This is a great conversation because I’m one of those people who’s terrible at arithmetic, but quite good at math. As in: I can look at a function, visualize it in 3D space, see what different max, mins and surfaces are dominated by what terms etc, but don’t ask me to tally a meal check. I’d be useless at applying any math without a calculator.

Similarly, there’s a lot of engineers out there that use CAD extensively that would probably not be engineers if they had to do drafting by hand.

The oatmeal did a comic that distilled this for me where they talked about why they didn’t like AI “art”. They made the point that in making a drawing, there are a million little choices made reconciling what’s in your head with what you can do on the page. Either from the medium, what you’re good at drawing, whatever, it’s those choices that give the work “soul”. Same thing for writing. Those choices are where learning, development, and style happen, and what generative AI takes away.

That helped crystalize for me the difference between a tool and autocomplete on steroids.

Edit: to add: you’re statement “I claim to understand but don’t” hits it on the head and is similar to why you have to be careful if plagiarism in citing academic review papers. If you write YOUR paper in a way that agrees with the review but discuss the paper the review was referencing, and, even accidentally, skip over that the conclusion you’re putting forward is from the review, not the paper you’re both citing, that’s plagiarism. Notion being you misrepresented their thoughts as your own. That is basically ALL generative AI.

Something like 98% of what you see in the night sky is already out of our reach. If you left right now, at the speed of light, you would never, ever, reach them.

Another consequence of that is that some day the light from those stars will also be unable to reach us. They’ll still be there, same as the day before, but not one shred of information from them will be attainable.

If you could go to this future, you would have no way of convincing people, except say, the ancient texts. To some extent it would not even matter because again, existing or not, there is no way for them to interact.

98% of what’s in the night sky would just have to be taken on faith.

Im not advocating religion here I just always thought there was some poetry in that.

I got certified in June. I don’t carry a mask because the risk of disease transfer is small, and I don’t want one more thing to worry about if it’s something I have to do.

There’s a small, practical first aide kit in most of my packs (2x alch pad, bandaides, benedryl, gauze pad, superglue), and a full one in my car. The one in my car is still mostly practical (all of the above plus more gauze, sling, calomine, butterfly bandage, antibiotic ointment, BP cuff, stethoscope, SpO2). Most of it is meant to stop bleeding I just don’t want on my seats.

Just retrained in June, American red cross. We were taught breathes and compressions.

You can be pretty technical/capable and still write that article (especially if you have technical expertise outside programming). I have never felt so seen.

I worked my way up from arduino -> RasPi -> Debian -> Self hosting quite a few things. I’m very much a hobbyist/novice, but I’m used to learning. It is so hard to read some documentation and understand what something even does sometimes. This goes double for incredibly useful tools for monitoring/implementing other tools. Like I swear I read the kubernetes descriptions 30x before I realized what in the hell it actually does, and now I’m probably about to break my entire home network with it because I think it’s cool as hell.

Also, to your comment specifically: I can get sensors on PCBs I personally made collecting data, throwing it through my own MQTT broker, hosting a dashboard etc, all at a remote site across state lines. I have no idea wtf markdown is. I use yaml for HA stuff with the ESPs, but I don’t know why markdown is a thing and it’s not just python.

And I am 1000% sure there is a very good reason for 98% of this. But yes I found this article hilarious. In my personal circle of hell all nouns end in “-ly”.

I cannot emphasize enough how unwilling I’d be to interact with someone that has these.

I’m glad somebody got the joke.

I understand you’re frustrated about the AI race. That’s an excellent point, and it deserves careful consideration. First, in considering the AI race we need to consider what AI is…

Oh I’ve loved it so far. And you’re right on the “what you learn is more useful”. Like I’d done a fair amount of hobby/work prototype stuff on rasbian, and eventually went “man, it’d be great if this but more horsepower” and wound up Debian.

Anyway, my point is despite doing a fair amount of coding, and circuit level electronics including troubleshooting comms and all the fun things like race conditions that go into that, I had zero idea how a computer was actually arranged. Troubleshooting Debian helped me with that and is infinitely transferable as opposed to being a tip and trick with windows.

But my original comment was just about Nvidia cards. I’ve had some I just slot in and they work, and some I have to spend an afternoon troubleshooting. Still reinforces your point though, troubleshooting it the first time was how I learned how things actually get displayed.

I’m not fully a penguin, but getting there. Saw the memes, experienced it first hand in one case and was plug and play in another. It’s luck of the draw.

I spent 3hrs yesterday troubleshooting an issue that ultimately came from forgetting I had installed firewalld in addition to ufw, had both enabled, and obviously their rule lists were seperate.

I almost certainly got there by doing a tutorial “brain off”

Do you happen to use android auto? Does that work OK? I could go without, but that’s one integration that’s just got it’s hooks on me hard.

