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hunter-gathereron Starlink Mini 2

Same. I've done what parent post said with much success, but when I try to make it my own vacation, it's always short. It is nice to let the family enjoy it though

hunter-gathereron Smart home devices should work without the internet

I live in such a more simple reality then a lot of people whom posts like this resonate with. I literally have two things hooked to the Internet in my house: my phone and laptop. Everything in my life functions fine, and I have just as much free time as most people as far as I can tell, and that's without a dishwasher. I do have a good assortment of scrubbers though...

hunter-gathereron US voters roundly reject data centers in ballot measures

I live also an hour away from Hansel Valley, and the concerns are broadly environmental where I'm at. I think people just don't know how to articulate the damage, even though they intuitively feel it coming. I think your point about power generation is debatable. I know some USU and BYU researchers have put out studies on the waste heat being just north of Salt Lake.

In regards to your wildlife refuge and "stinky swamp" points: wildlife don't know the boundaries of refuges, and use more land than owned by DWR. A stinky swamp is perfect habitat. I've been waterfowl hunting for many years and have seen the decline and patterns change. I can't imagine this data center helping much with that.

I wouldn't be opposed to it if AI was otherwise being rolled out responsibly, and being used to solve real problems. But in reality, it's mostly just more vaporware production, meeting notes expansion and contraction, and otherwise useless bullshit.

In the words or my Republican father regarding O'Leary "We just have enough stuff already". And this from a very much blue collar, working class, no health care rural-american.

hunter-gathereron When electric cars were for women

I'm with you exactly. However, motorcycles I thoroughly enjoy.

hunter-gathereron Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear

Carbon capture makes little sense until fossil fuels have been replaced. I guess there are some Bio char technologies that might change the equation a bit, but watt for watt, you need to replace your carbon emissions first (generally speaking)

hunter-gathereron Amazon’s “digital pacifier” for toddlers

Hard agree. And a lot of unstructured play. Actually, that should all last well into their pre-teens IMO.

hunter-gathereron Nvidia OpenShell

You opt for your birthyear? Interesting... See, I use my actual birthday. You must have been born 1st-9th?

hunter-gathereron I know why the mathematicians weep

I am in the same boat as you, but like someone posted earlier in another thread, I concede that a large percentage of my value proposition has vanished in a year. What worries me is that I'm having fun at the bar but have no idea when closing time is. I suspect that same feeling is aching a lot of people. I for one have had multiple discussions with my wife the last 6 months about what we are going to do when I get laid off, especially because we built a life around the notion or remote work in a niche field which seems to be eroding away. Fortunately I've been wise with my finances, so I have options. But I too have considered starting over in another career. Sort of sucks, but I am coming to terms with it.

hunter-gathereron Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts

I bought my first ledger hardware wallet circa 2017 (If I recall correctly). At the time, they shipped it without any anti-tamper packaging, and even had a note bragging about how it didn't matter, because of how their devices were set up. I forget the exact wording, and would be interested if anyone here has it. Anyways, at the time I was doing hardware hacking for 3-letter agencies, and decided to not use ledger devices when I saw they weren't too concerned with their supply chain.

I bought directly from ledger. I don't know if they were assembling devices in house at the time or not.

Edit: further context, this discussion is somewhat relevant to how confident they were. See the OP's remark about what ledger said: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ssycjn/my_l...

hunter-gathereron Why Texas Is Making Data Centers Wait

Everyone is using AI for everything now. Including people on here. It's "AI this" and "AI that". Why are people surprised this is what has happened? Has nobody on this forum ever lived in the contrast of a home with minimum appliance, then moved to a place with 4 gamers all over clocking their GPUs for 3 to 4 hours a day, and not observed the delta in utility bills? I'm honestly shocked everyone is surprised at what is happening.

hunter-gathereron Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSU9gNm5pAI

This just dropped the other day and is pretty relevant to the discussion. You might find it interesting.

hunter-gathereron 4,400-Year-Old Tomb of Egyptian Judge Found at Saqqara with Colors on Walls

I've had that happen to me. I actually recently wrote a draft blog and looked over it, and it felt AI generated. My writing style has definitely changed.

hunter-gathereron CIA Releases President's Daily Briefs in Commemoration of 9/11

Not true. The PDB comes from a lot of sources. They are hand picked but are often left pretty raw. I know this because I used to be a HUMINT collector in DIA. They are hand picked, but usually in the sense of "what briefs well". It ends up being more about yearly performance objectives and how it looks on a quad chart than anything agenda related

hunter-gathereron Borges Labyrinth in Venice reopens to the public

Somewhat shameless shout out about this... My friends father is Steve Peck, the author of "A short stay in hell". It's a short story about a guy who ends up in hell that is this library. Fun weekend read.

hunter-gathereron How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer

This is true. In fact, if you come across a merchant that accepts credit with a minimum purchase amount or tacks an extra fee, you can take the receipt and call the terminal owner (visa/MasterCard) and report it. The receipt has a terminal ID, and it turns out the likes of Visa get really pissed if merchants do that.

I know this because I used to work on a US military base. There was a sole merchant on a particular installation that was doing this, but it was extreme. They'd force you to buy over 10 USD if you wanted to use a card, and it was the only place to grab a snack. One day there terminal was shut down, and for a period they only went to cash payments. Once they took credit again they removed the minimum purchase. Turns out somebody got pissed, and reported them.

