I'm fine enough now to retire but get on my hands and knees whenever I drop a tiny surface-mount resistor, which I have reels of tens or hundreds of. If I can't find it after 5 or so minutes, that's when the "what am I doing?" thought finally hits.
104 karma · joined May 16, 2025
the real pain in the butt in my present is Patreon because I can't be arsed to write something separate for it. as-is, I subscribe to people on Patreon and then never bother watching any of the exclusive content because it's too much work. some solutions like Ghost (providing an API for donor content access) get part of the way to a solution, but they are not themselves a video host, and I've never seen anyone use it.
one thing I have protested, to the point of being obnoxious, is school-managed Chromebooks. I've talked to every principal of every school she's been in since Covid-19 to persistently request I be allowed to furnish a Windows laptop or at least a Chromebook I manage. -and in a bit of a surprise to me, everyone's been accommodating (though never to let her use a Windows laptop; I think maybe providing it as an option makes breaking policy to let her bring a self-managed Chromebook seem reasonable). I argue I operate web services with user information at home and don't want school employees on my network, and I don't want the financial liability of her accidentally damaging school property.
Daughter tried suicide a few weeks ago. "It was not a serious attempt," but obviously it is. We go to only local hospital; they don't have a pediatric unit, so ER basically just looks at her and aren't sure what to do because it's not like she's bleeding out. They clean the cuts and ask if I want county behavioral health involved. I'm in over my head and need help, so I say yes.
Behavioral health mobile response person comes out -- good guy, made me see something I hadn't prior -- because I've had her in therapy for half a year prior but we weren't really making much progress on anxiety/depression issues -- but he says we weren't going to get anywhere with therapy before drugs, that she was too far out, and in retrospect that was absolutely the right call. Anyway, he puts her on 72-hours mandatory hold. Here, this means the child must be transferred to a pediatric health facility with suicide watch and psychiatric services. This became a big problem.
Cincinnati Childrens Hospital had no beds (and I have ill will toward them anyway). Dayton had no beds. Charge nurse was calling people for hours and hours, and I joined in calling places (we stayed at hospital the whole time without sleeping), and it wasn't until 24 hours after admission we're finally transferred. My mom was/is a social worker for those with developmental disabilities, and spent about a decade working at long-term facilities for juveniles, where it was almost always court-ordered. I spent a fair bit of my time there for economic/childcare reasons while she was working -- awful place for the kids (not for me; I hung out in staff rooms and watched movies). Doors, by law, could not be locked, and they were terribly understaffed; violence and rape was expected. We had a second person from county behavioral come out, and once I realized the only kinds of places open to us, started pleading and insisting to have the hold lifted, but they refused. I wind up with one out-of-state option, and one in-state; both about an hour and a half away, and both the kinds of facilities I was terrified of. I later talked to other parents and was surprised to find time to find a facility, lack of beds, and travel time were all common issues between us. I went for visitation every day, and at least one adult would almost always come out of visitation crying, not realizing these places are poorly-staffed, unsafe prisons until they first visit and talk with their kid.
Anyway, so the 72-hour clock starts only once daughter's transferred to this pediatric psych facility (she wound up staying for 5 days; this is a whole other issue where they had no social worker available to provide AMA paperwork, they claimed). -And this place is a long-term juvenile psych facility, so it tends to have a lot of kids who were sentenced by courts to be there; violent offenders, but it was a mix (daughter has a story about playing Uno with a kid experiencing "weed psychosis", which'd I'd never heard of before; interesting stuff). You know, so I'm going to bed every night, and I've got some wild nightmares I could share -- BUT everything turned out mostly fine. At one point, daughter witnessed staff slam a kid against the wall hard enough for him to bleed from the head, and didn't clean the blood off the wall; the toilet in her room didn't work and the room smelled like feces; they couldn't lock doors, and the facility was severely understaffed. A recipe for disaster, but it could have been a LOT worse than it was, though trauma is there nonetheless from the experience.
Now, the reason the county insisted on sending her to this hellhole is because it's the only way to unlock county behavioral services. You must first have committed an attempt to harm yourself or someone else, or be ordered by courts. I wrote at the beginning I was able to get a counselor before all this, but this took a lot of emails and phone calls, and the place I found with help required 2 hours on the road per visit. The person I got was new in the field and didn't specialize in pediatric; he was not a licensed psychologist nor psychiatrist, but he was the only person I could get and I was grateful for any assist. There were/are no available pediatric psychiatrists or psychologists EXCEPT through county behavioral; they have them all locked away from the market, basically.
