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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 18th, 2024

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  • Yes, I did. Everything I tried on copilot wanted me to upload corporate data to the cloud. (Yeah, NO). It told me it could help with my email…if I uploaded them individually. (Still bad practices here and breaking corp policy).

    I expect LLMs should be really good pattern driven activity, but I’ve yet to figure out how to make this useful.

    I tried to use a local LLM to summarize outline and discuss my *.md notes for annual review. It sucked at it if it didn’t completely crash the model. It couldn’t even provide a unique list of all tags in the files. (It took me about 30min manually). I thought that it would be good at that. I would have been better off spending to learn find | grep commands or spent time learning python.

    I’m still searching, but maybe one day I’ll figure out a use for these.










  • Mint was my gateway distro. Endeavouros was my next jump. I’m now on Arch. I do like that it has forced me to learn a lot about how and why things work. I’m still learning and starting to figure out what I’ve learned incorrectly. At the end of the day I think I got the “I have to change something and distro hop” bug.

    I think I would love just about any rolling release. Yay!

    I also found I wanted gnome. I’d rather use my keyboard for almost everything.

    Cinnamon is a great transition from windows. Linux is great because you can choose from 900 flavors to get exactly what YOU want. *and it’s a curse…

    I put the wife on mint first then Debian with gnome on 2 laptops and she seems to be pretty happy with it. (One is dedicated to running a laser cutter and the other her personal laptop) She still had to keep a windows machine, but it’s really only used to run a vinyl cutter.

    All that said, I’d suggest trying Endeavour. I’ve got 2 kids using different laptops with intel chips and nvidia graphics. It’s been pretty smooth. They use KDE and barely flinched coming from windows.

    Happy travels in your quest and may the learning be fun!


  • The ads feel like insult to injury. They have been less and less appealing as a company. It’s far easier for me to change my email, but getting the family to change is harder. (I’ll eventually have and use a custom domain).

    I’m an annual family plan subscriber. I’ve never seen a discount to renew my plan. Yes, if your on a different plan, you can get a discount. It seems though, current customers be damned.




  • Unfortunately, I think we’re trapped in planned obsolescence. I’ve been taking the approach of looking at cost as a primary driver.

    The difference between a crappy 4K tv and a quality 4K tv is hard for me to distinguish in most cases. Especially, if they’re not side by side.

    Let’s say I set my max price at $550.

    You can find a cheap brand Onn or TCL in a 70” range size. If you go smaller you’ll likely find “better” brands.

    I don’t think there’s much that makes one brand better than others. 5-7 years is probably max life of anything you’ll buy today. Unless you’re willing to open it up and start trying to find the bad capacitors and re solder to the board.

    Rule #1. The tv never connects to internet Rule #2. Rule #1 never gets broken Rule #3. Use another device to play signal (fire stick, Apple TV, cable box, Xbox, PlayStation, pc, etc) Rule #4. Use a sound system not the tv speakers. Go big with surround systems or don’t. Anything is better than tv speakers. I’ve used a 2.1 setup for decades. A soundbar with sub is simple to setup and use.

    I’ve heard Roku is one to potential avoid now as I’ve heard they may require Internet connection on setup of some new tvs.

    A good tv has an acceptable picture, size, and plays a video source.