

Well, them and the bandits, I’d imagine.


Well, them and the bandits, I’d imagine.


I spun it up it up in may to fool around. Today I opened a brand new air purifier and imeaditley disassembled it to flash ESPHome firmware on it. It never once ran stock.


One thing I’ve noticed: my self hosted services are rarley, if ever, hounding me to check out features. I cannot emphasise enough how much I loathe a program fighting for my attention.


Small Soldiers


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.


this makes me feel much better. I’m debating spooling it up on wifi after disconnecting it and piecing it back together.


thank you! I had looked at the documentation but was unable to find that. I think to be safe I’m going to follow what @[email protected] said as well. There’s no reason not to label them.
Which means, sorry future people stumbling on this, I will not be providing definitive evidence one way or the other on this.


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.
2nd gramps. I spooled it up in about 2mins on an unraid server.


doing this dance right now, I toyed with the honest version of this. Either by adding a “robot.txt” section, or typing “This resume prepared for XYZ inc for the position of ABC based on proficiency in <list job reqs> as requested in position posting”


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.
Nice try FBI Agent.


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.


I don’t know why I didn’t think of that! I have a number of pis and a few outdated mini-pcs. I didn’t connect that fact they can be miserable to use so long as it validates it works. Thank you so much!
I think we can both agree tautology works because it works, and that’s good enough for me.