Don’t forget Louisiana… My wife’s favorite.

Above everything, lack of curiosity. If someone is uncurious, it’s a big red flag to me.

Ubiquiti has had outages in the past that meant you couldn’t manage the equipment right in front of you.

Even discounting the potential security implications of that kind of management, the rage I would feel in that situation is enough that I while my AP is nice, works great, I will never use any of their gateways.

I’m using a 2.5g protectli with OPNSense now, and it’s easy to manage, and all local.

It would be a crying shame if someone were to figure out a way to force those e ink displays to refresh fast enough that it kills the batteries on those things…

Generally speaking I do things myself because it’s cheaper, in that it lets me allocate cash in higher quality versions of things than I would otherwise be able to afford. I grew up pretty poor and that was how my family did things. Car breaks, that’s why you buy a Chilton’s. Appliance isn’t working? You can always order the part for a tenth of what it costs to have the appliance guy tell you what’s wrong. AC quit working? Those capacitors are super easy to replace and only cost $7.

Now I could pay people to do more things for me, but it’s only under certain circumstances.

Sometimes it just boils down to something my Dad told me underneath a car (or a house maybe) like 30 years ago: “Nobody is gonna care about your shit more than you do.”

It’s a surprisingly good comparison especially when you look at the reactions: frame breaking vs data poisoning.

The problem isn’t progress, the problem is that some of us disagree with the Idea that what’s being touted is actual progress. The things llms are actually good at they’ve being doing for years (language translations) the rest of it is so inexact it can’t be trusted.

I can’t trust any llm generated code because it lies about what it’s doing, so I need to verify everything it generates anyway in which case it’s easier to write it myself. I keep trying it and it looks impressive until it ends up at a way worse version of something I could have already written.

I assume that it’s the same way with everything I’m not an expert in. In which case it’s worse than useless to me, I can’t trust anything it says.

The only thing I can use it for is to tell me things I already know and that basically makes it a toy or a game.

That’s not even getting into the security implications of giving shitty software access to all your sensitive data etc.

I try to not buy any Wi-Fi smart home devices anymore. I try to stick to zwave or zigbee, zwave I have better luck with generally. I even left my nest thermostat at my old house and installed a 10+ year old zwave thermostat at the new one. Way happier. I’m not relying on googles API to be stable anymore for home assistant interaction.

Alas, I cannot grow hair on the top of my head, so I must grow it on the bottom.