It's funny seeing "The Dixie Chicks" listed under "The Chicks", given they didn't change their name until 2020. I get it, but it's amazing how thorough they were retroactively updating content.
I had a Withings watch and absolutely loved it. I considered buying another one after my old one got water damage. However, it was becoming evident from changes to the app that it was getting more and more locked down and ultimately was going to require a subscription for anything useful. At the same time, the app was getting buggier. At one point I lost multi years worth of data when I had to re-sync my watch to a new phone.
It's a shame because I liked their spin on a hybrid smart watch which looked like a traditional analog watch. Garmin does make hybrids, but to me they all look too sporty or tactical.
I was hoping for something more novel. There must be dozens of companies out there working on rethinking what repos and workflows look like in the agentic era. It feels like we're all riding around in horseless carriages but haven't yet figured out the ergonomics of a modern automobile.
I only have a few digits of pi memorized, so I had better luck using digits from fibonacci's sequence. I can derive them in my head, albeit slowly as the numbers get large.
I've been experimenting with AI powered DAWs. I finally settled on using Pi Durable to embed the prompting directly in the UI.
I've also found AI good at building synths. I now have a bunch of synths, samplers, and drum machines that my DAW can configure through MCP. For example, I can tell it to configure a 303, generate a 4-bar arp pattern, slowly increase the resonance across the pattern, and add it to the song.
That seems interesting. yes I basically set up a similar thing. Made a few synths and made them expose via MCP. Originally I tried having the LLM be an embedded feature in the app but MCP works better, although I left the feature in in case it's useful.
I have ZDR enforced and see only compatible models and providers, yet am able to use it. DeepSeek as a provider may not be ZDR, but the models are available from ZDR and no training providers on EU/US servers.
Yeah, they all do it though. And now that models are being natively trained at FP8/NVFP4, I’m not sure it matters.
Only way you can really know you’re getting the full model is to host it yourself. Every inference provider has every reason to lie and it’s impossible to find out the degree to which they are.
It’s a pretty common requirement in the enterprise world. If you’re processing data for enterprise customers, it’s a lot easier to retain nothing than to deal with all the compliance issues that arise if you’re retaining data.
I grabbed one of these since I didn't have a hardware FM synth. While playing around with a web-based patch editor and seeing how well synths can run in a web, I started using AI to build out my own synths, and it's been a lot of fun. I've done FM, granular, samplers, 303 and 808 clones, and a bunch of others. So yeah, if you don't care about the experience of having a bespoke device, you could probably one-shot something much more sophisticated than this.
This is the same argument from when Sirius and XM radio merged. It didn't matter that they were monopolizing satellite radio because the real competition was terrestrial radio and internet radio.
Yeah, it's a rhetorical maneuver that's as old as monopoly power when you think about it.
"Actually we're really David and we need to band together against Goliath." Points at imagined external threat
The part that's wild to me is that we know that this merger extends to politics and control over media. The IP's, studios, franchises, all the actual businesses are just part of the estate. It's the Hearst Media Empire story retold again.
I used to use Claude inside of a terminal within Webstorm until I realized I rarely looked at the code in the IDE. Instead I was creating draft PRs and reviewing the code in github. Now I use claude inside of herdr, and I appreciate having more screen real estate devoted to claude. As a long-time Jetbrains subscriber it pains me to stop using it. But at this point, I'm not sure what they could come up with that would be compelling enough for me to switch back.
Their coding agent "Junie" is actually really good. The problem is they force you through only a few curated models. And try to funnel you through them to subscribe to do it, too. It's not like Pi or opencode that lets you just point at an OpenAI API endpoint and then choose whatever model. If I recall you can even actually use local models, or openrouter etc, but only use the specific model variants from their curated list. It's insane. They tried to stick themselves in the middle, and failed. Nobody will use it.
They've also done so many pivots on AI, all of them weakly and annoyingly done. They couldn't even pull of FiTM copilot well, they were super late on it and it had all sort of bugs.
They could have just taken the loss and written an amazing GUI coding agent that integrated well with their IDE -- amazing integrations with their refactorings, etc. -- but that played well in other people's ecosystems but they refused and tried to own the whole pipe. Or something. They just confused me.
Their latest attempt is to allow you to connect to and run other people's agent harnesses inside the IDE and it works well enough but it wasn't enough to grab me since I (like you) use herdr on another machine to do the coding.
I've been using their products since ~IDEA 3.x. Almost my entire 25+ year career really. My fingers are wedded to their keystrokes.
JetBrains face a unique problem: they are a real business that can't just raise infinity money from SoftBank or request government bailouts because the sheer size of their debts imperils the financial system. So they have to do things that might seem annoying or overly pushy versus their competitors.
For their entire existence people have complained about JetBrains this way because they always face some competitor that isn't making money and isn't even trying. Eventually those competitors go down, but a new one instantly arises. People just really love losing money on developer tools.
Wanting to charge money for an AI service is a clearly sensible business move. If their competitors weren't shredding the world's entire supply of investable capital as quickly as possible, this would be a good strategy. Alas.
You can actually configure the ide with any open ai compatible endpoint, I use llma and it lists all the models that I have currently installed, works well. Or am I missing your point?
Junie in particular, or just their various other "AI Assistant" / "Chat" things? They have multiple confusing overlapping products/modes going on. "JetBrains AI" -- which may or may not be same as "Junie"?, "AI Chat", then there's the "Agents" tab which integrates outside coding agents.
I guess they iterated quite a few products to "not get behind" and see what sticks.
Most recently they integrated air, which is basically an "agent management/orchestrator" where you can run any ACP-compatible agent with any model you want and it's just the single place where you manage them, see their progress, steer them, merge their results etc.
AI Assistant > Providers & API Key
There is an option Third Party AI Provider, where you can select OpenAI compatible, and then you can customize where (core, instant helper, inline etc) do you want to use third party, where JetBrains.
I've been using the web search in OpenRouter, which is similar in that it's a wrapper around other search engine providers. It's really convenient to be able to experiment with new models and new search engines without having to go through corporate hoops to subscribe to a new service.
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