Regarding the article, the ~390 USR sounds about right to me. I only use a credit card, pay it completely off at the end of the month. I've never once paid interest since in the 8 years I have used this card. Every few years I buy a plan ticket with the rewards.

hunter-gathereron Oceans hit highest temperature on record

This is wildly out of touch with reality. Have you never seen a construction site? A 0 carbon generation site doesn't exist.

hunter-gathereron Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

I'm not an expert here, but I see what you're saying. Is the carbon calculation from the meat _processing_??? Every year I hunt a buck and carry it off the mountain. So the carbon footprint for getting that meat for my family is really the drive up to and from wherever I'm hunting from, plus a few other small things that probably amount to almost nothing.

I live close to a large meat processing facility, and it appears to be quite an energy intensive operation from the outside. Never been inside though, so I can't say for sure. But transporting live cattle, feed, water, slaughter, freeze, freeze+transport all might be pretty carbon heavy.

hunter-gathereron Charles Ross spent 50 yrs building Star Axis naked-eye observatory in New Mexico

The crazy thing is that we'll all just continue to sit back and let these sort of things happen, only screaming to each other on the internet about it, doing little to nothing.

hunter-gathereron Advertise in ChatGPT

Ads are often misleading though. You know, it "looks bigger in the picture" type of thing. If ads were honest, the hose hideaway my wife just ordered would have said "flimsy piece of plastic shit you will throw away after a year, but should get you through the summer".

hunter-gathereron EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0

I didn't say it was a privilege. I said it was viewed as such when I was in the military.

I wasn't talking about work agreements with civil companies. You brought that in. My comment was in regards to public service only.

I don't disagree about public servants having more time off or more money. But I believe they should be on call. If that means cancelling vacation to vote, so be it. You don't want to have that life style? Don't run for public office.

FWIW, I've had skin in that game. I was stop lossed when I had 4 months left on my enlistment for a 15 month combat deployment. That's public service. Elected officials should be present and ready to serve.

hunter-gathereron EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0

I don't know... I'm not European so I don't really care, but I feel like there are some jobs that have an existing overlap of _duty_. I was in the military, and PTO was viewed as a privilege, and sometimes leave was cancelled, but that makes sense because of the position. Other civilian jobs, like firefighters, police, maybe some medical practitioners, might have this same thing. Politicians I would say is definitely one of those positions, where you should actually be in "public service". Officials in a democracy are supposed to be elected not because we need people to fill vacant jobs, but because we need people to be on duty to make the hard decisions.

Basically, I don't think politicians should be held to the same standard as some SWE making note-taking apps.

hunter-gathereron Great Salt Lake Tracker

We really should just figure out how to be sustainable. I also think there is a hard reality people don't want to even consider talking about, which is the Southwest US is too overpopulated and overleveraged for the natural water resources available to it.

hunter-gathereron OpenRA

Played OpenRA a few years back, and as an 80s/90s kid played the original. OpenRA is great in my books. I've linked this before, but I suggest watching some.of the competition replays of OpenRA from the "five aces" YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmywk-96Irk).

hunter-gathereron Data centers trigger voter backlash

Indeed. Our air is so bad we can't afford to open up more smoke stacks. Of course Kevin doesn't care because he's in Canada.

hunter-gathereron Data centers trigger voter backlash

I'm local-ish to Box Elder county in Utah, here people absolutely give a shit about the environmental burden to the region. It isn't just about water consumption, but other things. I think the "We need to win China is AI" narrative is (appropriately???) falling of deaf ears. Obviously I don't have the numbers, but even lay-people in my circles have asked how these alleged AI_driven benefits (fighting cancer, stopping climate change, and whatever) are really going to come to fruition, when what they really observe in their backyards are data centers being generated so we can fill our lives with AI slop.

hunter-gathereron Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health

Yes. I also took a lower salary to continue a remote only position. I've had recruiters reach out to offer positions in places I don't want to go back to, and I always politely tell them that they'd have to pay me more than I'm worth to go back.

hunter-gathereron Can we have the day off?

Maybe in some places??? I am an 80s kid, and was raised with what we'd call something like lower middle class. Neither parent has a college education, worked minimum wage, and owned a home and fed 4 kids. We didn't have as much stuff... But we sure were outside and playing a lot more back then.

hunter-gathereron OpenClaw isn't fooling me. I remember MS-DOS

Everyone in my circle would seriously bat an eye at all those numbers. Congrats on making it to the upper class.

hunter-gathereron The "Passive Income" trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs

I'm the least interested person in art you'll ever know, so how she prices her work I'm not sure. I know she doesn't go by time spent on a piece, but instead how good it turns out. I think she just casually looks at other art for sale that is around the same quality and prices accordingly. After so many rounds of that I think you just get a good intuition for it.

She also has a few art shows she applies to and goes presents at those. I think this is where most of her recurring customers come from honestly, and not Instagram. Though she has had a few commissions from Instagram.

A side note on those looking to buy art, you might refrain from asking for a custom piece. If you see something you like, there's a good chance you don't know why you like it even if you think you do. So when you give the artist a picture you want them to translate into something like oil, it'll probably disappoint. The frustrations I've seen my wife go through trying to get a commission right is tiring.

hunter-gathereron The "Passive Income" trap ate a generation of entrepreneurs

Didn't feel like a misdiagnosis to me. My spouse around 2017 was one of those that got sucked into a course to earn income with an Amazon store. As I read the article basically every point resonated with my experience.

The dog walking business example was also appropriate in my mind. My spouse fortunately broke even, minus time, on her attempt with drop shipping garbage nobody really needs. Now she makes decent money with her oil paintings. Not "passive income" but real money and profit. Not enough to retire (that's what I am for!) but actual money nonetheless.