My homelab is a learning tool that became useful enough to keep some things alive. It started with a raspperry pi and docker and has evolved to multiple systems with backups and some decently complex networking.

Ive always seen a “homelab” as different from a “home server”. Homelabs are meant to be fucked up as you learn things. Have a home lab long enough and you end up with a test lab and production environment.

My mother in law actually surprised me by asking if the family group chat could switch to signal. I wasnt going to bother her about it because i assumed shed hate it since shes bad with technology. It was a pleasant surprise.

The fact that this is not already happening sucks. Why wait

Matrix is what I moved to. To make transition easier for my core friends I wrote a guide with step by step instructions and pre-made a replica of our discord server. I got probably 70% of them to come over.

The real hit was large communities. For roughly a month I came in daily letting my communities know about what was happening and that I was gonna switch so if people wanted to find me here is where they could find me. I got 3 kinds of replies:

1. The nihilistic “I’ll never escape it, everyone already has my information, why fight it”
2. (In reference to the ID verification) “I’m not American so I don’t care if people have my ID because my country doesn’t have the problems America has”
3. “Moving is too hard and I use one specific feature the other apps don’t have and my friends are here so I’ll move when they move”

Moving to the new platform, giving a grace period to friends, and then moving and cutting contact with the platform had the highest success rate. People that want to talk with you will move, even if it’s just to only talk with you. But the hardest thing is accepting that some people just don’t care about their privacy and want the easy to use features enough that they are willing to lose contact with you.

My coworkers use Claude like an actual brain subscription, and I have started to write off everything they say as if it came straight from the AI. They have gained so much unearned confidence about shit they have no idea about, and have even argued with the development team about it.

I got into an argument about how in band and out of band DTMF work with one of them for a solid half hour before they finally admitted they didn’t actually know but were going off what claude said.

I wanted to punch them for wasting everyone’s time. If you don’t understand stop answering definitively like you’re the expert.

Some customers have switched to using AI emails too. Customers that used to ask extremely low level questions will now submit a 2 page long email with action items and explinations about why our product does X, Y, Z, and I have to read it twice to figure out their problem isn’t even in the action items because the AI hyper focused on the wrong thing.

Like ok thanks you dumped the entire app log into Claude and asked it “why no work” and Claude read an error message that’s benign and now the customer is demanding fixes for something that is not and never has been a problem and won’t actually solve the root issue.

Yakuza kiwami 3!

I’m a badass but I’m gonna get cancer in about 15 years

If I see a restraunt that has all AI images of their food I automatically assume it’s a ghost kitchen and refuse to buy from it. Ill take a low quality phone cam pic of the food over AI because at least I know what I’m getting and know it’s real.

Its because people grab it randomly and then blindly install off the AUR

I was nervous to switch to arch at first because of all the jokes, but it’s honestly been pretty slick. My servers are all on Debian but I put arch on my daily driver and the most “tomogachi tinkering” I’ve done has been Bluetooth nonsense, which is a general problem on most distros.

Not quite, at least not in American healthcare terms. A copay is your portion of the cost for an appointment, procedure, or prescription. For example of the doctor visit is $100 and my copay is $25, I pay $25 and the insurance pays $75 (in practice the insurance doesn’t ever really pay their full share but that’s a more complicated part of the equation.)

The deductible is how much I have to pay out of pocket in a year before the insurance starts paying anything. My deductible might be say, $1000, meaning I have to pay $1000 out of pocket before the insurance kicks in to cover anything at all.

max out of pocket is the maximum amount you will pay for medical in a year.

Oh and of course there is the premium which you pay monthly for the pleasure of having insurance.

So if your premium is $200, copay is $25, your deductible is $1000, and your max out of pocket is $5000, and a (normal non specialty) doctor visit is $100, you have to visit the doctor 10 times before the insurance pays anything at all (you pay the full $100 each time) and then the 11th visit is $25 and the insurance pays the rest. If you visit the doctor enough to hit max out of pocket (160 more visits to a normal non specialty doctor), then the insurance kicks in to pay 100%. And no your monthly $200 premium doesn’t go towards your max out of pocket

Most people never hit their max out of pocket and most people without kids that Ive talked to never hit their deductible unless they have a condition that requires regular treatment or if they get into an accident or have something major happen. Then you can blow out your deductible / max out of pocket in one hospital visit.

