isn't text based but is a gem for me. Can be played out-of-order skipping the previous entries in the Quest for Glory series. Don't know how well it's aged but such amazing atmosphere, fantastic art direction, and probably scary for kids at times.

    2 votes
  11. Comment on Firefox just got better for Chinese, Japanese and Korean speakers on Android in ~tech

    talklittle
    Link
    It looks like these are the open-weight models: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models They split them into two models each, so English-to-Korean and Korean-to-English are separate...

    It looks like these are the open-weight models: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-translations-models

    They split them into two models each, so English-to-Korean and Korean-to-English are separate files. There are "base-memory" 40 MB models and "base" 60 MB models. Apparently CJK don't get "tiny" 18 MB models, unlike say English to French—makes sense since CJK to English are harder to translate.

    2 votes
  12. Comment on NGINX introduces native support for ACME protocol for obtaining TLS certificates (Preview release) in ~comp

    talklittle
    Link
    Code: https://github.com/nginx/nginx-acme Timely as there has been some talk about automating more of Tildes' certificates management. Certbot works well, but would be nice to simplify the setup...

    Code: https://github.com/nginx/nginx-acme

    Timely as there has been some talk about automating more of Tildes' certificates management. Certbot works well, but would be nice to simplify the setup and remove that dependency in the future.

    12 votes
  13. Comment on Fate/hollow ataraxia Remastered is out on Switch and Steam in ~games

    talklittle
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    This remaster wasn't on my radar at all, but apparently it just came out. A lot of people know the famous visual novel Fate/stay night, but fewer know the sequel Fate/hollow ataraxia. It's not...

    This remaster wasn't on my radar at all, but apparently it just came out. A lot of people know the famous visual novel Fate/stay night, but fewer know the sequel Fate/hollow ataraxia. It's not that surprising because it's in large part a "fan disc" with a lot of slice-of-life and lighthearted filler stories and even some minigames.

    It does have an actual central story though. Most of the story escapes me now, but I think it involves a mysterious time loop. There are a bunch of recurring characters from Fate/stay night and a few additions too. It's a lot of fun for fans of the original story—you should read the original (or watch the anime) before this sequel.

    2 votes
  14. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    talklittle
    Link Parent
    What's currently present is a very minimal insertion of a dummy user and group: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/blob/0a9a1669e351afd520169eb012ad1d1285a637f1/tildes/scripts/initialize_db.py#L81...

    What's currently present is a very minimal insertion of a dummy user and group: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/blob/0a9a1669e351afd520169eb012ad1d1285a637f1/tildes/scripts/initialize_db.py#L81

    There was a merge request for seeding dummy data here: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/-/merge_requests/147 — Looks like groups, topics, users. Not comments. We can probably merge that into the develop-1.101 branch (cc @Bauke). IMO it would be fine for you to cherry-pick that into your working branch and use it that way, if it would be helpful.

    Which reminds me, I forgot to tell you that it's best to branch off of the develop-1.101 branch instead of master. And merge requests will be made to develop-1.101 (or whatever the latest version is at that point in time) as well. This is a recent change and the documentation updates haven't made their way to master yet.

    2 votes
  15. Comment on Tildes Minecraft Hardcore - Live at 20:00 UTC today in ~games

    talklittle
    Link Parent
    That is great, good job getting that working. Looks like it was even more work than I thought!

    That is great, good job getting that working. Looks like it was even more work than I thought!

    2 votes
  16. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    talklittle
    Link Parent
    It is great to hear someone is showing fresh interest in the Tildes source code! Internal discussions among maintainers were we were leaning toward the pyramid_openapi3 addon since Tildes uses...

    It is great to hear someone is showing fresh interest in the Tildes source code!

    Internal discussions among maintainers were we were leaning toward the pyramid_openapi3 addon since Tildes uses Pyramid. I made an openapi.yaml with my personally preferred data model naming (to match Three Cheers mobile app internal properties): https://gitlab.com/talklittle/tildes/-/commit/d0f80f5ace0580b440c0f4c9734c523d37b22a56

    (We didn't go with the currently popular FastAPI because AFAIK it doesn't integrate with Pyramid, and it would be its own completely separate code path.)

    Beyond that I got busy so haven't written any of the code paths to go from routing, data queries, and then JSON response. It doesn't sound like a terrible amount of remaining work to get our first, read-only API up and running. Could exclude authorized endpoints for first prototype as well. It would be amazing if someone were to make it happen! (And keeping the Tildes community in the loop by continuing to post updates here and/or on GitLab.)

    4 votes