No. MIDI controllers have their place, but many people work without one, or only use one for live performances. There are often also way more knobs in the various FX chains in a DAW than you would reasonably want to map to a controller, but still want to touch at least a few times while making a song.
Knobs are confusing when converted to a mouse paradigm because there can be a few strategies to control them (click+drag up/down, click+drag right/left, weird rotational things, etc), and you have to guess since each FX studio and software may implement it just a little different.
For the sake of easy reference, I'll leave the relevant snippet from the linked article so people can decide for themselves with a bit more information:
> Another important note - some binary blobs and other non-free software components are used today in PebbleOS and the Pebble mobile app (ex: the heart rate sensor on PT2 , Memfault library, and others). Optional non-free web services, like Wispr-flow API speech recognizer, are also used. These non-free software components are not required - you can compile and run Pebble watch software without them. This will always be the case. More non-free software components may appear in our software in the future. The core Pebble watch software stack (everything you need to use your Pebble watch) will always be open source.
Some more details from the Apollinaire wikipedia page:
> On 7 September 1911, police arrested and jailed Apollinaire on suspicion of aiding and abetting the theft of the Mona Lisa and a number of Egyptian statuettes from the Louvre, but released him a week later. The theft of the statues had been committed in 1907 by a former secretary of Apollinaire, Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret, who had recently returned one of the stolen statues to the French newspaper the Paris-Journal. Apollinaire implicated his friend Picasso, who had bought Iberian statues from Pieret, and who was also brought in for questioning in the theft of the Mona Lisa, but he was also exonerated. In fact, the theft of the Mona Lisa was perpetrated by Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian house painter who acted alone and was only caught two years later when he tried to sell the painting in Florence.
Just chiming in here - any time I've written something online that considers things from multiple angles or presents more detailed analysis, the liklihood that someone will ask if I just used ChatGPT go way up. I worry that people have gotten really used to short, easily digestible replies, and conflate that with "human". Because of course it would be crazy for a human to expend "that much effort" on something /s.
EDIT: having said that, many of the other articles on the blog do look like what would come from AI assistance. Stuff like pervasive emojis, overuse of bulleted lists, excessive use of very small sections with headers, art that certainly appears similar in style to AI generated assets that I've seen, etc. If anything, if AI was used in this article, it's way less intrusive than in the other articles on the blog.
Author here - yes, this was written using guided AI. I consider this different than giving a vague prompt and telling it to write an article. My process was to provide all the information, for example I used AI to:
1. transcribe the phone call into text using whisper model
2. review all the email correspondence
3. research industry news about the breach
4. brainstorm different topics and blog structures to target based on the information, pick one
5. Review the style of my other blog articles
6. write the article and redact any personal info
7. review the article and suggest iterate on changes multiple times.
To me this is more akin to having a writer on staff who can save you a lot of time. I can do all the above in less than 30mins, where it could take a full day to do it manually. I had a blog 20 years ago but since then I never had time to write content again (too time consuming and no ROI) - so the alternative would be nothing.
There are some still some signs you can tell content is AI written based on verbosity, use of bold, specific HTML styling, etc. I see no issues with the approach. I noticed some people have an allergic reaction to any hint of AI, and when the content produced is "fluff" with no real content I get annoyed too - however that isn't the case for all content.
The issue is that the article is excessively verbose; the time you saved in writing end editing comes at the cost of wasting readers' time. There is nothing wrong with using AI to improve writing, but using it to insert fluff that came at no cost to you and no benefit to me feels like a violation of social contract.
Please, at least put a disclaimer on top so I can ask an AI to summarize the article and complete the cycle of entropy.
> [...] I can do all the above in less than 30mins, where it could take a full day to do it manually [...]
Generating thousands of words because it's easy is exactly the problem with AI generated content. The people generating AI content think about quantity not quality. If you have to type out the words yourself, if you have to invest the time and energy into writing the post, then you're showing respect for your readers by making the same investment you're asking them to make... and you are creating a natural constraint on the verbosity because you are spending your valuable time.