The thing that pisses me off most is that cars have these vulnerabilities, and automakers do a shit job of protecting them, but do just a good enough job to keep me, the owner, from playing with them.

Lmfao, that’s what I mean, it makes way more sense to plan for the scenarios where you won’t be forced to, you know, resort to canibalism.

I’m a big fan of just augmenting your floating stock at home. I make a point of buying a few extra cans every-time I grocery shop, a few extra boxes of pasta etc. I focus on things I may actually cook with so I’m rotating stock. Diced tomatoes, canned beans, those tomatoes with green chilies in them. I’ve got some canned meat that I almost never cook with (a just in-case thing), it gets rotated through making dip during football season, but it’s there if I need it. I’ve also got textured vegetable protein (which is more for camping/a vegetarian I dated and tried to learn to cook for). Again, it’s a luxury for some folks (both for budget and space reasons).

But that was my point. This may not be you but it was surprising to me in early covid how many people just didn’t keep food around. Also spices, like it’s great to have rice and beans, but you’ll be a lot happier if you make sure you’ve got chili powder, hot sauce, soy sauce, etc.

Sure there are “grab and go” scenarios, but it is far more likley someone might need to put together some meals in a less than ideal situation. Being able to do, say, mac and cheese with some shredded canned chicken and hot sauce with a side of green beans goes a long way to keeping spirits up.

I didn’t grow up super rural, but it’s just the way my house was. One reason was the weather, the other was my mom was amazing at stretching a dollar. She’d buy when there was a great sale, and we’d have 4-5x of whatever the item was downstairs. So you’d wind up eating Christmas themed breakfast cereal until like May, but it also meant there was just a bunch of reserves.

As someone who is generally on the more prepared side, the use case for most stuff falls far short of “doomsday”. There is a ton to be said about things that are just generally useful in adverse situations. I’ve lived through a dozen or so storms that took out power for a few days (longest I think was 2 weeks). It’s usually not a complete blackout everywhere.

Point being: I can see it being useful to have a bunch of info in something easily portable to say, double check breaker wiring helping your friend fix some stuff after the storm. Look up the emergency AM/CB/NOAA radio freqs. I have a lot of the resources on this thing on a server, but that’s not mobile and would eat a lot of power just booting up. To package it nicely in a form factor like this would probably run me just about $189.

But the overall point is I think this falls on the extreme end of practical preparedness but I can absolutely see the use. Honestly the most practical thing on there are the books. Again, usually if a community gets hit bad you wind up with people that have power having a bunch of people stay over. Being able to allow multiple people stuff to read would help kill time.

All of that being said, its a distant second to the critical items that, again, have a huge range of uses: A solid first aide kit, 2 weeks of food (even if it’s not awesome). I realize that’s a luxury for a lot of people, but money is much better spent there first.

Strayed off topic a bit, but it’s because while I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to plan for SHTF scenarios, I do think we’re going to see a general decay (but not elimination) of public services/utilities and an increasingly pissy climate. I think it’s important for people to not fall into the bunker-prepper fantasy OR write off being more prepared than they’re accustomed to.

Exactly. Whats funny is facebook could have done this in like… 2010. Like I’m fairly certain I had “group pages” back then that were a very small number of people. But you’re right, the channel thing is crazy useful. Like my one group has 3 people, but we’ve got like 50 topics. It’s gotten to the point there are archives, ie: the “thanksgiving” channel moves from the “archive” group to “general” group around mid sept.

I’ve also been lucky enough to avoid having it be work related. Like I have slack for work, that notification noise is the devil, where as the discord notification noise means my buddy is posting pictures of his kid.

1000% agree. Like I use it for some spread out family (one server) and college friends. There’s <5 people in each. I think eventually forums will adopt the fediverse infrastructure. I’m on an old school forum for my vehicle, and it’s great. It’s direct out of 2010, it wouldn’t suprise me if those kind of sites brought in all the code that the fediverse runs off of. As a casual observer, that’s really what lemmy seems like to me: “what if 2005 internet, where people managed their own webpages, but it ran on a common architecture that made it easier to cross-link with other sites if you wanted?”

They do still exist, I have a specific but popular vehicle, and there’s a dedicated forum style site directly from 2011.

In a perfect world, that would be folded into the “fediverse” protocols, but like they’re already paying their own hosting etc. In the end that’s all reddit did: absorb some nominal hosting and IT for exposure. It made sense for hype niche communities, which is how reddit grew, but now that they’re killing control of the communities… Well… It turns out people were willing to pay for those servers back when they were expensive…

Discord is amazing for a step beyond group messages. I have no idea how it got into a roll as a “community tool”.

isn’t that a lot like the film industry though? Maybe thats the model that makes sense.