HN user

mcgrath_sh

481 karma
Posts2
Comments184
View on HN

I too store all my photos on Dropbox. I used Hazel on macOS to move them into YYYY/YYYY-MM folders. I now use a bash script to do similar. This organization system has been rock solid for me for over a decade. I honestly don't want more than that. I dislike the obfuscation so many photo storage solutions use. I want my files and my folders.

My KeePass database is pretty stable at this point. I would say edits happen every few weeks, if that. My edit date is ~2 weeks ago, and it was because I was logging into an account I hadn't touched in a few years. Nothing really changes much in my personal database. I add stuff occasionally, but new accounts are few and far between, and so are password changes. I'm not sure what would be changed every few days for an individual.

Sizing chaos 5 months ago

Sure, not every shoe brand is equal, but if I know I'm a 9, I can generally start there and find a shoe plus/minus a half size. I have yet to go into a store and wind up in a shoe that is 3 sizes larger than what I thought my size was. Or 3 sizes smaller. Or a size 8 in one shoe from a brand and a 10 different shoe. I can order Nike/Jordan brand shoes without trying them on and they fit. Have done it for years.

I went to re-buy the "same" jeans ~8 months after my initial purchase and the size I was wearing didn't fit in the new jeans. Tried another pair with a different wash and was back to the original size. I have tried on jeans from the same brand with similar cuts and came away two sizes apart. I can swing several sizes as a starting point between some stores. I get it, not every jean is going to be identical, but it isn't a ridiculous ask to be able to have a size I can start at and be within a size of what I need.

I don't think it is "a stigma against something that was built assisted by an LLM." I think the author is coming at it in the same way I do with some similar tools: "this is good enough for me, I am the end user, and I don't have the time or desire to iron out a bunch of edge cases or make things for more than one user."

I am rewriting my website. I was using a converted Pelican template. I started the rewrite using variables similar to the template, then about halfway through, I realized, "this is dumb. I am the only user. I care about nobody else. I can hardcode nearly all of this, and if I want a change, change the hardcoded name." An example of this was various social media names.

I have scripts that convert color themes for applications from more popular themes to a theme I particularly like. I hard-coded the input colors and output colors. I could have made a config file, etc, but, that adds complexity and, more importantly *I do not care about other users.*

There is a huge leap between "good enough for me to use for exactly my use case" and release or sell as a product.

I use my password manager for those. The only card I have in my Apple wallet is my grocery card. Otherwise, I go to my password manager and pull up the entry and the attached images. Some, I have just a barcode png. Others I have screenshots of the card from an app/website. This has been a really good balance for me.

As an aside, I tried to use base64 for the images so everything was in text, but decoding with a shortcut was annoying enough I went with the image attachment.

I use a combination of stow and make to manage my dotfiles. I added a makefile well after using stow for a decade. The makefile is more for new system setup than day to day management. I might try out replacing stow with make based on this blog, more for fun than anything. I'm a bit reluctant to replace what has been working so well for a decade, but I'm very intrigued by this. Make has always interested me. It seems like it could be incredibly powerful in the right hands.

I'm shocked it is most of your software. I think I have under a dozen AUR packages. It has been that way for about a decade. I added a couple for gaming recently (mostly because Lutris just crashes for me), but nearly all of my software comes from the official repos.

There is a happy medium between the "hotels every other weekend year round" travel/club sports and no sports, which is sports for your school or community teams. If I ever have kids I absolutely want to enroll them in sports. It will absolutely not be the travel/club teams that means us going to hotels every other weekend. I am probably naïve in thinking that it is possible to play for your high school without club sports, but I won't be traveling 10 hours by car for a U8 baseball tournament.

I can swear a lot while talking. I have never written a curse word in my code, especially professionally. Just seems odd and not useful? I wouldn't be offended if I came across one, but it seems weird to use in a professional setting? A lot of the times I have seen inappropriate words used were not in any context and were used as a "joke" when logging/debugging. So "dicks 01" or "fuck me 01" instead of a bland "check 01" or whatever. For some reason, that seems much more unprofessional than a comment like "this code is shitty but works, need to clean up."

The contextless swearing seems so unnecessary and adds nothing to the code, whereas a comment with a curse word in it reads way more human.

I'm trying nix instead of Homebrew on my mac. It worked great until I decided to give rust a shot. I think my solution is to just do rust development on my Arch machine and stick with nix. That said, if I run into additional issues, I will probably just go back to Homebrew.

Where were your pain points?

Professionally? Sure. Personally, I don't want to learn and maintain ansible for something I do once every 5-7 years. I basically diffed the defaults and got the settings I need to change in my script. I then add or remove them as I tweak things (infrequently). The rest of my shell script is a Makefile I use cross platform for making directories and stow-ing dotfiles.

I batch cook and freeze meals, and some of them look similar (sauce and chicken vs sauce and pork) and I want to eat the older stuff first. There are also some products that are recommended to be disposed of within X days of opening, which fall well before their best by date.

Genuinely curious, I don't write anything long by hand, but do you not jot down disposable information with frequency, or date food, or anything like that? I date food we put in the fridge/freezer. I jot down something like a phone number if I am redirected. I have to give my pet medication occasionally and I use a post-it to track so the household can know. Like I said, I'm not writing anything even as long as a card, but I use a pen multiple times a week, and essentially daily. I know a lot of people use their phones for this stuff (and I do too), and maybe I'm an old person now for not using my phone for all of that.

