shortformblog

There is. It can be heavily customized to your needs and built to leverage a large ngram data set:

https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-dat...

I would suggest diving into it more because it seems like you missed how customizable it is.

LanguageTool (a Grammarly competitor) is also open source and can be managed locally:

https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool

I generally run it in a Docker container on my local machine:

https://hub.docker.com/r/erikvl87/languagetool

I haven't messed with Harper closely but I am aware of its existence. It's nice to have options, though.

It would sure be nice if the Harper website made clear that one of the two competitors it compares itself to can also be run locally.

Hey, just to offer more details on this piece: After I saw the initial video with Perifractic, I reached out to him via fax (a 20th century technology) to set up an interview over Zoom (a 21st century technology). Over an hour-long call, he offered a ton of details on the project that weren’t in the video.

“Now, I won’t go into too many details, but we basically took out a second mortgage on our house to get this done,” he told me. “It’s been seven months, nearly eight months of work, actually.”

We also talked about how a revived Commodore might interact with prominent existing Commodore-adjacent projects like Amiga Forever and the Commander X16, and discussed the possibility of new hardware.

I’m sorry you can’t tell the difference between a 2,500 word profile and an AI piece.

This is a fresh interview with him with many additional details.

Our tire was shredded so that would not have worked.

We know how to change a damn tire. We just couldn’t easily buy one because Gatlinburg didn’t have any garages open on Sunday morning.

The problem was less that we had to replace it and more that it was a fairly significant distance away. (A distance made longer because we weren’t on the freeway but heavily trafficked roads in a tourist-heavy area.) We were near downtown Gatlinburg, and there were places that were closer, but they were all closed because it was a Sunday.

We also would have had a better shot at not having our tire blow out if the closest gas station wasn’t 10 miles away.

There are plenty of places where it would make sense, actually, but Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg are very much not on that list. They are towns surrounded by mountains where once you get off the strip, you may not even run into a gas station or grocery store for a while.

Also, that was 15 miles, not 15 minutes. I think it took us more than an hour to get there with all the traffic. Excellent example of a tourist trap.

A related quirk of the area is its onetime attitude towards free alcohol samples, which I wrote about last year: https://tedium.co/2024/11/10/free-sample-history/

The irony being, of course, that it is surrounded by an area where it is basically impossible to get by without a car.

My wife and I once left Gatlinburg after a week there and our tire blew out on the way out of town. It was a Sunday morning. Literally our only option to get it replaced that day was a Walmart location 15 miles away. So we had to wait for AAA for an hour and a half to tell us we were stuck using a donut to get there.

There is a trolley system but it is anemic.

This is good to have. A few months ago I was testing a S3 alternative but running into issues getting it to work. Turned out it was because AWS made changes to the tool that had the effect of blocking non-first-party clients. Just sheer chance on my end, but I imagine that was infuriating for folks who have to rely on that client. There is an obvious need for a compatible client like this that AWS doesn’t manage.

I respect that you did this. Nice quick data grab.

I mean, threads can be awkward discussion mediums, but what’s democratizing about them is that they can atomize engagement. If every tweet is a roll of the dice, it raises your odds of reaching an audience when you have a bunch of them. And if you hook someone with just one, odds are that user will be super-engaged by the end.

It’s also worth noting that social networks like Twitter tend to discourage just sharing links, whereas a thread that sucks someone in REALLY engages them. It’s interesting that he chose to cite Doctorow here, who is probably one of the more aggressive thread-sharers around. On Mastodon, where he still does it, it can clearly feel like a lot, especially given that there’s no algorithm.

On Bluesky, threads are honestly a little less effective because links are not downranked. But the downside is that people may never click the link, leading to context collapse. Some of that is on you, the creator, to set the expectation. Some of that is on the end user. But the algorithm (yes, Bluesky has one) can make it hard for you personally to set that tone.

As a blogger/newsletter guy with a decent-sized audience, I tend to favor Kev’s stance. But I think you have to consider what social networks are doing—and how much it reshapes/misshapes what you create. I don’t post on Threads because I find its algorithm too aggressive and believe it harms context (and it also discourages linking). But Bluesky and Mastodon are pretty good at avoiding that issue.

