brailsafe

If I had your setup, I would still prefer the client experience of either Infuse, Jellyfin, or Plex, but I don't think I'd value it enough to pay. The first time I used plex, I was impressed by the fact that I didn't really need to do any of what you've described with your collection (for the most part). I just had a huge dump of torrents and other randomly sourced video files, in wildly varying formats, that were named just barely well-enough for Plex to turn that into a very nicely browsable home media experience with no extra work, that I could then stream to any device with a client. Not that I'd be dismissive of manually organizing a collection, it's just not a compelling hobby to me, so a drop in media viewing experience with an amazing frontend that handled all of the meta stuff was spectacular.

In contrast to your HTPC setup, I've actually never even considered owning my own TV, it was just a streamlined way for me to access my collection on other non-TV devices, including the mac I didn't want to keep files on.

Early in my adulthood, the balance of rent vs buy was closer, and renting was either the choice for someone without much money, or you paid a premium for the convenience of renting, but otherwise the cost of borrowing for the same place was much more similar to the rent cost. I didn't have any interest in buying, not just because I didn't have the money yet, but because I didn't see any value in owning over renting. I still don't see much value in owning, but now it's nearly impossible, and rents are half of cost ownership.

Taking a cursory look at the ThinkPad website, which is nearly unnavigable, the model I was able to find with 64gb of ram and a 1TB currently costs (a lot) more than an M5 Pro that has a better SoC, way better screen, way better battery life probably, it's not even a contest now other vendors had to adapt to hardware shortage pricing.

As far as I know, they're taxed higher in the sense that they're not exempt from capital gains, like primary residences are, but in my view it seems like that would at-most be a marginal disincentive if renters don't have much in the way of other options or protections (which vary across the country). Likewise, I'm fairly sure a mom+pop residential landlord can save on tax for any expenses related to secondary suites or secondary properties if it's considered business income. If there is very little suitable supply, it still makes sense to acquire the asset and profit off of rent, although this dynamic may be changing with increased cost of borrowing and less demand depending on market, AirBnB short-term rental restrictions, etc..

When money was free and restrictions were few, non-institutional investors seem to have capitalized aggressively on this, because the price of the property increased dramatically and also it was a near-certainty that there would be a constant stream of inflated rent a landlord could charge.

I'm happy about those tax disincentives, but they do strike me as playing around the margins; in normal economic circumstances, they should play around the margins, but that particular aspect of the economy is so embarrassingly tilted that it's really not funny anymore.

This seems to be, or have been, a very common scenario in Canada, which is why I completely discount when most politicians start going on about a "housing crisis" when in another breath they'll say they don't want houses to get cheaper. If it was a "crisis", one might think houses would be treated with special care instead of basically just another commodity. If a person with wealth can just buy up as many of a finite resource within, especially within the same city as they can tolerate the possession of, then nobody should have a surprised Pikachu face when they do that. If all of the food could and was bought up by a few rich people and figuratively removed from access by anyone who can't bid arbitrary amounts for it, there would and should be riots. That's how houses and condos are priced, and more supply without finite policy restrictions just mints more money for people who already have it. If it's a crisis, why is anyone allowed to own more than 1? Level it out.

My music discovery then was different friend groups incrementally amassing large collections of albums in whatever sub-culture that friend groups had doubled down on. My iPod would be the culmination of my friendships. I would then fall in love with bands and albums and tracks on these albums without any influence before hand on their popularity or their algorithmic match to my music tastes.

I've been intentionally doing this with my music streaming service. If I hear a song I like or someone in one of many friend groups recommends something, I'll add it to my liked songs, and eventually get around to listening to it. Sometimes I'll find a gem and go into their discography further. I can't agree with never getting this feeling back; there's also a resurgence in popularity for physical media and offline music players, so it might be quite common again soon.

Agreed, plenty of Canadian's lurking here, even Dang himself.

Oddly enough I recently accepted an old beat up, but gigantic utility truck from the 90s that I'd never have purchased, and while it's fun to drive, it's also absurd to try and park it anywhere. Even box trucks are comparatively easy to figure out. When it dies, I'm sure as hell not going buy another one, but until then I'll enjoy not knowing how close I am to anything.

Sometimes I wonder whether going excessively slow around corners is a symptom of people pushing their steering wheel from the side opposite the direction of the curve instead of pulling it from the same side into the curve. Just a hunch, but doing the latter usually feels like I have more control.

Reasonable analysis, especially because this person seems to have an actual house. In my case, I rent and don't pay for electricity directly, so the cost effectiveness threshold is whenever the landlord starts complaining

Vancouver is fucked in many ways but general safety is not one of them. Quality of life is quite good if one can afford.

