aurmc

Me. Or I did back when I used it. Now I’m on Jellyfin but the point is the same.

I share my Plex/Jellyfin with a couple dozen friends and family members, all of varying levels of technical knowledge. “Install an app called Jellyfin on your smart TV” is complicated enough for most people. “Also search for another app called Tailscale and now log in with my credentials, yes it’s going to ask for control over your device’s network acces, don’t worry, it’s fine!” So now it’s just a public URL served up with Caddy.

Nothing bad has happened yet, there’s not much valuable on this machine other than CPU cycles and movies I definitely obtained legally, and I would notice right away if a cryptominer jacked up the CPU to 100%.

I’ve tried switching to Safari a few times, but I keep struggling with finding an ad-blocking extension that Just Works. Aside from that, I like it, but just a couple minutes on the ad-covered Web makes me need to go crawling back to Chrome. I set up uBlock Origin Lite years ago in Chrome and it’s functionally fully set-it-and-forget-it.

“Just use pi-hole” well sometimes I leave my house so that is an insufficient option.

I'm still astonished at how good this little thing is. The only problem I've had is the realization that 256GB isn't enough for me, but save for that I really have no excuse to upgrade. Can't justify a newer machine when this thing does everything I need!

Even for pretty intense workloads it rarely struggles or slows down. And even with some pretty intense battery degradation (reasonable, to be expected after five years of heavy use) it still runs for more than long enough for me on a single charge, although I really can't go to a coffee shop without a charger if I'm doing development work. All that, and it's dead quiet? I could never go back to the old ways!

I understand the thinking of "I'd like to do local inference on a laptop", but as long as I have a beefier Mac Mini sitting at home that can do all of that for me remotely, why bother?

I can see myself putting Asahi on this thing and giving it to my yet-unborn kids for them to finally drop it down a staircase someday. I've been rough with it and it hasn't broken yet!

If that were the case, then everyone who lived/worked near Ground Zero in the months before 9/11 would have had these same health consequences.

Instead, it's clear that that isn't the case. Plenty of research, including studies on firefighters and other first responders on 9/11 and the days after (and plenty of anecdata from doctors around here) have borne out that the health effects from being around Ground Zero for the first couple of weeks after 9/11 was much deadlier than simply breathing in mild air pollution.

(In addition, while I didn't live here at the turn of the century... what air pollution? Manhattan doesn't have a collection of coal power plants near Wall Street. It doesn't have more ICE cars than most other cities; it probably had fewer ICE cars per square mile than an ordinary Wal-mart parking lot in the suburbs.)

Sure, yes, compared to the prices of storage 35 years ago, it's a bargain.

Compared to the prices of storage today, when people are presumably buying the product, it's actually a bad price.

Judges are not at all stupid enough to fall for that. You would get laughed out of court for that. Judges are not computers, and they can not be tricked with these kinds of technicalities.

In fact, the defense of "I wrote the prompts that led to the code that the LLM wrote" would be a much better defense.

I’m astonished at how bad search in Gmail is. I searched for “iPhone receipt” to find out when I purchased my current iPhone, and it pulled up every single email I’ve ever gotten from Best Buy, since they all have a link in there to buy an iPhone, and they all have a link in there to look up a receipt from them.

I know that those emails have both the words “iPhone” and “receipt” but I feel like The Search Engine Company That Also Does Email should have a smarter search engine in their email.

I’m pleasantly surprised that I can ask Gemini for help with it if I specify “look through my Gmail for this information”, but it takes it a minute or two to find it.

I thought it was cute.

The RCT style didn't really add anything other than showing it on a conveyor belt of sorts, but it was cute and in a world where HTML and CSS are practically free to make, we might as well spend some tokens on making educational content a bit more digestible.

I'm sure there's a plaintext essay that can explain this just as well if the RCT style was distracting.

I’m a counselor at a day camp this summer, and we have Smart Boards in our rooms. I do some of the NYT games with the kids each morning (and then usually the smart board is off for the rest of the day).

I completely agree. If this didn’t have the timer (or maybe if it were counting up in the corner) it could be a great addition to our collection of games.

I hit Costco once a month just because they have the only pharmacy near me that always has my prescription medications in stock. Then I hit the bakery section for the blueberry muffins, speed through self-checkout, and then get a hot dog and scroll Hacker News or something like that while I eat it.

In and out in 30 minutes at most. But I've done the same thing at Ikea. You can just go there for the meatballs! You don't have to buy furniture too!

>If you ever listen to music and sing along, even for a few seconds, the volume cuts because it thinks you're talking to someone. It's a shame.

This became such a huge problem when watching Jeopardy with my AirPods. I keep mumbling answers every 30-ish seconds, and when I do that, the show pauses and the world suddenly becomes audible and I have to remember to disable that feature.

The automatic switching from noise canceling to transparency mode really does work incredibly, and I'm still shocked at how well it works, but it still feels ridiculous to speak to someone with AirPods in my ears. Even if I know that transparency mode is on (and on the newest Pros, it's so good that I can barely hear a difference between it and not wearing them), it still feels rude to speak to someone with them in.

I always take one AirPod out if I have to say literally anything to anyone, and both come out if it's going to be more than one sentence. Just feels rude. We've someone created a technical marvel: the world becomes silent all around you, and then the world comes back immediately when you start speaking, and then it slowly evaporates around you when you stop speaking for a few moments.

And yet it still feels ridiculous! And rude!

Instagram drove me so insane with that that I spent a while searching through the app to figure out how to disable it. There's a way to do it, and for a while it worked; I only got notifications about things like direct messages and posts from a few people I specifically told it to send notifications for, but I never got the "recommended" posts.

Then I got a replacement iPhone and reinstalled Instagram.app, and it defaulted to "show you notifications for everything we think you might be interested in" again, and I was too lazy to spend all that time relearning how to disable those notifications. I disabled the notifications entirely and now I open the app once a week or so to check in.

I had to do the same thing with Facebook years ago. Now I open it once a month to see who from high school got married in the last month and click the little "heart" icon and scroll until I get bored (~2 minutes). Can't trust Zuck with notifications.