I’m getting back into it again after a long break due to burnout. I’m still burned out but it’s getting easier to think through problems.
I’m building a home server. This was something I put off for years due to some perfectionism. Eventually I just threw together something with old hardware and headless Ubuntu. Much to my surprise, the power draw is only about $4 a month. I can live with that so no need for specialized hardware.
I’m doing the common -arr stack using docker compose. I’m using plex because the jellyfin doesn’t work as well on an Apple TV.
Having a server running is nice. I can set up some stuff on a whim. Most recently was the Mealie recipe manager. It’s great knowing my data won’t be paywalled. I’m using syncthing as a simple backup method between my devices - everything but media of course. It’s fine if I lose media.
An unexpected benefit of having the server is that it inspires my wife. She decided to give vibe coding a try. She’s an artist, not an engineer, but with a little help she was able to make a task tracker for us. She tailored it to the way we tackle our tasks and, again, it’s really nice knowing it won’t get paywalled in the future.
I’m still burned out, but having a server to tinker with is helping.
A friend’s parents were recently targeted by AI scammers that impersonated family members. This shocked me because her parents are pretty poor, and I imagine it’s not free to make targeted scams like this. So, why were they targeted?
My guess is that my friend is listed on a company website as an executive, and scammers are using company pages to find targets worth spending money on. Scams like these aren’t free, but they’re cheap enough to cast wide nets. The nets are only going to get wider as AI becomes cheaper and more available.
Security by obscurity, as effective as it was, is coming to an end. AI enables scammers to spear phish indiscriminately.
Do you have an example? I’ve done a slightly-more-than-casual search for convincing post-processing and haven’t found success. Filters still tend to retain the sharpness of pixel edges in a way that CRTs don’t, and the contrast doesn’t look right either.
Interesting article. I hope their engine gets to the point where it actually looks like CRT instead of the blocky filters we see nowadays.
Here’s an entertaining video showing the difference in retro games on crt and lcd screens. It’s pretty incredible if you aren’t aware. Games back then were designed on CRTs and can look awful on LCDs in comparison.
Baking everyday as a way to keep a professional identity is an interesting idea. Being semi-retired, I’ve noticed that I am starting to struggle the curiosity and motivation that kept me going when I still worked. This article makes me think I should pick up a habit of doing some “work” daily.
Visual snow’s impact on my life is fairly small. Driving at night is a little tough. It’s hard to paint still life’s when the values are jittering. Reading text on a page gets tiring because the text wiggles slightly.
I agree with this post, and suspect a lot of us will see the logic in approaching problems like this.
However, this approach isn’t universal and should be used with caution. A head-on approach isn’t effective with a person who is conflict-avoidant. Any of the given examples, no matter how gentle the delivery, will be seen as a personal attack and cause to pull away.
A quick search shows that there are over 20,000 ATCs employed in the United States. (I'm not confident in the sources I found - anyone know where to get reliable stats for things like this?)
Is the number of retiring ATCs higher than normal? I assume it is, but the article doesn't mention the baseline. It's hard for me to understand the scale of the issue from this article alone.
My best guess is that HPPD was triggered by how I used NyQuil as a young teen. I would drink half a bottle, sleep for half the day, and wake up feeling better. I did this pretty regularly for a few years whenever I got sick.
I would love to try hallucinogens but I’m worried that it’ll aggravate my HPPD. It’s a pretty rare condition, and only a single optometrist I’ve spoken with actually believes I experience it.
The article is well written and shows why dynamic typing can be so compelling.
This is how I’ve been writing web services for the last decade. It was a style that came from being frustrated with the experience of using many all-in-one frameworks.
Frameworks take time to learn and the skills are generally non-transferable. Any complex application still requires you to know the underlying languages frameworks attempt to abstract. Frameworks often make testing more difficult due to adding layers of abstraction between what the application does and how the code is written.
Writing actual SQL/CSS/etc in a dynamically typed language to be used in a template is so much easier to understand, debug, and validate.