Interview him while you still can. I encourage you to seek out whoever Ted's contact people are and try to get that interview in. Make it long and thorough, and put it on YouTube and archive it.

http://www.thetednelson.com/contact.php

> a decent, modern replacement for...G602

What's wrong with the G502? I like the wired G502 pretty well. Ideally I'd tweak the shape to be a little more like the M500s shape, but I'm happy enough with it overall.

I had a G502 that lasted years, but the last two I bought lasted me 6 months each (the wheel got completely gummed up somehow). I acknowledge that cat hair and sweaty hands are a bad combination for a mouse wheel, but that's insanely poor durability, and they're annoying enough to disassemble that they're effectively not cleanable.

> Can I safely uninstall the extension and keep my existing containers, names, colors, icons, cookies, and active sessions?

Great question.

As a very satisfied, long time user of 2 extensions in combination, Temporary Containers and Firefox Multi-Account Containers, I wonder the same thing.

I found out the hard way some time back that simply disabling (not even removing it) and re-enabling the Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension would cause all the painstakingly set up containers and their saved credentials/data to get "lost".

If there were to be a way to "export" and "import" sets of named containers with their settings and data, that would be great for not losing which-site-maps-to-which-container-and-is-already-signed-in (whether natively or within an extension).

Theoretically I'm kinda rich, but I feel the crunch at the grocery store.

I buy the highest quality, lowest cost stuff I can find.

There can be a positive story here maybe though:

- More doordash = less grocery

- More farmer's market = less grocery

- More home-grown = less grocery

Though TFA points out,

  80% of Americans say they're still trying to spend less
  28% are actively trying to cut back on groceries
  56% are trading down to lower-priced brands
  49% are simply buying fewer items,
  44% are leaning harder on coupons and promotions

BTW my nearest grocery shut down this quarter. Couldn't make money. Got to go farther now.

Yeah, ChatGPT voice is great experience vs. Siri on that phone. In case you haven't done something like this already:

  1. In Shortcuts app, make shortcut named "AI Voice Mode" (or whatever you want, YMMV)
  2. Set it to run the ChatGPT action "Voice Mode" (requires at least the minimum paid tier, I think)
  3. To trigger, say "Hey Siri, AI Voice Mode" (or whatever you called the shortcut)

This is a pretty slick integration, but yeah, if it were baked in that would be all the better.

Ridiculous that for past many years we can talk to GPT on our iPhones without any hiccups and this new Siri is still the same old horse crap (at least for me and this latest beta). Buy them already Apple or possibly be replaced by them as their path & trajectory (working on Ai devices now and they are stealing like Jobs did with Xerox) mirrors yours in the late 1970s.

Thanks for the tip and if Im not mistaken it's similar to asking Siri to ask chatGPT to ask XYZ?

> similar to asking Siri to ask chatGPT to ask XYZ

Effectively, it sort of does that, but really it just listens to the wakeword and opens/switches to the requested app & modality.

FWIW, I get a very different functional result using the Shortcut method vs. asking Siri to delegate natively. To compare, I asked Siri (non-beta here) now to "ask ChatGPT <x>" and I got a top-card with some fairly low quality SEO-ranked weblinks.

You can also map the Action Button to GPT voice mode.

All emails should be 2 lines only, is something I learned when I started working in an office. For example,

  WHAT YOU ARE SAYING

  WHAT YOU NEED FROM YOUR AUDIENCE (RESPONSE OR DECISION OR ACTION ETC)

My boss taught me this. Because people just don't read long emails. Simple as. Do YOU (want to or have time to) read someone else's long emails?

As time goes on, often I say (to myself) "forget that", and write all the detail that is needed anyway, even in email. But only for audiences that may care about the detail (or otherwise are safe to skip the email altogether).

But who uses email at work anymore, anyway, right? I guess some organizations.

> Do YOU (want to or have time to) read someone else's long emails?

Always - as long as it makes proper use of paragraphs and doesn't have too many spelling/grammatical errors.

If I ever have to respond to an email asking clarification questions because they wanted to write a concise email, then my time is being wasted.

Most orgs still rely heavily on email, and most emails should be more than two lines to be useful. If it's only two lines, Slack it.

Disagree. Way too many modes of communication, which is endlessly irritating. If you want to send me a message at work, email is the common denominator.

Always super interesting to see how "powerful people" communicate.

big tech CEOs and major politicians use email almost as if it's an instant messenger: short, informal, to the point.

I guess it kinda bites them in the ass because the way I know this is via email leaks or subpoenas...

But it does mean that people can use whatever clients they like, and they can be across multiple organisations without weirdly expensive plans and administrators bridging instances or what have you.

> My boss taught me this.

And it shows. If you are not the boss, you can't just write something and expect the recipient to figure it out.

Right? Next tip for developers, always work in a private office, preferably a corner office, I learned this from my boss.

I prefer adding the detail; if it's going to turn into a phone call anyway I might as well have a script ready to go.

