We’ve become so…jaded. I remember flying home from Japan, watching movies on my Ipad and dicking around on the net via inflight wifi. Literally flying over the ocean, in a chair, in the sky, with a supercomputer the size of a book, using invisible waves to communicate instantaneously across the globe.
Yawn.
Our calibration for extraordinary is out of whack. That’s the issue, I think.
You’re welcome :) This video discusses / shows some automation ideas, using a prebuilt kit you can grab
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrreIi8LCiw
I have no affiliation with them (other than i thought of the exact same idea he did, about 12 months after him, lol). You can see it in action from about 3 mins in.
It’s not the most impressive stuff possible, but the side by side screen give you and idea of what’s under the hood.
You already know the answer, I think. It’s because they didn’t land.
Orbiting the moon - super cool. Seeing new stuff from far side - super cool. Emotional investment in something we’ve more or less done before? Well…
Which is actually a damn shame, but brains are funny like that. The entirety of human progress (and hubris) is down to chasing the next dopamine hit - and that probably includes the original moon shot.
Artemis is asking you to feel the same thing twice. Your lizard brain isn’t stupid - it’s just honest and lazy. If novelty is the drug, then this isn’t a new drug. It’s a carefully rebranded rerun with better CGI and a press kit. Plus, you’ve probably had a lot of other proxy hits to the ol’ reward center so that something as big as “humans in a tin can fly around the moon” just registers as “meh - I’ve seen better on For All Mankind”.
And I hate that for us.
^ exactly that.
Also, I suspect that’s the reason for Claude famously telling everyone to “go to bed” all the time. That bastich cannot run time and date as a background check reliably…it wings it based on start of conversation. Bitch I type a lot and fast…stop tellling me to go to bed at 9pm.
I expect it will get patched soon.
An endearing quirk…but it exposes the wiring if you know. Still, doesn’t make the trick any less impressive when it hits.
Good question. Short answer: not quite.
The LLM is the reasoning layer. It reads your input, figures out intent, and outputs structured instructions. They have a method that achieves that (MCP).
Something else like Home Assistant, n8n, a Python script, whatever you’ve set up actually executes the actions. The LLM interacts with those things.
So for the calendar example: your email client triggers on a booking reply, passes the text to the LLM, the LLM extracts the date/time/location and outputs something structured, and then your automation tool creates the calendar event and sets the reminder. Once it’s set up, it looks and feels like one thing, because you interact with it via the LLM (or even better - you vocally tell the LLM. Yes, JARVIS).
So the LLM never “talks to” Google Calendar directly, it just does the bit that’s hard to do with traditional code, which is reading messy natural language and making sense of it.
Same for Home Assistant. The LLM parses “turn the lights down a bit, it’s movie time, play something sci-fi” into a device + action + value, and HA does the actual switching.
The secret sauce that makes this work is MCP (Model Context Protocol) - basically a standardised way for LLMs to talk to tools and services.
Instead of custom glue code for every integration, you wire up an MCP server once and the model knows how to use it.
Growing library of them now: filesystems, calendars, browsers, databases, smart home etc.
Anthropic open-sourced the spec, most major local LLM frontends support it.
Think of it like hiring a translator who can manage your crew, rather than hiring someone who speaks every language and also has keys to every building and is also a plumber/electrician/contractor/interior designer, if that makes sense.
TL;DR: once you set up the stack, then the cool automation stuff can happen. Not a big ask, just a bit fiddly, like learning to program your VCR.
Super surprised Google’s AI doesn’t have the stack / harness inbuilt tho. They could afford to do a lot of the heavy lifting invisibly. I bet they actually do and it’s just … shit. Or a paid extra lol.
Some examples
That’s probably just the basics. People have some clever uses for these things. It’s not just summarize this document
What sort of coding and what sort of automation tasks? The latter is an easier ticket to fill than the former, though I might have an idea for you on that end if coding is a must
Sorry - don’t have Android Auto so couldn’t tell you. Please report back if you do?
I’ll take that as a thank you :) It’s good, ya?
I get where you’re coming from, but the issue isn’t that YouTube makes money, it’s how aggressively they’re doing it simultaneously.
