In case anyone is wondering you can download a stardict of the shorter oxford english dictionary (and most of the other dictionaries mentioned in this thread!) and have a local copy then use software like stardict or svdc to look up. I actually put up a copy on the internet archive earlier this year. Good timing huh? https://archive.org/details/soedrich-star-dict-2022-11-11

Does your kid like minecraft? Make a game with them on the minetest/luanti engine. For a base game you can use Minetest Game or a minecraft clone like Mineclonia and follow this modding book. Have the kid make 16x16px textures in gimp and you can rtegister some modded blocks Its as easy as this:

minetest.register_node(“default:stone”, { description = S(“Stone”), tiles = {“default_stone.png”}, groups = {cracky = 3, stone = 1}, drop = “default:cobble”, legacy_mineral = true, sounds = default.node_sound_stone_defaults(), })

https://www.luanti.org/en/

https://rubenwardy.com/minetest_modding_book/en/index.html

A fun weekend project was to set up a local model to tool call from openweather and wolfram alpha through their API for factual dataset retrieval and local weather info.

Someone In our community showed off toolcalling articles on local instance of Wikipedia through a kiwix server and zim file and that seems really cool project too.

I would like to scrape preprints from ArXiv and do basic rag with them. Also Try to find a way to have a local version of OEIS or see if theres an API to scrape.

So I guess my solution is to use automation tools to automate data retrieval from wiki’s and databases directly. Use RSS, direct APIs, scrapers and tool calling.

Also detecting filter keywords within the image would be nice

I didnt know they had that many E’s for shoes, my condolences.

Eh. Meme consumers are riding a pointless high horse on this one. On one hand yes there is arguably a human aspect to manual creation thats lost and theres still plenty of screwups in generated details if you look closely. On the other hand memes and edited silly cat pictures are not high art, they’re the low effort fast food quick consumption equivalent of images. We call them shitpost, I mean come on.

The whole point of an image is to activate a series of neurons in your brain that excite certain patterns to convey information to you. The whole point of a meme is to do this to convey humor or a poorly vieled political message with little creation efforts and high resharability.

In the beforefore times you had to actually paint and color by hand on a piece of paper, make models and set pieces out of materials like clay, cut up printed pictures to stitch them together.

Then we could digitize everything, create models and animations with clicks of the button, edit images easily through software, and share our creations effortlessly. This lead to the rise of the Internet’s first generation of memes with stuff like the dancing baby and flashgrounds references and caption memes.

Now its completely effortless with machine learning models trained to create images/sounds/videos from simple sentence instructions. It probably my takes a minute for someone to instruct image models to boilerplate an acceptable picture through typing a few keywords, or import an existing image and instruct edits. All without the need to learn the ins and outs of image manipulation software, 3d modeling software, ect.

Why spend an hour to make an edit in gimp for maybe a few dozen people to look at it once, go “heh” and immediately forget about it as they doomscroll past.

Unlike most jerkasses with an armchair opinion ive actually cooked some comics and memes in my day for the internets consumption. Sometimes Ive spent way longer than I should have in gimp just to make a funny edit. I’m happy these tools exist to let people engage with visual creation on their own terms. If you don’t have time or hardware for learning gimp to crop a meme I won’t be on my high horse telling you that your bad and your images are fundamental wrong just because you had a computer/model boilerplate it for you from some keyword prompting. Fuck em, they get the slop they deserve to consume.

I’ve pumped at least a few hours into at least 90% of the games I own, gave each entry a fair shake, and either moved on or come back to it now and again. Its the rare exception that the game is so up my alley I can pour endless hours into it without the experience getting boring.

I don’t care about achievements or even completing it. I play games mainly to try out a new experience and get the brain working in different ways. Some of my favorite games I can pump many hours into and have completed, rougelikes especially are infinitely replayable. But others are once and done experiences I got my fill of over the course of a couple of hours and have no desire to come back to. Theres no shame in being the later.

Firefox has been slowly ramping up AI integration and data collection/telemetry. Fortunately theres many forks that rip all that out. Librewolf and ironfox are good examples.

The truth is Mozilla is not profitable as a company and FF would have died a long time ago if Google didn’t pay up to keep them alive to help avoid monopoly busting suits. In a worse timeline we don’t even have modern FF to fork from or ublock in 2025.

Gotta get the bakugan balls in there too