I think Apple is really sleeping on making this run a Linux server. These things are very capable and draw very little wattage when idle. It would make an excellent homelab device, but MacOS currently holds it back in this regard.
I'll probably manage with Mac OS well enough, but my linux distro comes out of the box with all the latest OSS tooling I'm familiar with, plus a package manager, and it has linux cgroups and namespaces that power the container technologies we all know and love.
If I switch to Mac OS, I have to sort out a package manager and install all the stuff that's missing, and when it comes to containers... they're just linux VMs. I'd happily cut out the weird proprietary middleman if I could.
Linux for argument’s sake, may have a few things that are better than Mac OS but Apple being the last vertical computer company from the 1980s, I don’t think they have any interest in using Linux, not after Next, Motorola, IBM, Intel and Nvidia in the past. They don’t need to they appear to navigate thru tech very well in comparison to Microsoft or Intel, for example.
Maybe. As a parallel, I know C# and F#. They are programming languages. They are built on top of Microsoft products like the JIT and more basically Assembly language.
I have no idea how assembly works - in my years of experience I’ve never had an issue that required I dig that deep into it. Does that mean I can’t be effective with higher-level tooling because I do not know the absolute basics?
The entire point of a programming language design is to give you an abstracted environment with a complete coherent semantics so that you don't need to understand what's going on under the hood.
You can be effective at using C# and F# to solve other problems specifically because they are very well designed at the goal of abstracting over the lower level hardware. But if your goal is to build an intuition of how programming languages themselves are implemented and how computer hardware works, then, using those languages will be counter productive.
If you're trying to use math to solve arithmetical problems, then by all means using AI to help. But if you're trying to advance the math field itself, then actually knowing how math works is probably essential.
Put in more concrete terms: if someone wants to be a working mathematician without learning the fundamentals of math, then how do they even know what prompts to the AI are worth writing? In what way are they adding any value to the process at all?
I never said one should not know the fundamentals of mathematics, I was trying to express it’s a damned lot easier when once understood you can delegate the lesser aspects to machinery. Abacus, calculator, computer, CAS, now AI: the mathematician’s understanding and intuition are still fundamental, but the instruments they can rely upon are levelling the playing field (and indeed, it is a great field in which to play).
You really ought to study recent developments in the service industry. Olive Garden added a tablet to every table so that customers can place their orders without talking to or waiting for a waiter. The goal was faster, more accurate service, since now the waiter did not need to remember your extremely detailed order.
And yet most people prefer talking to a waiter. There are other restaurants that have tried similar approaches and people would almost always deal with people rather than a robot.
I would love a robot to clean my home and do household chores, but in the service industry I would prefer real humans doing the work.
> ...and people would almost always deal with people rather than a robot.
Here's the thing: they don't give a rat's you-know-what about what you prefer. And it's not just due to arrogance (maximizing profit) it's due to the harsh economic realities of running a service business in the US.
I'm an American who has lived in Asia for many, many years. It's very common in many Asian countries for restaurants and the like to be virtually overstaffed, and many businesses (especially cafes) are open ridiculously long hours. Mostly because labor is cheap and many of these businesses are family-owned, so family members (sometimes including children/teens) perform the labor. And also because the costs of starting a small business and keeping it running are much lower.
Whenever I visit the US, I have to prepare myself for woefully understaffed businesses...that charge 2-3x what a meal, coffee, etc. costs in much of Asia. And many are open for 5 hours a day because they can't stay open longer and make money.
Beggars can't be choosers. The economics of American life, and the expectations that have been bred, have led to a situation in which paying more for less is the norm and it's only going to get worse. Unless you're willing to pay $20 and wait 30 minutes for a cappuccino, expect fewer humans to be serving you.
I'm sure their numbers show the tablet in use, as corporate desires. I place my order with the waitress and she picks up the tablet to place it, citing "that's what they want us to do"
This is my recent experience as well. Models want to run linters, tests, etc. And that is all covered in GitHub actions. So I have been instructing agents to push a draft PR, then I validate the static checks pass and tell the agent if there are issues.
Agents and AI are getting expensive, it seems silly to waste tokens on static checks.
Anyways the most layman way I’ve seen it explained is this: skills help save token usage for the right context. Not every request needs all instructions all the time - running tests is different than reviewing a PR, so why should the context window have instructions for both on every request?
So now you split instructions into “skill” files, which are basically opinionated markdown files. And you invoke those with something like /grill-me in the prompt depending on what you’re doing.
There are some steps to have the agent automatically know what to invoke for you but in my experience this automation is hit or miss.
It is also challenging to keep track of a growing library of skills and keeping those up to date.
So YMMV regarding skills. I typically keep things in a single markdown file even if the context window gets a bit bloated.
Yeah, I get that. I have created dozens of skills, but they are usually to accomplish very specific tasks. Some of them have accompanying scripts, etc.
My point is that this sounds more like a general AGENTS.md use case, similar to defining tone of voice, output format, etc.
It just seems skills is the only way to distribute certain "behavior" as of today. But not everything is a skill IMHO, and not this is not one of them.
On the other hand, maybe we're seeing an evolution of what skills are becoming.
I have always had issues with playing high bitrate BluRay remuxes, with HDR and DTS 5.1+ audio. Granted the last time I tried JellyFin was January 2025 so it is possible this has changed.
I've been using Jellyfin for roughly 5 years, most of my library are Blu-ray remuxes (50-100 GB) and I haven't had a single one fail to play. My setup is Apple TV with Infuse connected to a LG C9 with a modern Yamaha receiver.
Transcoding is a whole can of worms I chose to avoid by playing everything directly.
Infuse is the magic ingredient that avoids the codec/transcoding issues other people sometimes experience. It supports direct play of pretty much every possible video thx to its built-in codecs. I’ve been using it for 2 years and I don’t think I had a single case of transcoding. It is paid, but worth it IMO.
This is almost certainly a you problem. Tons of people play remuxes with Jellyfin.
I would check that your client supports the requisite codecs, and has a sufficient network connection. Or alternatively check that your server has enough horsepower (GPU or CPU) to transcode.
Are you sure the client and the server are powerful enough? Do they support all required codecs? I have issues with 4k movies because my Jellyfin is served by a mac mini, and my client is an old Android tablet that doesn't support hardware decoding, but that is hardly Jellyfin's fault. Though they just updated ffmpeg to the latest version, so it might help.
Can you update the "did not answer" flow to, instead of six busy signals and hanging up, be the dialog to end of the Matrix (1999)? The film concludes with Neo talking into a phone booth phone to the audience and I think it would be fitting here as an Easter egg.
Yes, that wouldn't be hard with the normal voip.ms call routing.
But my intent was for it to be as visually and functionally identical as possible to a phone booth you would've found on a street corner a few decades ago, just in an unusual place (and free). I've avoided anything in the normal usage of it that would deviate from that.
I've implemented this. There's no random function with voip.ms, but there are time-based rules. So it'll play the Matrix easter egg about 1/90th of the day after no answer.
And the other 1%, a call from the Machine (Person of Interest) with a Dewey Decimal System number callout. It would be even better if the booth itself rang and when somebody nearby answered, you get the numbers.
For those in need of a refresher, the dialogue is "“I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you."
Its like reading reddit comments now. Many of them are generated by AI and bots, and they sound just like real people. Or advertisers masquerading as regular people recommending specific products.
It used to be fairly obvious (using em dashes, etc) but now AI writing, with the correct guidance, is very much the same as regular conversational writing.
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