Rhaedas

LOTS of radiators.

The rest of social media did to 4chan what reality did to The Onion. Both still exist, but only a pale version of before because the new versions are so much worse.

Go basic Doom, it’s not terribly hard on the easy levels.

Ollama.com is another method of self hosting. Figuring out which model type and size for what equipment you have is key, but it’s easy to swap out. That’s just an LLM, where you go from there depends on how deep you want to get into the code. An LLM by itself can work, it’s just limited. Most of the addons you see are extra things to give memory, speech, avatars, and other extras to improve the experience and abilities. Or you can program a lot of that yourself if you know Python. But as others have said, the more you try to get out, the more robust a system you’ll need, which is why you find the best ones online in cloud format. But if you’re okay with slower responses and lower features, self hosting is totally doable, and you can do what you want, especially if you get one of the “Jailbroke” models that has had some of the safety limits modified out of them to some degree.

Also as mentioned, be careful not to get sucked in. Even a local model can be convincing enough sometimes to fool someone wanting to see things. Lots of people recognize that danger, but then belittle people who are looking for help in that direction (while marketing realizes the potential profits and tries very hard to sell it to the same people).

Back in the 80s I bought a few of the Star Fleet Battles board game manuals. Loved going through them all and imagining how complex a game could be, but never was able to actually set up any gaming sessions (after all it was even more niche than D&D, and very dry in the tons of rules). When I ran across the Star Fleet Command series years later, it was like I could finally participate in what I had dreamed about. Granted it didn’t have all the rules (maybe that’s a good thing) and it was set in the “standard” familiar universe and many of the board game unique races and ships weren’t there, but it felt like playing the spirit of the board game, setting up scenarios and seeing what you could do.

FWIW, anyone who isn’t familiar with the board game, the Andromedans are probably where some of the ideas used with Borg came from. The alternate history and ship developments due to the wars that break out are also great.

And uneducated. They do not like awareness of reality.

My response when managers at my work use the word “productivity” is, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Twice.

I’ve had two wireless solar cameras for a few years now, and a doorbell one for a year. The main reason I picked Reolink was because it wasn’t tied to a cloud or account, it’s just on the local network for me to use as I want. Pros are that they are still working, both cameras and solar panels. It doesn’t take much to keep them charged up. They can’t compare to a wired higher resolution, but I wasn’t going to try and do all that for just monitoring an area. I did end up getting a repeater for the network as sometimes the connection would be bad or drop since they are near the edge of the network router range, and that seemed to help. The doorbell is much more reliable and fast, being wired.

Cons - they’re wireless, so there is lag both in logging on and in framerate. I moved one of them from one place to another and had to find a spot for the solar, discovering that during fall when the sun dropped but before the leaves fall there was a shadow, so I had to maintain the charge manually for a few week, which wasn’t a big deal with a battery bank. Only other complaint might be that the detection software isn’t perfect, especially for animals. We’ve set up a Blink camera (previously used inside a birdhouse) to watch some stray cats that the one Reolink kept totally missing even though it’s right in view.

But overall I think they’re quality, and I imagine based on the doorbell one that the higher end wired ones are probably pretty good.

🌎👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀

Wages not keeping in step with inflation is exactly why everything seems so expensive. $30k of today’s money is the equivalent of less than $10k in the 80’s, and cars were more than $10K then except for a few that ended up being examples of “you get what you pay for”.

I should probably state that as “wage increases being suppressed”.

Guess no one at Microsoft realized people use computers differently and more options is always better than one. Or they intended to have the option and either forgot to include it or it was buggy. Either way it was #2 on my “how do you disable this” list, and I had to deal with it for a while. I get how grouping can be good for some things, but when you want to be able to bounce between various windows and some happen to use the same app, it was a pain.

Even the small things. When work upgraded to Win11 overnight and I logged into the Start being in the middle, I almost lost it. Yes, I could fix it, and a few other things, but I had a moment.