Me either. However, I look forward to Legal Eagle breaking down the highlights.

Yep, I don't think badly of Google mostly because I don't think of them at all. While I was deleting my Reddit account a decided I'd try moving off of big tech companies products as much as practical and even after almost 20 years with GMail as my primary mail host I just don't have anything else left in their ecosystem. Over the years I've used a lot of their products, but they kept killing them off (Picasa, Google+, Code, Reader, various chat clients), so I've found mostly self-hosted alternatives.

I guess they're still making money hand-over-fist so whatever they're doing it must work for them, but none of it is useful for me.

Yep, that's why it was interesting. Celebs are mostly boring and already have access to platforms if they want to talk to people.

I want to hear from people who I'd normally never get to listen to and who want to share details of their interests.

They should turn off the AC too, if anybody has to sweat, everybody should have to sweat.

About 15 years ago I saw an independent film at a local theater and it turned out that the guy who made it was couch-surfing the country showing the film at small theaters and was staying that night with a friend of a friend, so after the showing we went over to the friend's place to hang out and talk.

The guy who made the film was pretty cool and told us lots about the process. Basically he spent a year and all his time and money on it, borrowed money from everyone he knew, and pulled favors from all his friends and their friends to get access to locations for shooting, costumes, props, etc.

What it came down to was that at that level there is no process. You just call in every favor you can, make lots of promises you can't keep, max out your creative problem-solving abilities, and hope like hell you can get it done enough to show before you completely run out of money and friends.

While we enjoyed the film quite a lot the dude was not terribly happy with it (all he could see at that point were mistakes and limitations), and was beyond broke (that's why he was couch-surfing his way through the cities he was showing in, he could barely afford transportation to the next city).

Film making technology has come a long, long way since then, so you could probably make a similar quality film much easier and cheaper now (I wouldn't be surprised if the expensive cameras he was renting at the time are outclassed by what you can do now with a nice phone and a second-hand Canon). But the rest is probably pretty similar. Lots of dollar-stretching and creative problem-solving.

More like 375 million years, about the middle Devonian period.

Tangentally: for millions of years after plants started using lignin as a structural material the decomposers couldn't break it down very effectively, so for like 60 million years lots of that tough plant material stacked up into deep layers and eventually turned into coal.

a couple years ago I asked an ER doctor to just let me die

Did they let you die?

It's not a bad plan if you can die of old age while the plates are still spinning.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's thumbthing weird about that image.

I grew up playing World of Walmart

Me too! Good memories. It was better before they nerfed the produce department though.

My main page feels about the same, maybe a bit more sparse and slow. But I have about 650 subs in my filter list, which includes most of the big, popular subs, so if there was much impact on the popular areas I probably wouldn't see it.

Indeed. I like 'Earthporn' too, but I think it should be all nature pictures that look like genitalia and suchlike. Rocks or trees that look like penises for example.

I'm not entirely sure how I'm earning Microsoft reward points, but they keep sending me $10 Amazon gift cards for them so.. that's cool anyway.

need to be taught how to feel.

And before that you'd need to convince a lot of us that that would be more useful than the current situation.

lemmy.in

They'd legally still on the hook for the difference, and if it's a large enough amount for the creditor to care about they'll come after you for it using the variety of means available. In the US that can include taking the money from the debtor's bank account or having their employer take it out of their paycheck before paying the debtor.

There are some ways around that. You can self-employ and ignore the garnishment request, but that works best if you have a constantly changing client list, like a roofing contractor or wedding-dress-maker or whatever. You have to be careful about keeping cash in your business because they can show up with the sheriff and take any cash, or in extreme cases they can seize non-exempt property (like, they wouldn't generally be able to seize the lawnmower you use for your lawnmowing business).

Also, just not having any money is a pretty good defense. There are limits to wage garnishment for example.

But yeah, in a lot of cases it's not even close to being worth the effort to chase someone down to collect, so you get a ding on your credit report for a few years, and then almost nobody cares.