The total bill for all this, by the way (uninsured, cash, including the ambulance) was $8,709.45. I didn't negotiate; I've planned for this, I took out $20k from broker on the first day I got to go home. Money isn't the issue; it's the non-availability of service which's the real problem here, for us. I was surprised to walk into county behavioral and be told while registering at front desk they don't accept self-pay; that they aren't set up for it. I've never run into this before, and it got a morbid chuckle out of me because this's been a heck of a roll of the dice up to now, specifically to get in county services, and now I'm told they don't offer anything for us.
I ask for the people who insisted on the 72-hour hold (and btw, the facility which held daughter prescribed nothing but an antihistamine, with trauma inflicted, though minor; worthless experience except to unlock services) to speak with me, and I get one of them. She talks to supervisor, and apparently nobody knows their own policies because they do, in fact, accept self-pay. I had to fill out a Medicaid form, which we don't qualify for. Now, the strange part about this is if you have insurance (and this is why they have you apply for Medicaid), they charge you on a sliding scale, but if you don't have any insurance and get rejected by Medicaid, they really don't have any system set up to bill you, so everything's free. The psychiatrist and counselor both are free; it's crazy, so I'll kick some money to food pantries while SNAP's cut off in the state due to federal shutdown, but it's like nobody's ever really thought through the systems we have for healthcare; it's inefficient and brittle from every angle, not just the providers/insurers screwing people over for capitalism angle; like a proof-of-concept someone slapped together over a weekend where everyone's spinning their wheels without a clue what to do, except it's something we've had for centuries and are spending $trillions/year on. -And every time the government provides new weapons or issues new mandates, it somehow seems to get worse.
(Things are going well now, btw; we got a real psychologist scheduled same-day, and first appointment with psychiatrist was 2-3 days after intake. She's doing better, but the journey here was straight Hell.)
we do actually have real democracy in this state, where we have binding referendums, but legislature is able to act faster than we're allowed to, to work around and nullify the policy we vote for. -so voting is fine; nothing wrong with it; but I guess I just worry, oftentimes, people get too involved in it and attached to movements which can accomplish something one day only for it to be reversed by the end of the decade. feels like the two sides are getting angrier and angrier, spinning their wheels in dysfunctional politics, and we can't have a functional government in this environment; one side guts government to replace with loyalists, then the other guts it again in a few years to replace the partisans, to replace with their own partisans. meanwhile, national debt just keeps climbing as people swarm into gold.
my compost piles, though -- not directly, but I can eat that; I can feed people with that. you know, you want to solve hunger -- you can contribute directly to food pantries. it's more work than voting, but something actually happens. -and almost all the regulation government cares about relates to capitalism; they don't care about my carrots because my carrots don't engage in capitalism. -and for some people in some circumstances, it doesn't take too much engagement with capitalism to be able to get $100k or whatever you need for a plot of land with electricity in a rural area if you plan out for it.
Herbert, as an aside, expressed a kind of appreciation for Nixon. His son wrote in a foreword to some edition of a Dune book I read mentioning this. He was glad the corruption was exposed and so blatant, because now, surely, voters would see how bad things became and will not let it happen again. Optimistic guy.
Do it, bozos!
Once the single-focus companies have to actually make a profit and flip the switch from poorly monetized to fully monetized, I think folks will be immediately jumping ship to mega-companies like Google who can indefinitely sustain the freemium model. The single-focus services are going to be Hell to use once the free rides end: price hikes, stingy limits, and ads everywhere.
.... but the field will change unpredictably. Amazon offers a lot of random junk with Prime -- hike price $50/year, slap on a subscription to high-grade AI chatbot 10% of users will actually use (say 2% are "heavy users"), and now Anthropic is financially sustainable. Maybe NYT goes from $400 to $500 per year, and now you get ChatGPT Pro, so everything's fine at OpenAI. There're a ton of financial ideas you'll come up with once you feel the fire at your feet; maybe the US government will take a stake and start shilling services when you file taxes. Do you want the $250 Patriot Package charged against your tax refund, or are we throwing this in the evidence pile containing your Casio F91-W purchase and tribal tattoos?
1) so long as these age verification methods are for things at home, I think most people opposed to smartphones ("client devices" we have to pay for) will not be too inconvenienced. a few years ago, broker quit letting us use plastic code cards for 2FA and required we used an Android/iOS device, but I'm willing to tolerate having a single-purpose tablet in a drawer, though I'm still annoyed to essentially have a $100 undisclosed fee attached to service I have to pay every 3-4 years when they drop support for older versions of Android.
