FYI, a few typos in “3. Organize with Categories” first paragraph in the getting started tutorial/blog post.

If you pay low enough wages and workers are too exhausted to do anything about it, lower productivity is profitable. It’s about the bottom line.

If the workforce makes a pittance and is too exhausted to rebel, the bosses win.

Are you gaslighting or fucking with me? The retention system for motorcycle helmets still gets referred to casually as chin straps. It goes under your chin, which also happens to be in front of the neck.

I own and ride a motorcycle. I own and wear a helmet. I call them chin straps. Everyone I know calls them chin straps. Diagrams for helmets in English call them chins straps or, on occasion, the “helmet retention system”.

I honestly don’t care what you call them - I’m just trying to be helpful and interpret what I thought you meant. I don’t understand why you are being argumentative? Is it a translation thing maybe?

They may be referring to the motorcycle helmet chin strap.

I tried AI a few times over the last few years, and sometimes I don’t ignore the Gemini results from a search when I’m tired or I’m struggling to get good results.

Almost every time I’ve done either, helpful looking hallucinations wasted my time and made my attempt to find a solution to a technical problem less efficient. I will give specific examples, often unprompted.

I also point to a graph of my electric bill.

I also describe the logon script that a colleague (with no coding experience) asked for help with. He’d used AI to generate what he had to show me and was looking for help getting it to work. Variables declared and never used. Variables storing relevant information but different, similarly named variables used to retrieve the information.

I grabbed a TubesZB and it has made things so much easier. I can put it wherever I need it and if I need to migrate my HA VM to another host there is no fuss. Literally did it the other day and it worked flawlessly.

Your banal chattering is unnecessary. Are you able to grasp the importance of my experiments? Begone from my sensory range, lest I have you disassembled for servitor parts

Do you have any solution for services that aren’t over a browser? I’ve been using Tailscale but I’m looking for alternatives. Pangolin only seems to work for either browser-based services or opening ports to the Internet, unless I’m missing something.

Ex. How do I connect a client app on my phone to my subsonic server for music without opening my home server to the net?

I’m not a software developer or used a dedicated programming AI inside an IDE or anything. Just inconsistent, occasionally scripting-heavy IT type stuff. My organization offered me whatever AI google makes available because they had more licenses than they were using so I figure whatever, sure. I think 80% of the time (when I’ve been desperate enough to look at its summary of a technical search or used it for help, even with Google products like a Sheets or Appsheet function) it has hallucinated useless answers that occasionally sent me on wild goose chases when they looked convincing. I’ve been pointed to non-existent powershell commands and multiple non-existent python libraries. To be fair, when I searched for one of the powershell commands I found AI slop articles about it. So at least it had some excuse… or maybe someone found the hallucinated results were trending and tried to capitalize on that.

I was having a rough day and figured I’d ask the chat version geared towards programming to give me a complicated Sheets formula. I saw a flaw in its formula, explained it, and ended up being gaslit as it proceeded to support the accuracy of its results step by step and literally used a different value on the one problematic step to demonstrate that it’s logic was sound.

My favorite was when I searched to see if AppSheet supported tooltips in forms. It listed the features of AppSheet including the ability to display tooltips in forms. It offered a reference link. The link was to a forum with the following, admittedly paraphrased exchange:

OP: Does AppSheets let you use tooltips in a form?

Reply: No, not within a form.

I think you are kind of comparing apples and oranges. A decent UPS delivers voltage regulated wall power (smooth spikes and dips, or a brownout) and seamlessly switches over to battery power when wall power dips or drops. It often has a bunch of additional hardware that adds to the cost but wouldn’t be useful to someone using a CPAP machine with it. Ex. remote access via Ethernet or at least a connector to signal a PC so that it can cleanly shut down.

I don’t believe that power stations like the one you linked are designed to maintain power seamlessly during an outage. I recall it being a battery that you’d switch to if you lost power or to take camping. I don’t think it’s meant to be run plugged in all the time with devices drawing from it all the time. Admittedly, I have no power stations so maybe I’m not the best person to comment.

