You’re spot on regarding how AI operates.

AI is stupid story time!

I recently helped a friend with a self-hosted VPN problem. He had been using a free trial of Gemini Pro to try to fix it himself but gave up after THREE HOURS. It never tried to help him diagnose the issue, but instead kept coming up with elaborate fixes with names that suggested they were known issues, like The MTU Traffic Jam, The Packet Collision Quandary, and, my favorite, The Alpine Ridge Controller Trap. Then it would run him through an equally elaborate “fix”. When that didn’t work, it would use the failure conditions to propose a new, very serious sounding pile of bullshit and the process would repeat.

I fixed it in about fifteen minutes, most of that time spent undoing all the unnecessary static routing, port forwarding, and driver rollbacks it had him do. The solution? He had a typo in the port number in his peer config.

I can’t deny that LLMs are full of useful knowledge. I read through its output and all of its suggestions absolutely would have quickly and efficiently fixed their accompanying issue, even the thunderbolt/pcie bridging issue, if the real problem had been any of them. They’re just garbage at applying that information.

I would be shocked if he cared. It’s just not amongst his concerns.

The ads seem to be pretty variable depending on usage so I suspect not everyone is seeing the same thing. I rarely use YouTube in any form. When I do and I’m rawdogging it for whatever reason, it seems like I get a few short ads, like 30s or less. They’re annoying but not awful.

A friend keeps YouTube running constantly on his TV in the background while he works. He gets so many ads and they’re so long! Like several minutes of ads, mostly unskippable, over the course of a 15 minute video. I don’t know how people deal with that shit.

I see you have met my last boss!

Totally agree, it’s a harder to debunk way of protecting your time. Grandpa story time!

I follow something I call the rule of thirds. Of any three unverifiable improvements in workflow, two remain secret and they and their saved effort are solely mine while the smallest goes to the company. If I bust out 12 in a row, the company gets the smallest four. Maybe three if I’m feeling catty. I occasionally dole out one of the retained 2/3 when I need to look good for a review or something.

I learned this from an employer a few years back. I maxed out the first year and made a ton of improvements, so my first review was stellar. My second year’s review, though, noted that I hadn’t kept up with the previous year, so it was just a “meets expectations”. I was outperforming most of my peers, but not previous year me, so they thought I was starting to slack off. That’s when I realized many managers are idiots so you have to game the system if you want to succeed.

Anecdotal, but… I’ve been a musician for 36 years and have fantastic hearing not just for my age but for any age. I know, I have to get it quantitatively tested twice a year!

I can’t tell the difference at all between FLAC and 320 kbps from the same source. I can tell a difference between FLAC and 128 kbps, but it’s not huge. It sounds a bit dull, but I have to be looking for the difference and comparing the two. If you just gave me one or the other with no reference, I might suspect the 128 if it was a simple recording of a single instrument or a song I’m intimately familiar with, and even then I wouldn’t be sure of it. It just sometimes “feels” weird.

So I converted over 4 terabytes of my music stash to 320 kbps and cut the total space into less than 2. Feels good.

Absolutely. I was raised as a male in the United States, so crying was strongly discouraged.

I recommend “The Tao of Fully Feeling” by Pete Walker. I read it a few times and can cry my eyes out on a regular basis now.

I couldn’t agree more. I got interest in higher-end audio equipment when I was younger, so I went to a local audio shop to test out some Grado headphones. They had a display of different headphones all hooked up to the “same” audio source.

60x vs 80x sounded identical. 60x to 125x, the latter had a bit more bass. 125x to 325x, the latter had a lot more bass and the clarity was a bit better. Then I plugged the 60x into the same connection they had the 325x in. Suddenly the 60x sounded damn similar. Not quite as good, but the 60x was 1/3 the cost and the 325x sure as hell didn’t sound 3x better. They just had the EQ set better for it.

Tell me about it, and there’s always something better than what you have. How to be smart about buying tools deserves its own entire comment chain.

I didn’t know about these until recently, but I now recommend folks check out local tool libraries to get started and see what they want or need for low to no cost.

We have a one car garage full of maintenance and fabrication tools I’ve acquired over my life. They’ve paid for themselves multiple times over in even just the last decade, but the cost and space requirements are prohibitive for a lot of folks. It’s one of those “having money saves money” situations, but tool libraries can help a lot.

Don’t get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because wood is fiddly as fuck.

OR

DO get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because it will burn that shit right out of you If you don’t die from an aneurysm first. It’ll teach you to build all sorts of wiggle room into everything in life, not just furniture.

People will think what you made was amazing, that it took so much skill.

Nope.

Only you know how you put everything together loosely, then tightened screws incrementally while adjusting clamps and smacking it with a rubber mallet until it looked right. There are pilot holes they can’t see that don’t go anywhere. You definitely missed gluing something important. You might have weighted a piece with epoxy and cat litter because you forgot to buy weights, it was 3 am, and you were unintentionally high as balls on stain fumes, but you really wanted to finish in time to surprise your partner for their birthday.

They don’t know, they’ll never know, and they don’t need to know.

Appreciate you linking in your blog post. I’ve been on the fence about Kagi and you bring up a lot of good points informed by sources I’m unlikely to delve into.