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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Physical held the least amount of info (you probably weren’t going to find much). Software like encarta was cool - had lots of info. But in the days of dinosaurs libraries was where it was at. It was common to ask an adult a question and you get either “I don’t know” or some BS that you believed was true (but wasn’t).

    If you really wanted to know, you’d ask the librarian at school or at your towns public library and they’d help you find a book on that topic. Libraries were magical places - even for the people who were too cool to admit it.


  • I’ve been playing around with AI a lot lately for work purposes. A neat trick llms like OpenAI have pushed onto the scene is the ability for a large language model to “answer questions” on a dataset of files. This is done by building a rag agent. It’s neat, but I’ve come to two conclusions after about a year of screwing around.

    1. it’s pretty good with words - asking it to summarize multiple documents for example. But it’s still pretty terrible at data. As an example, scanning through an excel file log/export/csv file and asking it to perform a calculation “based on this badge data, how many people and who is in the building right now”. It would be super helpful to get answers to those types of questions-but haven’t found any tool or combinations of models that can do it accurately even most of the time. I think this is exactly what happened to spotify wrapped this year - instead of doing the data analysis, they tried to have an llm/rag agent do it - and it’s hallucinating.
    2. these models can be run locally and just about as fast. Ya it takes some nerd power to set these up now - but it’s only a short matter of time before it’s as simple as installing a program. I can’t imagine how these companies like ChatGPT are going to survive.

  • The most annoying thing isn’t even the price hikes or the direct sales - it’s the ambiguity they’ve introduced into things. “Hey we need pricing for xyz”. “Ya, we’re not sure if we’re going to quote that”. Like wtf? We’re a middleman who has deployed VMware on our systems for decades mostly because that’s what end users want - but it doesn’t matter to us, we can deploy in other options easily enough.

    But like - It’s like quote it or take the account - but the customer has a project and you won’t make up your mind. Seriously, we have quotes stuck in pergatory for over 6 months, yet they won’t call the end user and sell direct. Customers literally can’t buy VMware even if they are ok with a 1000x cost - and they wonder why people are moving on.

    Budgeting season is sept-Dec. I think everyone I know is kicking off a migration project for 2025 to another platform - mostly because they can’t get a quote/licenses. VMware is screwed and it’s only just begun.



  • This isn’t an iPhone problem. This doesn’t happen normally. There’s one of two things going on:

    1. you jailbroke your phone/sideloaded/installed some shady app. Solution: hard reset that phone and set it up as new. Do not copy over anything, and use the phone as close to stock as possible for a bit. These notifications will stop. Then you add apps and stuff slowly until you figure out what is the offender.

    2. you’re being targeted. Somebody did something nefarious and they are probably good at it. It’s not easy to get into a stock device. I find this option possible but unlikely unless you’re a VIP or you’ve REALLY pissed off an ex lover or are married to overly attached girlfriend.

    *Edit

    Maybe there’s a third option. Maybe the phone’s hardware is just borked somehow - a chip or sensor or something is broke. /shrug. I suppose that’s possible too.








  • Ya, because it’s a TV. You connect those things to the inputs and drive the content from other things (game console, firetv, htpc, etc.

    I’m baffled by people negatively reacting to my post. It’s how tvs have worked for 50+ years. Just because they recently got the ability to execute programs, doesn’t mean you have to use it. Just air gap it and the issue is 100% solved as far as the tv is concerned.





  • It’s expensive but I recently bought a flydigi apex 4 controller and I absolutely love it. Seems to work with everything, is solidly built, and has precise controls.

    I’m sure there are other options too, but this is one of the good ones!

    Edit: apparently it does not work natively on PS5. My apologies - I thought it did, but was mistaken. I believe it can be done with special cables/adapters but that’s more hassle than it’s worth imo. For a PC controller though (how I use mine) - it’s absolutely my most favorite controller of all time (and I’ve been gaming since the Atari 2600). ;)


  • Honestly-I always wondered how in the hell women with nails even just a little bit long typed comfortably on a keyboard. I figured it was either a) not a big deal or b) a super pain in the arse and another example of the world (for whatever reason) not making a simple product to solve a simple issue (like bandaids that match people’s skin color for example).

    Now I know! :)

    Phones must be a bitch as well…. The solution to that might be a bit harder to pull off…



    • I walked around with a ruptured appendix for weeks without knowing it. In my case, the pain was very minimal (not normal)
    • there was so much raw sewage in my abdomen, they decided to gut me from my pelvis to my sternum, take everything out, and powerwash me
    • there was a problem with the hospital pharmacy. I woke up in the ICU with zero pain meds and my nurse screaming murder at the pharmacy tech over the phone. “For the love of god he’s up, I need that morphine RIGHT FUCKING NOW”
    • don’t know how long it took, but that was pure hell.
    • then I got full bowel blockage, multiple times, throwing up and all, with my stomach cut in two trying to heal. Surprisingly the blockage was almost as painful as the unmedicated seppoku I experienced.

    Take my upvote for bowel pain being horrific.

    Another data point. I also literally broke my back from a fall on the ice. If bowel pain was a 10, I’d put breaking my back at about a 6.