In other words, I see it both ways.

I actually helped with some of the beta testing for it. They worked on it very early on in the Apple silicon Mac lifecycle, and it hasn’t been updated in nearly half a decade. I consider it a proof of concept.

https://github.com/corellium/linux-m1

As a 20-year Mac enthusiast who knew a thing or two about Hackintoshing, Marcan got me excited about Linux. The idea that someone could just say, “we can solve this difficult problem and make it work, with little external help”? That is the core of FOSS right there, and he helped so much work happen, so quickly.

Loved following his various social feeds. I was sad when he stepped away from the fediverse. I hope he comes back as just a regular hacker without this massive weight on his back.

Seems like a kit that can be personalized across broad categories might be a better bet. By putting the onus on one list you don’t solve the main problem, which is that the list might block things you’re fine with.

The problem with a list like this is that a “bad website” is in the eye of the beholder. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with you personally not liking the Shopify or the Semrush blog. But I think that everyone else has their own calculus.

It’s the same reason why social media blocklists can be problematic—everyone’s calculus is different.

My suggestion is that you promote it as a starter and suggest that users fork it for their own needs.

Feel like the solution to this problem is probably to offer an app that turns magic links into notifications. As well as to probably untether the magic link from the cookie in the browser, so that you are not required to hit the magic link in the same browser that you called the link from.

Did we really need to research this? An early televised documentary series, The Flintstones, made this clear more than 60 years ago.

Just because you don't know what the hell you're talking about doesn't mean you have to take it out on me.

It has to be AMD specifically, with some cards working better than others. Really old Nvidia cards work if you’re willing to go all the way back to High Sierra, though I haven’t tested it with this specific setup.

Intel iGPUs work on bare metal up until about tenth gen Core series, but I don’t know if you can pass them through with Proxmox.

This list is a good place to start: https://dortania.github.io/GPU-Buyers-Guide/modern-gpus/amd-...

If you just want to mess around, RX 580s are pretty cheap on eBay these days and are fast enough to handle most tasks on a Mac.

Oh, almost forgot, I actually wrote about my process getting this set up about six months ago:

https://tedium.co/2024/04/08/hackintosh-proxmox-vm-experienc...

On top of the GPU, I pass through a USB-C card. I did have some problems with getting the WiFi card I have working but I have it plugged in via Ethernet anyway so not much of a problem.

My main reason for this is to have an easy way to access graphics software in the relatively rare cases I need access to Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign specifically.

Yes, this is correct. There seem to be a lot of people confused about the benefit of this in the thread, but it’s very simple: This tool exists essentially as a replacement for doing a full Hackintosh build of a system. You install Proxmox on a machine with a GPU, set this up, pass through the GPU and any other PCIe cards you want to run, and you’re in business.

It turns a days-long process into something that you can be up and running within like an hour. With OSX-KVM you have to set up the machine to be ready to do all the stuff like passthrough. This leverages the fact that Proxmox makes all that stuff super-simple.

Because I can manage it in a relatively understandable web interface and not have to deal with a bunch of config files. It's also significantly easier than Hackintoshing the machine, which is what I did previously.

I see you're a nixos enthusiast, so I take it you enjoy config files. I just like having a machine I don't have to think about.

It’s much less of a pain when passthrough is involved, FWIW.

I use this script on my Z420 with a Xeon and RX570 GPU (which I use to access Mac-specific apps remotely). It works really well. Excellent script, though I can’t go above Monterey with it, because of CPU limitations on the Xeon.

You're removing a lot more than filler with this kind of tool. It's sort of like taking a journey but not bothering to enjoy the trip.

That folks think it’s an MBA that benefits from building a sustainable media business and not the people who work there, who get paychecks and better resourcing, is one of the great misunderstandings of the journalism business and the reason why I pipe up in threads like these.

It’s because I’m a nerd with a background in journalism, and have been around the realities of a lot of this stuff for a while.

This is a good way to put it. Honestly, it sounds like they have a messaging challenge that they need to solve around this.