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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • Depending on how much you have set aside it can work, if you don’t have anything set aside and break a leg in a freak accident you can get stuck making massive payments on $20,000+ of medical debt and set yourself back several years. I’m sure it’s gotten more expensive now too, that was 6 years ago, and while I don’t have the debt any more, I also have complications from the surgery that still bother me that I feel like I can’t afford to get fixed.

    That said, a high deductible plan can also leave you screwed, and doesn’t save you as much money as they act like it does. The pricing is different for insured vs uninsured patients, and your insurance company has basically negotiated the rates higher so you think they’re more useful than they actually are.


  • Started moving to Element/Matrix this weekend when I attended a protest and wanted to have some kind of communication, but also wanted to leave my primary phone at home. I was using a de-googled android fork and an e-sim, but being a data-only e-sim, I couldn’t use Signal due to the phone number requirement.

    Annoying to have try to get contacts to get another app, but at least it’s decentralized and comes with the option of being self-hosted once I’m ready to tackle that.


  • Mine aren’t quite that long, but are similar. And I’m a guy. I get really severe ingrown toenails if I keep mine trimmed too short, but don’t have any issues as long as I keep them grown out past the skin. Yes, they’re annoying, and took getting used to. I can still wear closed-toed shoes (occasionally I buy a size larger if the shape of the shoe feels tight on my nails). It all still beats the pain and occasional bloody socks from my nails cutting into my toes as they grow.


  • I have a bunch of different zigbee models, but my overall favorites are the Sengled Zigbee plugs. They have power monitoring, which can be really useful for automations.

    For example, my computer monitor makes an annoying high-pitched squeal when in standby mode, so I have it and my PC on separate Sengled smart plugs and if the PC plug is drawing low enough wattage for 10 seconds that I can be sure it’s off or asleep, my automation turns off the monitor smart plug, and when the PC plug wattage jumps back above the threshold, the monitor plug gives power to my monitor again.

    Obviously that specific use is a bit niche, but the ability to know when not-smart devices are using more or less power and run automations accordingly can be really useful.

    There are other brands besides Sengled that have power monitoring, but I’ve found theirs to be pretty reliable, just make sure you get the zigbee plugs, because they also make wifi plugs that look basically identical to the zigbee model.








  • Oh I have read and heard about all those things, none of them (to my knowledge) are being done by OpenAI, xAI, Google, Anthropic, or any of the large companies fueling the current AI bubble, which is why I call it a bubble. The things you mentioned are where AI has potential, and I think that continuing to throw billions at marginally better LLMs and generative models at this point is hurting the real innovators. And sure, maybe some of those who are innovating end up getting bought by the larger companies, but that’s not as good for their start-ups or for humanity at large.


  • It can be, but sometimes packages are removed from the official repos, but still available in AUR, only running yay -Syu will install the AUR versions of dependencies that are no longer needed, and can leave you with a bunch of unnecessary packages from AUR.

    If you run pacman -Syu on its own the unnecessary dependencies will be removed and you won’t get the AUR versions, and then yay -Syu will only update things you actually want from AUR.



  • I’m using “good” in almost a moral sense. The quality of output from LLMs and generative AI is already about as good as it can get from a technical standpoint, continuing to throw money and data at it will only result in minimal improvement.

    What I mean by “good AI” is the potential of new types of AI models to be trained for things like diagnosing cancer, and and other predictive tasks that we haven’t thought of yet that actually have the potential to help humanity (and not just put artists and authors out of their jobs).

    The work of training new, useful AI models is going to be done by scientists and researchers, probably on a limited budgets because there won’t be a clear profit motive, and they won’t be able to afford thousands of $20,000 GPUs like are being thrown at LLMs and generative AI today. But as the current AI race crashes and burns, the used hardware of today will be more affordable and hopefully actually get used for useful AI projects.


  • MrMcGasion@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldLemmy be like
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    3 months ago

    I firmly believe we won’t get most of the interesting, “good” AI until after this current AI bubble bursts and goes down in flames. Once AI hardware is cheap interesting people will use it to make cool things. But right now, the big players in the space are drowning out anyone who might do real AI work that has potential, by throwing more and more hardware and money at LLMs and generative AI models because they don’t understand the technology and see it as a way to get rich and powerful quickly.


  • It’s not any different from running a random bash script, which is why according to the Arch wiki, users of the AUR should “verify that the PKGBUILD and accompanying files are not malicious or untrustworthy.” That’s also why good AUR helpers ask if you want to look at the PKGBUILD every time you install or update anything, because best practice is to read them every time so you know what it’s doing.

    The AUR there for convienience, which means it tends to get used by newbies who really probably shouldn’t be using it. But I also won’t pretend that I follow the guidance every time myself.