Privileged is a complicated term for his life. On one hand, yes from the outside, and especially as presented in the movie, it seems like he had a typically idyllic upper middle class life. But if you do any digging into it, you find out that his father was an extremely volatile, violent abuser and his mom wasn’t much better. That sort of childhood trauma is a hell of a thing and absolutely impacts someone’s mental state.

A city I lived in had an “Adopt a storm drain” program, where you were supposed to check up on it and text them a photo after big storms. I took the one outside my house since it was available and did some cleanup a few times when it got clogged with branches and leaves. It was oddly satisfying.

Can I come by and change all of the air filters in your cars and HVAC system? For some weird ass reason I find it very satisfying.

Basically, yes, but there are only three speeds in common use. 10/100/1000M will be enough to support for basically every consumer device out there. 2.5G is starting to become common in routers and some desktop or high end docks, and 10G is starting to show up in high end prosumer devices, but they can usually also support at least 100/1000M. There isn’t much 10M gear still out there except in very specific industrial applications. Really, if your router supports 100/1000 it will cover 99% of the devices in the wild.

If the two sides don’t have a common speed, then it just doesn’t work.

Support for older/slower connections does get dropped sometimes. I’ve seen devices that are 100/1000 only, and I had a fiber->ethernet box that only supported 1G/10G one one port, and 10/100/1000 on the other.

Oh god, it’s been a long time since I took Vibrations and Waves, but I still remember filling notebook after notebook with Fourier transform equations.

I think I’m currently doing both, for two similar projects. The first is pretty clearly slop, but solves my problem in the short term, while the one I’m working on is a much more general solution.

Oh, ok thanks! I’ve been wondering about the split 2.5/10G switches I’ve seen and wondered why. That makes a lot of sense now! I’ll take a look at them again.

Almost every tech company I’ve worked at has had a “Investors are coming, dress up” day. And when asked what “dress up” meant they said, “wear one of the more recent company branded t-shirt/hoodies we gave out”.

Yeah, I have deep reservations about the various AI companies, the environmental impacts of the industry, and many of the other issues that people are bringing up here. And, I have still found a few very practical uses.

My partner was fighting with their insurance company about getting reimbursed for several thousand dollars of medical expenses. After a couple of rounds of rejections I had them send me the paperwork, insurance information, and rejection letters and then asked ChatGPT what we should say to get them to reimburse us. It came up with a letter that had the right legal mumbo jumbo to convince the insurance company to agree and pay us. Yes, I could have hired a lawyer, but the legal fees would have eaten up most of the money. And I guess I could have gone to law school, gotten a specialization in insurance law, and figured it out myself. But that also would have cost more time and money.

I still think “AI” is overhyped and has a lot of ethical issues, but there are also some very practical uses.

I think there is quite a bit more subtlety than that.

Yes, just asking an LLM, even the latest versions, to write some code goes from “wow, that’s pretty good” to “eh, not great but ok for something I’m going to use once and then not care about” to “fucking terrible” as the size goes up. And all the agents in the world don’t really make it better.

But… there are a few use cases that I have found interesting.

1. Project management, plannning, and learning new languages/domains when using a core prompt as described at: https://www.codingwithjesse.com/blog/coding-with-llms-can-still-be-fun/

I like to add:

- Do not offer to write code unless the user specifically requests it. You are a teacher and reviewer, not a developer 
- Include checks for idiomatic use of language features when reviewing 
- The user has a strong background in C, C++, and Python. Make analogies to those languages when reviewing code in other languages

as well when I’m using it to help me learn a new language.

2. Reviews of solo projects. I like working with someone else to review my code and plans at work, particularly when I’m working in a domain or language that I don’t have experience in. But for solo projects I don’t have someone to give me reviews, so asking a coding LLM “Review this project, looking for architectural design issue, idiomatic language use, and completeness. Do not offer to fix anything, just create an issue list.” is really helpful. I can take the list, ignore anything I disagree with, and use it for a polishing round.

I feel that there is a great joke comparing the apparent mental health of people who develop file systems and statistical mechanics, but the narcolepsy is hitting just a bit to hard for me to figure it out right now.

All of the ports support all three speeds. When you first plug in, there is a quick round of negotiations where both sides basically say “Here are the speeds I can work, what about you?” Then they go with the highest that both support.

That’s that speed the ports are capable of. 10/100/1000 megabits per second. Most things with an Ethernet port nowadays are 10/100/1000 capable, and 2.5Gb is becoming reasonably common.

Weirdly, Roku and other smart TVs are often only 100Mb capable since 4k streaming only requires about 60Mb and if you are squeezing pennies a 1Gb port is a bit more expensive.

10Gb is just starting to get available for high end consumer devices.

My router only has four downstream ports, and due to the layout of my house I only want to run one cable from the router to my home office anyway. If it had enough ports and the house was laid out differently I wouldn’t have bothered with the switch.

Unmanaged switches are usually quite a bit cheaper and just work. You plug everything in and that’s it. Managed switches need configuring and cost more. I paid $25 for my 8 port 10/100/1000 switch, while the managed version is about $120. With a managed switch you can do things like turn individual ports on and off, traffic limit and monitor per port, and other fancy networking things that I’ve never bothered with.

BeOS is my favorite desktop OS of all time. Nowadays I run Linux on all my machines, but there are things that it was better and faster at on a Pentium 75 with 16MB of RAM than today’s multi GHz and multi GB systems running Linux, MacOS or Windows. I’m not sure how much of that you will see in a demo like this, as is was more day to day things from back when we cared about local files and applications and weren’t permanently connected to the internet. But still, it was amazing.

In my home state there is a very small town that supposedly was going to be the recipient of a large investment that sank on the Titanic. Or possibly it was just the investors? Either way, the town never got the investment and so remained a very small town. I imagine that there must be a number of such stories of what might have been if the Titanic had made it to dock. Do you know of any?

I wired my house with cat6 when I moved in. The overall setup looks like 10G fiber to the house -> 2.5G capable router -> 2.5G capable NAS running *arr stack. Also off the router is a single cat6 run downstairs -> 8 port 1G unmanaged switch, which is connected to my desktop, work dock, parters dock, TV, and backhaul run to the back of house wifi extender. The desktop, both docks and wifi extender are 2.5G capable. The TV is 100M. This has been extremely reliable. I plan on upgrading the switch to a 10g capable one at some point, and then the router. Since the switch is unmanaged, is there a good way to know when it is the limiting factor and I should update it?

I run Debian 13 on my 13 year old Thinkpad. It’s perfect for my uses.