If I hadn't already deactivated my account this would have been a good time to do it. I had like 135,000 accounts on my block list.

huh, Windows still distributes a handful of .com programs. Neat.

I liked .com back in the day because it was easy to write assembly and dump it through the MSDOS 'debug' program to create an executable.

I deactivated my 15 year old Twitter account this weekend.

Then I deleted all my Reddit posts.

Then I created a new email account and I'm migrating off of Google.

I guess I should go check out Nebula or something next, and try out PeerTube.

What about playing musical instruments like learning guitar? Wouldn’t that constitute a habit that becomes automatic after enough practice?

Not for me. I've been trying to learn an instrument for several years. I can make it maybe a few days at a time before I forget to keep doing it. If I'm very persistent I can get in enough days of erratic practice to learn a short song.

Playing short sequence of notes is kinda-sorta automatic as in I don't have to think about all the details of positioning my right hand (it's a bit like touch typing on a keyboard, I don't have to think about the individual letters), but that's about the maximum level of 'automatic' I've been able to achieve. Finger placement for every chord is completely conscious, every key change, placement of emphasis, etc., all deliberate, conscious actions.

While it's kind of satisfying to make it through a piece, it's not relaxing in any way. I keep hoping that someday I'll get good enough at it that I can make it through at least one song without needing to think about each step, but it's slow-going.

A lot of those door-to-door guys are indeed scams. Or if not outright scams, just incompetent.

It's hard to find good installers that aren't completely booked for a year or more.

Depending on your needs and skill level, a decent-sized solar setup isn't hard to DIY. You don't necessarily need to start with a huge system, you can set up a smaller system to run an AC system or some load like that. Then if you want scale up as you learn more.

Also, solar doesn't have to be photovoltaic, solar thermal is great for hot water.

"Hey, how do I get to the Plex server?"

"Open your browser and go to Hell"

"..."

I'm not familiar with this guy's technique. How did he go about baiting potential targets?

The usual methods of the past used text and staged images, so the targets didn't see the real person until a meetup. I'd suppose though that with the advancements in live video filters over the past several years there's no reason this guy couldn't just dress in drag and apply appropriate filters so he appears as required.

whatever technical bullshit they needed to do to reverse them

Apparently ultimately this involves hitting the person hiding the encryption keys with a $4 wrench until they provide the keys.

Nothing major as far as I can tell. Here's an overview via SuperUser. KeePassXC might be a better option for some use cases if you're mostly not on Windows as it does not require .NET. Note that "KeePassXC does not support plugins at the moment and probably never will", but it does have built-in support for some things you might want a plugin for in KeePass2.

Re-Wheeled their boards.

What does that do?

I use a cheap paper notebook, like 5x8 inch size. Each day, first thing when I start work, I write the date at the top of the next blank page, copy the items from the previous page that are not done, and add new items at the bottom of the list as they come up. Tasks I haven't started have a blank box next to them, tasks I've started get a half-filled box, and finished items get a filled box. Anything that moves from one day to the next that hasn't been started gets a digit in the box that increases by one each day. If the number gets to 10 I cross the item off as cancelled. When I'm picking a new task I try to prioritize some the tasks with higher numbers.

If I need to take notes I'll use nearby blank space, sometimes a facing page. Generally I keep notes very short, long details go into whatever ticketing system we're using with the ticket number in my notebook so I can find it again. There are a few other habits I use that are generally in line with the Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity techniques, like simple flags for what sort of action I can take on the item (completable (about half a day or less), needs more info, needs decomposition (more than half a day of work)), with the notable difference that I don't make any effort to 'capture everything'. I load-shed aggressively and early, which is in-line with the way I want to live my life.

Mostly I don't keep very many active tasks, so it's rare that I have to cancel items. If my list is getting long I stop putting new items on it and just tell people I'm too busy to accept new stuff. I used to try to track more stuff, but I learned that just meant I ended up with lots of notes about stuff that I never had time to do, so I quite wasting my time tracking them.

When the notebook is full I put it on the shelf and get a new one.

