u/Annoying1978

So, I know we’re all supposed to hate AI and though I really don’t think we should use AI to generate creative assets, I do think there are ways where video editors can utilize it to make our projects smoother. 

HERE WAS THE PROBLEM: I am on a Mac as I’ve been for a long time but recently I started running out of storage capacity. While I plan how to build my next NAS for the future (since everything is pricey as hell right now) I bought another external SSD and moved a TB of data off my other large external drive to give me some working room for now. 

The problem is that I need to search for assets among both external hard drives. My old one is fast and plugged into my thunderbolt part. I edit off this drive. It’s fast and I’m able to edit 4k video without problems. But the new drive is slow, but I moved like 20 old projects there and I need to use assets saved in these project folders. 

So I have to search 2 external drives BUT I don’t want to search the internal SSD. The internal SSD is where I have all my applications and OS running. When I am looking for assets I don’t need to look at my internal drive at all which gums up my search with unrelated files. So I needed a solution that would search only my 2 external drives. But that wasn’t the only issue. 

There’s a new issue that has been identified as old as September 2025 and with the new OS update (Tahoe 26.5.2 25F84) the bug affected me. Basically, processes like mds and mdworker get stuck in an endless loop and make external SSD unsearchable. You can fix this with a terminal command to rebuild the index manually which is only like a 10 minute fix, but I had to do that twice in the past 30 days. 

So I wanted a tool that would solve these 2 main problems. I started working with Claude and made this tool called Scout into a beast of a search tool. 

Here’s all the problems it fixed:

I can search LIVE (which is slower but more complete), if I want to find something that hasn’t been cached yet. It tells me the last time the app cached my 3 drives. I can force it to rescan on-demand as well. That way I don’t actually use any background processes that can cause a loop like what’s affecting the Finder right now. 

• I  can select only the drives I want, single or multiple. This search is specific for my video editing needs. 
• It has fuzzy search so if I search for “american falg” it will also pop up results for “american flag” because sometimes I make typos and sometimes I save clips with typos.
• It previews every video and image with a thumbnail (which does not happen in finder many times because of codecs, etc…). 
• I can scrub every result. I can go back 30 seconds and go forward 30 seconds on video.
• For audio files, I can immediately change the volume and not have to touch my official external speakers or go up in the top menu bar because something was recorded with +30 dB and it’s about to blow out my ears and my speakers
• It plays RLE (Animation Codec) which is important if you use After Affects a lot to import in Premiere Pro, it handles a bunch of codecs that Apple’s Finder doesn’t handle. It uses the ffmpeg installation I already have so now every video file I have on my system can be previewed, not just H.264/H.265
• I have all the details of the video, image or audio files when I click on them (dimensions, size, date last used, fps codec, etc…)
• I can filter and sort by date, time, size, kind
• I can drag the file directly from the app to Premiere Pro (or any editor). I can drag the thumbnail or use a button
• It saves the last 5 searches, but it doesn’t just remember the name or phrase I searched for, but what combination of drives I used on that search as well.

I looked at 3rd party utilities to try and fix this issue for 2 full days. I tried some free apps that were horrible. I looked at paid apps that cost anywhere from $8 to ones that had a subscription fee. Basically, for $20 I got my own custom super Finder app that I can iterate and update when I want new features. If I cancel my subscription for Claude this whole thing cost me $20 and an hour of working with Claude on fixing bugs and making changes. 

This is how AI should be used. Not to generate slop images or video content, but help us make real content faster by making customized tools that we need. 

Even for images. I know the dimensions, the color profile, the format, etc…all at a glance. It’s still not perfect, but it’s superior than any other app I have tried to use to search assets. 

It has made my editing life SOOO much easier. I probably would have paid well more than $20 if I found this type of app on the web during my struggles. 

This was a pretty considerable effort. I know some PHP, Javascript and other front end stuff for building websites. It’s not like I don’t know how to code at all but this is way beyond my capabilities and it took an hour or so to make and according to Claude I could make at least 2 apps a month with the amount of tokens this app took to create. 