> Not a great time price-wise to be building a NAS

That under-states the matter. It is a terrible time, price-wise, to build a NAS.

I'd almost rather have no AI whatsoever and have storage 1/10 the price of pre-AI times.

(If there were a magical choice between having AI and significantly more expensive storage, and having no AI and some program to dump that investment money into getting and somehow leveraging significantly more available storage, that is.)

I would kill (figuratively, anyway) to have no AI whatsoever. No slop machine threatening to replace my job, or turn my job into babysitting its stupidity, and hardware would be reasonably priced? That would be awesome. AI has brought me nothing but downside.

AI has freed most people I know from the tedious job of writing actual emails and birthday greetings - leaving then more time to e.g. wash dishes or clean the floor.

Seriously, if arts and creativity is what sets humans apart from other animals, then AI has almost completely displaced our capacity to even consider doing these activities ourselves. People reach for AI when they should be composing a birthday greeting themselves.

People were Googling these things. Those who were good with words, didn’t do that before AI and won’t do it today. They don’t have to.

Is it a genuine birthday greeting if you just let AI do the job?

Was it a genuine birthday greeting when you bought a card? Or used an online card? I don’t really see the difference. The point is you thought of them, not the actual words

With AI you don't have to think about them.

Great business opportunity there. Make a free service that sends AI generated birthday notes to people. All the user has to provide is the other persons birthday.

People cannot be relied upon to provide accurate birthdays but nobody would suffer the social faux pas of an incorrect birthday congrats note. Nor would they send it to a spam catching email, but rather are guaranteed to send it to a regularly checked address. They know the persons birthday after all.

You can then sell high quality birthday information correlated to contact information to ad agencies.

Fuck this current internet. So dystopian.

Then the receiver AI can thank the sending AI before deleting.

I used to write birthday emails to my friends years ago. I quit when calendar systems started automatically promoting me when birthdays happened. Remembering someone's birthday no longer seemed like a significant effort on my part and so it wasn't worth the bother since it didn't say as much.

For 90% of birthday greetings, are they ever genuine?

Like seriously, outside of some close friends and family, are you sitting there deliberating over a message for your coworker Steve in the Slack chat or a cousin you barely talk to outside of a birthday and Christmas card?

that was their point

someone at work unironically said they use ai to compose "thoughtful responses" to people, and my immediate thought was that what they are doing is the literal opposite of thoughtful

Are you being sarcastic? There's no way you believe people couldn't wash dishes or clean floors because of all the emails and birthday greetings they had to write, or that people have almost completely lost the ability to consider making art.

It's a paraphrasing of the popular 2024 Joanna Maciejewska quote: "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."

I believe it was rhetorical. They were trying to illustrate that we've automated tasks that people might find to be fulfilling (drawing, writing) but are still a long way off from affordably automating drudgery.

> or that people have almost completely lost the ability to consider making art

They haven't lost it, no, but there's a lot of financial incentive to stop paying people to do it.

But we now have trillionaires, aren't you happy about that? It means you might be the one some day too /s

I immigrated wanting to become a millionaire. Never found time working my ass off. Now that I get pension and tokens from Musk and Zuck, I can finally try!

> I'd almost rather have no AI whatsoever and have storage 1/10 the price of pre-AI times.

Almost? ALMOST!?!?!

If you handed me a button that would make it like LLMs had never existed I'd be slamming that button so hard Sam Altman's clothes would spin around.

Return memory and storage prices to normal, undo the sloppification of ~everything, remove all these annoying "features" that are so useful they have to force them upon people, and make scammers actually have to put in a slight bit of effort, all at the "cost" of real human developers, artists, writers, etc. getting paid for their work....

If this is a hard decision for you, you are the problem.

Same. Every time I think about this, I come back to the fact that I was excellent at my job before AI, and even enjoyed aspects of it, so I would be fine if tomorrow it all blew up.

I don't really agree with the specifics but I can identify with the emotion. To me the problem with AI isn't AI, it's that investors are idiots and put hundreds of billions of dollars into AI companies that have near zero chance of being profitable enough to pay them back and those companies took that money and blew up computer parts supply chains that are vital to the rest of human existence. If we didn't have this massive build out that has no chance of repaying itself and instead had a build out that only doubled ram/gpu/nvme prices we would be far better off. As it stands, we're going to have a ton of gear that will be of questionable utility once any of the disruptors get their 100X+ per watt improved/different hardware going and to get that hardware we broke everything else. This ai stuff will also likely plateau and have the openweights models and opensource tooling catch up and at that point the companies are basically GPU REITS with diminishing demand as the stuff ages out and the disruptor's gear gets built for much better performance per watt. They've made it really ugly for us now and it will get really ugly for them in the midterm future imo. Not a good outcome for anyone.

Same, I'd smash it like it was offering me a million dollars. I cannot think of a single positive thing that has come out of the AI boom. It has been a net negative for all of society.

Oh come on! I'll take a few years of expensive RAM in order for humanity to get wide access to something near as makes no difference to the Star Trek Ship computer.