I keep the notebook next to me on my desk. If someone asks me for something I check the book, if it looks like I've got time, I add it to the book. When I go to a meeting, I take it with me. If I don't happen to have it I usually remember what's on the current page because I just wrote it there that morning.

It's low-tech, and I like it that way. Partly because I like to find nice pens to write with.

What you are describing about Twitter wasn't my experience with it at all. I just followed my friends, interesting people I met at events, etc. I wasn't looking to be connected to influencers or whatever was the popular chatter of the moment, and I freely used the block feature to filter out people who posted stuff I wasn't interested in. It worked just fine like that. Decent experience (too shallow for my preference, due to the nature of the platform, but not unpleasant).

I feel like most social media platforms are, to a large extent, what you make of them. Like my Facebook feed is pretty nice. It's about 60% family and friends that I like, 20% interest groups (kayaking and hiking mostly), and 20% ads for stuff I'm interested in (mostly authors right now). There's none of the toxic bullshit that a lot of people complain about.

So yeah, I agree with the 'follow people you are interested in' advice, but that's not unique to Mastodon or Lemmy or whatever.

My biggest problem is figuring out what I want to do with any coding skills

Maybe some dumb little games? If you aren't interested in 3D gaming you can do 2D platformers, top-down Rogue-likes, or Zork-style interactive fiction (text) games (from scratch instead of with a Z-Machine).

As a self-taught developer, when I was learning I found it a lot more useful to just go code stuff, and then when I found something that seemed hard or ugly, I could go look for solutions to that kind of problem, which was much more interesting than just reading about various techniques. (Well, I was learning well before normal people had internet, so mostly I invented some shit to fix my own problem, but it got easier/faster after the internet became available).

That would probably be a good focus for a Lemmy instance if someone was looking to run a good-sized one.

So what will everyone having their own AI look like in a way that doesn’t just sound like a chatGPT joke? What would make it a desirable future?

I guess that depends on how much authority you'd want to delegate.

For me, it would be nice if I could have it do things like shopping tasks without being more of a pain than doing the task myself. For example, I needed to buy a hot-water carpet cleaner today. It would be great if I could tell it

Hey Staffie, buy a carpet shampoo machine for home delivery within the next two weeks. Pick a highly rated machine from a widely recognized brand, and focus on carpet cleaning and water extraction performance, I don't need any upholstery cleaning features. Don't spend over $400. If the best option is under $200 don't ask, just buy it. If it's over $200, show me the top two options before buying.

And end up with something pretty close to what I'd have picked if I did the shopping myself.

It would also be great if I could have it reliably perform arbitrary tasks that it isn't specifically programmed to do. Like

Hey Staffie, check if I've got enough PTO to take next Thursday and Friday off, and if so, reserve a campsite for me at Foo State Park for three nights, preferably one close to the water, then send Mr. Boss an email letting him know I'll be out those days.

If it were particularly smart it would infer from previous conversations that I might want a 1lb propane cylinder, marshmallows, graham crackers, and Hershey bars added to my grocery list and would add them automatically (because it already knows my preferences about small automatic expenditures like that and is aware of the spending limits I've given it).

Then it might come back a few minutes later and say

'Hey boss, all the campsites within 250 of the water are already reserved, but site 1701D, which is near the only restroom and a tailhead, is available. Reviewers report that the park WiFi access point is installed at the restroom, so that site has good free internet service. Shall I reserve it?

So yeah, in general, the ability to take arbitrary directions and execute them in reasonably intelligent ways (for example If I ask for a site Foo State Park, and there are two such parks in my country, it should be able to guess which park I'm talking about based on the context (like, if I'm reserving 3 nights and one of the parks is an hour down the road and the other is a two day drive, just assume the closer one)) and not require pre-programmed interfaces to every single thing. It should be able to search the web, find the interfaces humans use, and use those to do the kinds of things humans can do. It should also have some capabilities to use my accounts and passwords under a delegated authority to get shit done as my authorized assistant.

Ideally it should also do things like observe my choices and infer my preferences so it can constrain choices it offers me:

Hey Staffie, order lunch from Subway for pickup at 3.

