It needs to be more trustworthy. If I have to double check everything, I still have to figure out how to do whatever it’s doing, then figure out how it’s doing the thing, then verify if it did it right. By then, I could have just done it in step 1.5 probably.

I just think this is patently false. Or at least there are/were orgs where cloud costs so much more than running their own servers that are tended by maybe 1 FTE across a bunch of admins mostly doing other tasks.

Let me just point out one recent comparison - we were considering cloud backup for a couple petabytes of data, with a few hundred GB changing or adding / restoring every week or less. I think the best deal, where we held the software costs equal was $5/TB/Month.

This is catastrophically more expensive over a 10 year lifespan of a server or two and a small/mid sized LTO9 tape library and tapes. For one thing, we’d have paid more than the server etc in about a year. After that, tape prices have always tended down over time, and the storage costs for us for tape is basically $0 once in archive storage. We put it in a cabinet in another building - and you can fit A LOT of data in these tapes in a small room. That’ll cost basically $0 additional for 20 years, forget about 10. So let’s add in electricity etc - I still have doubts those will be over ~$100k over the lifetime of the project. Labor is about a wash cause you still need people to manage the backups to the cloud, and I think actually moving tapes might be ~.05 FTE in our situation. Literally anyone can be taught how to do it once the backup admin puts the tapes in the hopper or tells them which serial # to put in the hopper.

I also think that many companies are finding something similar for straight servers - at least it was in the news quite a bit for a while. Now, if you can be entirely cloud native - maybe it washes out, but for large groups of people that’s still not possible due to controlling hardware (think factory,scientific, etc)or existing desktop software for which the cloud isn’t really a replacement and throughput isn’t great (think Adobe products, video, scientific, financial etc data).

Though it’s more work with current AI at least compared to another team member - the AI cannot have access to a lot of context due to data security rules.

I feel this also misses something rather big. I find there’s a huge negative value of people I have to help through doing a task - I can usually just get it done at least 2x if not 5x or more faster and move on with life. At least with a good intern I can hope they’ll learn and eventually actually be able to be assigned tasks and I can ignore those most of the time. Current AI can’t learn that way for various reasons, some I think technical, some business model driven, whatever. It’s like always having the first day on the job intern to “help”.

The other problem is - unless I have 0 data security rules, there’s just so much the AI cannot know. Like I thought today I’d have Claude 3.7 thinking write me a bash script. I wanted it to query a system group and make sure the members of that group are in the current users .k5login. (Now, part of this is me not knowing how to prompt, but it’s also stuff a decent intern ought to be able to figure out.) One, it’s done a lot of code to work out what the realm is - this is useful generically, but is just code that could contain bugs when we know the realm and there’s only one it’ll ever operate in.

I also had to re-prompt because I realized it misunderstood me the first time, whereas I think an intern would have access to the e-mail context so would have known what I meant.

Though I will say it’s better than most scripters in that it actually does a lot of “safety” stuff we would find tedious and usually have to have something go wrong to add in, so … swings and roundabouts? It did save me time, assuming we all think it’s method is good enough - but this is also such a simple task that I think in some ways it’s barely above filling out a lot of boilerplate. It’s exactly the sort of thing I would have expected to see on stack overflow back in the day.

EDIT: I actually had a task that felt 100% AI could have done… if there was any way for it to know lots and lots of context. I had to basically fill out a long docx file with often AI like text describing local IT security standards, processes, responsibilities and delegations. Probably over 60% I had to “just make up” cause I didn’t have the context - for higher ups to eventually massage into a final form. But I literally cannot even upload the confidential blank form, forget about have some magic way for AI to get a brain dump from me about the last 10ish years of spoken knowledge and restricted wiki pages. Anything it could have made up mostly would have “been done” by the time I made a functional prompt.

I don’t think we solve this till we can run frontier models locally at prices less than a human salary, with integrations into everything a human in that position could access.

For home use (and small uses at work) I’ve found cyberpower to be cheaper than APC and yet work as well. You’d likely need to get a model with a network card option, and that’ll cost more I think. I’m not in EU though, so IDK what model would meet your needs and price point (which seems pretty low to me for a network enabled UPS).

Dells IME just suck. YMMV. Compared to the T480 it’s more portable and lighter.

The Carbox X1 Gen7 is probably a decent choice, but it will depend on the specs - get at least an i5, and max out the RAM to 16GB - you can’t add it later, so make sure to buy one with the 16GB.