Makes sense to me, your other comment that elaborated on the scenario adds some useful context. I assumed there was quite a lot missing and tried to frame the comment for future versions of myself that might think it's a good idea to just run with a wildly out-of-scope idea with too much hubris.

because why not?

I'm not certain, but it seems like you're not being entirely serious here, however..

If you aren't joking, or for other people in this position, I'd first wonder if the landing page required a search function that would hypothetically be subject to the vulnerability, then I'd wonder about what the normal nature of your business is and how much latitude you personally have in the allocation of billable hours to arbitrary technology choices and whether those do actually align with the deliverable, then if I was the boss I might wonder why you created a bunch of (potentially) out-of-scope random liability using unusual lesser-known tools based on a personal vendetta against WordPress.

I've been in this position, conceptually if not literally, and I've probably been (in a way, rightfully) fired for it, but my country's labor protections are likely not quite as good as Denmark's.

If there's a question about why money was spent on implementing a bunch of stuff nobody knows for a reason nobody cares about, especially for a very short-lived thing like a landing page, then it's a sticky situation if the answer is basically novelty. Something like this, if it does serve a purpose, should be planned for and a case made for it, but that also doesn't really seem like agency work.

If I was asked for WordPress, which I have, and I delivered Rust, I don't think I'd keep that job, but mileage may vary.

Most work is about solving problems as they are, not what we wish them to be, and if a 5 min job becomes a month long job that the customer didn't ask for, it's an extreme case of yak-shaving.

I wonder if this will work on my iPad 3, maybe with some Swift... 3 backport code?

The convenience, anecdotally, largely comes from stocking up on a big buy and not having to carry anything futher than from the cart to the car and from the car to the house. This is also done at any other big box store, but Costco does it the best, because the savings cones from the lack of selection and the sheer size of the carts and items.

I went a bit far in saying there's a "missing" sense of taste, but did mean that it's not important to apply it when buying huge amounts of groceries, so I agree.

What I was thinking of more broadly was the cookie cutter nature of many suburbs. You get a stamped out template of a neighborhood with the same franchises. Houses over here, parking lot over there.

To understand the appeal of Costco to suburban families, you have to understand their caloric needs. Costco is the best solution if you need to buy 48 eggs and 4 gallons of milk a week along with 8lbs of chicken, 4lbs of turkey, and pounds of broccoli, green beans, spinach, sweet potatoes, onions accompanied with apples, peaches, mangos, avocados, blueberries, strawberries and oranges.

Isn't this effectively what I said? Admittedly I could have gone a bit far in suggesting they don't have a varied sense of taste, but what I meant was that it's not important to them to apply it to groceries, if they're a Costco member.

Quantity and convenience

no culture of responsibility or safety and no professional licensing group to enforce it for them.

Naturopaths and chiropractors are licensed to do various things too, physicians, etc.. a license does not imply that there would otherwise exist a culture of responsibility, foundation in evidence or anything of the sort. It's an incentive structure and regulatory practice. One may even keep their license while being a monster and abusing other incentive structures that don't have a bearing on that license.

Software engineers are not typically licensed as engineers, that's all one can say without dipping into prejudice.

This is a prime example of why programmers are not seriously considered engineers.

Seems to me like your comment is simply an example of prejudice.

You're just describing another standardized incentive structure that you're operating in, and using that as a basis to extrapolate that programmers of all kinds—whether they work on a video platform or on machinery that could cause catastrophe if it fails—are implicitly careless careerists who refuse responsibility by nature.

Keep the totally out of pocket red-pill misogyny outta here. Where did that even come from

My impression of Costco's selection is that it's the retail distillation of car-centric suburbs, despite it not being exclusively those people who shop there. The happy suburbanite cares about convenience and quantity above all else, from what I can tell anyway. They don't really have a varied sense of taste, they just want stuff, and they want easy access to that stuff. They like a "haul" that they do once a month, and buy vehicles that will fit it.

For me, I'll join a friend who has a membership from time to time, but I'll only get chicken breasts, a rotisserie, maybe frozen fruit if the price is competitive, and... soap; everything else is just noise and/or extra calories that I wouldn't have bought anywhere else but happens to fit in the industrial-size cart and usually isn't a substantially better price, or it's just not a good offering. I could buy greek Yogurt cups, but really I don't want that brand or the lemon or lime ones, so I'm paying marginally less to enjoy half of them. I could buy salsa, but unless it's a party, I have no need for a year's supply. It's just a lot and it's probably kind of agreeable. Also the blankets, they're alright.

The small selection of things I get are the few items—as the probably AI author suggests—that I'd either buy anyway in smaller quantities or just don't have opinions about. The one time I actually did have a membership, I'd find myself working backwards from it to justify to expense. I let Costco borrow my money and to get it back I'd need to exploit their good deals, but ultimately they just made a killing off of me filling my cart with arbitrary bullshit stuff.

