TitanLaGrange

@TitanLaGrange@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rural Towns Are Aging, Cash-Strapped and in Desperate Need of Workers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep. My household is WFH 100% and we moved to a small town (Iowa). We’re not especially high-paid for the tech industry, but we are above the local median income by almost 10x. We try to spend with local businesses as much as possible to help get money into the local economy, but there’s only so much locally-made/available stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rural Towns Are Aging, Cash-Strapped and in Desperate Need of Workers⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I live in a small town, and I love it. Rent is cheap, I can bicycle to the grocery store, and it’s just 30 minutes from a major city where all the cool stuff happens! The only downside is nobody wants to commute to my place for house parties

  Same! I consider that last bit a win, a couple of times a year is enough for me.

  if your small town has a small town theater

  We did, but they didn’t make enough to stay in business. One of the local churches bought it instead of paying to renovate their place of worship. I haven’t been over there, but I assume their youth movie nights are top-notch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube’s ad blocker crackdown now includes third-party apps⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is why I pay for YT Premium. No way in hell am I watching ads, but I do want to be able to use the platform, and the money has to come from somewhere. So far it’s been pretty good value, although SponsorBlock is of course still required.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More than $35 million has been stolen from over 150 victims since December — ‘nearly every victim’ was a LastPass user⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It does indeed. My job includes writing and deploying .NET apps on multiple platforms, and it works fine for me.

  But some people prefer not to use .NET when comparable native options are available, so they might prefer KeePassXC.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨More than $35 million has been stolen from over 150 victims since December — ‘nearly every victim’ was a LastPass user⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Nothing major as far as I can tell. Here’s an overview via SuperUser. KeePassXC might be a better option for some use cases if you’re mostly not on Windows as it does not require .NET. Note that “KeePassXC does not support plugins at the moment and probably never will”, but it does have built-in support for some things you might want a plugin for in KeePass2.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The cofounder of Google's AI division DeepMind says everybody will have their own AI-powered 'chief of staff' over the next five years⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  So what will everyone having their own AI look like in a way that doesn’t just sound like a chatGPT joke? What would make it a desirable future?

  I guess that depends on how much authority you’d want to delegate.

  For me, it would be nice if I could have it do things like shopping tasks without being more of a pain than doing the task myself. For example, I needed to buy a hot-water carpet cleaner today. It would be great if I could tell it

  Hey Staffie, buy a carpet shampoo machine for home delivery within the next two weeks. Pick a highly rated machine from a widely recognized brand, and focus on carpet cleaning and water extraction performance, I don’t need any upholstery cleaning features. Don’t spend over $400. If the best option is under $200 don’t ask, just buy it. If it’s over $200, show me the top two options before buying.

  And end up with something pretty close to what I’d have picked if I did the shopping myself.

  It would also be great if I could have it reliably perform arbitrary tasks that it isn’t specifically programmed to do. Like

  Hey Staffie, check if I’ve got enough PTO to take next Thursday and Friday off, and if so, reserve a campsite for me at Foo State Park for three nights, preferably one close to the water, then send Mr. Boss an email letting him know I’ll be out those days.

  If it were particularly smart it would infer from previous conversations that I might want a 1lb propane cylinder, marshmallows, graham crackers, and Hershey bars added to my grocery list and would add them automatically (because it already knows my preferences about small automatic expenditures like that and is aware of the spending limits I’ve given it).

  Then it might come back a few minutes later and say

  'Hey boss, all the campsites within 250 of the water are already reserved, but site 1701D, which is near the only restroom and a tailhead, is available. Reviewers report that the park WiFi access point is installed at the restroom, so that site has good free internet service. Shall I reserve it?

