Despite having OpnSense as my router and a managed switch, for some reason I never considered separating things on my local LAN subnet until I was working on a remote backup PBS server I was going to put in my daughter's home and wanted it to by default VPN into my home, but I didn't want it to end up on my home subnet. Out came a separate subnet for a DMZ with no access to anything except me being able to access it. Once I did that, I ended up setting a guest WiFi VLAN, a second VPN subnet for remote access instead of SSH, and a separate VLAN for stuff like Roku which don't do anything but access the internet.

To be honest, doing the whole thing was somewhat easier than I thought, but nowhere near what a casual, non-technical user would be able to do. The problem is that without an actual VLAN implementation, a "guest" SSID is not ironclad. It just takes more equipment and more know-how to separate things for casual users.

That's if you don't use an account when you use it. I use an account associated with it. Recently, as an exercise to see what it had learned about me, I asked it to write an obituary for me. It was spot on and referred to conversations I had with it from last year.

Funny how I started referring to it as "he" and I'm completely heterosexual. But to answer your question, I'm almost to the point of jumping in at their lowest tier, which I think is $20/month. It's supposed to be my father's day present to myself.

Case in point, I was working on a project where I needed to do .csv file processing in a BASH script and I knew AWK was the perfect tool to do it, but I had never written an AWK script. So I went through a couple of iterations with ChatGPT, asking it to create me a script and then I modified much of it to work in the way I wanted it to work for my process. Without ChatGPT, it would definitely have taken more time to write something from scratch and I may not even have been inclined to use AWK had I not had a good start with ChatGPT and resorted to other, less optimal methods. But because of ChatGPT, I now can write decent AWK scripts and am not afraid to tackle projects which may come my way.

Whether it's a con job or not is irrelevant to me. While I've found ChatGPT to be completely mediocre when it comes to technical stuff, I have poured hours into discussing the humanities with it with astounding results, at least for myself, and I would hate to see the knowledge it has of our conversations vanish into thin air (or rather become unusable for me and become only a commodity for whoever buys them out). It would be a lot of time lost on my side and it would suck if I have to start on square one with another model.

I kept calling bullshit as I read the summary, but I wasn't going to say anything because I figured these people are smarter than me. They may still be smarter than me, but it may have been more believable if they hadn't thrown the kitchen sink in there.

Well, it looks like nuclear is right in between solar and wind.

For a second I thought you said "Salo" and thought "Man! That's brave to post that you've watched Salo!"

What people don't understand is that every language or programming method has its own strengths and weaknesses. Take, for instance, string processing on SQL server. It doesn't really exist. Sure, I can write a Perl script to get SQL data and manipulate it, but that's only useful if I am writing an interface and will be doing something with the data outside of SQL afterward. I loved the list processing functions in Coldfusion (and if I go back further, those from Advanced Revelation in the 80s), so I wrote a whole bunch of SQL Server functions that operate on lists: cf_gettoken, cf_listlen, cf_listfirst, etc. When it comes to manipulating strings on SQL Server, everyone else wonders how I can get the work done so fast, and none of them are willing to even sit down and look at the functions, which are actually very short by nature.

The fact that you refer to them as geniuses should tell you something: they do stuff that you can't do, or they do them in a much shorter time than you can do. Of course you proceeded to call them "plainly overconfident". Well, if they're overconfident, then they probably aren't geniuses and just assholes. But if they're true geniuses, then you learn to put up with some of their idiosyncrasies because chances are that they're still right. Curious and wondering what you think about our good old Linus?

Collusion? Copying? I can think of many reasons to hate people/companies on how they treat other people. Airlines are a good example. Nobody is happy with how they're being treated by the airlines, but we all put up with it. Selling water to people for $25 for a bottle is just wrong. Nobody should be able to get away with that, regardless of whether someone else is willing to pay for it.

I agree with your assessment. On a superb sale at Binnys, I have gotten handles of Baccardi for $12.95, which is insanely low. On their regular sales, which come up all the time, I get it for $14.95 (yes, I would be considered an alcoholic), which is still very low compared to other places. On a visit to Iceland, I gave up my drinking for the most part just because the price of booze was so high. A fifth, which is 750ml (for comparison to a handle, which is 1750ml) of Captain Morgan cost me about $75. Turns out Iceland had a problem with alcoholism and they remedied it by making booze less available (special stored, which are only open during days) and pricing it so high people just couldn't afford to drink a lot of it.

So, how has the price of booze staying solidly low over here in the U.S.? Is it because of competition?

Next thing you know the price of booze is gonna go up because there's little demand for it, while the price of water has gone up as well. Looks like more money for all the greedy bastards.

I don't need a train to enjoy taking time off shit. I'd rather get the travel over with so that I can spend the extra days at home, listening to awesome music and enjoying what I'm paying a mortgage for.

I rode the train from Shanghai to Hangzhou in 2016 and have a picture of the train moving at 307 kph, so 191 mph. And the ride was so smooth you couldn't even tell you were on a train.

Our problem in the U.S. is not technology. It's bureaucracy and red tape as well as way too many middle men who want to make money, not to mention materials and wage differences between the U.S. and China, making something like China's trains cost prohibitive. Other possible issues could be right of way related for optimal routes maybe.