Kay Ohtie

I took my travel guitar on my latest flight. Not as small as a Traveler-brand one, but I was able to put it behind 2 other roller-bag carry-ons that were rotated length-wise instead of depth-wise along with my partner’s CPAP. Still meant 4 bags in the overhead slot like normal. I just put my CPAP bag under the seat in front of me and didn’t bring a backpack, instead. Same net result.

But that’s with a travel guitar, specifically the Enya Nova GO SP1 which is much smaller than my mini-jumbo Washburn (EA15). I don’t know how on earth I’d fly with that short of making arrangements to put it in a special location besides the luggage compartment. I’d be too worried about it being damaged even in a hard case, especially from the atmospheric changes.

I have the X4, and I adore it. I wasn’t sure if I’d like it or not but got it on sale, and I’ve been thrilled with it and encouraging folks interested in something more portable than a typical larger e-reader. I just turn it on and read, no need to set a do-not-disturb mode, I just get to focus on that.

“Smaller screen” also sounds bad unless you have flavors of ADHD that cause you to restart the page regularly, and this actually helped me in that regard.

Like, I still have to strip DRM from books I buy if they aren’t DRM-free, but I don’t buy on the Kindle shop anymore, and most others use Adobe Digital Editions, which is fairly easy to rip using plugins for Calibre.

I think of it less as “combine”, and more “separate” on purpose. There’s the images pointing out how much stuff one had to carry before that a smartphone replaces as one slab but… it doesn’t do most of those things as well.

I really like my X4 from that standpoint. It’s much longer battery than my phone screen grants, and I don’t have to open any menus to toggle anything to say “go away, notifications”, or anything like that. I’m separated from everything else on my phone while I read on it.

But it’s also quick and cheap to make absurdly-delicious roasted veg.

My favorite: take a bag of frozen broccoli florets, mist it with some oil (it’ll harden on them), sprinkle with some salt and pepper and toss in it at 400 degrees F for like, 15 minutes. Halfway through I pull the basket and drain the accumulated water in the bottom to increase browning.

Delicious, crispy, I can devour an entire pound of broccoli that way in like 5 minutes.

Most toaster ovens, even ones with strong convection for “air frying”, are not quite consistent enough in their heating. You have to pay far more than you would for an air fryer to get even heat coil distribution and a good door seal for that. The specific kind of rapid cooking that dessicates and browns the surface you get out of air fryer devices is just kind of hard to replicate outside of them.

If you ever look inside an air fryer you can kind of immediately see why – the heater-to-volume ratio is absurdly close. You have the equivalent of the biggest coiltop stove burner directly above a few quarts of air volume with a fan forcing air from it to circulate. It’s just kind of unfair of a comparison for both toaster ovens and even full-size ones that advertise an “air fryer” mode by comparison for that reason.

My only wishlist for Navidrome is SSO support besides reverse-proxy/forward-auth headers. I’ve got that setup with Authentik and Nginx Proxy Manager, but having to make specific path exceptions or duplicates with rewrites for apps/API, rather than just being able to generate an app password/token in Navidrome for an app to use, definitely is annoying. I don’t think I saw a write-up anywhere but I figured out what was needed.

If I recall, in the US, anything in a food advert photo that is meant to come with the product – IE, the toppings of the burger – must be real food, and cannot be paint or such or that’s false advertising. The milk in cereal is provided by the consumer, so they can use the glue there. And while the ketchup is applied via syringe, it is, in fact, ketchup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIEhDSWXeF4

What they get away with is the arrangement of the ingredients, things like splitting and spreading a pattie to make it appear larger, fluffing the choice lettuce pieces and tomato slices, using hidden toothpicks to arrange things.

It’s possible the Japanese ad you presented isn’t food at all, and just model food, like presented in shop storefronts – looking like the real thing. That steam is definitely added after the fact. It also has a bit of a sheen in spots on the bread that makes me think it’s just plastic, but I don’t think the same “false advertising” laws apply in Japan.

I’m trying to figure out what leads someone to look at this and say “yes this is good” and then fucking print it, or pay to have it printed. Like, why would you just… print without even fucking looking?

My partner and I refer to the remote on that thing as “the bean”

It’s the Toot-Toot-Toblerone

I saw comments on his Fediverse post of the comic indicating it may be that “golden sunlight” shading idea of adding warmth. It’s much flatter of an effect in generated images than in his art, I think, where sometimes it’s heavy and sometimes light and not even always present.

just throw a yellow filter on it and post it as “jordan pee”

Yipyapyop

Same. I call them “cartridges” for lack of a better word but they last over a year each for me and still haven’t shown the “time to replace” indicator.

Yep! I set it up with Calibre-web as the OPDS provider, can have multiple.

It’s almost like prediction markets are a scam, weird

Me completely. Sorry, I don’t wanna play DBD or space rocks or the tenth “analog horror giggle backrooms” to come out in the past 5 years.

I just wanna “I’m not crying you’re crying” about owls in Ori.

The other problem is the “um actually the field of ML is a subset of AI” people because, technically machine learning is a subset of the field of artificial intelligence mathematics.

But them acting like that isn’t doing the devil’s dirty work to “um actually” at everyone is absurd.

The two matching sleeves (plus distortion from position) screams chop, not slop. Slop ain’t that kinda copy/paste job, and it’s too subtle of a joke.

Maybe slop chop plopped their faces on the original chop.

All of these features are not something the models themselves can do, but are grafted on.

I could easily write a Home Assistant automation pattern matching for nearly every way someone could say “how many Rs are in strawberry”, depluralize a plural letter, and run it against “wc” in a bash terminal.

That doesn’t mean it’s smarter. It’s that I’ve added something specific to it.

MCP and the like is just that too, gluing on functions or the ability to hopefully invoke a function. That’s why so many hilariously mundane ones exist.

At the core, it’s still a large language model: a statistical model of frequency of word and word chunk (token) patterns.

Sometimes one model can invoke another via that tooling but it’s still a grafting on. It isn’t a singular thing or system, but disjointed pieces so completely detached from how brains work.

This isn’t AI hate, it’s reality. I love the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. It’s cool as hell. But an LLM is fundamentally incapable of being anything more than an LLM with glued on pieces that invoke functionality.

OpenAI saw people mock the inability to count so they wrote a specialized tool to count letters and glued it on.

The world is full of endless edge cases. The inability to simply resolve them without gluing on every single one means it just isn’t doing anything new.