DAMMIT

The project I’m actually most excited about is exactly the “use the carpentry” one you pointed at: software for CNC and laser machines. I’ve got a laser at home that’s made me a lot of inlays and gifts over the years, and the existing tools (LightBurn etc.) are good but kept missing the technical, specialist features I wanted - so I started building my own. It’s called Nexus Studio.

Ayyyy yeah that’s what I’m talking about! (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞

That’s a really cool project dude, if it’s public I’d love a link to check it out! (I tried Googling, to no avail) I have a friend who has both a CNC machine and a laser cutter (a fuckoff-huge thing the size of a desk, that can cut metal), so your work on that might be helpful to us 😊

In any case, good luck and I hope those resources help. Drop me a DM if you want to talk shop!

Ah, you’re alright mate. Like I said, I got the same guff when I posted my first project here, and it sucked. I wanted to offer my advice because I think it’s brilliant that AI is opening up development to a whole new raft of people, and I’m excited to see more people building neat little software projects that fill their needs - we get to watch peoples’ journeys unfold through repo commits. It’s like watching someone’s first Dark Souls playthrough.

I have another bit of feedback which I hope might be helpful: Everyone is building an encrypted messaging app these days. Do something new, and use your carpentry experience to inform what that something is. You have a wealth of knowledge and this thing is an incredible tool for augmenting that, see if you can solve an old hard problem with it!

See, now I want to help again 😂 What tools are you using and do you have any harnesses set up and what’s your system prompt like? The beautiful thing about agents is that you can just point them at repos and have them cherrypick the useful bits. Here’s a few that you may find useful:

• https://github.com/obra/superpowers
• https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail
• https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94f (strong recommend for organisation and human readability, also reduces token use handily)
• https://github.com/obelisk-complex/hermes-agent (this is my fork of Hermes that adds an on_output hook, but it includes my custom self-checking harness that I built for myself as well)
• https://github.com/obelisk-complex/claude-agents (My Claude Code agents, also good for cherrypicking generally but especially the QA agents)

I’m surprised you think I care. I’ve seen what you’re dumb enough to fall for.

Imagine thinking you know all there is to know about AI and then using an AI Detector which are famously bullshit: https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-work/

You don’t need an AI detector. The patterns are obvious. But that’s also the wrong criticism. Rolling your own encrypted messenger app is dumb, whether you use AI or not. Setting up and hardening a Matrix server with AI == godbrain. That’s just implementing (battle-tested) software that someone who knows what they’re doing wrote.

I considered it, and the point stands. I came here offering advice - good advice, grounded in two decades of IT career, because nobody who cares about security rolls their own app with encryption unless they know what they’re doing. There’s too much risk of a bad implementation and leaving holes for bad actors to find.

They can just do what I do and use AI to set up their Matrix server. I set it up before AI was a thing too, but it’s so much faster now. That uses a lot less tokens, too. But they don’t seem particularly interested in actually taking advice onboard, so I’m not holding my breath.

edit: well that’s refreshing, he listened! Don’t get that on the internet too often these days.

You asked for criticism and advice, and that’s exactly what I offered. It’s based on my own experience here. I was offering it to be helpful. Just what exactly are you trying to achieve with this response? Because yeah, I’m not getting attacked, I’m getting lectured. For offering advice when it was solicited.

I’m certain you don’t see the problem here, so I’m out. But for the love of Christ, just use AI to set up, harden, and manage a Matrix server instead of wasting tokens building your own application. You’ll end up with something much more secure than an app with a possibly-bad crypto implementation that you don’t have the experience to see, find, or fix.

I think you’ll find I didn’t accuse you of trying to deceive anyone, I just suggested that you not gloss over using AI in your projects. Because yes, in my experience people here take it very badly if it looks like you’re trying to present AI generated work as your own (note: that doesn’t have to be your intent, it just has to look like it was). I was trying to be helpful, and as far as I can see my wording and tone were mild, so I see no reason that my comment should have made you feel unwelcome. The more fool me for the attempt, I guess.

Man, your writing here all reads like Claude after I’ve given it a list of “AI tells” to avoid in its writing. There’s structural patterns that are pretty easy to see when there are so many samples right next to each other. I strongly suggest not trying to gloss over your use of AI in your projects when posting about them; some people will always hate, but most I think don’t mind AI code as long as it’s been tested properly and doesn’t have any more bugs than you’d find in any other project.

Problem is, testing encryption properly is difficult, and there’s a lot more to a messenger application than just sending encrypted messages. That’s my criticism: you’re reinventing the wheel for no good reason.

My best advice is to set up a Matrix server if you really don’t trust Signal, rather than trying to roll your own. Its a lot less work, a lot more secure, and you can modify the source anyway if it doesn’t do what you need.

Ahhhh fair play. I have a lot of freedom since I’m paying out of pocket for my own use. I have a pretty beefy rig for running local, but it’s not beefy enough to run deepseek pro and the like 😬 so, I have a bunch of subscriptions to try out a bunch of different models and see what works best in my workflow. I also have a problem with making alts in games, which seems like it rhymes 🤔

Been pretty impressed with glm5.1 too, before deepseek-v4 came out, but you’d be amazed what even a smaller older coding model can do with the right config and a little proactive context management. I really hope this trend of smaller, better models for local agentic use continues.

I’ve been using deepseek v4 flash on opencode’s infra for a couple of weeks and it’s pretty solid for something so low-cost. Honestly satisfied with it over Claude, for the premium Anthropic charges. Have you tried it at all?

“Both” is also acceptable.

I am not patronising and that was not my intent. Read whatever you want into it of course, I can’t stop you.

Well, sure, and I appreciate your sanguinity haha! I just main support, and felt your question deserves a proper answer.

I am planning on answering when I’m at a computer, as well, because I actually do have a matrix server set up with Synapse and MAS. Quick question though, when you ask how it works, do you mean the actual backend, or are you asking if the performance/user experience is good?

Don’t get me wrong, suggestions are appreciated, but you’re answer is absolutely typical of a Stack overflow “huhuh well don’t do it wrong then” comment. You could have, for example, said you don’t use Synapse but this is why you like Continuwuity. (edit: not prescribing speech, giving an example of how your comment could have read better)

As well, I take issue with the idea that people can only ask for help in sanctioned forums. This is a self-hosting community, after all; I am here not only to learn but to share what I learn, which I thought was the whole point.

What is this, StackOverflow? You didn’t answer their question and instead just told them to use a different solution.

Ah, I’ll put in a zoom feature, that’s a good idea!

Remind me of the hardware you’re running on? 22 hours for a 4k HDR movie sounds about in the ballpark for converting on CPU. I’ve just switched to Linux (Mint, not Cachy) and I think there’s an issue with detecting GPU on Linux, so this’d track (or you have Precision Mode enabled) - if you see “libx265” or “libx264” in the top right, you’re on CPU. I’m looking into this one.

Can I ask which version you downloaded? I’ll look into the DVTools/MP4box issue.

Also, yes, I removed the codec and container selection boxes - it’s HEVC/MKV by default unless you go for “Compatibility Mode” in which case you get H.264/MP4. “Preserve AV1” of course preserves AV1 which is incompatible with MP4 so they’re mutually exclusive.

So… How’s it working? 😅 (Just realised it’s been a while since I’ve touched HISTV and this came to mind, I’ve been working on my business and day job)

LLMs will never be people

Boy oh boy, you’re not gonna like this one bit: https://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/335288388/when-did-companies-become-people-excavating-the-legal-evolution

(To be clear, I understand you think you covered this with “computers may be” but my point is different: the law is often dumb and you would be amazed at what politicians who don’t understand tech - or get paid not to understand it - will pull off)

Edit: Downvotes from people who missed the point. You can’t say “LLMs will never be people” because you simply can’t guarantee your/our lawmakers won’t be that stupid.

Ah, what version did you try? This is due to issues with the renderer, but I just got this fixed by disabling GPU drawing for the form last night. Give 2.5.9 a go 😊