I don’t think it’s good, I think it’s unavoidable. For decades the right has been a party of, for lack of a better term, evil. However, they’d hidden it under a cloak of libertarianism/freedom and religiosity. This gave them plausible deniability. Sure, some voters were responding to dog whistles or were otherwise drawn in by the undercurrent of evil, but it was forgivable to vote conservative because the cloak gave them plausible deniability.

Trump threw away the cloak. He’ll bring out a fragment of it and wave it around when someone points out hypocrisy, but it’s so transparently performative that the plausible deniability is gone. Those in power on the right are openly greedy, hateful, petty, dishonest, racist, authoritarian, fascist, etc. Anyone who still supports them has to either be so ignorant and frustrating to deal with that they aren’t worth your time or so willfully ignorant that they are difficult to forgive.

I still think they can figure it out, but the leopard will likely need to eat their face and the faces of everyone they love and go on a villainous “This was my plan all along mwahahahah” speech before that happens. Or Trump will just say “AI, Fake News” and they’ll find more loved ones’ faces to feed them.

The left hand won this round.

It is like encouragement for the thing you were already likely to do, which is the goal of targeted advertising.

It’s the claim of targeted advertising. The person I saw talking about this actually ran the numbers, comparing two very similar geographic markets. In market A they paid for advertising, but in B they did not.

When comparing market A to market B, market A had a marginal increase in sales for the advertised product vs. market B. However, they were charged for orders of magnitude more conversions than the actual increase in sales.

The idea is that when compared to something like actual click-through purchases, where a user literally clicks on an ad and then buys a product, it’s extremely deceptive.

I literally had bets on whether or not someone would respond exactly as you did, bragging about never seeing ads because of ad blocking.

There is actually an argument that advertisers like Google are abusing micro targeting to extract advertising revenue from clients while, at least in some cases, delivering few actual new customers.

Here’s the process.

1. Google sees that your profile (browsing habits, demographics, search patterns, etc) suggest you are interested in product A.
2. Google blasts you with advertisements for product A, essentially marking your browser session and claiming you as a recipient of their advertising. Ever look at a particular product and find you are being advertised for that product incessantly for a while?
3. If you happen to buy product A around the time that your session was shown an advertisement for that product, Google claims you as a conversion and gets paid for convincing you to buy the product. Advertising works!

So if Google’s algorithm thinks you are already going to buy product A, they show you an ad for product A constantly because it means they’ll claim you as an advertising success and get paid extra.

Are we now protesting that they reversed their decision?

…no? I’m not really protesting so much as offering what I think the other person is trying to say. I think they are saying that Google crossed a line, and walking it back doesn’t change that fact.

In my opinion, Google has crossed countless lines over the last 5-10 years. I’m looking for alternatives that meet my own needs. That search has accelerated over the last few years, when the things Google has done have been most egregious. This isn’t a protest. This is disillusionment. I’m abandoning ship.

I’ve had a pretty good experience with it aside from this recent problem with my phone - Pixel 8 Pro. It’s a big deal right now - I have a number of self hosted services I use on my phone accessed through a shared subnet via tailscale. When I left it enabled, multiple times a day I’d lose connectivity entirely. It would get fixed if I just quickly disable-enable it… at least until it randomly happens again in an hour or two. I started using spit tunneling, which I think fixed the connectivity issue for internet-dependent apps but nothing I tried fixed calls and texts.

Unfortunately, my mother has been having a number of health issues so there is no fucking way I’m going to risk missing calls and texts…so I just deal with being disconnected from my servers for now. I really wish there was a solution or something I could do to figure out what’s going wrong. I can’t keep trying random things and risk it. Calls from my mother are virtually the only calls I get, other than spam.

I’ve had to stop using it on my Pixel. In the last few months I have more and more suddenly lost all connectivity outside of my tailscale network. I tried excluding apps but I still will randomly fail to receive SMS or calls, suddenly getting them delivered in a rush when I disconnect from tailscale.

If anyone has any tools to recommend troubleshooting the phones connection let me know. I have no idea how to learn more about the problem beyond the obvious “If tailscale isn’t on, it doesn’t happen.”

I think it was fairly obvious that the move was going to piss people off, they just misjudged to what extent. Modern business strategy is to claim to listen to customer feedback and just quietly plan to implement it anyway, just do it more subtly, more quietly, and more slowly.