brushfoot

Solopreneur making use of it in my bootstrapped B2B SaaS business. Clients don't need or want anything flashy. There are islands of interactivity, and some HTMX sprinkled there has been a great fit.

Copilot at $10/mo. lets you use Sonnet 4 in VS Code, which has been working very well for me in agent mode. Curious what Claude Max offers that sets it apart.

My experience has mostly been the opposite -- changes to several-hundred-line files usually only take a few seconds.

That said, months ago I did experience the kind of slow agent edit times you mentioned. I don't know where the bottleneck was, but it hasn't come back.

I'm on library WiFi right now, "vibe coding" (as much as I dislike that term) a new tool for my customers using Copilot, and it's snappy.

At this rate, it's more than FOSS infrastructure -- although that's a canary in the coalmine I especially sympathize with -- it's anonymous Internet access altogether.

Because you can put your site behind an auth wall, but these new bots can solve the captchas and imitate real users like never before. Particularly if they're hitting you from residential IPs and with fake user agents like the ones in the article -- or even real user agents because they're wired up to something like Playwright.

What's left except for sites to start requiring credit cards, Worldcoin, or some equally depressing equivalent.

I've read the Meditations -- in the Emperor's Handbook translation -- and they're nothing like GP is making them out to be.

In their original, unedited comment, they didn't even get Marcus Aurelius's name right, attributing the Meditations to Mark Antony.

Their take is such a wild and inaccurate mischaracterization of Stoicism that it's frankly not worth engaging with -- written absentmindedly while "listening to corporate policy announcements." Take it with a grain of salt.

> Cursor deciding which files to add to context then charging you for the size of the context

Copilot is unlimited for a flat fee [1]. I've been happy with it.

They also have a free tier now, but it's limited to 50 chats a month, which I'd burn through pretty quickly.

1: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/about-github-copilot/subs...

I disagree that this is a useful springboard. And I say that as an AI optimist.

A report full of factual errors that a careful intern wouldn't make is worse than useless (yes, yes, I've mentored interns).

If the hard part is the language, then do the research yourself, write an outline, and have the LLM turn it into complete sentences. That would at least be faster.

Here's the thing, though: If you do that, you're effectively proving that prose style is the low-value part of the work, and may be unnecessary. Which, as much as it pains to me say as a former English major, is largely true.

Apps to fight apps has never worked for me. When I'm bored/tired enough, it becomes a game to disable my own restrictions.

What works for me is removing the antecedent completely by charging my phone in another room at night.

Now the battle is easier: Decide once a day to put it there, and track how many days you succeed.

For me that's a lot easier than having it in my pocket, where the Internet is always a couple lazy taps away. Now I at least have to walk to it if I want it, and that often "breaks the spell."

I finish work and chores hours earlier when my phone is charging in another room, without consciously doing anything else differently.

It really makes me want a 1980s-style cellphone with no screen and big physical buttons.

I resent that accusation. We should have a Zoom call on two Canon webcams to hash this out.

Nothing about this is deceptive or a violation of consumer rights. Far from it.

This is common for cameras. My Sony works in the same way. It can be used as a webcam using HDMI and a capture card. Canon clearly states this in their marketing for OP's camera.

OP apparently didn't understand this, but the solution is simple -- get an HDMI cable and a capture card.

Not a big deal at all.

The outrage in this thread is incredible. Buying a couple A/V adapters to adapt a non-webcam camera into a webcam is somehow seen as a terrible burden.

If someone doesn't want to do that, perhaps they should buy...a webcam. No adapters needed.

A camera comes with more power at the cost of simplicity for this use case.

I can imagine supporting my right to charge my customers for the software I build for them, absolutely. And I support Canon's right to do the same.

Many of us have had the experience of clients telling us to "just" write code that they think is easy, but we know how that can go in reality.

There's already a simple solution here in HDMI. I don't see a reason to be outraged at Canon over not providing another solution that most buyers will never even use.

You still can use it as a webcam. It's right there in the marketing materials. Clean HDMI out. That lets you use it as a webcam.

Canon advertising its potential to be used as a webcam doesn't mean it's a webcam. It means you can adapt it for use as one. And you still can. The adapter is an HDMI cable or software, which may or may not be free.

