Yeah this sounds REAL off.

But don’t you see?! Those increased expenses will just be passed along to the scammed!

(No actual point here just thought it was funny to compare to the logic we hear for not punishing other abusive businesses)

Lol ay! This is how we do things at our house, sleeping arrangements are up to each individual each evening. Might sound really weird for folks who’ve never done that, and it does have some things to watch for (can accidentally drift toward a more roommate like relationship dynamic if we don’t put attention toward avoiding that at times).

But sheesh the freedom to just go get a solo night’s rest at will with no hurt feelings? Took some careful communication (and some accidental hurt feelings along the way, to be clear) to get here but it is GREAT, we both love it. Really reduces friction in other areas of life when better rest is an option.

Argh, okay gotcha. Someone needs to start a Framework, but for IoT devices. This is bullshit lol

I do understand what you mean, but I think you’re probably significantly overestimating the difficulty of using the tool. One of its major strengths is its ability to just understand you, like you’d talk to anyone human, with the benefit that you can even instruct it to use a style you prefer. Just say “I’d like your answer to be terse, let’s see if we’re on the right track before getting into details”. Just as an example.

With all that said you know what you want and need better than anyone else, that’s all I’ve got to say on it, cheers!

Just throwing this out there, but the problem you’re describing sounds like a good fit for an LLM I’ve been using for similar purposes, Claude.

I’ve found it to be really good at helping me slog through what would be a burdensome and wasteful amount of reading, in order to answer specific questions OR to get a baseline understanding of a thing.

It’s a bit hard to know how much value comes from my engineering background and my tendency to “know what I don’t know” and thereby ask focused questions, but it’s definitely worth a shot. I have found it to be surprisingly sophisticated and much better than slogging through the wasteland of bad search results + too much unrelated but real info.

A topic like this where there’s a tremendous amount of legit docs, articles, and forum activity - it’s really the exact use case where it’s very difficult for a human, and very easy for an LLM to effectively digest that info.

Some caveats I’ve noticed:

• it sometimes is overly agreeable / “friendly” when it should be more direct
• it does sometimes hallucinate or say BS with casual confidence, which sucks because the more you need the info the less well you can spot that. It hasn’t hampered usefulness too much for me, but then again I’m usually able to spot the mistakes even in ~unfamiliar subjects
• they’ve moved the free tier back to a less capable model at the moment…most of my good experiences are with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, but Claude 3 Haiku (present free tier) is still good

If you’re really curious but the volume of reading and documentation to get started is presenting a big barrier, try using Claude to see how quickly you might be able to clear that obstacle. It’s been removing those exact barriers for me very effectively lately.

Edit to add: a particularly useful way I can imagine folks in your shoes using this - as a “companion” while you try to follow a guide in an article somewhere. It can answer questions about terms you don’t understand, even reasoning behind doing certain steps or what to do if it goes wrong. In fact, you could almost certainly just feed it the written procedure itself (telling it that you’re doing so) and really get it to reason about the process with you. Just help get you through whatever implementation.

Argh, this is exactly the scenario that I’ve anticipated and has kept me away from similar (home automation as well).

That’s what I want, high reliability, local only storage, remote view of some kind, and minimal (ongoing) fuss. Sounds like you did not quite land on that if the thing you bought grosses you out? Or do you mean something different?

Oh man, that’s hilarious. “Our business model doesn’t actually even work where we live. But I know what we’ll do about that, we’re going to do it exactly the same in a place we don’t have a clue about!”

The hubris, lol. It’s delicious.

You’re right, but I will say the federal govt has a sometimes magic way of greasing certain wheels and getting things done in a hurry, if the right person is pushing on it.

Lol ah yes, the “fork me daddy!” camp weighing in

When did they add blackjack and hookers?! That’s a hell of a feature update

We’ll also assume that destroying the universe takes constant time.

Well yeah just delete the pointer to it!

Yeah, in my case this one was too close to home for me to love it. 10 or 20 years ago I probably would’ve felt differently. Similar for Idiocracy, I don’t think I’d feel the same way about it if it came out today. Kinda chilling when I think about that, honestly.

That’s definitely part of the problem. I had an incident recently where an older family member had a minor panic. Because I left my (mfg in 2006!!) vehicle running in the driveway while I ran inside. During the day. In a very safe suburban neighborhood. Just a flat out absurd concern and she leapt right to it, instantly. She’s always been concerned, she’s a grandma, but she wasn’t pointlessly terrified like this years ago.

I think many of us don’t realize how badly this irrational fear has taken hold, or maybe I should say how effectively this irrational fear has been deployed. Otherwise ~reasonable people are walking around thinking the worst is going to happen everywhere at all times, based on absolutely nothing - worse than nothing, it’s based on weaponized deception.

So the police downplayed a dangerous situation, allowing it to fester and escalate until someone was predictably hurt? Weird!

Got anything to recommend? I’m a dude with butt and thighs that cause me to size up in the waist routinely, else I get the “pocket handles” thing, or just rip stuff lol.

Edit to add, by way of skin in the game: I used to shop for denim with a “tapered” cut (Levis had / has one, for example). If anything I now think they made the problem visually worse, drawing attention to the situation. I now prefer a pretty traditional straight cut, BUT when I’m overweight enough those may as well feel like JNCOs lol. I’m just barely trim enough at the moment to where a typical straight cut doesn’t feel like my ankles are swimming in fabric. Guess it’s Ankle Tents or Apple Bottom Jeans for the Lads, lol. Or be less chubby, in my case.

I’m becoming more aware of this lately too. Just realizing that Amazon for example has almost negative quality control, in the sense that a counterfeit product from one supplier just gets lumped in with the real ones from other suppliers, and then they sell them having lost the knowledge of who supplied the counterfeit.

And I know no one is checking for flammability of kids’ clothing / items. So I mean, who’s to say stuff made with lead or whatever the fuck else isn’t just getting hucked on down the line too?

Got any rules of thumb or heuristics you’re using? So far all I’ve really got is “nothing for kids from a store without a physical location in my country”. Just basing that on the fact there will at least be someone to sue, which usually encourages better behavior. I also generally avoid the “I can’t believe this is so cheap” products (outside legit sales) because usually something important is getting squeezed somewhere, given the already generally oversquoze situation that is “the market”.

That seems pretty plausible to me, yeah, because it’s being attempted already and we seem to be sliding that direction. Privatizing those public services sounds like precisely the way to usher in a fresh new hell like this, completely agree.

I really wonder what that may look like too and how likely of an outcome it is. I mean we’ve seen versions of it with “banana republics”, but that wasn’t quite the modern era and wasn’t sophisticated tech companies. I also think most tech companies today would not want that responsibility, just the rewards, it’s a bit hard for me to imagine them actually attempting to provide a government. I think what we’ll see is increasingly hollowed out public institutions matched with ascending power and control of the corps, but leaving the govt in place (largely for a target people can point to when they’re mad) and stopping short of overtly seizing power. Best of both worlds for the corps.

For real. The big tech companies are today basically approximating and exceeding what have before been exclusively state-level capabilities. Not all of those capabilities, of course, but enough that the writing’s on the wall. Meta, Google, Amazon (and others) - they truly see themselves as above “petty” things like governments. Just obstacles to work around.

The question is what will we allow them to get away with, not how far will they try to take things. We should be clear on that.