This is why I pay for YT Premium. No way in hell am I watching ads, but I do want to be able to use the platform, and the money has to come from somewhere. So far it’s been pretty good value, although SponsorBlock is of course still required.

It's English, so it's difficult to be wrong, but that phrase do be weird.

It does indeed. My job includes writing and deploying .NET apps on multiple platforms, and it works fine for me.

But some people prefer not to use .NET when comparable native options are available, so they might prefer KeePassXC.

Nothing major as far as I can tell. Here’s an overview via SuperUser. KeePassXC might be a better option for some use cases if you’re mostly not on Windows as it does not require .NET. Note that “KeePassXC does not support plugins at the moment and probably never will”, but it does have built-in support for some things you might want a plugin for in KeePass2.

So what will everyone having their own AI look like in a way that doesn’t just sound like a chatGPT joke? What would make it a desirable future?

I guess that depends on how much authority you’d want to delegate.

For me, it would be nice if I could have it do things like shopping tasks without being more of a pain than doing the task myself. For example, I needed to buy a hot-water carpet cleaner today. It would be great if I could tell it

Hey Staffie, buy a carpet shampoo machine for home delivery within the next two weeks. Pick a highly rated machine from a widely recognized brand, and focus on carpet cleaning and water extraction performance, I don’t need any upholstery cleaning features. Don’t spend over $400. If the best option is under $200 don’t ask, just buy it. If it’s over $200, show me the top two options before buying.

And end up with something pretty close to what I’d have picked if I did the shopping myself.

It would also be great if I could have it reliably perform arbitrary tasks that it isn’t specifically programmed to do. Like

Hey Staffie, check if I’ve got enough PTO to take next Thursday and Friday off, and if so, reserve a campsite for me at Foo State Park for three nights, preferably one close to the water, then send Mr. Boss an email letting him know I’ll be out those days.

If it were particularly smart it would infer from previous conversations that I might want a 1lb propane cylinder, marshmallows, graham crackers, and Hershey bars added to my grocery list and would add them automatically (because it already knows my preferences about small automatic expenditures like that and is aware of the spending limits I’ve given it).

Then it might come back a few minutes later and say

'Hey boss, all the campsites within 250 of the water are already reserved, but site 1701D, which is near the only restroom and a tailhead, is available. Reviewers report that the park WiFi access point is installed at the restroom, so that site has good free internet service. Shall I reserve it?

So yeah, in general, the ability to take arbitrary directions and execute them in reasonably intelligent ways (for example If I ask for a site Foo State Park, and there are two such parks in my country, it should be able to guess which park I’m talking about based on the context (like, if I’m reserving 3 nights and one of the parks is an hour down the road and the other is a two day drive, just assume the closer one)) and not require pre-programmed interfaces to every single thing. It should be able to search the web, find the interfaces humans use, and use those to do the kinds of things humans can do. It should also have some capabilities to use my accounts and passwords under a delegated authority to get shit done as my authorized assistant.

Ideally it should also do things like observe my choices and infer my preferences so it can constrain choices it offers me:

Hey Staffie, order lunch from Subway for pickup at 3.

Sure boss, do you want your usual 6 inch turkey sub?

Yep

Nacho cheese chips or salt-n-vinegar?

Nacho.

Done, I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Stuff like that.

It’s funny how much this varies from family to family. We never eat dinner before 9PM. Usually two meals per day, lunch at maybe 1PM and dinner between 9 and 10PM. We’re just doing desk-work though, so no extra calorie needs. If I’m doing physical stuff I’ll usually add a light breakfast.

I was curious if that would work on ethernet cable! I’ve seen it done on coax, wasn’t sure if it would work well enough on UTP to be useful outside a lab setting. Cheap too. Cool!

Wire tracker maybe? You might want a higher quality version than that particular one if the cable run is long, one of the reviews suggest that the distance is limited.

I grew up playing World of Walmart

Me too! Good memories. It was better before they nerfed the produce department though.

huh, Windows still distributes a handful of .com programs. Neat.

I liked .com back in the day because it was easy to write assembly and dump it through the MSDOS ‘debug’ program to create an executable.

That’s what I’ve been wondering too. I keep seeing people complaining about ads, but I use Edge (and Firefox) with Bing regularly on an up-to-date Win 11 system and I’m not seeing anything like that.

Maybe they’ve got demographic targeting that I don’t fit into or something.

I’m not entirely sure how I’m earning Microsoft reward points, but they keep sending me $10 Amazon gift cards for them so… that’s cool anyway.

No, I agree that allegiance is a behavioral motivator, but I think it is distinct from loyalty and that people tend to conflate the concepts (similar to how people sometimes conflate or confuse infer/imply and borrow/lend).

Loyalty, a behavior, can be observed; allegiance, a commitment (maybe supported by emotion, maybe not), cannot.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s thumbthing weird about that image.

It doesn’t say ‘open with your thumb’. Open it with a knife or some other technique, then insert your thumb & lift.

loyalty is earned

For me, it’s not even that. Loyalty is not owed, nor is it earned. It is nothing more than a description of behavior.

Think of it this way: I always do my grocery shopping at Target instead of Walmart, even if I see that something is slightly cheaper at Walmart I’ll still most likely go to Target for it. Some might see that and say, “Look, he has loyalty to Target”, assuming that I shop at Target because I am loyal to that brand. But that’s backwards. Really it is that I can be described as ‘loyal’ because I consistently go to that brand. ‘Loyalty’ is a description of the behavior, not the cause of the behavior.

it can be used against you

Only if you have bought into the coercive bullshit that ‘loyalty’ is itself a reason to do something. Employee or customer loyalty is nothing more than an observation that people consistently support the company. That loyal behavior is seen because those people consistently have reasons to support the company. If you observe that people are loyally supporting your company, that is because they have reasons to do so (for example, you might be paying them to show up and do shit. Or maybe they think the shit they are doing is important or fun).

People who want something from you for less than it is worth will try to convince you that loyalty is something you owe them or that they have earned from you because if you believe the lie that loyalty is a reason for action that makes it easier to get you to give them something for free.

IMO acting out of loyalty is never good. That is a backwards application of the concept intended to make you to act against your own interests.

Some people like to flip the idea of loyalty around from a description of behavior to a reason for behavior as a method of manipulating other people.

Like, if people see me consistently supporting my friends even when that is difficult they might think I’m ‘loyal’, but that’s backwards. I’m not supporting them because I am loyal, I support them because I like them and want them to succeed (and hopefully they’ll support me too). If someone wants loyalty from me, that’s an immediate red flag that tells me they either don’t understand why I do things, or they don’t care and just want me to do whatever they want.

Yep, two simple mechanical knobs is easily the best microwave oven interface. Although I do like the fancy Samsung microwave I have that is almost completely silent and lightweight, I think it uses an inverter instead of a chonky HV transformer. I wish I could get a combo of that inverter with a couple of simple knobs for controls.

Sure: Dry Steam

Dry cleaning fluid too!