fizzle

Usually I find these lists a bit “meh”, but there’s actually a bunch of stuff here I want to try.

• Upvote RSS
• Sync-In
• Poznote
• Postgresus
• Loggifly
• OpenArchiver
• BentoPDF

Yeah I use StirlingPDF extensively.

I might give Bento a try but ultimately not much incentive to change.

My “company” is tiny, and only employs myself 1 colleague, and an assistant. We’re accountants.

We self host some models from huggingface.

We don’t really use these as part of any established workflow. Thinking of some examples …

This week my colleague used a model to prep a simple contract between herself and her daughter where by her daughter would perform whatever chores and she would pay for cello lessons.

My assistant used an AI thing to parse some scanned bank statements, so this one is work related. The alternative is bashing out the dates, descriptions, and amounts manually. Using traditional OCR for this purpose doesn’t really save any time because hunting down all the mistakes and missed decimal places takes a lot of effort. Parsing this way takes about a third of the time, and it’s less mentally taxing. However, this isn’t a task we regularly perform because obviously in the vast majority of cases we can get the data instead of printed statements.

I was trying to think the proper term for an english word which has evolved from some phrase or whatever, like “stearing board” became “starboard”. The Gen AI suggested portmanteau, but I actually think there’s a better word I just haven’t remembered yet.

I had it create a bash one liner to extract a specific section from a README.md.

I asked it to explain the method of action of diazepam.

My feelings about AI are that it’s pretty great for specific niche tasks like this. Like the bash one liner. It took 30 seconds to ask and I got an immediate, working solution. Without Gen AI I just wouldn’t be able to grep whatever section from a README - not exactly a life changing super power, but a small improvement to whatever project I was working on.

In terms of our ability to do our work and deliver results for clients, it’s a 10% bump to efficiency and productivity when used correctly. Gen AI is not going to put us out of a job.

I’ve had a Synology NAS for 15 years or so, and I think it’s ideal for this kind of use-case.

It has a point and click configuration UI that you access from a web browser.

There’s a reasonably large ecosystem of packages you can install.

I’d have a super-serious talk with them about backing up their stuff.

You’ve missed a few critical elements.

Firstly, pets can’t reason, don’t understand what’s happening to them, and the worst part - aren’t able to minimise their own suffering. For example, I lived with a dog that had quite advanced cancer in one leg. Every time he got up he would hurt himself. The leg just couldn’t support his weight but he couldn’t not put it down. He had cancer in other parts of his body as well.

Secondly, lots of people are just unable to provide the high level of end of life care that an animal like that needs. Like, if you need to go to work every day, you just can’t be there to carry your dog every where they need to go, and make sure they don’t hurt themselves. There’s no social security for pets, they haven’t worked hard and saved up for their end of life care. The vast majority of pet-owners can’t afford indefinite high level care.

Every day you own a pet, you are making decisions on their behalf. Yes they can’t choose euthanasia themselves, and you have to make that decision as their guardian. Ask yourself, what would this creature choose to do if they could reason and if they were aware of the relevant considerations.

Obviously that’s not an easy decision. I haven’t had a pet for the last 15 years because I don’t want to have to make this kind of decision.

I basically just avoid exposing ports from containers unless I really do want them exposed on the host?

Most services go through my reverse proxy, traefik.

Things like databases don’t publish ports on the host because they’re only accessed internally, using their container name.

Yeah I’ve been using wireguard for a long time myself personally, and more recently for a small team to access an intranet.

I’m a big fan. After a half hour or so trying to understand configs it’s pretty manageable.

Maybe everyone already knows this but you can generally see better in your peripheral vision in low light.

Almost all of your color vision / cones are concentrated in a tiny central area of your retina.

The grey scale / rods are dispersed around that.

In some ways I think night vision is a kind of skill that some people might be better at than others, even if the mechanics of their eyes aren’t special.

Yeah me too. I think this is called “coil hum”. I notice it with things like usb-c thunderbolt ports. Often you can swap a cable or something and it’s resolved.

I’ve been trying to get zulip working.

Sounds like it addresses your requirements.

Seems to be a real bitch to self host - I’ve been doing this a while but the compose yaml is pretty arcane with hundreds of environment variables.

I didn’t “give up” exactly but it’s been on the back burner for a month or so now.