2) I've so far only been locked out of minor services like Anthropic by not having smartphone w/ mobile service, not because they require app use but because they ban VOIP numbers for registration. many businesses do charge me a little extra for not using a smartphone, but the cost is not too high, about on par with ignoring loyalty cards.
3) this cannot ever be required for something like onsite ID verification (e.g. at an airport) or I would be locked out of essential government processes. I'm willing to keep a device in a drawer, but will never carry a client device around with me.
4) this is not a problem exclusively for elderly grandma with satellite brick phones. I'm in my 30s with IT/developer background.
My realization in ordering the Rock-2Fs is I really only need an MMU (that is, an SBC instead of something like an ESP32) when I'm running something with a graphical desktop, which is, outside my workstation, never (except for kiosks, which I use Android tablets for). -OR when I want to plug something into a bloated SBC board which saves me from having to solder a connector on, which is sometimes.
I use one for running a timelapse camera (camera is USB) while another is a portable mp3 player I can put in shirt pocket and which has aux port (tho its aux line is noisy). -So that's two of the four Rock-2F boards in use.... but it took me far less time to think up uses and deploy 25/25 of seeedstudio's ESP32C3 boards I ordered a couple years ago, and have used ~5/25 of the ESP32C6s I ordered early this year. They're so cheap, and use so much less energy than ARM boards, that it's difficult to justify using the SBCs anymore.
I think they're asking $50 for a base 2GB Pi4B, now -- that's 10 ESP32C3 boards (with integrated WiFi and BMS, btw!) -- and the Pi5 is even less competitive except in what I'd characterize as a very unusual scenario where you need high compute at edge (where it's both needed AND the latency of computing at the edge is lower than sending it to central server for processing), OR you need the security of protected memory, OR you have no central server and an ESP32 isn't going to cut it (I'll say, though, that one can run a thermostat with multiple WiFi-connected thermometers, and run a web server interface just fine.).
This will be good to study from, if nothing else for me personally. I appreciate that it's almost wholly unobfuscated.
It wasn't enough to just shove a folder through the gap of the doors; you had to ensure the folder opened up as it was falling, changing more of the pixels to get to the trigger threshold. It took me around 5 minutes to get it to consistently trigger. CEO was displeased dev & design team now knew how to bypass the door lock from the outside; he wasn't going to pay to fix it.
Maybe best to internalize Have It Your Way like BK's teams did.
In the 90s and into the mid-aughts, we would give out our names, phone numbers, and addresses no problem. It's a world where cryptocurrency could sprout because it was built around chat rooms and forums with like-minded individuals, or individuals working/playing in particular niches. Today, most people seem to assume giving your address is something only an idiot would do, or that times have changed drastically so it was fine then but stupid now.
I think we live in a world now where people are conditioned to no longer speak to each other. This is a world where Jesus would be very strange indeed, even if we do find ourselves under a nominally Christian nationalist government. Imagine letting a stranger into your house, or even talking to a stranger in a parking lot. There will, for sure, be no kind of foot-washing.
I agree this is largely conditioning coming from the gamification of socializing brought on by social media and other websites to drive engagement. I don't think the average Internet user would be like this without conditioning by big technology companies. I think it can be beaten by recognizing it as a harmful addiction, and an addiction that can be pretty tough to beat. Government and tech companies aren't going to fix it; it's something you have to want to fix for yourself.
It runs Debian headless now (I didn't have particular use for a laptop in the first place). Not sure just how unpopular this suggestion'd be, but I'd try booting Windows on the laptop to get an idea of how it's supposed to run.
I would guess directory listing? -But I'm an idiot, so any elucidation would be appreciated.
of course, not all social media is bad, I think. maybe. -but I think it's easier to get people to make the government ban Facebook/Instagram/Reddit/whatever than have people individually switch; it's sort of inherently antisocial for a person to peel off from the main hive and switch to a smaller self-selecting platform, I might argue.
If you can keep up software support, the hardware becomes much more valuable both now and later, but this is much harder to do in the consumer space where the software than in the industrial/AI space; I'd say the majority of my PC replacements until I was established financially were the result of software not supporting my hardware (not that it couldn't do the task if there were support, but simply that there was no support), and I should say, too, that in almost every case, I regretted dumping $1k in today-dollars for a single game or application otherwise.
Obviously, the problem's much worse with phones/tablets where most people use them for Cloud activities; people use them for 2-3 years and they go in the trash or their service provider might buy it back essentially as e-waste to be scrapped (despite marketing implications of them being reused to help surgeons in Africa).
regarding authentication mentioned elsewhere, passing cookies is no big deal.