 I’m not even explaining every backed end feature, like the capability of using Apple APIs to previewing video codecs it natively recognizes and only falling back on ffmpeg’s slower transcoding preview process when necessary. It also purposefully lowers the transcoding quality of non-native codecs and make the video srubbable before the whole clip is fully loaded and cached. It’s fast, reliable and I can iterate it whenever I want new features out spot a bug. 

I’m impressed. 

So, I know we’re supposed to hate AI and I don’t think we should use AI to generate creative assets, I do think there are ways where video editors can utilize it to make our projects smoother. 

HERE WAS THE PROBLEM: I am on a Mac as I’ve been for a long time but recently I started running out of storage capacity. While I plan how to build my next NAS for the future (since everything is pricey as hell right now) I bought another external SSD and moved a TB of data off my other large external drive to give me some working room for now. 

The problem is that I need to search for assets among both external hard drives. My old one is fast and plugged into my thunderbolt part. I edit off this drive. It’s fast and I’m able to edit 4k video without problems. But the new drive is slow, but I moved like 20 old projects there and I need to use assets saved in these project folders. 

So I have to search 2 external drives BUT I don’t want to search the internal SSD. The internal SSD is where I have all my applications and OS running. When I am looking for assets I don’t need to look at my internal drive at all which gums up my search with unrelated files. So I needed a solution that would search only my 2 external drives. But that wasn’t the only issue. 

There’s a new issue that has been identified as old as September 2025 and with the new OS update (Tahoe 26.5.2 25F84) the bug affected me. Basically, processes like mds and mdworker get stuck in an endless loop and make external SSD unsearchable. You can fix this with a terminal command to rebuild the index manually which is only like a 10 minute fix, but I had to do that twice in the past 30 days. 

So I wanted a tool that would solve these 2 main problems. I started working with Claude and made this tool called Scout into a beast of a search tool. 

Here’s all the problems it fixed:

I can search LIVE (which is slower but more complete), if I want to find something that hasn’t been cached yet. It tells me the last time the app cached my 3 drives. I can force it to rescan on-demand as well. That way I don’t actually use any background processes that can cause a loop like what’s affecting the Finder right now. 

• I  can select only the drives I want, single or multiple. This search is specific for my video editing needs. 
• It has fuzzy search so if I search for “american falg” it will also pop up results for “american flag” because sometimes I make typos and sometimes I save clips with typos.
• It previews every video and image with a thumbnail (which does not happen in finder many times because of codecs, etc…). 
• I can scrub every result. I can go back 30 seconds and go forward 30 seconds on video.
• For audio files, I can immediately change the volume and not have to touch my official external speakers or go up in the top menu bar because something was recorded with +30 dB and it’s about to blow out my ears and my speakers
• It plays RLE (Animation Codec) which is important if you use After Affects a lot to import in Premiere Pro, it handles a bunch of codecs that Apple’s Finder doesn’t handle. It uses the ffmpeg installation I already have so now every video file I have on my system can be previewed, not just H.264/H.265
• I have all the details of the video, image or audio files when I click on them (dimensions, size, date last used, fps codec, etc…)
• I can filter and sort by date, time, size, kind
• I can drag the file directly from the app to Premiere Pro (or any editor). I can drag the thumbnail or use a button
• It saves the last 5 searches, but it doesn’t just remember the name or phrase I searched for, but what combination of drives I used on that search as well.

I looked at 3rd party utilities to try and fix this issue for 2 full days. I tried some free apps that were horrible. I looked at paid apps that cost anywhere from $8 to ones that had a subscription fee. Basically, for $20 I got my own custom super Finder app that I can iterate and update when I want new features. If I cancel my subscription for Claude this whole thing cost me $20 and an hour of working with Claude on fixing bugs and making changes. 

This is how AI should be used. Not to generate slop images or video content, but help us make real content faster by making customized tools that we need. 

Even for images. I know the dimensions, the color profile, the format, etc…all at a glance. It’s still not perfect, but it’s superior than any other app I have tried to use to search assets. 

It has made my editing life SOOO much easier. I probably would have paid well more than $20 if I found this type of app on the web during my struggles. 

This was a pretty considerable effort. I know some PHP, Javascript and other front end stuff for building websites. It’s not like I don’t know how to code at all but this is way beyond my capabilities and it took an hour or so to make and according to Claude I could make at least 2 apps a month with the amount of tokens this app took to create. 

 I’m not even explaining every backed end feature, like the capability of using Apple APIs to previewing video codecs it natively recognizes and only falling back on ffmpeg’s slower transcoding preview process when necessary. It also purposefully lowers the transcoding quality of non-native codecs and make the video srubbable before the whole clip is fully loaded and cached. It’s fast, reliable and I can iterate it whenever I want new features out spot a bug. 

I’m impressed. 

So, I know we’re all supposed to hate AI and though I really don’t think we should use AI to generate creative assets, I do think there are ways where video editors can utilize it to make our projects smoother. 

HERE WAS THE PROBLEM: I am on a Mac as I’ve been for a long time but recently I started running out of storage capacity. While I plan how to build my next NAS for the future (since everything is pricey as hell right now) I bought another external SSD and moved a TB of data off my other large external drive to give me some working room for now. 

The problem is that I need to search for assets among both external hard drives. My old one is fast and plugged into my thunderbolt part. I edit off this drive. It’s fast and I’m able to edit 4k video without problems. But the new drive is slow, but I moved like 20 old projects there and I need to use assets saved in these project folders. 

So I have to search 2 external drives BUT I don’t want to search the internal SSD. The internal SSD is where I have all my applications and OS running. When I am looking for assets I don’t need to look at my internal drive at all which gums up my search with unrelated files. So I needed a solution that would search only my 2 external drives. But that wasn’t the only issue. 

There’s a new issue that has been identified as old as September 2025 and with the new OS update (Tahoe 26.5.2 25F84) the bug affected me. Basically, processes like mds and mdworker get stuck in an endless loop and make external SSD unsearchable. You can fix this with a terminal command to rebuild the index manually which is only like a 10 minute fix, but I had to do that twice in the past 30 days. 

So I wanted a tool that would solve these 2 main problems. I started working with Claude and made this tool called Scout into a beast of a search tool. 

Here’s all the problems it fixed:

I can search LIVE (which is slower but more complete), if I want to find something that hasn’t been cached yet. It tells me the last time the app cached my 3 drives. I can force it to rescan on-demand as well. That way I don’t actually use any background processes that can cause a loop like what’s affecting the Finder right now. 

• I  can select only the drives I want, single or multiple. This search is specific for my video editing needs. 
• It has fuzzy search so if I search for “american falg” it will also pop up results for “american flag” because sometimes I make typos and sometimes I save clips with typos.
• It previews every video and image with a thumbnail (which does not happen in finder many times because of codecs, etc…). 
• I can scrub every result. I can go back 30 seconds and go forward 30 seconds on video.
• For audio files, I can immediately change the volume and not have to touch my official external speakers or go up in the top menu bar because something was recorded with +30 dB and it’s about to blow out my ears and my speakers
• It plays RLE (Animation Codec) which is important if you use After Affects a lot to import in Premiere Pro, it handles a bunch of codecs that Apple’s Finder doesn’t handle. It uses the ffmpeg installation I already have so now every video file I have on my system can be previewed, not just H.264/H.265
• I have all the details of the video, image or audio files when I click on them (dimensions, size, date last used, fps codec, etc…)
• I can filter and sort by date, time, size, kind
• I can drag the file directly from the app to Premiere Pro (or any editor). I can drag the thumbnail or use a button
• It saves the last 5 searches, but it doesn’t just remember the name or phrase I searched for, but what combination of drives I used on that search as well.

I looked at 3rd party utilities to try and fix this issue for 2 full days. I tried some free apps that were horrible. I looked at paid apps that cost anywhere from $8 to ones that had a subscription fee. Basically, for $20 I got my own custom super Finder app that I can iterate and update when I want new features. If I cancel my subscription for Claude this whole thing cost me $20 and an hour of working with Claude on fixing bugs and making changes. 

This is how AI should be used. Not to generate slop images or video content, but help us make real content faster by making customized tools that we need. 

Even for images. I know the dimensions, the color profile, the format, etc…all at a glance. It’s still not perfect, but it’s superior than any other app I have tried to use to search assets. 

It has made my editing life SOOO much easier. I probably would have paid well more than $20 if I found this type of app on the web during my struggles. 

This was a pretty considerable effort. I know some PHP, Javascript and other front end stuff for building websites. It’s not like I don’t know how to code at all but this is way beyond my capabilities and it took an hour or so to make and according to Claude I could make at least 2 apps a month with the amount of tokens this app took to create. 

 I’m not even explaining every backed end feature, like the capability of using Apple APIs to previewing video codecs it natively recognizes and only falling back on ffmpeg’s slower transcoding preview process when necessary. It also purposefully lowers the transcoding quality of non-native codecs and make the video srubbable before the whole clip is fully loaded and cached. It’s fast, reliable and I can iterate it whenever I want new features out spot a bug. 

I’m impressed. 

So, I know video editors are supposed to hate AI and though I really don’t think we should use AI to generate creative assets, I do think there are ways where video editors can utilize it to make our projects smoother. 

HERE WAS THE PROBLEM: I am on a Mac as I’ve been for a long time but recently I started running out of storage capacity. While I plan how to build my next NAS for the future (since everything is pricey as hell right now) I bought another external SSD and moved a TB of data off my other large external drive to give me some working room for now. 

The problem is that I need to search for assets among both external hard drives. My old one is fast and plugged into my thunderbolt part. I edit off this drive. It’s fast and I’m able to edit 4k video without problems. But the new drive is slow, but I moved like 20 old projects there and I need to use assets saved in these project folders. 

So I have to search 2 external drives BUT I don’t want to search the internal SSD. The internal SSD is where I have all my applications and OS running. When I am looking for assets I don’t need to look at my internal drive at all which gums up my search with unrelated files. So I needed a solution that would search only my 2 external drives. But that wasn’t the only issue. 

There’s a new issue that has been identified as old as September 2025 and with the new OS update (Tahoe 26.5.2 25F84) the bug affected me. Basically, processes like mds and mdworker get stuck in an endless loop and make external SSD unsearchable. You can fix this with a terminal command to rebuild the index manually which is only like a 10 minute fix, but I had to do that twice in the past 30 days. 

So I wanted a tool that would solve these 2 main problems. I started working with Claude and made this tool called Scout into a beast of a search tool. 

Here’s all the problems it fixed:

I can search LIVE (which is slower but more complete), if I want to find something that hasn’t been cached yet. It tells me the last time the app cached my 3 drives. I can force it to rescan on-demand as well. That way I don’t actually use any background processes that can cause a loop like what’s affecting the Finder right now. 

• I  can select only the drives I want, single or multiple. This search is specific for my video editing needs. 
• It has fuzzy search so if I search for “american falg” it will also pop up results for “american flag” because sometimes I make typos and sometimes I save clips with typos.
• It previews every video and image with a thumbnail (which does not happen in finder many times because of codecs, etc…). 
• I can scrub every result. I can go back 30 seconds and go forward 30 seconds on video.
• For audio files, I can immediately change the volume and not have to touch my official external speakers or go up in the top menu bar because something was recorded with +30 dB and it’s about to blow out my ears and my speakers
• It plays RLE (Animation Codec) which is important if you use After Affects a lot to import in Premiere Pro, it handles a bunch of codecs that Apple’s Finder doesn’t handle. It uses the ffmpeg installation I already have so now every video file I have on my system can be previewed, not just H.264/H.265
• I have all the details of the video, image or audio files when I click on them (dimensions, size, date last used, fps codec, etc…)
• I can filter and sort by date, time, size, kind
• I can drag the file directly from the app to Premiere Pro (or any editor). I can drag the thumbnail or use a button
• It saves the last 5 searches, but it doesn’t just remember the name or phrase I searched for, but what combination of drives I used on that search as well.

I looked at 3rd party utilities to try and fix this issue for 2 full days. I tried some free apps that were horrible. I looked at paid apps that cost anywhere from $8 to ones that had a subscription fee. Basically, for $20 I got my own custom super Finder app that I can iterate and update when I want new features. If I cancel my subscription for Claude this whole thing cost me $20 and an hour of working with Claude on fixing bugs and making changes. 

This is how AI should be used. Not to generate slop images or video content, but help us make real content faster by making customized tools that we need. 

Even for images. I know the dimensions, the color profile, the format, etc…all at a glance. It’s still not perfect, but it’s superior than any other app I have tried to use to search assets. 

It has made my editing life SOOO much easier. I probably would have paid well more than $20 if I found this type of app on the web during my struggles. 

This was a pretty considerable effort. I know some PHP, Javascript and other front end stuff for building websites. It’s not like I don’t know how to code at all but this is way beyond my capabilities and it took an hour or so to make and according to Claude I could make at least 2 apps a month with the amount of tokens this app took to create. 

 I’m not even explaining every backed end feature, like the capability of using Apple APIs to previewing video codecs it natively recognizes and only falling back on ffmpeg’s slower transcoding preview process when necessary. It also purposefully lowers the transcoding quality of non-native codecs and make the video srubbable before the whole clip is fully loaded and cached. It’s fast, reliable and I can iterate it whenever I want new features out spot a bug. 

I’m impressed. 

Don’t threaten me with a good time.

This is what Republicans are using to attack democratic socialists?

Is this supposed to make people angry or upset? There’s a lot of confusion about what democratic socialists want, and that’s fair. Even within our group, there are differences among us.

For example, while Mamdani does not agree with the criminal justice and decarceration points on the national platform he agrees that criminal justice reform absolutely needs to happen. We put far too many people in jail.

Fox News, Newsmax and Mike Johnson have been trying to scare Americans on a “hidden socialist agenda”, but the reality is DSA is about making things more affordable and fair for everyone.

Republicans tell you that they want to protect your freedom. They also believe the government can’t do anything correctly, so they tell you that privatizing as much as possible will save tax payers money and they have been preaching “smaller government” for nearly 70 years. Yet they created the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA, ICE and the DEA.

All of which is supposedly necessary to keep you safe.

To keep you safe and make sure your freedom is intact, they need to monitor everything you do. So they give lucrative multi-billion dollar tax payer funded surveillance contracts to private companies.

But wait! This is getting expensive, so they want to reduce your social security benefits that you paid into and to stop feeding the poor. Besides the poor should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

6% of this country makes $250,000 or more. They are considered rich and successful. Did they pull themselves up from their own bootstraps? Half of them had parents that were already quite rich (top 20% of all wealth). Only 15% of Americans that are considered rich today had parents that were poor (bottom 20% of Americans by wealth).

Centrists (aka democrats) tell you that they disagree with the Republican mantra that we should privatize so much, but they’re going to go along with most of it anyway because they have been paid by the same corporate lobbyists that have paid off the right.

While republicans pass tax cuts and take more government services away, democrats fight for marginal improvements like the Affordable Care Act, expanding child tax credits and infrastructure bills.

And yet, most people are still struggling while the rich get even filthier rich. In 1940, 90% of children earned more than their parents. By 2010 that number dropped to 50%.

In 1978 the CEO to worker compensation ratio was 30 to 1. Now it’s 340 to 1.

Meanwhile at least 40,000 people die every year because they don’t have access to healthcare, 20% of all American adults have some form of medical debt. That collective debt has now exceeded $220 billion.

In the 70s the price of a home was 3x the median salary. Now it’s 5x.

This isn’t working.

So, socialists want to control the means of production. What does that mean? That means entities that are important for society like utility companies, internet service providers and pharmaceutical companies are controlled by a social collective.

Instead of being controlled by an individual or group of people whose main objective is make as much money as possible, these specific entities would be controlled by you, the people.

That means utility companies would provide you with the most cost effective and reliable energy making sure they are doing what’s best for the community, not what’s best for their bottom line. Just like things are done in Nebraska right now. (Go ahead and look into it).

It means pharmaceutical companies won’t charge you $1400 for an EpiPen or $300 for a bottle of insulin.

Does this mean your small little ceramic cat store is going to be taken over by the government? No. But this does mean that companies that provide a public necessity shouldn’t be controlled by private entities whose sole purpose is to make a profit, many times at a great cost to your health and safety.

This is all so we can live better. You won’t have to decide between paying for rent and groceries. Your mother won’t die because an insurance company denied life saving surgery. Defense contractors won’t exist simply for profit, but for actual defense (what a concept!). They won’t fund propaganda influencers that lie about the dangers in the Middle East so politicians continue spending money on the failed $68 billion F-22 program, just so Bill Lumbergh's stock will go up a quarter of a fucking point.

No, we don’t love Stalin. We don’t worship Mao. But we don’t believe that government is useless. We believe the government can and should make life better for all of us, not make it worse.

We definitely don’t agree with the right on anything but centrist and corporate democrats have been bought by the same lobbyists that bought the right.

So here we are.

It is a shame how many people do not understand how science actually works. People are throwing a fit because medical recommendations changed over time. What the fuck do you expect when you are dealing with a brand new virus that is mutating so fast nobody knows how it is going to react next?

Fauci, the WHO, and the CDC were working with the best available information at the time. In the beginning, we did not even know for sure how the virus was being transmitted, which is why the initial guidance on masks was what it was.

Once we got more data, the guidance was updated to recommend wearing masks.

Science is not stagnant. It evolves when we get new information, but poorly educated conspiracy theorists refuse to understand that basic concept. They act like medical experts were lying or trying to intentionally harm people to somehow “control us”. It is an obvious sign that our education system has completely failed us.

Now these same morons are crying over excerpts from Fauci’s personal diary, upset because he wrote about how right-wing media was attacking him and thought about how to handle the PR nightmare instead of only writing textbook entries about the virus. He vented his personal thoughts in a private journal. That is literally the entire point of keeping a personal diary. To talk about his personal feelings.

To top it all off, at the hearing today, Fauci had to invoke the Fifth Amendment on the advice of his attorneys because he was facing a politically motivated circus. When a senator is openly obsessed with trying to throw you in prison just to score political points, you do not sit there and play their stupid game.

On the origins of the virus, Fauci never claimed to know with absolute certainty how it jumped from animals to humans. He gave the most reasonable theories based on available science. Because the Chinese government refuses to share complete information, we may never definitively know if it leaked from a lab or originated from the Wuhan wet market. That uncertainty is the reality Fauci always represented to the public.

In hindsight I think we made some crucial errors, but that’s what happens when you’re dealing with an unknown virus.

I do not think we should have shut down schools for as long as we did because of the massive mental toll it took on children, but at the time, everyone was flying blind and trying desperately to save lives. Teachers were vulnerable, but students constantly broke safety rules outside of class, throwing parties and then bringing the virus right back to class infecting other students who later infected teachers and even parents and grandparents. We were figuring out a deadly pandemic in real time.

And I will be completely honest. I did not follow every single rule either. I was frustrated like everyone else. I was in a new relationship at the time and certainly did not want to sit around locked inside my house doing nothing. We flew on trips, went to bars, and hit the beach. I completely understand why people were angry about losing their freedom, but trying to prosecute public servants whose entire job was trying to prevent mass death is fucking stupid.

The response was messy. Some states were draconian while others barely did anything, and the rules were not enforced fairly. The real lesson we should take away is that we need to get our infrastructure prepared for the next pandemic, because there will be a next one. Instead, uneducated conspiracy theorists want to scapegoat medical experts who were doing their absolute best under impossible conditions. It is so fucking stupid, and I cannot believe the level of stupidity I had to witness watching the hearing today.

Absolutely disgusted!

Trump claims all democratic-run cities are “filthy dirty” and “smell.”

The Nazis said “Jews had lice” and were the cause of typhus. Joseph Stalin called people that opposed him “social waste”.

All dictators have used language to call dissenters “parasites”, “vermin”, and “social pollutants”. They all gradually increased their hatred through their speeches. First saying people should stop interacting with these undesirables and then later saying they should be purged so cities can be “cleansed” from these “undesirables”.

Everyone wonders how the Germans allowed Hitler to do what he did. This is exactly how. 37% supported the Nazi party and the rest did nothing to stop it.

History repeats itself.