You only have as much institutional knowledge as you're willing to cultivate and be liable for. Many companies already don't give a shit about institutional knowledge, indicated by how little they're willing to invest in keeping a strong team together, caused in-part by long-standing toxic incentive structures.

Ask an AI to solve a problem and it may do that, but if you don't understand why or how it works, or what to do with the information in order to keep it useful for even the medium term, then all you've done is taken away the opportunity for someone else to be responsible for something you shouldn't be.

It's not necessarily a mystery how to make good food. You can ask an AI how to make good food, follow the instructions, and you're off to the races. The question then is whether you want to be in that race.

Would you have gone to chef school? Would you work in a kitchen? Are you willing to deal with customers, or risk RSI from so many repeated kitchen movements? Are you willing to practice and be tested?

If the answer to any of those is no, then get the hell out of that kitchen and let the people who have more grit than you do their job. Do what you can to make it easier for you to pay them consistently and well on the back-end.

Politicians also like to pat themselves on the back for things like zoning density "particularly along transit corridors" as if only the immediately stroad-adjacent parcels are viable for accessing the bus and anyone who makes less than $300k a year should be grateful.

Like thanks, I guess, for doing the absolute minimum that should have already been the default policy for 50 years

is estimated at 10 months by Anthropic themselves, and it's growing.

How is this different than any business with something to lose saying a competitor isn't as good? Not saying it's false, but it would seem to me that it's more important how customers feel about the issue.

There's a subtle difference between what each of us is describing I think. It seems you're arguing that wearing headphones in public isn't generally inherently rude, and you have a selection of anecdotes to support it, and I'd agree that those are plausible and fine.

Incidentally I have no interest in living in SF, Boston, or Japan for various reasons, but it is interesting that I also wouldn't necessarily anticipate they'd be suitable for completely random friendly, welcomed interactions, in transit or wherever. Japan gives me a very siloed, weirdly socially isolated vibe, Boston I haven't been to, and SF just gives me a sort of aggressive individualist capitalism achievement chasing vibe. California cities in general feel like a departure from what I like.

However, I'm not exclusively talking about literally accepting every random encounter in public transit or on the street only. In those places, you do have bars, gyms, third-spaces, cafes, etc.. that are for the most part, "public"; you should be able to connect with people in your community and avoid signalling that you aren't there to participate.

I'd basically agree that wearing headphones out in the world at all is not inherently rude, but wearing them in all of those places, an overwhelming majority of the time, intending to avoid almost any interaction with strangers, is deliberately socially rusty. It almost seems like a strawman I'm arguing against, but it's my impression that's what the ease of AirPods enable, compared to larger less-convenient headphones. You can leave your house with the AirPods in, no wires, take calls without your hands, go to the gym, do your shopping, go to the park, go for a jog, bike ride, and keep the world out end-to-end. It's my view that unless you have a real sensory issue, that's shit for everyone involved at some scale.

Edit: I'd accept that I may not have articulated that so well in prior comments, but thought the overall was implied to mean the degree to which AirPods uniquely enable this

You're still not saying anything specific, what about it wouldn't look like that and why? Again, looks pretty legit to me, and all I'm using is my eyes and exposure to people in the world.

Ya that all sounds about right. Crazy times. Ironically, I followed a similar progression with slightly different variables. Maybe intermediate engineer in 2020—certainly not fresh anyway—but because of the volatility in the job market I couldn't bring myself to spend on a new PC then, so I built a piece of crap out of used parts I literally found on the street. Fast forward to now, finally stable and earning decently, decide to pull the trigger on these recent (modest) upgrades, and then bam, fired. At least I'll have a gaming rig to kill time for the next two years of unemployment lol

Driving is also something (nearly) everyone does and benefits directly from, so negative externalities are easier to accept.

This reads a little too close to driving being an inherently good thing or some sort of objective requirement, but it's only that way in certain urban places because the built environment makes it as arduous as possible to do those things without.

Something that pisses me off about many urban places that don't even otherwise require people to drive, is that many who do use their cars the most often have their neighborhoods protected from the noise they contribute to everywhere else. This whole thing of putting apartments only where there's already the most disgusting car-infested thoroughfares; "sorry, can't have an apartment one street in off the main drag, that's only for bungalows! Don't like it? Get richer. Excuse me while I drive through your bedroom and park for free in front."

Surely this isn't as stupid as an SUV trying to take light rail though right?

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/how...

Maybe Seattle is the problem ;)

Shhh don't forget we have a water shortage. But it is nice to have electricity wrapped into my relatively cheap basement suite rent ;)