dan

I was trying to remember which brand it was, but it was so long ago now.

I asked ChatGPT and it found it right away: a Simpson Concorde top loader. Australian brand, actually made in Australia back in the day. Acquired by Electrolux in 2001. I can't find any close-up photos of the control panel (as expected, there's not a lot of info about 1990s washing machines online) but ~~I~~ ChatGPT did find a post where someone said their rebalance light was on: https://www.justanswer.com/australia-whitegoods/73wnx-machine-simpson-concorde-741-won-t-go-rebalance-button.html

Not only was Claude not trained on it, but the language is actively trying to be hostile towards it.

It can just be something small! Help a tourist with directions. Help an elderly person cross the road. Give a homeless person some food or water. Things like that.

Just keep in mind that Substack charge a once-off $50 setup fee to add your own domain. I wouldn't ever run a blog on a domain you don't own, as you should have full control over your own branding and persona online.

Try Premiumize. It's probably the best debrid service available today. They usually have a Black Friday sale, so you might want to pay for a month to try it out, then get a year or two for cheap during Black Friday.

If you have an Android streaming box, try it with either Weyd or Syncler. Syncler is a continuation of the old TVZion app, if you ever used that.

In addition to file hosts and torrents like Real Debrid, Premiumize also supports Usenet. You'd still need an indexer like NZBGeek, but you can use your Premiumize account to download .nzb files instead of having to get a separate Usenet subscription. You can use the Premiumize Usenet server in Sabnzbd too, if you ever want to automate downloads using the -arr suite instead of just streaming.

Support is very widespread so clients that don't support it are likely using outdated libraries.

Yeah it's very common for CDNs to transcode images (convert them to a different format) to save bandwidth. Your browser or app tells the server which image formats it supports using the Accept HTTP header, and the server returns the image in the best format it supports. There's been significant improvements to data compression technology in the last 20+ years, and an AVIF file is usually around 50% the size of a comparable JPEG file of similar quality.

Cloudflare does this (although I'm not sure if it's only a paid feature or if it's available on free accounts too), and major services like Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc do it too. At those scales, halving the amount of bandwidth used by images is a significant saving.

If an app gets an image format it doesn't support, it's likely not setting the Accept header correctly.

Edit: There's also JPEG XL which is essentially supposed to be like "JPEG 2.0", but it's not widely supported yet.

In the 90s, my mum's washing machine would stop if you needed to rebalance it, and a "rebalance" light would come on to let you know. It doesn't seem like newer washing machines still do that?

This is interesting because even though they designed the language to be impossible for LLMs to use, Claude still scored nearly 70% on their benchmark.

Help someone in need.

AI is more than just chatbots though, and there's plenty of use cases where it can be used to help people rather than replace them.

I started the year being very sceptical of AI, but it's helping me with a bunch of things at work now. For example, at work we have an agent for data analysis that can find the correct tables to use, gather data, and produce a report, along with proof (all the SQL queries it ran plus any ad-hoc code it used for analyzing the data) so that the work is repeatable and we can verify the accuracy of the queries and logic.

I'm a developer and it's helped a lot with side tasks too. If I'm coding and see an issue in our code (usage of deprecated code, tech debt we need to pay down, etc), I used to file a task or add a todo comment to look into it later, and eventually get to it. A lot of them are small tasks, it's just that I don't always have time to look into them while in the middle of a project.

These days, instead of adding it to a todo list, I just spin up an agent and get it to look at it while I'm working on other things. The resulting code doesn't get submitted for code review until I manually look at it and ensure it's correct. The codebase I work on has never been cleaner, because AI has helped me clean up so much legacy cruft that's accumulated over the years, while I still deliver my regular projects on time.

My personal account cost 3 times as much for the same prompt on my work account.

That's interesting. My employer is too large to use subscriptions and also we have our own harnesses, so they have to pay per token. Some employees spend thousands of dollars (or more) per month, but if they were doing it at home, they'd be easily able to fit the same usage into a $200/m subscription.