They don't trust the LLM so they cripple what it can do, would be the generous interpretation. I actually think they're intentionally crippling the LLMs' access to accounts, though, to reduce their spend not on CSRs, but on CSR actions for, for example, refunds, where the LLM becomes an excuse for the change; they can hide behind what they'll call technical issues or teething pains.
I immediately hop on customer service chat to ask for a refund. I was surprised to be talking to an LLM rather than a human, but go ahead and explain what happened and state I want the transaction for the subscription canceled. It offers to cancel the subscription at the end of the 30-day subscription. I decline, noting I want a refund for the subscription I didn't intend to take. It repeats it can cancel the subscription at the end of 30-day subscription. I ask for human. It repeats. I ask for human again. It repeats. I disconnect.
Amazon knows what it's doing.
Talk therapy is useful for some things, but it can also be to get you to more relevant therapy routes. I don't think LLMs are suited to talk therapy because they're almost never going to push back against you; they're made to be comforting, but overseeking comfort is often unhealthy avoidance, sort of like alcoholism but hopefully without the terminal being organ failure.
With that said, an LLM was actually the first to recommend exposure therapy, because I did go over what I was observing with an LLM, but notably, I did not talk to the LLM in first-person. -So perhaps there is value in talking to an LLM but putting yourself in the role of your sibling/parent/child and talking about yourself third-person to try getting away from LLM's general desire to provide comfort.
news.ycombinator.com###karma
news.ycombinator.com##.score
news.ycombinator.com##td:has-text(/^karma:$/):upward(tr)
I've thought about removing the graying feature and maybe doing a random sort of replies, but haven't accumulated enough spite yet.
BUT, of course, if you can get more value out of it inside a month or year than you put in, it doesn't really matter. Differences between frontier models feels pretty low to me currently, which was not always the case; even so, they're certainly far ahead of free models for my uses.
I did pay for OpenAI both in a $20/mo subscription and later for API tokens (came out cheaper than the subscription). Since Gemini 2.5 came out, though, I just abuse Google's free AI Studio (at least free in the US; idk what kind of geo-gating they do). I'm not paying Google, but they are keeping me from paying their competitors. It will take a large and hard-gated leap forward (or Google deciding my $150-250 worth of unpaid use has gone on long enough) to get me to pay again.
(just kidding; we'd divert it to subsidize billionaires) https://local12.com/news/local/ohio-allocates-billions-from-...
the server ("lodge") passes JSON to the client from what are called .branch files. the client receives JSON, parses it, then builds the UI and state representation from the JSON, then stored in that client's memory (self.current_doc and self.page_state in python client).
branches can invoke waterwheel (.ww) files hosted on the lodge. waterwheel files on the lodge contain scripts which define how patches (as JSON) are to be sent to the client. the client updates its state based on the JSON patch it receives. sample .branch and .ww from python implementation (in pastebin so to not make everyone have to scroll through this): https://pastebin.com/A0DEZDmR
you could go proper insanomode, too. remaking The Internet is trivial if you don't care about existing web standards -- replacing HTTP with your own TCP implementation, getting off html/js/css, etc. being greenfield, you can control the protocol, server, and client implementation, and put it in whatever language you want. I made a stateful Internet implementation in Python earlier for proof-of-concept, but I want to port it and expand on it in rust soon (just for fun; I don't do serious biznos). you'll very likely have 100% human traffic then, even if you're the only person curious and trusting enough to run your client.
This isn't very relevant to us though given none of us have any long-term issues (what actually got me to switch off health insurance was getting the EoB paperwork [every week, because the bills never seemed to stop for a long while after I stopped going to the burn clinic] for severely burning my hand in a grease fire; I would've been better off uninsured and shopping around). After a decade at the $20k/year assumption for family of 3's health insurance, we wind up with ~$200k saved up BEFORE investment gains (which, while I'll grant can be negative, we do have a pretty powerful, accessible, and long-term consistent engine in the US). Once I'm in my 40s, I should be able to afford having brain cancer; and if I don't get brain cancer, well, the biggest positive there is not having brain cancer.
LLMs seem to "think like a movie script"; if something is included, it's expected that it will be important later. It's a good thing to keep in mind when prompting them; it's generally a good idea to never go on tangents unless you're going to delete that tangent from the context once finished.
Daughter's school posted pictures of her online without an opt-out, but she's also on Facebook from family members and it's just kind of... well beyond the point of trying to suppress. Probably just best to accept people can imagine you naked, at any age, doing any thing. What's your neighbor doing with the images saved from his Ring camera pointed at the sidewalk? :shrug: