When I finished reading it I thought it was an anti-Trump piece, but the author also wrote: "That's why it baffles me that some prominent technologists embrace hateful ideologies.". Was Trump a techie too? He must have been behind the creation of JS.

"The ARM processor which powers the modern world was co-designed by a trans woman." This is not factually correct. Roger Wilson was one of the designers of the processor, but he didn't transition to become Sophie Wilson until 9 years after the first release of ARM1 according to Wikipedia.

Interesting point: was she "trans" before she transitioned, or only afterwards?

Lots of queer folks are pretending to be straight. Or do they only become queer when they emerge from the closet?

Yes, the understanding is that trans people were always trans. It may have taken time for them to understand that and perhaps more to decide to adopt that identity publicly, but they're not "not trans" before that. Other queer identities are generally thought of the same way in queer communities: many people have early experiences (e.g. fixating on same-sex characters in fiction the way peers might opposite-sex characters) that they later realise were early expressions of their orientation.

That makes sense, thanks :)

The author (me) is one of literally dozens of people who doesn't live in the USA. We don't all obsess over a foreign politician.

As for Sophie Wilson, I suggest you speak to your trans friends about whether they were trans before they publicly transitioned.

If you don't have any trans friends, perhaps reflect on why that is.

Man you realize your real name is attached to your incredibly obnoxious snarky replies right?

The transgenderist stance is that once a man announces he is a woman, then he was always a woman and always will be. Unless he detransitions of course. Then he was always a man and always will be. Same for when a woman declares that she is a man.

So a man who builds his entire career as a man, with all the privilege that brings, as Wilson did, can identify as a woman and these prior achievements now all become that of a woman. Even if this stretches plausibility, what with the sexism of the industry at the time. He can even receive accolades reserved for women, as if he had to work ten times as hard to be taken seriously in a male-dominated field.

This rewriting of history is also why, for example, film credits listing Ellen Page have been retrospectively updated to Elliot Page even though there was no Elliot Page at the time of filming.

The code is partly refined AI generated slop and the UX is lacking. The functionality is very basic and needs to be more thoroughly tested. This type of project is half a work day tops for a senior+ dev to create with agentic coding.

May I ask how you made the determination that network-monitor is "partly refined AI generated slop"?

I came to this conclusion as well. The README gives off some vibes but the sheer volume and writing style of the code comments is what really sells it for me. For example:

https://github.com/grigio/network-monitor/blob/9dc470553bfdd...

    // Enhanced styling with column-specific classes and alignment

This sort of marketing-speak isn't what people typically put in their code, LLMs love buzzwords. It's not just this, it's everything, but hopefully you get what I mean.

The mindless code comments are a dead giveaway. It's always the same pattern of: "a thing" <--- here is a thing Generally a dev would clean these up, but when they don't it's a major red flag to me that it's just unreviewed vibe coded slop.

- "Electron comes with a few rather significant drawbacks" Not going to mention them at all though? - what possible reason could one have to use Next with Electron? Not everything needs to be in Next and there's no reason for SSR + Node.js API server (primary advantages of Next vs React) when the client and server are on the same machine. The author's solution is to wrap this with another dubious framework (Nextron looks abandoned and hasn't been updated for over 10 months btw) to force them to somehow work together. Like why? - the idea behind Tauri to leverage the user's system's webview may sound like free real estate, but as many Cordova devs have previously found out, it's incredibly risky when you have no control of your own runtime. Desktop webviews are not a uniform layer. Ex. Webrtc is not supported on Linux webviews.

Yeah, it makes zero sense to use a SSR framework for an Electron app. Just use React, Vue, or Svelte directly. It's one of the few use cases where a SPA makes sense, since the bundle is being served locally.

They do mention bloat and memory usage

That's how the pros do it. Yes, you can load both a text and image gen models at the same time. Needless to say you'll need a very beefy GPU(s) to do this so I wouldn't recommend it unless you know exactly what you're doing as generally you'll want to max out your VRAM for one model at a time for the highest quality results. Open webui and sillytavern allow both text and image gen from the same UI although I wouldn't recommend it for advanced users. Otherwise Gerbil will give you multiple pages to toggle through via the titlebar dropdown.

I would personally never use an out-of-the-box browser because of this. Instead of Firefox I use(d) LibreWolf which strips out all the Mozilla trash. I'd argue that all gecko-based browsers are "bad" and Mozilla has been largely incompetent for many, many years now with failing to modernize their browser engine. As I remember, their current CEO fired the entire team responsible for a modernizing their browser codebase in order to focus on the type of crap described in this article. I strongly believe that by far the best browser out there right now is Brave. However, as with Firefox, it's pretty terrible out-of-the-box and you have to add "local company policy" files in order to be able to strip out all of its web3, AI and other crap that nobody wants. In a way, all modern browsers are the same. I can't wait for more serious competition although I'm doubtful that's it's really possible due to the sheer complexity of the problem, but I do realize that there are some serious contenders coming up in the next few years.

Ladybird might be a good alternative in a couple years

Gerbil's built-in image generation is based on "StableUI" and I also prefer its super simple UI. Yes, you can load your own LoRa from the "Image Generation" tab. Gerbil also includes the optional ComfyUI integration from the settings for very advanced users. Its graph-based UI is a bit too advanced for me personally.

I believe what you're describing is outside of the scope of Gerbil. Gerbil is not an LLM front-end, but Gerbil will run your LLM and seamlessly integrate (orchestrate) it with a custom front-end from the list in my original message. I believe this functionality will need to live in a custom front-end. I'm curious how jan.ai is planning on handling this. I'm guessing they're writing their own custom front-ends which is probably tightly integrated with their system.

Very hopeful of the multi-file stuff from jan.ai --- in the meanwhile, it's easier using Co-pilot for this than:

- isolating 50 files at a time

- dragging them into Adobe Acrobat

- closing each w/ ctrl w

- tapping enter to confirm saving

- typing the Invoice ID

- repeating until all 50 have been done, then remembering to quite Adobe Acrobat so as to re-launch it and repeat (can't leave it running, because there is a (reported) bug where after doing this several times, it stops saving)

- running a batch file made from a concatenated column in a spreadsheet to rename the files

The next question is when there will be an LLM front-end which can:

- open each file in a folder, parsing the content

- open each file in a PDF viewer

- fill in the entry fields of a Java application

- wait for the user to review both windows, if necessary, correct/update what was entered and save, then repeat for the next file

Ah well, job secure, even when that happens (though maybe hours would be cut back?) --- the big question is when LLMs will be reliable enough that human review is no longer viewed as worth the expense of a salary.

Holy, your machine is a beast. 96GB of VRAM is pretty insane. I've been running a single 16GB VRAM AMD GPU. At the bottom of Gerbil's readme I listed out my setup where I use a 27b text gen model (gemma 3) but you'll be able to use much larger models and everything will run super fast.

Now as for your question, I started out with LM studio too, but the problem is that you'll need to juggle multiple apps if you want to do text gen or image gen or if you want to use a custom front-end. As an example, my favorite text gen front-end is "open webui" which gerbil can automatically set up for you (as long as you have Python's uv pre-installed). Gerbil will allow you to run text, image and video gen, as well as set up (and keep updated) any of the front-ends that I listed in my original post. I could be wrong but I'm not sure if LM studio can legally integrate GLP licensed software in the same way that Gerbil can because it's a closed source app.

Thanks for the reply, I'll give Gerbil a try.

You're more trackable by using NoScipt and there's no good reason to use it if you know how to properly use uBlock: https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-don... uBlock is a content blocker so it can do everything NoScript can if you learn its advanced UI usage. Using additional extensions makes you more trackable.

>You're more trackable by using NoScipt and there's no good reason to use it if you know how to properly use uBlock

What data do you have to support this assertion? uBlock doesn't seem to have the ability to selectively enable only JS nessecary for functionality, and if it does, the UI makes it much more difficult to enable.

I just ran a test -- merely uBlock use renders me unique, whereas one in 5742.77 had the same fingerprint as me when using NoScript. (I suspect that's the number of people also using Firefox with NoScript who own this particular monitor size)

A big chunk of the fingerprinting techniques require JS -- it's pretty hard to ascertain what specific extensions are installed with it. I tested disabling it and it didn't seem to do much difference in terms of bits of entropy on EFF's tool.

I encourage you to try for yourself and then think hard on your advice.

I cannot judge the validity of your test and I have done any tests myself. I encourage you to read the link from post to the top firefox hardening resource (arkenfox) that labels NoScript redundant. This is further backed up by another top privacy resource: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/browser-extensions/ This also links to the uBlock docs which outline different modes. Medium/hard modes make NoScript redundant.

>I cannot judge the validity of your test and I have done any tests myself.

I'm going to assume you meant to say "I have not".

If you can't judge the validity, maybe you shouldn't give out advice that might be read by vulnerable populations, given the sources you list do not address my points.