RemindMe! 3y “reply to this thread”.

Tweezers.

When you realize how many wars were averted because of them.

• Catch 22
• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (series)

Wait until AGI!

AGI: Yes.

Wait until the sentient robots!

Sentient robots: Yes.

Wait until biological…

Biologics: Glub, glub. Yes.

She was the co-author of the second edition of Bunnie Huang’s New Essential Guide to Electronics, for those looking to make hardware in Shenzhen: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/a-new-essential-guide-to-electronics-by-naomi-wu-details-a-different-shenzen/

Cleaning up the kitchen every night.

Used to leave dishes in the sink during college, then do them when it got full. Got a side job as a bartender, where you had to clean up every surface after the last shift, ready for people the next day. Applied it to home. Has stuck ever since.

Fortunately, married a woman who had the same habits. We’ve never gone to bed with a dirty kitchen, even after a group gathering.

Tried bash, Make, and awk/sed. All hit brick walls. Finally landed on pyinvoke. Two dependencies to install on any new machine. Never had problems. Also, easy to debug and modify as projects evolve.

I just spent the weekend installing 24.04 on a Lenovo laptop as a self-hosted server. The only thing that didn’t work was the fingerprint scanner. No big deal, but it seems peripheral device driver support is still a bit janky.

Running the self-hosted apps under Docker, though, worked without a hitch. chef’s kiss

We were waving iPhones feet away from the tag. It didn’t get picked up so we wandered out to the neighborhood.

My guess is, to preserve battery, iPhones wake up and scan for nearby AirTags only X seconds at a time (don’t have actual numbers, but guessing somewhere between 30-120 seconds). Whatever AirTag ID they pick up, they send anonymously to the cloud along with location. If the owner has the tag in lost mode and the ID matches, they get notified.

This means if you’re walking around with your phone and it hasn’t hit the scan window, you could miss the tag. This works in a high-density area like a city center with lots of phones waking up and scanning at different times, but not so much in low density places.

In that case, a GPS tag with cell modem might work better, but it’s a lot pricier and requires regular charging.

An AirTag for my wife’s cat, along with a collar holder. She’s an indoor cat but REALLY wants to get out. We got it after reports of coyotes roaming around and attacking small pets.

One time she darted out a sliding door window, we tried to track her down. Went all over the house, then outside. Ended up driving all over the neighborhood. Nothing. Turned out the whole time she was hiding under a car, 20ft from where she got out.

Confidence in the tech is low.

First and last snowboard lesson. Long time ago. Never again.

A friend gave me the best career advice years ago: make a personal portfolio site.

He said nobody really reads through resumes anymore. A portfolio with lots of screenshots or photos, and a very short paragraph works best. Also tack on a resume for those who ask for it.

Organized by category, date, or whatever makes sense. You can use a blogging engine like Wordpress, or a static hosting platform like Jeckyll or Hugo. Assign it a simple domain (like .work or .portfolio). Keep it updated with latest clippings.

Then whenver someone asks, just point them at the site. Print it on a biz card, make custom stickers, etc.

If you want free hosting, check out Github Pages.

AOL.

If only for their resilience.

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1991/11/29

I intentionally kept historical imports out, since Reddit is blocking APIs under the guise of limiting AI scraping.

My main point was setting up an easier way for low-tech mods to set up a parallel community, then nudge users to move over.

Could there be a one-click way to automatically ‘import’ a Reddit subreddit over to a Lemmy community? Meaning, create it, import the sidebars, welcomes, rules, graphics, etc. so it looks familiar to regular users. If not, at least a step-by-step tutorial on how mods could do it.

Another option would be to provide something like a crossposting Chrome or Firefox extension that lets people simultaneously post content to both Reddit and Lemmy. Give them a smooth transition path.

Lastly, the Bluesky concept of ‘pluggable algorithms’ is one way to make it so users can choose whatever sort works best for their interests.

AWS bread and butter is EC2, S3, and Lambda.

The reason AWS is focusing so much on Gen-AI is because they’re in the shovel-and-pick business during the gold rush. This guy’s beef should be with the over-excited gold speculators, not the general store purveyors of denim and panning equipment.

They all add donors to lists and send them solicitations based on the premise that a former donor doesn’t need as much convincing for their cause. It’s fairly easy to unsubscribe as soon as you get the first message, but by then your email may have already entered a partnership pool, so you’ll start getting similar solicitations.

Best way around it is to use an email anonymizing service, or one way phone/text numbers. Or you can treat it like a game and donate under username+charity@mailservice.com, then watch how many more messages you get to that specific address.

To answer your main question, eff.org and msf.org are pretty good charities. You can also check https://www.charitynavigator.org/.

If it’s purely political orgs, local groups are less likely to have aggressive fundraising arms.

Think where you would like to be when you’re thirty, then work backward to now and figure out what you need to do to get there.

Also, don’t be afraid to take chances.

Years ago, I used to live in a neigborhood just down from what they called ‘the projects.’ Those who couldn’t get into Section 8 housing would spill over onto the streets. One time we had a pretty harsh cold snap. Several people died. A few of us started buying tents, sleeping bags, and blankets from Costco and handing them out to those camping on the sidewalks or side streets.

Now, we live in an area that has pretty good food and housing non-profits, so we donate to them every year. I generally don’t give to individuals, hoping our donations, aggregated with others, will reach more people in need.

During COVID, a local non-profit with an urban garden set up an outdoor fridge and pantry for those sleeping around the perimeter. The non-profit would load it up with any excess produce. But word got out and people started donating, usually leftovers from restaurants. We started going to discount grocery stores and buying bulk foods and stocking up the fridge once a month. Took the kids and had them do the stocking up, just to normalize it.

We’re beyond lucky not to be in that situation and feel strongly that we should help where we can. Paying it forward and all. I don’t think anyone who is pinched should feel bad, but those who can afford it, should.

We’ve never mentioned any of this to any friends or family. I only bring it up here, hoping more people feel inspired to step up.