The platform runs on creator content, yet payout rates, especially for smaller channels, have barely moved while YouTube’s revenue keeps growing. They’re squeezing every side of the equation at once while the people actually making the product worth watching see the least of it.
Ad-blocking isn’t theft. It’s a rational response to a platform that’s decided unskippable ads are acceptable on top of an already profitable model. If the value exchange felt fair, fewer people would bother. Early days of streaming showed that people accept a fair deal. Enshittification has driven many of us back to the seven seas.
Izzat anything like FreeBSD?
The second one, sadly :(
Still, the infra is there. So, it’s one of those “if you build it, they will come” (eventually) things. Maybe.
Huh, Pipeline. OK, I’ll look into that. No point in reinventing the wheel.
I was poking around Grayjay last night and saw that a lot of extensions I had in mind had already been added, but still no lean back couch mode (at least, without casting from phone).
That might work for you and I but isn’t generalizable (eg: kids, elder kin etc).
If Pipeline has an android TV fork, it will save me from engineering something out of spite.
PS: network effect is real but we / they forget sometimes that other things exist. YouTube is a frivolous luxury…and the quality has been sliding for a long time.
There are (very few) content creators I regularly watch on YT that aren’t elsewhere - the rest is opportunistic crap and brain rot the kids are in to.
I can engineer around all of that. Most people could.
It would be the work of a weekend to yt-dlp the vids I’d like to keep and then switch off. Hell, I’d set up PinchFlat to run as a cron job twice a week an d/l shit into a folder so I can watch it off line if I have to.
Thinking out loud; I’d need a janitor process too: age-based expiry by default, but treat user likes as a retention signal. Thumbs-up could promote a video to a 30-day TTL; hard cap retention at 2 extensions unless explicitly locked, in which case it gets moved to a permanent archive folder.
If I cap quality to 720p, 1TB gets me rolling stock of what…2000 vids? 5000?
I could integrate that directly as an auto updating folder in JF or Nova Player…shit…now I want to do it.
Anyway, the second Smarttube dies (it will; it’s too good at what it does) or the m.youtube pipe dries up, people will leave in droves.
My guess - and this is a guess - is that Google is deliberately playing whack-a-mole rather than going for one giant hard lockout all at once, because too much pain too quickly risks pushing people to the alternatives.
Boiling frog and all that.
A vile den of scum and villainy :)
YouTube is too big to fail” is not the flex you think it is.
No, I do not expect any one of those platforms to “become YouTube.” That is not the point. The point is reducing dependence on a platform that has spent years making itself worse because it assumes users have nowhere else to go.
Fuck that and fuck them.
Scale? Things do not need to match YouTube’s total global footprint to be useful.
They need to serve actual human beings well enough that migration becomes viable.
That is how this starts: not with 2 billion people moving at once, but with chunks of users, creators, and communities deciding they’re sick of eating shit.
As for “will the videos stay there forever?”
They are not staying on YouTube forever either. Videos get demonetised, geo-blocked, copyright-nuked, hidden by algorithmic sludge, or deleted all the time.
Centralisation does not guarantee permanence. It guarantees dependence.
I’m not for that.
That is why people mirror, self-host, archive, syndicate, and build bridges between platforms.
People imagine only one possible future: “Everyone stays on YouTube because YouTube is big.”
I am pointing at the much more obvious one:
“YouTube keeps enshittifying itself until more and more people route around it.”
It does not have to die overnight. It just has to become less necessary.
Soon enough, YT will block all the clever back doors we use with uBlock, Smartube, Revanced, Newpipe etc. Then what? Eat shit? Nah.
This thread has inspired me to roll up my sleeves and see what I can think thru. I already have a back of napkin idea for a basic MVP that joins all those services I mentioned into 1 front end. I will make it for myself and when its solid enough, throw it up on Codeberg for others to fork and improve.
Do you know Language Jones at all? He has some good ideas on this very thing. Eg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQXiSGDXknA
Yes, the irony of using an LLM to learn a language is not lost on me, but the combination he suggests (including italki) and the other tools he recommends make it seem like a great use case.