2
points
nmcfarl
Joined 2,642 karma
Founder CastingWords
Coder and Founder. Union County, OR
https://castingwords.com
https://nmcfarl.org
nathan.mcfarland@nmcfarl.org - feel free to drop me a line.
- Sadly not flat and not open. But more far flung repeaters are an option as I have electricity further from the house.
However the TDeck being hard to use makes it unlikely the kid would carry it. And bad UX in general makes it hard on my wife. It was mainly the bad UX and lack of open source (no hacking for me) aspects that put a damper on things for me.
- I am so glad that he did this and I did not.
I’d seriously been considering trying meshcore out, as I live on several hundred acres without cell service, and I’d like some means of communicating with my family. So far CB radios have not worked as they are large to carry day-to-day (particularly for the kid). This seemed like a solution - and fun to tinker with. Apparently not.
- This is going to be painful for people in a way which I haven’t seen discussed here yet.
A year ago I went on vacation with my family, and the kids wanted to watch Netflix on VRBO‘s TV and so I logged in to my account on the tv. And of course I forgot to log it out when I left - so, predictably, the next people decided they hated my taste and went through and deleted all my likes and dislikes, and rated I swear 100 teen romances. I somehow got my account logged out of that TV, but the account was trashed and unrepairable so I lost about a decades worth of history and started a new one.
Afterwards, I thought I should’ve just cast from the kids iPad. And now that won’t be possible.
- My sixth grader has classmates who call 20-year-olds boomers, at least when the 20-year-olds are doing things they don’t like.
It really just means someone I don’t like who’s older than me.
- Interestingly, I have yet to find I have the horrible feedback problem people are talking about in this thread with my APP3, but I do in my Honeywell syncs, about 1 day in 3.
And as I wear glasses all hearing protection in the earmuff style block less noise than the APP3 - though I normally wear both.
- I’m not sure if that’s true.
The number of times I’ve opened FFmpegs man page must number in the hundreds. I think I’m a pretty good conceptually, but I can’t remember all the flags. IE that –s is frame size, while -fs is file size.
And while that man page does have some examples, these days I tend to ask an LLM (or if it’s going to be simple Google) for an example.
- The conclusion is, it is much better until they cut the coating. However, it feels more like plastic than it does like fabric.
- I’ve had two cases for this in the last month. Not that I have access to an agentic browser.
* We decided to buy a robot vacuum, again. And we decided on a particular model that yo-yo‘s up and down in price by about $200 every month. We ended up buying it off of Amazon because of camelcamelcamel, but if I could have easily tracked prices and bought elsewhere, I would’ve. And I would’ve considered using an antigenic browser to do that for me – if I could trust them at all. One model number and I know the price I wanna pay, I just don’t want to check a bunch of storefronts everyday
* kids going back to school – and he has a school supply list. He’s up for a new backpack and a new lunchbox, and a bunch of back to school clothes - so those we’ve actually been shopping for all summer. But the wooden ruler, the three sheafs of college rule paper, etc. I don’t wanna shop for. I actually had chatGPT scan the paper list, and then get me either direct links, or links to searches on walmart.com (they are more than an hours drive from us, but they do deliver to my wife’s work). Then I created a cart and had them deliver. ChatGPT solutions were not bad, I only switched one or two items for a version my kid should have versus a version I should buy. In the moment, I probably would have trusted a bot to do this, though retrospectively I’m glad it went the way it did
- My stepmom who retired five years ago, did COBOL dev as part of her banking job until 2002ish and then she was full-time management track. In her bank, most of the work had been integrated with Java, and the Java was done by outsourced Indian teams. At the time she retired she felt the Indian teams had been failing for years to meet objectives, and finally management was seeing it. Additionally everybody who knew the COBOL side of things was retiring at the same time as she was and she did not want to know what the system would look like in five years.
- To save some googling the Politicians Fallacy is this one:
We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.
- This is really possible. I installed Claude code many months ago, and never used it - but may have logged in in at that time. When sonnet 4 was released I tried it again, and started using it with just my API keys (I do not have a paid subscription).
- This was once true, I think, but it is no longer true. If you set an API key in your environment, Claude Code will work.
- I read a lot, I have 2 e-readers and stacks of paper books, and an iPad Pro.
And it has been at least five years since I read a book on the phone, or iPad, though a couple years ago I read part of a PDF book on the iPad.
I think this stuff is really down to personal preference. And the kind of reading you do and where you do it.
My iPad never leaves home, and as such, it’s always going ahead to head against the e-reader, and losing except in the case of PDFs.
I do occasionally find myself with too much time and in a place with just my phone and not my laptop case (which almost always has e-reader in it, along with my laptop), and in those cases, I generally read hacker news.
Paper books get read when I cannot find an electronic version - which is fine, better than any other form except the e-reader.
But that’s me and my devices and my usage patterns and hangups. It’s not my wife, It’s not my kid, and it’s probably not most of you.
- The horrible thing is there can be lots of differentiation here. I grow my own meat birds for my own consumption, and they taste radically better than anything I’ve ever had in America. (Barring when I eat my friends’ birds.) Artisanal chicken could definitely be a thing, although it would definitely cost more.
I feel that regulatory capture is part of the problem - processing your own birds is safely is definitely possible, but what is required to process them for sale makes it so the local USDA butcher would have to charge as much for a chicken as for a sheep, and that’s just not viable.
- My stepmother (in her 60s) inherited or rather lot of furniture from her parents, enough to furnish most of a house. It’s spectacular and at this point it has to be well over 100 years old. She both wanted it and has lived with it daily for coming on 40 years.
And my wife inherited three pieces from her parents and they make up much of our dining room, and her uncle gave her two pieces that he made by hand, and that did not fit into his new house. I was dubious about the stuff from her parents, but it’s beautiful if dated and we’ve gone with a very “eclectic” decorating style, no room has to look like any other room. And now I’m very grateful for all of it.
- I lost a Mac laptop in the pre-MagSafe days, to a bullpen environment –a sysadmin was rushing to a meeting, snagged his foot, and took the cable and the laptop off the desk at high speeds.
After that, I was a big fan of MagSafe, but today’s USB-C and better batteries situation solves a lot of problems that MagSafe did in a different way. It allows for you to have multiple reasonably priced chargers, so the one on your desk can be safely placed, with a short unsnaggable cable. And you can still go to meetings and take your laptop home – because you have another cable in your bag and another at home.
So these days, I barely use the MagSafe cable on my MacBook Pro.
- I don’t know what Amazon did - but I use Aider+Openrouter with Gemini 2.5 pro and it cost 1/6 of what sonnet 3.7 does. The aider leaderboard https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/ - includes relative pricing theses days.
- 360 points
Additionally the inverse is true. Sometimes kids choices are restrained, and they really would like to do a thing they are not allowed to, and gift cards offered them away to do that. Case in point: my tween figured out that we don’t let him buy in game currency for any the games that we do let him play, however, when a relative gives him a gift card, we let him redeem it, making gift cards incredibly popular gifts.