Dirty Static

Adobe Wants $840 a Year. ArtCraft Cloned the Suite for Free.

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 11:54:00 -0500

Adobe would like $69.99 a month for Creative Cloud Pro, which works out to about $840 a year, every year, with an early termination fee if you try to leave inside the term. That price is the entire business case for what happened next. A project called ArtCraft is rebuilding the Adobe suite as free, open source software, app for app, interface for interface, and giving it away under MIT and Apache licenses with no account, no telemetry, and no subscription of any kind.

The Dead Are Posting Now

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 09:02:00 -0500

Your phone buzzes. It is your mother, checking in, asking about your day, in her voice, with her timing, her little verbal habits intact. She has been dead for two years. Nothing about this scene is speculative anymore. A growing industry will build that mother for you from voice notes, videos, texts, and photos, and sell her back as a subscription. The dead used to be silent. Silence was the whole arrangement. Now the dead are posting, and the living are paying for the privilege of answering.

Set Up Hermes Agent: The Self Improving AI You Actually Own

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 08:41:00 -0500

Most AI agents are a subscription wearing a trench coat. Hermes Agent is the other kind: an open source agent from Nous Research, MIT licensed, that runs on your own machine or server and keeps its memory, its skills, and its history in a folder you control. Its signature trick is a learning loop. After a complex task it writes itself a skill file describing what worked, refines those skills as it reuses them, and searches its own past sessions when a new job smells familiar. The agent stays constant; the brain is swappable. This tutorial installs it, connects it to the big name models first, then shows the cheap and free route through Ollama. The project lives on GitHub under NousResearch/hermes-agent, with documentation on the Hermes Agent site.

RTX Spark Laptops Compared: Brilliant at AI, Beaten at Games

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 07:45:00 -0500

On October 16, Nvidia stopped being a company that sells parts for other people’s laptops and became a platform. RTX Spark machines from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, and MSI went on sale the same morning, all built on one chip: the N1X, an Arm based Grace CPU fused with a Blackwell RTX GPU and a pool of unified memory the two share. Nine models make up the first wave, and the review embargoes have now lifted. This is the comparison that matters: one chip, six badges, and a very clear split between what these machines are for and what they are not.

The Top 10 Uncensored LLMs on Hugging Face

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 07:15:00 -0500

Somewhere on Hugging Face right now there is a model that will answer the question your chatbot at work just refused to touch. There are thousands of them. A recent academic census of uncensored large language models counted 67 with more than a million downloads each, and one legacy build, dolphin-2.9.1-yi-1.5-34b, sitting past 53 million. This is not a fringe. It is a parallel ecosystem with its own star authors, its own techniques, and its own release day rush every time a new open model drops.

AI Just Revived Magnetic Tape

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 06:58:00 -0500

The most futuristic industry on Earth is placing its biggest storage bet in twenty years on a technology from the 1950s. According to Nikkei reporting from Tokyo, Fujifilm plans to increase its magnetic tape production capacity fivefold, the company’s largest buildup for the medium in roughly two decades, driven directly by demand from artificial intelligence.

Tape was supposed to be dead. Instead it became the warehouse of the AI era, the offline medium where data centers, financial institutions, and research organizations keep the data that matters most and moves least.

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