Everyone laughs at the precisely arranged layers of folded blankets at the foot of the bed until they wake up shivering.

Same for my mountain of pillows of different thickness.

Maybe keep a little critical information on a dead man’s switch and let that be known when revealing the rest.

Idk if actually wise, but it seems like you might want to keep some leverage for self protection

Was also in that position. Took an entry level QA job and just bounced around a lot.

Trying to be concise and noting this is all just my random opinion from personal experience:

1. Always be building something. Look around at listings and see which tech stacks seem like stuff you’d enjoy and are hiring, Google them, download them, build with them.
2. Carefully and securely after seeking much advice, host live demos of your builds somewhere and link them on your resume. If it’s something that might generate a large bill if abused, you could set up an auth system for it and have prospective employers email demo account requests by some form on your page. If you’re thinking web dev, at least host a simple page in AWS or Azure just to demonstrate some mastery of the basics of the front end, DNS listings, etc. Describe your setup in the page and why it is safe and efficient.
3. Look for support and/or QA positions to make a start somewhere. Look for chances to leverage your new skills there for automation, analysis, or reporting.
4. Contribute to open source projects and list contributions on your resume.
5. (risky but often good) take freelance jobs gor short term work and exposure to different concerns… carefully with thorough research

… I think that’s my highlight reel.

The vacuum sealer reminds me: a handheld electric pump.

Some are strong enough to blow up car tires. Especially if you have kids, they’re great for inflating water toys and balls and whatnot.

Second the warm white Christmas lights.

They can quickly make a depressing apartment feel like a warm home.

LAN tester.

I thought of it as fancy electrician / network equipment. Not anymore. Now it’s basic troubleshooting / procedure.

On a particularly frustrating switch installation, I picked one up for like $20 on Amazon, and it’s made me much less annoyed by network changes.

For context, I’m one of those people who hoards any electronic bits that might prove useful on a hobby project later, so lots of old patch cables and cable reels with unknown breaks, so maybe a LAN tester is really only worth it for others like that, but I’d recommend it to any level of tech enthusiast at least.

In a sense, more people working towards secret protection generally did result in better secret protection, like encryption algorithms and secure architecture and whatnot.

It only starts to become a paradox when you get into actually executing the task of protecting a specific secret… but I think we could draw that line somewhere for almost any task.

There is a point of generality where more people means better results and a point of specificity where you only want the exact right number of people.

If anyone has followed the saga, apparently 4/14 is my serious answer

To satisfy the curiosity, just download Ollama. You can run your interactions locally, no feeding the demon and full privacy.

Set up a modelfile with system prompts for the kind of personality you want to create. Do some googling, may want to tweak settings to get response creativity just right. Higher parameter base models generally better and more hardware costly.

If you want pics, you can use StableDiffusion. I recommend using docker images because it’s really complicated and environment sensitive.

You can tie the two together with a little Python logic and have the core bot prompt the image generator at certain chat moments. Ironically, if you’re not comfortable writing code, you could just get VSCode and Gemini and spit out some pretty okay Python code without strong understanding.

There are also tools for local audio generation I’m less familiar with but am sure Google could get you there.

Maybe start with a basic Ollama setup and see if it feels like it’s working for you.

As a kid, our Baptist church had two flags with golden eagles on the top in the pulpit alongside the cross.

The actual religious tenants aren’t a part of your typical American church.

Can confirm. Agents just kicked my door in and shot me dead.

The only thing I really remember being taught was something like, “If you think you’re going to cut it close, file for an extension.”

It’s just so damn easy now with the internet. I can get my W2 in my company portal, 1099’s from the bank portal, and file my taxes (for a fee) in the browser.

We’re not fiscally responsible enough to have anything going on that makes it very complicated, so there isn’t much genuine fear to overcome my natural laziness and poor impulse control

4/24 is the day for this chore