A soup.
I played the 3 CD OG Age of Empires III with my brothers as a kid. It was great. We rigged up Hamachi to create a private network and manually edited some AoE config files with our Hamachi IP addresses to be able to have LAN coop sessions. Half the session was getting everything installed and working.
Now it’s even easier and we play regularly, decades later.
I get there’s protectionism of local industry, but clearly the market doesn’t want what the industry is making. We are held captive to whatever the industry thinks we want. It’s not a real free market. We are prescribed options to bail out the fledgling automotive industry (whatever is left of it after outsourcing everything to Mexico and SEA)
I’m in the market for a new car in Canada. I don’t want a gas car. Environmental reasons aside, they just cost too much and have too many moving parts that can wear out.
I can afford most any gas car I want. The moment it becomes electric I cannot afford it. A $10k BYD looks nice, but my government decides I actually need to pay $45k starting instead.
Exactly how my office is doing things. All of us are tracked by our phones to ensure commutes and then by IP address pulled from Entra ID and company-wide VPN. They cross reference it with our seat booking system.
We were 100% remote for all employees since March 2019. Managers now encourage us to go out and buy food at the restaurants nearby (some even “jokingly” ask for receipts which some people keep).
It’s more important to hold up the economy than lower emissions and improve morale, employee happiness, and productivity.
I use Nextcloud to hold all my personal and important files as well as my wife and I’s shared photo album. I use an old Surface laptop as a digital picture frame and have it on a random loop slideshow of our pictures album on our Nextcloud.
We use the iPhone apps to upload our photos and then it shows up on our frame. Works really well!
I use it quite a bit. I don’t trust big companies who commercialize AI so I run my AIs locally on my old retired gaming desktop that I’ve turned into a homelab/media server.
I use Kobold.AI to self host an LLM like ChatGPT (Dolphin-Mistral7b if you are curious). I mainly use it for low effort knowledge searches for stuff that is easier typed out long and descriptive (since google struggles with this). Since it’s AI I have to be careful about what I search since I’ve seen it make stuff up but for the majority of what I use it for (Programming syntax, Linux troubleshooting, general questions) it’s pretty good.
I also have Stable Diffusion running as well using the ICBINP model (which is pretty decent for photorealistic images). I use this AI to generate social media display pictures and porn :) it’s fun because it’s a surprise at what you’re going to get but sometimes it generates absolute horrors. Anatomical horrors. Those are genuinely horrific. Other times it’s really good.
It did the opposite lmao. I asked it what my vacation leave was because you need to verify leave amounts before you’re allowed to request any additional leave. It said I had 0 in my balance and I know for a fact I have at least a week left 🤪 took almost a month to sort it out. Had to provide balance screenshots and everything. I’d be probably fucked if I hadn’t manually screenshot my leave amounts beforehand.
I had to prepare a high level report to a senior manager last week regarding a project my team was working on.
We had to make 5 professional recommendations off of data we reported.
We gave the 5 recommendations with lots of evidence and references to why we came to that decision.
The top question we got was: “What are ChatGPT’s recommendations?”
Back to the drawing board this week because LLMs are more credible than teams of professionals with years of experience and bachelor-masters level education on the subject matter.
Thor Herring when