Just because you can generate 20 hours of output in 30 minutes, doesn't mean you should. I don't really care about whether or not you use AI on principle, if you can generate great content with AI, go for it, but your post is classic AI slop, it's a verbose nightmare, it's words for the sake of words, it's from the quantity over quality school of slop.
> I had a blog 20 years ago but since then I never had time to write content again (too time consuming and no ROI) - so the alternative would be nothing.
Posting nothing is better than posting slop, but you're presenting a false dichotomy. You could have spent the 30 minutes writing the post yourself and posted 30 minutes of output. Or, if you absolutely must use ChatGPT to generate blog posts, ask it to produce something that is a few hundred words at most. Remember the famous quote...
"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."
If ChatGPT can do hundreds of hours of work for you then it should be able to produce the shortest possible blog post, it should be able to produce 100 words that say what you could in 3,000. Not the other way around!
If you can't be bothered to spend even an hour writing something up, especially allegations of this magnitude, then chances are you know it's actually not an article with any content worth reading.
Sure, the problem here isn't a lack of veracity in regard to your source material. Many readers are also concerned with the stilicisms and prose of the articles they read. I don't care particularly that the complete article wasn't written by a human. The generic LLM style is however utterly unbearable to me. It is overly sensational and verbose, while lacking normal sized paragraphs of natural text. It's reminiscent of a poor comic except extrapolated to half the stuff which gets posted to HN.
I get you, It grinds my gears. I've been told that I "Talk" like an LLM because I go into detail and give thorough explanations on topics. I'm not easily insulted but that was a first for me. I used to get 'human wikipedia' before, and before that 'walking dicitonary' which I always thought was reductive but it didn't quite irk me as much as being told my entire way of communicating is reminiscent of a bot. So perhaps I take random accusations of LLM use to heart, even if it does seem overwhelmingly likely to be true.
You're getting downvoted for being right. Attempt being nuanced and people will call you a robot.
Well if that's how we identify humans I for one prefer our new LLM overlords.
A lot of people who say stuff like "boo AI!" are not only setting the bar for humanity very low, they're also discouraging intellectualism and intelligent discourse online. Honestly, if a LLM wrote a good think piece, I prefer that over "human slop".
I just wish people would critique a text on its own merits instead of inventing strawman arguments about how it was written.
Oh and, for the provocative effect — I'll end my comment with an em dash.
What are you comparing it to or what do you feel is missing? Remote desktop has gotten way better on Linux since the days of only X-Forwarding or VNC, at least from a performance perspective.
I tried just about everything a couple of years ago. Various VNC variants, X2Go etc.
They all sucked in terms of speed/performance compared to Windows-to-Windows RDP, and none allowed for starting a new desktop session if user wasn't already logged in, or resuming existing session if present. Both essential to me.
Many lacked some features like clipboard, file transfer, sound. First two are hard requirements as well.
I see things have been moving, so I'm hoping things become viable in a year or three.
This is really cool, so thanks for sharing. Since the motivating goal for the question you are answering is WCAG compliance, is the output of pdf2htmlex meaningfully more WCAG compliant?
Depending on your requirements on both PDF input and HTML output, there is often no way to do this that is both easy and general. At it's core, PDFs are not designed to be universally reflowable.
Can someone explain how this works with links that cause changes? (i.e. changing the amount of an item in a cart, or removing an item from a cart)
I assume you would have to tailor the prefetch/prerender targets to avoid these types of links? In other words, take some care with these specific wildcard targets in the link depending on your site?
Published date looks like Jul 8, 2025 but I ran across it today Jul 24. Affected extensions at least on Chrome seem to have been pulled at this time; haven't checked Edge, although I assume they would have been pulled too.
Knobs are confusing when converted to a mouse paradigm because there can be a few strategies to control them (click+drag up/down, click+drag right/left, weird rotational things, etc), and you have to guess since each FX studio and software may implement it just a little different.