Sure boss, do you want your usual 6 inch turkey sub?

Yep

Nacho cheese chips or salt-n-vinegar?

Nacho.

Done, I'll let you know when it's ready.

Stuff like that.

Thanks for that. I've been kinda-sorta keeping an eye out for a good solution for this. My house has three main panels (it's set up for subletting) so solutions like Sense won't work well, plus I don't want it to be dependent on a cloud service. I'll check out this product.

humans must’ve walked around naked before covering up for some period of time, right?

Some still do, but they tend to wear some kind of genitalia covering.

Contemporary humans have disproportionately large penises compared to many other animals. Perhaps when we started evolving larger penises we co-evolved small dick jokes ("I was in the pond!"), leading to habitual use of various types of penis-hiding clothing.

I suspect future models are going to have to put some more focus on learning using techniques more like what humans use, and on cognition.

Like, compared to a human these language models need very large quantities of text input. When humans are first learning language they get lots of visual input along with language input, and can test their understanding with trial-and-error feedback from other intelligent actors. I wonder if perhaps those factors greatly increase the rate at which understanding develops.

Also, humans tend to cogitate on inputs while ingesting them during learning. So if the information in new inputs disagrees with current understanding, those inputs are less likely to affect current understanding (there's a whole 'how to change your mind' thing here that is necessary for people to use, but if we're training a model on curated data that's probably less important for early model training).

I don't know details of how model training works, but it would be interesting to know if anyone is using a progressive learning technique where the model that is being trained is used to judge new training data before it is used as a training input to update the model's weights. That would be kind of like how children learn by starting with very simple words and syntax and building up conceptual understanding gradually. I'd assume so, since it's an obvious idea, but I haven't heard about it.

If the defendant fails to show up the bondsman has to pay the court the entire amount

I'm curious, does the bondsman actually give the court cash, or just guarantee that they will if the defendant doesn't show? And if that is the case, do they bond out more people than they actually have cash to cover, knowing that it is unlikely that they'll ever have to cover all those positions?

C# is my primary language, so I'd certainly recommend it. It can be a little daunting to get into because it is a large ecosystem of tools, so you might want to watch some videos and keep things simple for a while.

For work I mostly use it for APIs for web sites, that might be a good place to start if you're familiar with JS/TS front-end work. From there you might want to try Razor or Blazor for handling web UI work in C#. I'm not very experienced with that aspect of it, but it's mostly been a positive experience (TBH I kind of prefer React, but I'd need to spend more time on the Razor/Blazor side to have a strong opinion).

The desktop development side in C# is kind of a mess at the moment. Maybe stick with web until you're feeling pretty comfortable with the language.

I just do it, usually while thinking about other stuff.

So, for me if I start thinking about other stuff very much while doing something like brushing my teeth, I stop doing the something. Like, literally I'll snap out of a chain of thought that I mostly don't remember ('why am I thinking about harvesting cranberries? I need to get to work!') and I'll realize I've just spent a minute or two standing still in the bathroom holding my toothbrush and toothpaste staring at nothing in particular.

If I start thinking about something mid-process I'll end up missing part. The entire process requires attention. I have to mentally label 12 areas, A-L, then count 10 seconds for each area, every single time, A 0123456789, B0123456789, C0123456789, etc.

cat didn’t like stale food

That's a thing too. Dry food in bags has more odor than food that's been sitting out for a while. The fats in food left out in the open air will eventually go rancid too, but that takes a long time and shouldn't happen if you're cleaning the bowls periodically.

I don't mind if it's quality, topical content. But a lot of them going hard on min-maxing the effort for the advertising value by cross-posting the same few shots and generic titles to multiple communities and platforms.

my theory is that they might also want something else.

I keep about 4 different kinds of food around for our cats. I have three auto-feeders in different parts of the house each with a different foot and dispense schedule. That way the cat has some choice about what they are eating, and there's a bit of environmental enrichment where they can eat in different places.

I also hide little piles of cat treats in various locations around the house. Keeps the cats curious and exploring to see if they can find something good to munch.