Fuck American work culture. It sucks. It's unhealthy. It's unsustainable.

We shouldn't be living to just work. Work should pay for our life, but not be our life.

Europe does it right. Less work hours a week. Some countries like France have rules about contacting employees after hours, 4 weeks of vacation to start, and great benefits.

By contrast, The USA and Canada expects people to be available 24/7. They treat employees like property. And without worker protection and the "at will" work legislation, if you don't like the burn out your employer can fire you without cause.

This, among other reasons is why Western Canada can't take Quebec seriously.

They are a country within a country that beats to their own drum. Why they are even part of Canada is beyond me

Because walled gardens.

No "Smart TV" will let you run your own open-source player on their platform, but most of them come with a Plex client.

There's DLNA which most smart (and "not so smart") TVs support, but it's just a terrible user experience.

How about reputable news sites now spewing chatgpt crap?

I wrote an email yesterday to one of the largest news website in my country. they had one of those trash "filler" articles ("how to get the most out of your air fryer"). I clicked on it to see how much they could fluff such a silly premise.

It was 100% written by ChatGPT, with ChatGPT editorial style and all. The list of bullet points in the article was copied verbatim (some words were different but i attribute that to chatGPT's randomness rather than the company's competence to redact it).

I don't expect them to respond to my email though.

It's not only amazon. Newegg now also has a "marketplace" for random sellers to sell you counterfeit shit. So does Digikey. I've slashed Newegg off my list and Digikey too.

Every fucking retailer is turning their site into a "marketplace" full of trash.

Um, what "government" is getting us is subsidies to energy, which make gas cheap and worsen the problem.

Government also prices out nuclear by regulating it obscenely (meanwhile that coal plant is still spewing out carcinogenics contaminants 24/7).

It should be very clear by this point that governments are the problem. Well, to be fair, the problem isn't government per se. It's democracy. Democracy is a popularity contest where incompetent, but charismatic leaders win, and then they squander public money to keep people happy and keep them in power. They will absolutely NEVER take away subsidies to gas in temperate countries. That would be political suicide.

People are more than happy to pay taxes through their noses as long as you give them "Free stuff".

Democracy is a system that's flawed from the start.

it's actually the new woke crowd bullshit. since they don't want to be responsible for their actions they blame companies that produce the things they consume.

basically they are saying "yes I run a gas car, but I only do it because these evil corporations make cars and gas cheap and convenient. that's their fault"

I mean...

optical fibers -- the tiny, hollow glass strands that carry data through beams of light

My cameras are all either ESP32CAM ($6) or Raspberry Pi Zero 2W with camera modules, all connected to Zoneminder for recording (running on a Pi 5), and displayed in HA. I even set it up so i can long-tap the camera images and turn a nearby light on haha

I have a Zigbee network at home too but it's very problematic. It just doesn't work right. Some devices work fine, others will randomly drop or the connection will be flaky. The Hue zigbee network has been solid though.

I heard Z-Wave on 900mhz works much better, but i haven't tried that.

I went one step further and my house is mostly FOSS IoT with two exceptions:
1) some smart plugs from xiaomi i haven't bothered to change yet
2) the Philips Hue lights that work just too well
3) a xiaomi air purifier

the rest of my smart devices are all DIY, based on ESP8266 and ESP32, running ESPHome via Home Assistant. I have CO2, humidity, motion sensors and a ton of relays to control lots of stuff around the house.

In fact, I just learned that the xiaomi air purifier has a ESP for wifi that can be reflashed so I'm tempted to do it.

I'm from Argentina. cars come standard with manual transmission. you have to pay extra for automatic

the only reason I drive a manual is that the premium for automatic is too high. If I could I'd get an automatic hybrid like what I drove in Japan and never look back

I drove a hybrid for the first time in Japan last year and it was amazing. obscene torque for going uphill and Regen going down. I drove 1500km in two tanks of gas. probably 30L tanks because it was a small car (Toyota aqua)

The paid version of ChatGPT leaks like crazy. "Fine tuning" jobs straight up steal your training data.

I was recently trying it for a chatbot for a call center company's client. I was training a model, but only trained it with the prompt:

"You're a support operator. The client will ask you general customer support questions and you'll respond according to your training". I gave it the minimum amount of examples it requires (10 i think) with questions such as "what's my account balance" and answers like "I'm unable to help you with that, but you can query your account balance in the app".

I try the tuning model with a simple "hello". ChatGPT, with the fine tuning model, answers "Hello, this is Toyota customer service, how can I help you?". I was shocked. I realized i didn't give it any examples of how to respond to a simple "Hello". But I queried it again with hello, and it answered "You have reached Some Bank's customer service, blah blah blah".

It seems it wasn't training on "public chatGPT data". I'm 100% sure it was training on top of other fine-tuned models. And fine-tuning with GPT is only available with the paid API version.