Well, if I am going to push this into the project I envision, privacy is going to be key, so everything will be done locally.

Reasonable! And yes languagetool has some online AI thing, probably a junky wrapper around an LLM API TBH.

One thing I’d be wary of is… well, showing you’re using AI?

As a random example, I helped clean up a TV show a long time ago, with mixed results. More recently, I brought the idea of making another attempt to the fandom, and got banned for even considering “AI,” with most of them clearly oblivious to how the original restoration was made… I have a little personal writing project going too, and wouldn’t dare bring it up to the fandom either.

I don’t know what’s involved in your project, but be aware that you may get some very hostile interaction if it’s apparent you use diffusion models and LLMs as helpers.

You don’t strictly need a huge GPU. These days, there are a lot of places for free generations (like the AI Horde), and a lot of quantization/optimization that gets things running on small VRAM pools if you know where to look. Renting GPUs on vast.ai is pretty cheap.

Also, I’d recommend languagetool as a locally runnable (and AI free/CPU only) grammar checker. It’s pretty good!

As for online services, honestly Gemini Pro via the AI Studio web app is way better and way more generous than ChatGPT, or pretty much anything else. It can ingest an entire story for context, and stay coherent. I don’t like using Google, but if I’m not paying them a dime…

Before it was hot, I used ESRGAN and some other stuff for restoring old TV. There was a niche community that finetuned models just to, say, restore classic SpongeBob or DBZ or whatever they were into.

These days, I am less into media, but keep Qwen3 32B loaded on my desktop… pretty much all the time? For brainstorming, basic questions, making scripts, an agent to search the internet for me, a ‘dumb’ writing editor, whatever. It’s a part of my “degoogling” effort, and I find myself using it way more often since it’s A: totally free/unlimited, B: private and offline on an open source stack, and C: doesn’t support Big Tech at all. It’s kinda amazing how “logical” a 14GB file can be these days, and I can bounce really personal/sensitive ideas off it that I would hardly trust anyone with.

…I’ve pondered getting back into video restoration, with all the shiny locally runnable tools we have now.

F me…

Does no one see the propaganda potential for this? Yeah, let’s give one guy more intimate, influential control over the psyche of hundreds of millions.

Yeah I mean it really depends on the app.

If it just occasionally peaks, maybe modest zram and low swappiness is all you need.

But sometimes i crack it up (and basically disable zram) because I’m paging like 4x my RAM pool size onto ssds with big files.

Try it here instead, set the temperature to like 0.1 or 0.2, and be sure to set 2.5 Pro:

https://aistudio.google.com/

It is indeed still awful for many things. It’s a text prediction tool, not a magic box, even though everyone advertises it kinda like the later.

Gemini 2.5? Low temperature, like 0.2?

The one they use in search is awful, and not the same thing. Also, it’s not all knowing, you gotta treat it like it has no internet access (because generally it doesn’t).

It can be grounded in facts. It’s great at RAG. But even alone, Gemini 2.5 is kinda shockingly smart.

…But the bigger point is how Google presents it. It shouldn’t be the top result of every search just thrown into your face, it should be a opt-in, conditional feature with clear warnings, and only if it can source a set of whitelisted, reliable websites.

The irony is Gemini is really good (like significantly better than ChatGPT), and cheap for them (no GPUs needed), yet somehow they made it utterly unbearable in search.

Fffffff, that’s even worse.

Honestly the niche subs I visit are either cesspools or “brain drained” now, and unfortunately not much critical mass is here on Lemmy… Seems most went to Twitter, Insta/Tiktok or maybe Discord.

The heck is this title?

YouTube says goodbye to decade-old video player UI, but users hate the new design

Meanwhile, the article itself just cites a few tiny aesthetic changes and like four random Reddit comments. Doesn’t seem like they even tried it themself… That’s justifications for 460 upvotes?

It’s okay for zapping low-effort bots, but there should always be a way for humans to deal with it…

I literally don’t know why I’m shadowbanned though, I didn’t do anything even adjacently controversial!

I guess I just talk like a bot? Not that they ban those, ha…

But yeah that’s what gets me, if there was some stated reason for a shadowban or permanent I’d be understanding, but zero feedback? Really?

I have two accounts, with lots of karma, inexplicably shadowbanned. All I do is post in like 3 niche interest tech/fandom subs, zero politics or hostility.

The appeals page is like a black hole. No explanation, no process, no results.

I don’t even know anymore.

Good practice is putting anything important on an encrypted USB drive (as that stuff usually isn’t very big), and just treating the machine as “kinda insecure”

If you set up a BIOS password, someone at least needs to unscrew your computer to get stuff. But this is generally not setup because people, well, forget their passwords…

Oh yeah, its more than that. Low weight helps acceleration, braking (so safety), handling, range, wear on every component, and most of all, cost. The same sized tires will need less pressure, wear much less, and grip harder. If the car is lighter, you don’t need as stiff a chassis, nor as much braking to lock the wheels, less battery, motor, which means you can take even more weight off the car… You get where I’m going.

Racecars are fast because they are light, not because they have big engines and expensive bodies. Little 1500lb cars can lap a $3 million 1500hp (and quite heavy, because of all the stuff in it) Bugatti around a track.

Heavy cars can handle OK, but the cost is big.

+1

Weight is everything. Removing it makes almost literally every aspect of a car better, and it’s usually a terrible negative for EVs.

Good!

I’m hoping Arc survives all this?

I know they want to focus, but no one’s going to want their future SoCs if the GPU part sucks or is nonexistent. Heck, it’s important for servers, eventually.

Battlemage is good!

It was selectively given to institutions and “major” celebrities before that.

Selling them dilutes any meaning of “verified” because any joe can just pay for extra engagement. It’s a perverse incentive, as the people most interest in grabbing attention buy it and get amplified.

It really has little to do with Musk.