Which is 100% what this has felt like to work with, all spring and summer.

So we're in a slop phase, it'll pass. The first few years of youtube gave no hints that we'd get stuff like Veritasium.

Ignore the slop and use the tools to create something you never thought you could do. That's what it's for!

Same here, the usefulness of the slop machines is quite limited compared to the downsides.

That's quite uncharitable. What are you trying to achieve here?

They (probably) don't want to stop progress (especially unqualified like this) in general. They'd like a world where LLMs didn't come to exist.

And whether LLMs are progress at all remains to be proven.

There's a difference between standing in the rain and being hit by a tsunami, even if it's both just water.

Looking at current hd prices, I keep kicking myself for giving away several 3tb and couple of 4tb drives I had in my unraid server few years ago when I started upgrading my array to 8 and 12tb drives. At the time, a drive slot in my server was more valuable to me than a mere 3tb drive. i could have kept them for emergencies if any one of my array drives fail.

I'm doing it anyway and I've found some secondhand deals. Maybe COVID homelabbers are offloading gear?

I built a 24 TB HDD NAS in a 36 bay chassis for around $1000 all-in: mb, ram, rails, chassis, rack, disks, hba, nic

Awful Watts/TB but the plan is to run it and the GPU rig on solar.

I obtained a used Dell PowerEdge and just stuffed a bunch of drives in there. It's old enough that the RAM is not overly expensive (DDR3), so it has 192GB of RAM to effectively cache the data, and then 32TB of raw storage. (Of course I regret not spending the extra money to take it to 384GB now.)

The nice thing about the array being big is that I can just RAID 1 it instead of worrying about tinkering with RAID 5, and leave a drive as a hot spare.

PCIe 2.5G NIC for the uplink, and then it can serve over SMB or iSCSI. The main use case for this thing, incidentally, is it just is a caching proxy that holds Docker images, models off of Huggingface, and so on.

36 bay? Why so many?

The 36 bay was all I could find on fb marketplace.

I fell in love with the silly idea of squeezing 10G NIC + 10G writes (to a 2x12 RAID 10 HDD array) on the thunderbolt bus of my 12 year old macbook pro.

Then I got distracted with the server mb and truenas and ZFS.

What size discs are you using? This post is kind of hilarious, 24TB is achievable in literally a 2-bay NAS nowadays.

36 bays and only 24T of storage?

Can't you get that in a single disk that costs less than a kilodollar?

That will be a single point of failure, though. (Which you might not care about depending on the backup strategy.)

You're telling me.

I had a drive go bad in my 4 year old home-built NAS a few weeks ago, and it cost 2x what it originally did to buy the same capacity drive, and that was going to a grey-market importer on eBay, it was more on "reputable" sites.

Keychron K1 Max is the best tenkeyless ultra-slim keyboard IMO, and just about perfect.

I'd say it's a "small keyboard" in width and in height.

Mechanical, can be fairly quiet (with red switches), arrow keys, F keys, home/page keys. Well-built IME. Not exorbitantly priced.

Correct.

It does not require a "service" to consume multiple blogs efficiently, just simply "software" (an app will do).

The below RSS readers pretty much do their job and get out of the user's way. What's amazing is the sheer number of RSS readers that people choose to use; there are so many, people find ones that they personally like.

On desktop: Vienna https://www.vienna-rss.com/

On iOS: R2SReader https://apps.apple.com/us/app/r2sreader/id1608635613

Of course, if one wanted to use a service (or run one oneself), for features like syncing, then that is possible too.

But the basic setup remarkably simple, easy, and useful by itself IMO.

None of that matters since instagram has more users etc. Jesus, the question is "why blogs disappear" - they disappear because users don't care about the value proposition of your RSS app. Most of them are quite shit anyway - little commonality in terms of styling etc.

That's a completely different demand.

The question was "How would I, without any special services, consume multiple blogs today?"

You can do that with RSS.

Now you are saying it doesn't matter because everyone is on Instagram. So you aren't consuming "multiple blogs" in the first place, you're just consuming multiple Instagram accounts.

Keep in mind that nothing stops Instagram from providing RSS feeds for each user account.

You could literally just tell people to stop using Instagram and use Tumblr instead and the problem would solve itself. Tumblr hosts photos, photos albums, and videos, including blogs of several photographers. Tumblr has RSS feeds for each blog. You don't need to have a Tumblr account to follow blogs on Tumblr, you can just put them all into your RSS app and be done. You don't even need a separate RSS app. Vivaldi, a web browser, has an RSS client built-in.

Reddit has RSS feeds. Youtube has RSS feeds. Wordpress has RSS feeds (this is 50% of blogs, essentially). Mastodon has RSS feeds. Bluesky has RSS feeds.

There is nothing that we can do if people deliberately choose to go into a walled garden, but the open gardens still existand you have the full ability to use those instead.

Maybe if more people understood the value proposition of RSS's, they would have more reason to stop using Instagram and move.