So basically your insurance is paid to do diddly squat, except prevent you from going bankrupt if you get into a car accident (except they will totally find ways to deny your claim anyways).

Source: am a trans man with a neurological condition. I’m a medical nightmare and have had to learn to be a self advocate through multiple American insurances.

I vastly prefer it to calibre web personally, but it’s all up to personal preference. Kavita has a pretty extensive user guide too

I use calibre to label books by series. I don’t think I did anything crazy with the folder structure outside of putting comics, manga, and books in separate directories.

I have one media directory with books / manga / comics in separate subdirectories. I process metadata with calibre or other tools as needed, and point Kavita at my books directory and tell it to scan. Kavita should automatically group books of the same series together provided the series name is exact. (eg: “The adventures of Bob” vs “adventures of Bob, The” would be seen as different series. Kavita should also group the libraries together by directory, so I have 3 libraries, books, manga, and comics.

You do need to make sure books are all in the correct formats. I batch convert everything to epub and limit Kavita to only show epubs to avoid duplicates.

The upside to all this is that Kavita comes with a cleaner interface imho, opds is easier to set up, and I’ve had less issues with it. Also users can set their own reading lists and collections if you are setting this up for other users.

The “god” in that sentence is the chatbot convincing her it is a god.

And her name doesn’t specify her faith. She might be christian, she might not be. Her parents most definitely were since they named her, but people don’t always take up the faith of their parents.

Regardless, her faith has no bearing on this case. She could have a room temperature IQ, have been drunk, and had 3 mental disorders, none of that excuses a robot causing psychosis in her and causing her to commit suicide to be excusable.

What a load of crock. Hilariously this worked the opposite way for me. Was working in a medium sized business as the only tech support person. Boss was constantly asking “what do you do all day?” because I’d miss one thing on his task list, even though I was supporting the whole company. Got missed for promotions because “You don’t come say hi to the whole office in the morning.”

Moved to a fully remote job, started popping up more on the radars of execs because suddenly if they want people to show up to their weird little culture events they have to invite people to them on calendar events, and I can join them since I’m remote and can do my work at the same time as having it up on another monitor. They see my name and face everywhere and start associating me with someone who “shows up to the conversations”. I’m remote, do less work faster and happier, and am already interviewing for promotions.

And bonus I can just ignore people’s shitty social games, or wait to react to questions or requests until I’ve had time to think them through, instead of someone walking up to my desk in the middle of an outage and interpreting my stress as unfriendliness.

For books: mam (manually now that readarr died) -> calibre -> Kavita

If it’s a manga or comic, bypass calibre, straight to Kavita + komf for metadata / covers.

I literally use matrix voice for my d&d group every week lol, just join a server that has voice

Only thing I dislike is the lack of software based noise cancelling is a bit awkward but very managable

Tumblr etiquette. You converse in the tags to not fuck up the main post, so that others can reblog it without adding your commentary in. But sometimes the tags are really good and get screenshotted and added to the post chain

It IS a PC

It’s not the average consumer spending thousands on tokens. Even my work just had a meeting about how “the free lunch is over” now that AI costs are expanding, and they bought their own hardware to investigate hosting local models.

Linux is widely used in the enterprise world. It’s the home consumer world that doesn’t use it as much and even that is rapidly changing as things enshitify.

This still does not fix the problem of “I asked you because I wanted your input, if I wanted to ask the chatbot I would have”. The core issue.

The problem is the unearned confidence in the answer they know nothing about. Is them saying “I asked the ai and it said…” better than them asking the ai and not prefacing it? Yes. But the problem is asking the AI and then answering the question in the first place.

If you don’t know, say I don’t know, don’t regurgitate information feom thr AI. We all have access to the same tools, there is no reason to use AI to answer the question I asked you, because if I wanted what AI had to say I’d have asked it myself.