Good luck. I hope it works out well!

I’ll take the risk. I’m certainly not recommending it for anybody else, just saying it’s what I’m going to do. Worst case scenario, I’ll be in a VA nursing home. But I own a home - it would be cheaper for the VA to send an attendant to me. That’s what they did for my dad and brother.

Anyway, my dad racked up some pretty hefty bills from hospital visits over his last decade, and the VA paid for almost all of it. We only got billed $500 each for a few ambulance rides. The military isn’t a glamorous job and certainly not for everyone, but that retiree health plan makes a huge difference.

But the 4th of July is coming up, so that means a few days of staying up till 3am so I’m not startled out of my sleep thinking I’m in a mortar attack, so … there’s that.

Sorry for the late reply. I’m collecting a military pension and semi-retired now, so SS isn’t going to make or break me. I’m just thinking it’ll be better to spend it on vacations and fun when I’m 63 vs pills and nursing homes when I’m 70.

I was fortunate enough to get everything paid off a couple of years ago, so unless I buy another house, I shouldn’t have to worry about debt.

I guess what I’m saying is that even though it’ll be more money, I don’t think it’ll be much good to me at 70. Also, being single w/ no kids, I’m not trying to leave a bunch of money laying around when I kick the bucket. I’m trying to get as close to zero as I can.

Thank you for that explanation. My regex impaired ass thought he wanted to hurt generation[x|y|z].

I’m like “what’d we ever do to you?”

Anyone thought about when they’ll apply for Social Security(or whatever you have in your country)? I used to think people were dumb for taking SS early; obviously the longer you wait, the bigger your payment. But lately I’ve started to rethink that. I’ll probably take it right away because:

1. I don’t know how long I’m going to live: I just hit 50 and I still exercise every morning and try to go jogging occasionally, but that’s getting harder and harder to do. Plus I have this heart murmur my doctor hasn’t figured out yet.

2. I want to use the money while I can still enjoy it: I never used to pay attention to old people, but as I’m approaching that age, I’ve noticed there can be a sharp drop-off between age 60 and 65 or any given time span. Also, there’s a history of dementia in my family(both parents, brother, and now sister) so I’m on borrowed time.

3. There’s no telling when SS will become unsustainable. I think the projected date is around 2034 when they’ll have to start making reduced payments, but it’s hard to predict anything that far out. I’m just going to take my money when I can.

Any thoughts? Anyone out there already drawing SS?

At least the article points out that this is a Wall Street valuation, meaning it’s meaningless in reality, the company doesn’t have that much money, nor is it actually worth that much. In reality, Nvidia’s tangible book value (plant, equipment, brands, logos, patents, etc.) is $37,436,000,000.

$37,436,000,000 / 29,600 employees = $1,264,729.73 per employee

Which isn’t bad considering the median salary at Nvidia is $266,939 (up 17% from last year).

It sounds like the processor is the real limitation. Plenty of stuff from Windows XP era and before ran in less than 512MB.

Nice! I’ve been saying I’m going to go to Canada, but I have no idea what to do or where to go when I get there. It’ll be nice to get away from home, though.

Have a safe trip!

IRS makes free tax return program permanent and is asking all states to join in 2025

Good news!(if you live in the US) But there’s already opposition to the program, plus it’s on the actual states to join(and we saw how that went with the Affordable Care Act).

I don’t really have any suggestions, but I can say that your Weekly Discussion is hugely successful in getting people to post. As you can see, you get way more engagement in the weekly thread than from regular Posts in the community.

Like most people, I don’t post or comment much because I hate all the negative responses you get on Lemmy (and anywhere, for that matter), but I’ll try to be more active.

Awesome. I’d heard that Pat was one of Redd’s old friends from the “Chitlin’ Circuit” era of comedy, but I’ve never actually seen him do standup.

Probably better to ask on !localllama@sh.itjust.works. Ollama should be able to give you a decent LLM, and RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) will let it reference your dataset.

The only issue is that you asked for a smart model, which usually means a larger one, plus the RAG portion consumes even more memory, which may be more than a typical laptop can handle. Smaller models have a higher tendency to hallucinate - produce incorrect answers.

Short answer - yes, you can do it. It’s just a matter of how much RAM you have available and how long you’re willing to wait for an answer.

One thing I love about usenet is that it’s great if you’re just looking for one episode, song, etc and don’t want to download a whole collection.

Why replace torrents? Why not use both? It’s a bonus if your usenet provider includes a VPN.

I think it’s a decent metric. The important thing to know is that no single guide is going to work for everyone, everyone has to adjust it to their situation.

Me, for example, I have a 401K balance of zero. Every time I leave a job, I roll that over into my IRA, then into my Roth. I just like having control over my accounts; 401Ks have too many restrictions. But to each his own.

I was so excited to buy a condo with a fireplace. I haven’t built a fire in years, it just doesn’t get cold enough here.
Edit: In South Carolina. If you haven’t tried our barbecue sauce … consider yourself lucky🤮.

Even after the price cut, theirs is still 3x the price of Mercedes’ system which works better. I have a feeling Tesla’s earnings report won’t go well this afternoon. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-earnings-q1-175358835.html

I’ve already got a setup for tagging my own images, working on getting it GPU accelerated. But my family (us being people of color) are really adverse to anything involving AI, even if it’s local and right here on my own computer. No worries, though, I can make do without.

Yes, my scanner works fine for the few pictures I’ve done so far. The only problem is that there are tons more to do. Plus some of them have been in photo albums for decades and I’m afraid to peel the plastic page cover off because it could peel a layer off the photo - I’ve already had it happen. And my scanner is a cheap all-in-one model designed for documents, so when it feeds anything in, they curve around a pretty narrow roller, which could damage some older photos.

I’ll probably send the albums off to a pro, since they have large format scanners. They can just scan a whole page at once and crop out the photos individually, that way they don’t have to worry about damaging anything.

I’m not too worried about the money, the toughest part is figuring out how to organize and catalog all these pictures of mostly people I don’t know. AI would be a huge help with organizing the images, but I can see a lot of people having a problem with it.

I’ve started a website to try to document my family history from my great grandparents on down. So far it’s mostly been digitizing obituaries and VHS tapes, and putting them in a wiki style format. I haven’t figured out the best way to scan thousands of pictures. Overall, it’s been fun so far and I’m learning a lot about web hosting and video hosting.

Most of my hobbies so far have just been time-wasters. It’s nice to be involved with something that’ll (hopefully) be around after I’m gone.