The sales people are cons, but the idea has merit but not to make money. You’re probably not going to rent it out for a profit.

Where it has merit is if you do the research and understand specifically that the concept can work for you, and take the timeshare off someone else in the secondary market it can save you a lot of money, but only in specific situations.

There are good and bad systems and locations. You want to optimize on those.

You also have to be someone who will go on week long trips multiple times a year and have a life that let’s you either lock the dates in firm 9 months to 13 months out (depending on system) or can go in 30 days or less to what opens up last minute.

And you have to want to go to resort locations like Myrtle Beach, Orlando, Las Vegas, Smoky Mountains, Hawaii, Breckenridge, Branson, Williamsburg or California.

Oh, and you’ll want to be ok with 3 star locations without daily maid service.

The upside is you can often stay in 2 bedroom suites with full kitchen and laundry with pools and hot tubs and arcades and mini golf in various amazing locations for about 1,800 dollars a week or less. Sometimes much less. If you’re comparing 2 hotel rooms at today’s prices that can be very cheap for 7 days. The average say Hampton Inn is close to 200 a night per room, so at the higher end of 1,800 you’re still 1k less for the week.

And I’ve hit sales in the less demanding seasons for as little as $550 for the week. But of course if you’re looking at Hawaii in season you might be at the higher end of 4k for a week cash, and technically the sky is the limit. This is where knowledge and planning comes in because you can pay for a week in say Florida for 1,600 every year, but trade that week with one that in Hawaii that goes for 4,000 much of the time. You just have to beat everyone else to the trade which is what the planning is for.

I am not a salesman just a so far happy “owner” going on a lot of trips this way by “sams clubbing” my vacations and paying ahead for some.

If you do want to learn realistic costs and nuts and bolts - tugbbs.com can teach you a lot for free.

I mean people also say you’ll grow up from being a liberal so lol. I presume it has a lot to do with why you have a particular political position and if you’ve actually thought it out at all.

I find it fascinating that you have no preference between the candidates. Do you really think it won’t matter which wins?

I hoped so in 2016,but then we saw what happened after that.

I think we all have some things that we either don’t talk about to maintain relationships. Of course usually thats respected by both sides.

Do they care that you call them out? Do you dislike doing it? If neither happens it can be useful for people to realize they’re not necessarily holding a position that “everyone does”. It’s useful to be taken out of your bubble I think, and to see “regular people” can have different positions, and maybe try and understand why they do. It might change someone’s mind.

If course if they or you get worked up by the discussion and no one is getting anything out of it, no one is even ‘agree to disagree’ and it’s just causing everyone stress… Then you need to clearly lay out that you don’t like those sorts of comments.

If they ignore you, then you need to decide how much you want the relationship. You could say “I’m serious about these comments. If you don’t want to stop then you need to decide how much you want to see or interact with me. Because I am willing to just avoid these discussions, but I will not keep hearing these comments, and will stop coming.”

Idk the Republicans seem to really want fascism.

Probably just so you don’t accidentally waste time unknowingly rereading a book.

Usenet is hurt a lot by takedown notices unfortunately. So lots of older popular stuff doesn’t work. That said, things like Anime or something that isn’t given a takedown seem to be on there about forever. The server speed is a benefit for sure.

Windows post 7 was and remains annoying and getting worse all the time. So I wanted an OS without telemetry and one that I could control the updates on. I also work with Linux a lot at work. I use Alma 9 for a LTS release. Don’t have to mess with it much.

I have found that you usually have to go to a specialist forum or the like and spend a few months reading it and asking questions etc. Rarely has a community steered me wrong. However they also usually point to expensive or specialty products. Mass market is usually mediocre at best.

Sometimes though there are deals like Harbor Freight hand tools or their higher end power tools.

I am in NY upstate but travel around the east coast semi frequently, and was kinda thinking about online options too.

This seems like something the optimize charging tool could manage though. Starting the day at 90 percent or 80 percent or whatever is crazy to me - why am I going backwards to needing to babysit my phone when it’s charging, and why would anyone want to charge their phone when they want to be using it vs when they’re asleep?

Testing the Jellyfin photos thing out now. I don’t know if it’s working right, but when I first looked at it the issue was I thought it seemed very video focused. I guess otherwise I’m learning docker after all.

Fair enough, last time I tried docker, which was a long time ago, I had all sorts of issues with permissions and persistence. I guess it’s probably better now.