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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Yeah there is a ton of analysis to be done, but I really think the average undecided voter looks at the one choice they have and basically just asks themselves “am I doing ok right now?” If yes, they stay the course. If no, they pull the lever and flip to the other guy.

    The bad economy killed them. Kamala breathed some life into the campaign but it wasn’t enough. Is the bad economy their fault? Not really, inflation is bad worldwide post-COVID. But when people can’t feed their families, they blame the people above and use the only tool they have to punish them: cutting off their nose to spite their face.

    The real question is, where are all the Democrat voters who didn’t show up, that did show up for Biden? I think a combination of deep rooted misogyny, racism, and a weak message watered down to cater to “centrist” Republicans really hurt them.

    The Democrats tend to focus on the undecided voter. They shouldn’t, because those people are basically just motivated by their personal good fortune at that exact time. They should focus on the occasional voter, because that’s who wins them elections.



  • I needed instructions on how to downgrade the firmware of my Unifi UDR because they pushed a botched update. I searched for a while and could only find vague references to SSH and upgrading.

    They had a “Unifi GPT” bot so I figured what the hell. I asked “how to downgrade udr firmware to stable”. It gave me effective step by step instructions on how to enable SSH, SSH in and what commands to run to do so. Worked like a charm.

    So yeah, I think the problem is we’re in the hype era of LLMs. They’re being over applied at lots of things they aren’t good at. But it’s extremism in the other direction to say there aren’t functions they can do well.

    They are at least better than your average canned chat/search bot or ill informed CSR at finding an answer to your question. I think they can help with lots of frustrating or opaque computer related tasks, or at least point you in the right direction or surface something you might not be able to find easily otherwise.

    They just aren’t going to write programs for you or do your office job for you like execs think they will.







  • I can only assume they see it as a double edged sword. Rights-holders (read: publishers, labels & studios) would have the power to sue here, not creators (read: artists, musicians and filmmakers).

    These rights-holders also want to use AI so they don’t have to pay or deal with creators, so while they don’t love that other companies are making money off their content, they’re more just mad that someone else did it first before they could exploit their own content in the same way.

    Sue and set precedent, and they might accidentally make it impossible for them to turn around and do the exact same thing once they have the technical know-how.

    Entirely speculation, but it’s the only thing that makes sense to me.

    EDIT - As another commenter mentioned, I broke my own rule and commented without reading and this was discovery as part of an ongoing lawsuit. I did say it was entirely speculation though, and I still think this is why you don’t see so many AI related lawsuits in all the areas there is just tons of content generation. I also still think this is a “mad they couldn’t get there first” situation.


  • Sonos. Recent app troubles aside (it’s really not that bad, just kind of clunky for certain tasks), the longevity alone make them so worth it. Despite being essentially computers/smart home devices, they support 10+ year old devices in their latest app, older devices in their S1 Controller app, and the sound quality & setup ease is amazing.

    Plus, they have pretty good Black Friday sales and make it easy to build piece by piece if pricing is too high. You can also used replaced pieces to build a sound system in another room.

    Over ~3 years I started with a Beam, then bought a Sub and two Play:1s as rears. Bought an Arc, moved the Beam to the bedroom. Just recently I bought 2 Arc 300s as rears/upward firing Atmos speakers, and moved the Play:1s to the bedroom. Resale value stays high so if you have no use for a piece, you can sell it and get 50%-75% of what you paid out of it easily.

    There are cheaper devices with better sound quality out there, but nobody else can compete on the whole package with Sonos.


  • But those end up being the same in practice. If you have to put up a disclaimer that the info might be wrong, then who would use it? I can get the wrong answer or unverified heresay anywhere. The whole point of contacting the company is to get the right answer; or at least one the company is forced to stick to.

    This isn’t just minor AI growing pains, this is a fundamental problem with the technology that causes it to essentially be useless for the use case of “answering questions”.

    They can slap as many disclaimers as they want on this shit; but if it just hallucinates policies and incorrect answers it will just end up being one more thing people hammer 0 to skip past or scroll past to talk to a human or find the right answer.



  • Yep. I used to upgrade my iPhone every year just because smartphones were moving fast in the 2010-2020 era. Now, I’m on a three year cycle and barely even notice.

    I’ve resold every iPhone I’ve ever owned for 50% of the value or more, and I manage a fleet of iPhones for my job and we still have 5Ses in the wild for people. Apple still provides critical security updates for those devices and we’re at 11 years for those devices. Most people have 7 year old iPhone X era devices and I get almost no complaints or dead devices.

    iPhones have ridiculous longevity and hold resale value better than any other device.





  • Matter’s biggest problem is that it launched behind everything else. You’re already starting to see a lot of support for it just because it allows companies to support Apple Home without implementing the whole HomeKit stack & pay the licensing fees to Apple. SwitchBot, Hue and IKEA already have Matter support in their hubs in beta.

    But it won’t be relevant to non-Apple users until Thread radios start being more pervasive and the spec reaches v2 and supports more stuff. Then most devices will be Matter, because a company can support all 3 major vendor apps with one standard. Right now it’s:

    • Amazon/Google - most low end devices or devices made by those companies
    • Apple Home - devices specifically for homekit
    • Amazon/Google/Apple Home - devices for all 3
    • Amazon/Google/Matter - devices for all 3 that use Matter to support Apple Home

    Some will still go those routes, but eventually it will just make sense to support Matter and do away with all of those separate devices and support paths.

    I think the analogy is faulty because none of what exists is any sort of standard. It’s just a bunch of proprietary vendor implementations. Matter is the first front end Smart Home standard.



  • Wouldn’t the better move be the exact opposite? If you really want to move go for it, but barrier to entry only gets lower as time goes on, not higher.

    I don’t know what “scramble” you would need if you did move to Jellyfin. If your library and setup is already working on Plex, why wouldn’t it just be a matter of installing Jellyfin, adding the library folders you already use with Plex and letting everything scan in? Ask your users to create accounts and add them?

    And if it’s not that simple, then it’s hard to argue that it’s on the same level as Plex, isn’t it? Who even knows what the future holds? If Plex eventually collapses, Jellyfin might not even be the best solution. More time allows them to continue to improve it, or other solutions to emerge.

    Plex literally has no purpose outside of the core library product. The other revenue streams exist to fund the core product, and it’s not a public company. AFAIK, Elan is still the creator, founder and CTO of Plex. If he leaves or they make moves to go public, then I’ll begin the arduous task of clicking on an installer 5 times and adding some folders to a new service.

    For now, I think I’m good.