Give an example of one that was fraudulent and one that was a fake.

I’ve been building a DIY home assistant in my spare time and have been looking for a good wake word to use. Alia is great!

Don’t overthink it, and don’t over explain yourself to him.

“That sounds illegal and I’m not going to get involved with it. Talk to your bank. Let’s chat again in 10 years. Bye.”

I went through all this with my home washing machine a while back. The culprit in my case was trying to DIY laundry detergent and not knowing what the fuck I was doing.

I would skip the citric acid. I don’t see that moving the needle.

If your clothes stink, it’s probably biofilm left on them because the washer didn’t properly rinse off all the detergent. That comes from 2 places: too much detergent you added to your wash, and excess detergent stuck all over the washer internals from other people.

You’ll know that’s the problem if your clothes smell “ok” but if they get slightly damp it suddenly smells like wet dog.

One-time symptom treatment: make a strong mix of oxyclean and hot water in a bucket. Soak all your smelly clothes in it for at least 4 hours. Then drain and wash them normally.

If it’s in the machine, you’re in kind of a shitty position because the machine ultimately needs to be cleaned. If you have the time and are willing, run the washer empty with a cup of bleach. You might need to pause the washer and add it after the cycle starts - my machine drains when it turns on and pumps out the bleach, but if I add it a minute later it stays inside. Run the load with hot water.

Another thing you can do is run the machine with a cup of washing soda. That’s apparently better at removing biofilm, but imo bleach does a pretty great job on its own.

Moving forward, make sure you use the recommended amount of detergent. Too much and you’re back in the same place. Too little and there’s not enough detergent to actually clean your clothes (but the biofilm will still cover everything).

Voyager on phone for regular use. Then once in a while I log in on the desktop browser to save all my Star Trek memes and dump them on my company Slack.

It looks pretty good everywhere I’ve seen it. It’s a leg up from old Reddit, which was plain but stood the test of time.

I follow the “oh, shut up” rule.

If someone comes across so disjoinedly to what I wrote that they just sound like a screeching jack off without an argument, into the trash/blocklist/downvote they go.

I think giving users the ability to delete other people’s content is a nuanced issue. A reply to a Steam review is different from a top level comment on a site like Lemmy.

gives the ick

I think that gives you your answer right there.

I get a text pretty quickly.

Everybody laughed at me when I took a 10-port USB hub, installed a flash drive in every one, and set it up as a RAID array.

Today? With storage prices where they’re at? Think they’re still laughing?

Yes. They’re still laughing at me.

I used to have 3 grey hairs on my beard. Now she’s 3 and it’s all fucking grey.

“Well you’re probably just naturally greying anyway”

No. I’m greying because every visit to the toilet is an hourlong negotiation that didn’t have to happen.

You get one for free every time you have to have it repaired.

Is this like a cautious first date or is there a good chance I’m bringing them home tonight?

If the former, let’s get some spicy Asian noodles with a huge beer.

If the latter, appies at a safe restaurant. Easy on the oil, garlic, spice, onion, and alcohol.

Why would someone ask a person to explain an AI response they didn’t understand? Like, you’ve already offloaded the most important part from a human brain (getting a fucking answer)… Why wouldn’t you at least then ASK THE AI TO REPHRASE AND SUMMARIZE the response you didn’t understand? That’s the thing it’s actually good at doing ffs.

Japanese goods have a standard 12.5% tariff across the board afaik, so subtract $58 from your savings right off the bat.

And if they ship via courier (UPS, FedEx, etc), they will charge their own import fees on top of that (for the convenience of collecting the tariff money from you on the government’s behalf). IME this fee scales with the price of what you import.

And if you need warranty support you’re pretty much screwed.

It might be fun and novel to directly import something from Japan, but I wouldn’t count on saving any money.

I set this up before but ended up walking away. It works well but it always eats CPU generating the stream, which is a bummer if I’m the only user and not necessarily even going to use it once a day.

Talent is just something someone practiced a lot. Develop a talent based on something you love and you’ll have more opportunities to earn a living doing in a career you enjoy.

You sound like you already figured this out, but all those YouTube gurus are completely full of shit. Same as the books that tell you how to make millions of dollars in the stock market. If it was that easy to be successful, why aren’t they getting rich doing that? Because they’re full of shit and selling their viewers and readers a fantasy.

So go look at the world with new eyes. Literally everything you see on any day has got a career associated with it.

See a tree? Arborist. Landscaper. Forester. Biologist.

The sky? Pilot. Meteorologist. Rocket engineer. Fireworks technician.

A house? Painter. Plumber. Insurance agent. Christmas light installer. Organizer.

Think about what you like. What’s something you liked as a child and still like today? What’s not a fad and might be something to build a career around?

The safest path is to have a boss. Let someone else run a company and invest and take risks and come home with steady pay. Most people do this. You have a boss and limited control over how you work and how much money you can earn, but it’s safe and predictable.

You can be your own boss and have way more freedom, at the risk that your business decisions determine if you get paid at all.

Or there’s all kinds of in between. But I wouldn’t worry about that kind of thing yet. Figure out what you want to do first.

Hey at least Dean Koontz would have finished the fucking thing.

The last few died.

There’s a large group of folks here that swear by renting a VPS. A common argument is that when you fully self host and expose anything to the internet (incoming connections), you’ve always got some security risk you might not know exists.

A VPS offloads a lot of the low level security concerns to someone else (it’s the whole cloud sales pitch) and if someone breaks in, there’s little for them to steal (assuming you’re not putting anything personal and sensitive on the VPS).

The nice thing is that you can start with a small and cheap VPS and set things up and decide if you even want to self host, or to what extent. Then you have data to make a decision as to whether you need to upgrade to a better VPS, or port your setup to a local server (which you can now buy with a good idea of what sort of specs it should have).

On the flip side, you could also self host on whatever computer you have laying around (leave the laptop open) and play with some services there. If you decide you want to open it to the internet, you could just as easily port your local playground to a VPS and keep going.

I don’t think there’s anything in the self hosting world that really paints you into a corner.

20% pay increase for a 12% time increase. Honestly, those numbers aren’t big enough to entice me on their own.

But I think the bigger thing is job satisfaction. In your current job you spend 35 hours a week doing something you hate. Would a PA mean you’re spending 39 hours doing something you enjoy?

I would focus this more on your happiness than economics. Being miserable has no money associated with it but it’s the thing that follows you around 24/7.

If you just want to get away from bedside, you might want to keep shopping around for other degrees you think you’d like. If being a PA is something you know you’d like (never mind the 39 hours - just the tasks the job itself entails), that seems like a smart path to follow!