Hah. What the hell would upscaling a sedan even get me. My car car play CDs!!

… I think I am good.

I feel you misread. I mean what I spelled, county, the collection of cities that define the specific region I live in.

My library card gives me access to many libraries in that county, which yes, has works from people across the globe.

I know. It is not great. I ended up using FFMPEG to upscale to 4k using lanzcos filter.

Not the crispest, but vastly more watchable.

I will try AI upscaling when I can.

I have been rekindling my patronage to my county’s libraries and archive.org.

Sure, these are DVDs, but they can be upscaled and are easily backed up.

I buy a crap load of books like I have a spending problem, but I get them used from bookstores and thriftstores. Libraries will always have something I can’t find, with the added glory of browsing serendipity.

Sure, I like to pirate, but there is more treasure at your ports than you think.

Everything you typed out was a painful rediscovery on my part. I basically had to ignore my principles at every moment, but using Windows eventually became too gross, I had to get out.

For the money I spent experimenting with proprietary software, I could have donated to projects making the alternatives.

This is not a lesson I will need to learn again.

Yes. The cost is reasonable, and think it is worth it!

Right now I am using Tracktion Waveform, but I do not love it.

I am looking at Reaper, and I do like the workflow, but the way it loads plugins puts me off. Not horrible, I just need to do extra work to make it work.

Somehow I trust Opera and Microsoft over Brave as this point.

What a world.

Proxmox is awesome. Sort of the answer to most of my server wants.

Honestly, a terabyte can be filled up pretty quicky just with video games. High resolution films add up quicker than you think.

The library is good if you have the hardware to rip.

Not to mention stuff from the Internet Archive, which has all the things you definitely have never seen. It is nearly bizarre the gems one can find in the public domain.

For sure that is a limitation of an LLM. I was hoping the capabilities of Google or Bing would overcome that with extended formatting.

I am ignorant of the ownership of Opera, so I will reserve judgement. I will say that the browser is great, despite its problem foundation.

That is an awesome usecase. ChatGPT lets you get niche and weird, which isnwhere it is most productive.

ChatGPT has the issue that it has no date beyond September 2021, which is not typically an issue.

Hm, I guess I haven’t paid attention to the ownership, I just skip past the ads to the content.

They will always be worth listening to.

I get that too drom Bard sometimes, but it is for specific queries. I think the key is working on the prompt until it gets it. Sometimes you need to start over with a new chat.

Bing does not work like ChatGPT despite having the same base, even in creative mode. No idea why. However I like creative mode when I don’t just dont want to see links embedded. I also love taking advantage of free Dall-E.

Bard is great for anything that can be put into a list or chart, like comparisons. Literally put in a chart.

I am dissapointed in that I have not been able to get a single mathematic equation produced (like famous ones), but I know they can?

If you get the chance and willing to download a full ass browser, Opera has Aria, which is like the cleanest version of ChatGPT I have seen. Just the formatted answers with hyperlinks are worth it. It is good. It is hard to explain, but Aria mostly just works. It is closer to Bard in responses, and does what you want out of Bing without messing with convo styles.

Whatever prompts that Bing put for the convo style may be messing with the results.

All things said, I switch between them often, depending on my needs. It takes some time but I have built my intuition of which one will give the best response for the prompt, but I often just search the prompt in all of them.

Anyways, I hope you find more success using them!

Oh, great to know!! They are my favorite duo, and I often here them talk about How Stuff Works articles.

Thank you for the link.

Bizarre. Not even keep a few editors for… the editing??

I wonder how this will affect the Stuff You Should Know podcsst.

I had the same experience when choosing between the Intel or AMD versions of a prebuilt. Went with Intel due to having comparatably better specs at the price. Theading is better on AMD (as a rule?) but I can only have so much fun running multiple VMs.

It sucks. I hope you got the best part.

I have been using AI chat exclusively for searching for at least the past 3 days.

It is so much better in every possible way for simple factual questions, especially ChatGPT and Google Bard. Great for shopping. Microsoft Bing is okay, but you have to choose the right personality.

Sidenote: I KNOW using Google, and the other companies I will mention, is the antithesis of freedom and privacy. Yet, they are incredibly powerful tools that are getting implemented everywhere, so my curiousity has led me down an honestly fun rabbit hole.

The other AI that really surpised me is Opera Aria. Like Bing, it is using ChatGPT-4 and integrating real-time information. It just feels smarter, or perhaps more professional?

The caveat with all these except maybe Bard which, uses its own system, are very good at shutting down questions it does not want to answer. It feels weird and wrong when it happens, like it just saved you from asking something immoral, or at least too many questions about the tech.

Strange experience overall.

TL;DR AI chatbots are great at parsing the internet to get you answers with reasonable accuracy and relevancy when old-fashioned search can be tedious or fruitless.

I have come to agree on you with this approach. Education is important, no matter what form it takes.

My only issue is something I have obsereved and lamented, which is that humor done excessively seemes to have an inoculating effect.

Think of all the crap president the U.S. has had and all lampooning that was done to denounce them. While we mocked them, they continued their reign and carried creating and enforcing bad policies, as getting away with atrocities while the few qualified people with any legal power struggled to take them down. It doesn’t work.

So, while I appreciate the satire, at this point I find it an exhausting medium. People really do enjoy the taste of onion.

Vote with action. Capitalism is the shit we are in, but everyone acts as if we are in a death march.

Maybe we are? Maybe nothing matters?

Or it does matter, and we need to be smarter about how we make changes in the world besides urging people to use technology that does not match half of what they are used to.

There is a concept called nudge that can work here. It is easier to change behavior by making the “right thing” the default. Make it easy for people to switch off the big corporate tech. Yelling never did anything.

In the meantime, yes, vote with your dollars. Don’t give money to the things you hate.

This impotent cynism changes nothing.

Use the technology you feel safe with, or try try to build if it does not exist.

The echo chamber is making everyone deaf.

Cool recommendation! I just bought one!

I am hoping with all hope that it will let me replace my Roku for streaming.

As great as the functionality of the Roku is, the constant advertising makes me loath this thing. I do not want it anymore.