This is why I pay for YT Premium. No way in hell am I watching ads, but I do want to be able to use the platform, and the money has to come from somewhere. So far it’s been pretty good value, although SponsorBlock is of course still required.
It’s English, so it’s difficult to be wrong, but that phrase do be weird.
It does indeed. My job includes writing and deploying .NET apps on multiple platforms, and it works fine for me.
But some people prefer not to use .NET when comparable native options are available, so they might prefer KeePassXC.
Nothing major as far as I can tell. Here’s an overview via SuperUser. KeePassXC might be a better option for some use cases if you’re mostly not on Windows as it does not require .NET. Note that “KeePassXC does not support plugins at the moment and probably never will”, but it does have built-in support for some things you might want a plugin for in KeePass2.
So what will everyone having their own AI look like in a way that doesn’t just sound like a chatGPT joke? What would make it a desirable future?
I guess that depends on how much authority you’d want to delegate.
For me, it would be nice if I could have it do things like shopping tasks without being more of a pain than doing the task myself. For example, I needed to buy a hot-water carpet cleaner today. It would be great if I could tell it
Hey Staffie, buy a carpet shampoo machine for home delivery within the next two weeks. Pick a highly rated machine from a widely recognized brand, and focus on carpet cleaning and water extraction performance, I don’t need any upholstery cleaning features. Don’t spend over $400. If the best option is under $200 don’t ask, just buy it. If it’s over $200, show me the top two options before buying.
And end up with something pretty close to what I’d have picked if I did the shopping myself.
It would also be great if I could have it reliably perform arbitrary tasks that it isn’t specifically programmed to do. Like
Hey Staffie, check if I’ve got enough PTO to take next Thursday and Friday off, and if so, reserve a campsite for me at Foo State Park for three nights, preferably one close to the water, then send Mr. Boss an email letting him know I’ll be out those days.
If it were particularly smart it would infer from previous conversations that I might want a 1lb propane cylinder, marshmallows, graham crackers, and Hershey bars added to my grocery list and would add them automatically (because it already knows my preferences about small automatic expenditures like that and is aware of the spending limits I’ve given it).
Then it might come back a few minutes later and say
'Hey boss, all the campsites within 250 of the water are already reserved, but site 1701D, which is near the only restroom and a tailhead, is available. Reviewers report that the park WiFi access point is installed at the restroom, so that site has good free internet service. Shall I reserve it?
So yeah, in general, the ability to take arbitrary directions and execute them in reasonably intelligent ways (for example If I ask for a site Foo State Park, and there are two such parks in my country, it should be able to guess which park I’m talking about based on the context (like, if I’m reserving 3 nights and one of the parks is an hour down the road and the other is a two day drive, just assume the closer one)) and not require pre-programmed interfaces to every single thing. It should be able to search the web, find the interfaces humans use, and use those to do the kinds of things humans can do. It should also have some capabilities to use my accounts and passwords under a delegated authority to get shit done as my authorized assistant.
Ideally it should also do things like observe my choices and infer my preferences so it can constrain choices it offers me:
Hey Staffie, order lunch from Subway for pickup at 3.
Sure boss, do you want your usual 6 inch turkey sub?
Yep
Nacho cheese chips or salt-n-vinegar?
Nacho.
Done, I’ll let you know when it’s ready.
Stuff like that.
I was curious if that would work on ethernet cable! I’ve seen it done on coax, wasn’t sure if it would work well enough on UTP to be useful outside a lab setting. Cheap too. Cool!
Wire tracker maybe? You might want a higher quality version than that particular one if the cable run is long, one of the reviews suggest that the distance is limited.
That’s what I’ve been wondering too. I keep seeing people complaining about ads, but I use Edge (and Firefox) with Bing regularly on an up-to-date Win 11 system and I’m not seeing anything like that.
Maybe they’ve got demographic targeting that I don’t fit into or something.
I’m not entirely sure how I’m earning Microsoft reward points, but they keep sending me $10 Amazon gift cards for them so… that’s cool anyway.
Yep, two simple mechanical knobs is easily the best microwave oven interface. Although I do like the fancy Samsung microwave I have that is almost completely silent and lightweight, I think it uses an inverter instead of a chonky HV transformer. I wish I could get a combo of that inverter with a couple of simple knobs for controls.
Dry cleaning fluid too!
If I hadn’t already deactivated my account this would have been a good time to do it. I had like 135,000 accounts on my block list.
whatever technical bullshit they needed to do to reverse them
Apparently ultimately this involves hitting the person hiding the encryption keys with a $4 wrench until they provide the keys.
While the outside screen is too thin on my fold
Yep, I’m hoping they’ll do a slightly wider tri-fold model at some point. I’d like to have a wider front screen, like Galaxy S22 Ultra sized, and then be able to unfold twice to get a ~3x sized tablet-sized screen.
Not that that would help with the already astronomical price-tag of the Z-Fold.
ChatGPT currently knows the text of the Harry Potter novels, but it does not recite them when asked to do so.
I tried that several weeks ago while discussing some details of the Harry Potter world with ChatGPT, and it was able to directly quote several passages to me to support its points (we were talking about house elf magic and I asked it to quote a paragraph). I checked against a dead-tree copy of the book and it had exactly reproduced the paragraph as published.
This may have changed with their updates since then, and it may not be able to quote passages reliably, but it is (or was) able to do so on a couple of occasions.
C# is my primary language, so I’d certainly recommend it. It can be a little daunting to get into because it is a large ecosystem of tools, so you might want to watch some videos and keep things simple for a while.
For work I mostly use it for APIs for web sites, that might be a good place to start if you’re familiar with JS/TS front-end work. From there you might want to try Razor or Blazor for handling web UI work in C#. I’m not very experienced with that aspect of it, but it’s mostly been a positive experience (TBH I kind of prefer React, but I’d need to spend more time on the Razor/Blazor side to have a strong opinion).
The desktop development side in C# is kind of a mess at the moment. Maybe stick with web until you’re feeling pretty comfortable with the language.
My biggest problem is figuring out what I want to do with any coding skills
Maybe some dumb little games? If you aren’t interested in 3D gaming you can do 2D platformers, top-down Rogue-likes, or Zork-style interactive fiction (text) games (from scratch instead of with a Z-Machine).
As a self-taught developer, when I was learning I found it a lot more useful to just go code stuff, and then when I found something that seemed hard or ugly, I could go look for solutions to that kind of problem, which was much more interesting than just reading about various techniques. (Well, I was learning well before normal people had internet, so mostly I invented some shit to fix my own problem, but it got easier/faster after the internet became available).
How did you learn to talk to WolframAlpha?
I want to like WA, but the natural language interface is so opaque that I usually give up before I can get any non-trivial calculation out of it.
FTA:
So, yeah, almost certainly illegal in pretty much any grid-powered home in the US.
The basic problem is that if the grid power goes down the inverter can back-feed the grid enough to electrocute the people who are working to fix it.
Utilities require an approved isolation system of some kind that prevents that happening. They are pretty strict about this for various other technical and political reasons too, but evidently it is mostly a safety concern.
I’ve got some good locations at home for panels, and about 500W in panels that I use for camping, but the equipment I’d need to handle easily and safely consuming the power at home is kind of expensive (just running an inverter and a battery for an isolated system is easy enough, I’ve got all that, but it’s not cheap to seamlessly connect it to my home power system). Would love to have a safe and approved system like what is described in the article.