That's what the marketers wanted us to think, sure.

It's like me trying to sell you a car that can "turn into" a boat with the right attachments. Notice I didn't say how much the attachments cost.

The marketing material for OP's model:

> Use the EOS Utility Webcam Beta Software (Mac and Windows) to turn your Canon camera into a high-quality webcam, or do the same using a clean HDMI output.

No, they don't. They advertise that the camera can "turn into" a webcam with the right software or through HDMI out.

That's upsetting, but my point is the article itself is rage bait. It's not outrageous for Canon to charge for webcam software when there's HDMI video-out on the camera.

It's a workaround for the camera not bundling all the features that it needs to be a webcam, absolutely.

The standalone cameras I've used haven't included free webcam functionality and I don't think that's outrageous, but apparently many people here who've been downvoting me disagree.

Personally, I think HDMI is great for A/V tasks that a camera doesn't support out of the box since it's a widely supported standard.

> That's only because they're greedy

No, it's because Canon didn't sell OP a webcam. There's no expectation for them to provide webcam software.

If someone wants an external camera that doubles as a webcam with no adapters, that's totally fine for them! They should shop with that in mind.

It's rage bait. People hate subscriptions, understandably so, and people without A/V experience might expect a camera not sold as a webcam to easily double as a webcam since they both can capture video.

It's just a really poor reason to be outraged at Canon (or Sony or any of the other companies whose non-webcam cameras don't seamlessly turn into webcams without some standard A/V adapters).

OP bought a camera not sold as a webcam and is trying to use it as a webcam. Fair enough, I've done the same.

A standard way of doing that is to use a video cable to get video output and plug that into a capture card on your computer. OP doesn't want to do that and would prefer that the manufacturer included webcam functionality out of the box.

Also fair enough! But if that's the requirement, buy a camera that meets that requirement, and understand that it's not a standard feature in these cameras.

I get subscription fatigue, but this is not a good hill to die on. It's getting outraged over expecting a camera to do what it wasn't designed to do, when there are already simple and standard ways of making it do that.

On these cameras, HDMI is the right tool for the job. USB video quality is often poor where it's supported, and HDMI is there for video output.

These cameras are not made to be webcams. OP is using theirs as one, and that's fine; I do too. But device-side compression for USB video out, a webcam app, etc. are webcam features. They come at a cost, and many camera buyers don't need them.

For those of us using these cameras in these nonstandard ways, we can reach for HDMI, which is the right tool for this particular job.

OP is using a camera as a webcam that's not sold as a webcam. That's fine, I do the same with mine, but it's also fine of the manufacturer to allow for that by simply providing A/V interfaces instead of trying to account for every use case.

The company can charge whatever they want for this feature. Most people who can afford to use a good camera as their webcam will never use it, because they know the quality is worse and they'd rather use industry-standard HDMI.

If I asked Sony for a power generator to charge my camera's battery, they could charge me a million a month if they'd like. Hopefully that would signal to me that there are better and more standard options.

> Why should the OP need to pay a subscription to enable a feature that is build into the camera

Getting video into your computer through USB is _not_ built into the camera. Else why is OP downloading an app to do it?

The app is part of the implementation, and it costs money. I have no problem with the manufacturer charging separately for that. The rest of us can use a video cable to get video into our computers.

The app is part of the implementation. And they're apparently subsidizing the cost by charging separately for it.

Drop the fee and that's now baked into the camera's base price.

I have that setup too. I was referring to this:

> it won't autofocus continuously or keep the exposure and white balance stable unless you're recording a video

That basically defeats our setup as now they're worrying about their recording time running out in the middle of a meeting.

A word of warning on capture cards: I first bought a no-name off Amazon, thinking to save money. The video quality was abysmal. Artifacts everywhere.

I returned it and got an Elgato, which has worked great from day one.

Same setup here, down to the brand.

For those who don't know, the dummy battery is a power cable with a battery-shaped adapter that plugs in where the battery would go to provide continuous power.

Why should the manufacturer raise the price of the camera for you and me just to implement something extra OP wants that they can already do through HDMI?