  So yeah, in general, the ability to take arbitrary directions and execute them in reasonably intelligent ways (for example If I ask for a site Foo State Park, and there are two such parks in my country, it should be able to guess which park I’m talking about based on the context (like, if I’m reserving 3 nights and one of the parks is an hour down the road and the other is a two day drive, just assume the closer one)) and not require pre-programmed interfaces to every single thing. It should be able to search the web, find the interfaces humans use, and use those to do the kinds of things humans can do. It should also have some capabilities to use my accounts and passwords under a delegated authority to get shit done as my authorized assistant.

  Ideally it should also do things like observe my choices and infer my preferences so it can constrain choices it offers me:

  Hey Staffie, order lunch from Subway for pickup at 3.

  Sure boss, do you want your usual 6 inch turkey sub?

  Yep

  Nacho cheese chips or salt-n-vinegar?

  Nacho.

  Done, I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

  Stuff like that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do younger people go home earlier now? Or go out less? Is it since COVID?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s funny how much this varies from family to family. We never eat dinner before 9PM. Usually two meals per day, lunch at maybe 1PM and dinner between 9 and 10PM. We’re just doing desk-work though, so no extra calorie needs. If I’m doing physical stuff I’ll usually add a light breakfast.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just finished wiring the garage to the house - and find that the wire is damaged! Now what?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I was curious if that would work on ethernet cable! I’ve seen it done on coax, wasn’t sure if it would work well enough on UTP to be useful outside a lab setting. Cheap too. Cool!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just finished wiring the garage to the house - and find that the wire is damaged! Now what?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Wire tracker maybe? You might want a higher quality version than that particular one if the cable run is particularly long, one of the reviews suggest that the distance is limited.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could we improve men’s mental health?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  need to be taught how to feel.

  And before that you’d need to convince a lot of us that that would be more useful than the current situation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Question for software developers: how do you organize your To Do list at work?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s for this tip, very useful

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Question for software developers: how do you organize your To Do list at work?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I use a cheap paper notebook, like 5x8 inch size. Each day, first thing when I start work, I write the date at the top of the next blank page, copy the items from the previous page that are not done, and add new items at the bottom of the list as they come up. Tasks I haven’t started have a blank box next to them, tasks I’ve started get a half-filled box, and finished items get a filled box. Anything that moves from one day to the next that hasn’t been started gets a digit in the box that increases by one each day. If the number gets to 10 I cross the item off as cancelled. When I’m picking a new task I try to prioritize some the tasks with higher numbers.

  If I need to take notes I’ll use nearby blank space, sometimes a facing page. Generally I keep notes very short, long details go into whatever ticketing system we’re using with the ticket number in my notebook so I can find it again.

  Mostly I don’t keep very many active tasks, so it’s rare that I have to cancel items. If my list is getting long I stop putting new items on it and just tell people I’m too busy to accept new stuff. I used to try to track more stuff, but I learned that just meant I ended up with lots of notes about stuff that I never had time to do, so I quite wasting my time tracking them.

  When the notebook is full I put it on the shelf and get a new one.

  I keep the notebook next to me on my desk. If someone asks me for something I check the book, if it looks like I’ve got time, I add it to the book. When I go to a meeting, I take it with me. If I don’t happen to have it I usually remember what’s on the current page because I just wrote it there that morning.

  It’s low-tech, and I like it that way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨So many expensive homes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s me! Moved to a very small town with fast internet so I could have a house for about 0.75x my annual salary. It’s great, now we can almost afford to pay for student loans!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I can't code.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  C# is my primary language, so I’d certainly recommend it. It can be a little daunting to get into because it is a large ecosystem of tools, so you might want to watch some videos and keep things simple for a while.

  For work I mostly use it for APIs for web sites, that might be a good place to start if you’re familiar with JS/TS front-end work. From there you might want to try Razor or Blazor for handling web UI work in C#. I’m not very experienced with that aspect of it, but it’s mostly been a positive experience (TBH I kind of prefer React, but I’d need to spend more time on the Razor/Blazor side to have a strong opinion).

  The desktop development side in C# is kind of a mess at the moment. Maybe stick with web until you’re feeling pretty comfortable with the language.