u/chromespinner

I've been running the same set of workflows for well over a year. It involves pulling news items from RSS feeds and running them through a series of agents prompted to score them by relevance (in batches of 15), categorize, etc.

I've been wiring the agents to a variety of models such as Gemini Flash, Mistral Medium, Deepseek Flash, Stepfun. I know that the AI industry has gone through a lot of change in how it handles latency and throttling, and there's also been a shift toward MoE/thinking models.

But it seems to me that the workflows are taking at least 3x longer to complete than they did a year ago. The output quality is more or less the same as before.

Have others experienced this massive latency degradation/found ways to fix it?

On a Macbook Air, I use my main account for everyday work. I'm thinking of running Hermes continuously in another dedicated macOS account, where it can keep its own Chrome session open for research projects involving lots of web searching and browser automation.

The two accounts would stay logged in at the same time: I work in my main account, while Hermes runs in the dedicated account in the background. I'd then be connecting to that account from my main account via SSH/remote access when I want to give it research tasks or retrieve results.

I'm new to Hermes, but had a similar setup for OpenClaw. It worked, but added more complexity and frequent troubleshooting. Is the security/isolation benefit of this setup actually worth the added complexity, or is it overkill for a personal research workflow?

Does Hermes have enough guardrails that I should just install directly in my main account?

Hong Kong resident here...after successfully teaching my two kids how to ride bicycles while on holiday, we're back in HK where there is nowhere nearby suitable for the kids to ride.

Given how common public shared bikes are in China, I'm wondering if anyone can recommend some nice areas for cycling with kids the next time we are over in SZ?

Here's a dumb question from a vibe coder. I'm finding it difficult to gauge just how long a task will run for with various models. Sometimes (what I think is) a relatively simple prompt will spawn a 30-60+ minute task with extensive reasoning chains. This complicates my time management, and I often need to disrupt the local process as I literally need to shut my laptop and go somewhere.

Why can't an estimate be provided as part of the interaction? Would also love the option for alerts when complete.

I am experiencing ridiculously long chain of reasoning processes with every simple prompt.

Even a basic UI change might trigger a 20+ minute chain of reasoning process, that seems to continue long after the change has already been applied.

Does this have to do with Kilo Code settings or is it purely due to the model?

I have been using GLM 5.1 as well as the free Laguna M.1 model. I also tried small models, which are indeed faster, but usually do a poor job.

My 13yo son is very interested in tech, including drones, robots, EVs and more. We are in HK and have been to SZ many times (HQB, various flagship stores), but I wonder if there are ways to arrange factory or HQ visits. Or any major trade shows that would be of interest?

I have a kid enrolled in a local international school. I attended the same school >25 years ago and wonder often if things have gotten better or worse vs. my time. Unfortunately I am leaning towards worse.

I find in general that the teachers nowadays are more progressive and open-minded but also much less hard-working. Instead of report cards, there are periodic assessments that use a scoring system with no intuitive meaning. The teachers don't write any qualitative feedback.

Parent-teacher meetings are now entirely virtual and teachers for "hard subjects" are usually fully booked.

I hear from my kid every week or two that they are doing some group project, an outing, or watching a docuseries. All of this sounds to my cynical mind like less work for the teaching faculty. They have occasional "teacher training" days, so no school on those days.

The school is also using AI platforms to "support learning" and I heard that some teachers use AI to review assignments. Like any other industry, if AI is being widely adopted, I want to know what costs are being saved and whether savings will be passed on to the customer. Is it freeing up more time for "client-facing work"?

A big annoyance is a week every year when the school offers a variety of overseas trips. The organization is outsourced to private companies, so not only does it cost a fortune, but we also subsidize the teachers to travel along. If a kid doesn't join, they feel left out and get stuck in some local activity that seems thrown together just to fill time. Since when did international travel become a childhood expectation/entitlement?

But the biggest annoyance is the use of technology. Everything seems to be assigned online and assessed online. As a parent, it's almost impossible to track what they're studying and how they're progressing. It also means a lot of screen time and only so much you can do to supervise what your kid is actually doing.

Keen to know if other schools are doing a better job.

I’ve been using the Kilo Code extension on VS Code, configured to Amazon Bedrock (running a GLM model endpoint) for a couple weeks now.

I’ve been noticing a massive discrepancy with the cost tracking: The extension shows fairly high costs incurred, but when I look at my actual AWS Billing Console, the real charges are much lower.

This has been happening consistently, so it doesn't seem to be a reporting delay. Is this a known issue?

The fan in my off-warranty HP laptop is getting very loud. How much can I expect to pay for repairs? Will it be much cheaper if I do it when I'm in Shenzhen? If so, how to locate a reliable place?

I've been vibe coding with Kilo Code extension in VS Code for a while. Usually paired with my Github Copilot API (Sonnet 4.6) or Amazon Bedrock (GLM 5, Kimi K2.5).

Each prompt, regardless of mode, seems to generate at least several minutes of orchestration before a response. Occasionally it just stalls with "Considering Next Steps."

How can I streamline things so that I'm not mostly waiting around? Is there a much faster model that is still capable? Settings changes?

I provided an outline and prompted GLM to produce a great looking slideshow for an upcoming presentation.

But it's just an HTML slideshow and the AI says it doesn't have tools to output as PPT.

What is the use then? If I can't output and tweak in Powerpoint, it's totally useless.

I've been trying various AI platforms, and while some are pretty good at creating presentations from scratch, they seem lousy at improving an existing deck (making a mess of formatting instead of improving it, failing to stay within non-negotiable branding, design schemes).

What are the best tools with this in mind?