I wouldn't bank on a job in COBOL. I took several COBOL courses at an IBM affiliated university and enjoyed the language. I wanted to work in COBOL. I sent out dozens of applications and heard nothing back. I'm not saying "don't learn COBOL." That said, COBOL isn't a particularly difficult language, but at your age, I'd learn something more modern, and if in 5-6 years you are still interested in COBOL, learn it then.

MacBook Air M4 1 year ago

If I am spending $1700+ on a machine, it is going to be my primary machine. I know exactly what "the real life difference" is between 256 GB storage on my primary machine and 2TB storage on my primary machine. My personal Dropbox sits at 850 GB. It is simple math. It is egregious that going to 2TB storage costs $199 less than buying an entire second laptop. No thanks.

MacBook Air M4 1 year ago

I do use portable drives, Dropbox, and Amazon Glacier. I have four copies of my photos. They are, by leaps and bounds, my most irreplaceable data. I want every single one of them on my main machine, which makes automating backups to the external drives and Glacier infinitely easier. It is a dealbreaker for me, and I don't find $400 an acceptable price to pay to get past said dealbreaker. Well, realistically, $800, seeing as my personal Dropbox is at 850 GB, it would be silly of me to buy an un-upgradeable drive that would be teetering on storage space issues from the jump. Apple thinks it is reasonable to pay $199 less than it would cost for an entire second MacBook Air to upgrade drive space to 2TB.

MacBook Air M4 1 year ago

Odd, every steakhouse I have been to gives me as much water as I'd like, free of charge.

I'm not comparing a hamburger from my local go-to to a steak from a steakhouse. I'm comparing the cost of the mash potatoes that comes with my hamburger ($5) and what they cost at a non-Apple steakhouse ($15). I don't go to the Apple steakhouse not because I find their steak unreasonably priced (it is a great value, actually), but because I refuse to pay $60 for mash potatoes, and if I don't get the mash potatoes, the steak has no value to me.

MacBook Air M4 1 year ago

Charging a 400+% markup for storage and RAM does not suddenly make a laptop professional. Sure, if there was a significant difference between screen size, chip, battery life, etc, you could argue the $999 one is a prosumer device and the $1799 laptop is a professional device. The only difference between a $999 laptop and a $1799 laptop is 768 GB of storage and 16 GB of RAM. I will even be generous and say that is a $700 difference because Apple tosses in two more GPU cores ($100) when you go over a certain amount of RAM. On Amazon, I can get a 1TB M.2 drive and 32 GB of DDR4 SODIMM RAM for $150 total. A premium from Apple on those components would be $300-$400. They are at $700-$800.

MacBook Air M4 1 year ago

I don't think 1TB of storage makes something professional equipment. I have well over 500 GB of photos. I want each of those stored locally where I control the data. Nor do I think 32 GB of RAM makes something professional. I'd prefer to future proof such a large purchase, and because I can't even go back to Apple in 3 years and purchase more RAM I have to decide right now what might be useful in 5-7 years.

MacBook Air M4 1 year ago

I don't even necessarily object to paying a premium. If it was $200 to go to 1TB or 32GB RAM I'd probably be annoyed but still pay it. There is a difference between paying a premium and wholly unjustifiable prices.

MacBook Air M4 1 year ago

I still occasionally use a 2013 Air when I need a laptop. How no PC manufacturer has been able to get close to Apple's touchpad in two decades is crazy to me.

MacBook Air M4 1 year ago

Fair. A better comparison would be System 76. Comparing the 15" to System 76, I get a bigger screen (16"), TWO 2TB M.2 drives, and 64 GB RAM for $150 cheaper than a 15" with one 1TB drive and 32GB RAM. And the System 76 comes with a bunch of ports, too. For the same specs, it is $550 cheaper.

MacBook Air M4 1 year ago

True, I guess they do want to push iCloud. I just can't justify the pricing. Comparing the 15" to System 76, I get a bigger screen, TWO 2TB M.2 drives, and 64 GB RAM for $150 cheaper than a 15" with one 1TB drive and 32GB RAM. And the System 76 comes with a bunch of ports, too.

MacBook Air M4 1 year ago

I have considered going back to Mac after about 5-7 years on Windows/WSL, but the storage premium is just too much to swallow. If the $999 was a base 16GB RAM and 512GB storage, I'd consider it. I just added another 32GB of RAM to my 2020 built desktop for $50. You can get a 1TB crucial M.2 drive for $70. I know I'm comparing apples and oranges, but the storage cost is too much, and 256GB is much too little.

Edit: to go to 32GB RAM is $400. To go to 1TB SSD is another $400. That is essentially doubling the $999 cost. $400 buys me between 4 and 6 1TB M.2 drives or 2-3 2TB M.2 drives.

I don't blame residents at all. FIFTEEN hours a day is incredibly long. That would be from 6am to 9pm. Imagine having a drone buzzing by your house 930 times a day during all waking hours. Want to sleep in? Go to bed early? Best of luck. I lived across from a neighbor who blasted their music. I could never crack a window and had to blast the TV. Even on the back side of the house, I had to use headphones to drown out the noise. Maybe I am overly sensitive to noise pollution due to this experience, but I'd absolutely throw a fit if I had to live like that because of Amazon.