You know what I found this past year was that I could NOT find any way, to turn off anti-aliasing, for text inside a webview. I made a whole entire custom terminal app just for myself in Rust, Tauri, xterm.js and spent a ton of time trying to un-blur the text but failed. I redid the entire thing (well, Codex/Claude mostly) using a rust graphics library (egui) and now the text is finally sharp! and its fast. I am growing more and more anti webview with these AI coding tools.. they can almost one-shot convert a slow webview app into something that uses 1/10th the ram and 10x as fast. The text looks soooo much better, all fonts look better. In xterm.js, text looks super fat all the time (to me).
You are asking for a look that’s very niche. Not many people hate anti-aliasing so much. GNOME still has a simple UI to turn off anti-aliasing but not many apps respect that. The modern text rendering pipeline is just way too complicated from font lookup, ligatures, shaping, etc. To achieve this look in web views you’ll most certainly need to do it in
I predict a shift towards antialiasing being less desirable as DPI->inf. In my experience, disabling antialiasing dramatically improves sharpness and readability of small font sizes on modern 4K+ monitors, along with reducing eye strain and surprising bystanders.
I just tried it on my 5K monitor. I can immediately tell the difference and no, I hated the effect on text without antialiasing. Furthermore I just don’t think DPI->Inf. My 2014 iMac has the same DPI as my modern desktop.
You could also render the text inside a canvas in a web view, then you have a bit more control over the sampling. If you wanted to stick to a web view for some reason that is. Alternatively you could generate custom bitmap fonts on the fly based on the screen resolution.
I can't keep up with the rapid, non stop cool stuff being discovered! Someone figured out how to get the ESP32 to transmit, at lower bandwidth (I think I read 200-250khz) I don't know which project it was but there are a bunch on this site:
Holy cow... I've got to limit my projects, so I don't repeat history where I kept finding radio shack bags full of parts for ideas. But you can get 3 of those, with external antennas for less than $60 through amazon. I put it in my wish list instead of buying them now. I've got a data diode to finish first.
Sideband on 13 CM sounds like an amazing thing to pull off.
There are companies that sell people's home ip address as a VPN/Proxy for anyone who wants to use it for anything. They call it "residential ip's". People use them for web scraping, but probably tons of illegal stuff too. AI companies use them to not get blocked.
I've heard that they put it in IoT devices, free Android apps that people use on their TVs, free phone apps, games, prob lots more.. The companies advertise it like its super safe only legit normal people borrow the internet from these people but then in fine print it'll say its not our responsibility etc.
What I have been wondering is - since they don't seem to care or check what people are using the "residential ip's" for, what happens when someone does a bunch of illegal stuff on some random person's home IP and ends up raided by cops?
I feel like the world is going in these directions.. the excuse is always "well, they clicked Yes on the Terms of Service! They agreed to it!"
I notice... the newer models, they seem like they want to just "give up" much faster, and you have to put a bunch of extra programming around it (harness, for loops and if then's etc to force it to keep trying)
i am on just the $20 plan and I am using it literally almost all day, 2-3 different projects at the same time, and I am failing to run out! I am naturally always trying to be efficient, its a weird personality trait I have, where I don't try to but I willingly choose to use GPT-6-Luna most of the time now (well 5.6 before that) More Sol lately and for most tasks.. they seem to have the same output, its only super hard things where I kick it up to Astra.
I am so used to doing planning with the best models and switching to Luna, Deepseek 4.1 Flash (really, the cheapest model, and often much better results for lots of things) really people are limiting themselves when they only use one company's models. You really gain a TON by treating each one more like different people with diverse range of personalities, passions, skills, and knowledge.
Today, ChatGPT desktop app was tasked with making 7 variations of new versions of some existing websites of mine - and they all kinda looked the same. I did get lazy with it though.... I can solve that probably, with skills/changing the default frontend skills but also just sending the same task to Reasonix Code w/ deepseek, and some other models, gets some good wide range of outputs.
I'm glad i'm not the only one that noticed w/opencode.. I tried it a few times, every single time... it immediately went bad, didn't work, can't do anything simple like simple file edits.. yet somehow, there are thousands on the internet ready to tell me how great it is!
Opencode looks good in the terminal but that's really the only good thing about it.
I was wondering if I should try to create my own pseudo filesystem with FUSE for easy copy-on-write/snapshots, a native feel, and automated secrets filtering/swapping. I might as well combine that with good/easy isolation.
The whole “what sandbox/VM/microVM/thing is best?” question has been bugging me a lot lately, and I no longer trust any of these AI companies to keep data safe.
I’ve been testing a bunch of sandbox-related projects. Sometimes I just use a full Fedora Workstation VM inside Windows 11 with a shared folder, copy a project into it, and run long agent tasks there. It’s not ideal, but it is pretty safe. Sometimes I run agents in different WSL2 distros and test different things inside those.
I did like gVisor from Google — it’s not quite a microVM, but it’s not really just a normal container either. It wasn't easy to figure out how to get it working tho. Lima Machines worked well too, and I don’t remember it being annoying. SmolVM... ugh. There are two projects with exactly the same name, and it got confusing enough that I gave up. One of them did work when I tried it, though.
The confusing part is that there are now hundreds of sandbox projects, and they all solve slightly different pieces of the problem. Some have filesystem isolation, some have networking controls, some handle credentials better, etc. Nono, for example, has a nice secrets filtering/swapping idea where real credentials can be replaced with dummy values, but there have also been GitHub reports about isolation gaps — data being accessible when it isn’t supposed to be. I’m trying to figure out which projects are worth using, which are worth skipping entirely, and which might just have useful pieces of code or ideas to borrow.
I’ve got GPT-5.6 in one window doing a fairly ridiculous analysis of the different approaches and the likely long-term reliability/adoption risk of each repo. Separately, I have a WSL2 distro running Reasonix with DeepSeek doing its own analysis so I can compare conclusions.
What I eventually want is a desktop GUI over whatever combination of sandbox technologies turns out to be reliable. Ideally I could just type:
“Spin up 5 sandboxes for project X. Put Claude Code in one, Reasonix in #2, Codex in #3…”
or:
“Create 3 sandboxes, put whatever coding agents in 1, 2, and 3, and then have each one run twice.”
If it’s AI-powered, it could automatically name folders and copy results back somewhere like `folderName_3a`, or use Git branches/worktrees if desired. I don’t always want to use Git.
Every sandbox CLI has its own syntax, code quality, reliability, ease/pain of getting it working, configuration format, mount rules, networking options, etc., and I don’t particularly enjoy memorizing another pile of commands just to isolate an agent.
I’ve tried quite a few of them. A lot of them are still rough enough that I hit errors quickly and move on. Some seem much more mature — Lima is one I like conceptually, although native Windows support would be nice but I guess not a huge deal.
Credentials are something I never cared much about (API keys and stuff like that) but now.... I'm more worried. I really don’t want to deal with any problems from that. Or something installing something that grabs SSH keys, browser passwords (FYI.. Z Code asks you "do you wanna import all the logins from chrome?) browser sessions, cloud credentials, or my whole home directory. That concern isn’t limited to Chinese software either. I don’t automatically trust US AI companies just because they’re US companies. Zuck, Elon...zero trust in those two.
So I’m increasingly thinking the “right” answer might not be one sandbox project at all. It may be a GUI/orchestration layer that combines more than one backend and more than one type of sandbox. There could be common default presets and combinations of Git worktrees plus containers and/or VMs. I also feel safer that Docker/Podman on Windows generally runs inside WSL2, because it’s basically containers inside a VM.
The goal would be strong isolation underneath — maybe even combining two or more layers so one failure doesn’t expose everything — plus explicit project-folder mounts with read-only or read/write options, rollback/snapshots, network controls, secrets substitution, disposable environments, and an easy way to fan the same task out to multiple agents/models.
I also like the idea of having an AI model in front of the whole thing, with the ability to save whatever setup it creates as a preset so the AI part can be skipped next time. And I want it to support not only parallel agents using different models, but also loops where the exact same agent setup runs several times.
People actually bought version 1, and still use it, but its mostly free users. Its hard to get people to pay anything.. but i did make about $1000 from v1. People still use it everyday, even though its not AS useful as it was before since agents have improved but it comes in handy.
I can't even get anyone to try buttons cli for free lol, I use it though, to see what codex is doing in terminals (and I like clicking buttons and being able to generate commands faster than googling) https://buttonscli.com/3/
There are people who do not have any words in their heads at all when they think, and there doesn't seem to be any reason to disbelieve them. It may have been proven or at least observed in fMRI. Some people think in visuals.
I think some of this was discovered somewhat recently
I think you're conflating different things. Many people do not have an internal 'narrator'. I am one. I don't have a voice in my head saying words, ever. I do definitely have something like a playback of other people saying things, though. Words are still in there in the form of recall, they are just not part of the executive layer in a way I have access to.
Only if it is a very hard text that I have to move slowly thru. For normal reading, no not at all. If I am trying to read something faster than is comfortable, I will periodically emphasize the thing, the idea, behind a key word, so I am more likely to remember it at the useful time. Not verbal and there are many many times when I can describe the thing but not recall the normal word. Like the flat thing with keys in it instead of keyboard. Or even weird quasi-synonyms that serve to muddy the waters as far as sharing my thoughts with others goes.
Obviously there is a language layer in there somewhere, but my 'driver' doesn't access it. I don't think in words, I don't have an internal narrative, and when I'm reading I don't even 'see' individual words, in the same way you aren't thinking about your ankle muscles when you're hitting the brakes while driving.
I definitely can consciously make words, but it's 'me' deliberately deciding to make them and hold them in my head. It wouldn't happen naturally.
Yes, which maybe is a disadvantage because it limits the speed I read to the speed I can articulate the words in my head. But most of the time I'm not consciously aware of it, just like people who go one step further and move their lips are usually not aware (I assume).
And some people can’t see any pictures in their minds! My partner is one of these people. We both really enjoy reading fiction books, often with a fantasy or sci-fi bent and it genuinely amazes me that they can experience these books in a way that feels wholly alien to me.
The fun of reading to me is constructing the world in my minds eye and turning the words on the page into a visual experience only found in my mind using imagination. This is a reason why many people get upset when a movie adaptation is made and the actor chosen for their favorite character feels very off or wrong; their mental picture of that character is totally different and it causes dissonance that our brains don’t like. For my partner this is a non issue because they never make a mental image of the person, so the movie is genuinely the first time they are “seeing” a physical representation of the character.
The human mind is genuinely amazing and fascinating and I believe that this range of human experience will be the final 20% for “AI” that might never be reproducible.
Does anyone else just end up with a random celebrity 'playing' characters in your brain image of scenes? I find that I generally picture a person that I have seen on TV, with details that don't nessesarily match book character details.
For example, I recently read a novel where there is 'tough lady cop' character and in my brain, entirely involuntarily, the role has been assigned to Brooklyn Nine-Nine's Rosa Diaz in exactly the clothing and context she exists in that TV show.
When the character in the book has a certain clothing or whatever it all kinda glosses over until it's back to the character I have seen before.
I don't know if this is more a male thing or am ADHD thing or what but details of characters dress and looks are pretty much lost on me once there are assigned a character from 'central casting'
> This is a reason why many people get upset when a movie adaptation is made
I still haven't watched the Dune movies because of this reason. I liked the book a lot, and had a very personal image of what the world looked like, and was afraid to lose it. Unfortunately, by now, I've seen many video clips on social media, and my internal imagery has already been poisoned. Might as well watch the movies at this point.
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