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Keep in mind that if you have an outdoor speaker that is accessible to Google or Alexa then so do your neighbors.

What? Theyre not Bluetooth. Most are securely mounted to a subnet and possibly a user account.
Not sure what you’re insinuating but by that measure anything outside is your neighbor’s.

I could be wrong but I think that poster means that anything you can do by voice then your neighbors could as well. Control stuff, order stuff, access your data, etc.

re: AI chat bots’ lack of conviction

Posted by Korkstand on 5/14/25 at 9:06 am
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Messing around with Grok and ChatGPT I always notice how it gives an answer, then I ask it “but did you consider” and then it gives in way too easily. It seems even weak counter arguments will make it change its mind. Are they just telling us what we want to hear?

When you realize that they don't have a "mind" to change (and no real conviction either) they become a lot more useful. If you are arguing with it, it seems like you are asking for an opinion, in which case of course you can make it lean one way or the other. Yes, it is giving you the answer you want to hear.

These are tools. They are not "smart". They are really good at arranging words and creating images.

Give them better prompts. If you ask a simple question in a simple way, you will get a simple answer. If you ask for detail, you will get detail. If you have an opinion that you want reinforced, you will get reinforcement. If you have an opinion that you want it to argue against, you will get an argument against it.

If you think you have a good idea, don't ask if it's a good idea. Tell it to play devil's advocate from the start and tear your idea down. Use it as a filter to avoid making obvious mistakes or wasting time.

AI is a tool, the mind is yours to change or not.

re: ChatGPT configuration

Posted by Korkstand on 5/6/25 at 1:56 pm
Double post. Chalk this one up to this storm and Starlink.

re: ChatGPT configuration

Posted by Korkstand on 5/6/25 at 1:56 pm
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One of the problems is that this stuff is all fairly new and there aren't a lot of sources for learning.
Not only that, but just as soon as you learn something the models improve so that your new skill is useless. Right now people are "vibe coding" and drag-dropping automations and building applications extremely quickly, but soon enough the big players will be full agentic and they'll be able to do all that stuff even faster. It'll just be "here are my sources and endpoints, here are my credentials, I need to do *this*" and it will just be done.

The singularity is near.
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Percentages don't man shite. Its often used to skew someone's view of something.

Allstate annual gross profit for 2024 was $23.13B, a 54.68% increase from 2023. Allstate annual gross profit for 2023 was $14.953B, a 14.1% increase from 2022. Allstate annual gross profit for 2022 was $13.105B, a 35.2% decline from 2021.

% matter when dealing in billions not in Pennies

It's not the magnitude of the dollar amounts that is the problem. The problem is that profits can be negative, so reporting percentage increases or decreases in profits doesn't tell you much. As the other person said, the main use case for this is to skew views.

It is entirely possible for an insurance company to break even in any given quarter or year. Or lose money. When revenue is in the Billions, losing a Million or profiting a Million are both "breaking even". If profit is $1,000 in one period and $1Million the next, should we report that profits have increased 1,000,000/1000 x 100 = 100,000%, or should we report that they continue to break even?

Don't take this as arguing for or supporting any particular insurance company or the industry at all. I actually despise pretty much all of them. I just like being clear and honest about things.

re: ChatGPT configuration

Posted by Korkstand on 4/29/25 at 8:28 pm
Best of luck.

I think I will press on to see if ChatGPT can write an MVP for me mostly on its own. If that proves my premise is viable then I will dogfood it while I keep developing. I feel like I need an "everything app" to manage life in general. I'm tired of my data being scattered across dozens of apps and owned by others. I think if it was all in the same data store it would unlock a lot of power.

I've seen glimpses of that power with obsidian in merging my tasks with their context. I just need a system to combine everything else in the same way.

re: ChatGPT configuration

Posted by Korkstand on 4/29/25 at 6:33 pm
I have been using obsidian in a similar way, and I also like being able to create tasks on the fly and having them in the context in which they arose.

However, that lack of enforced structure is turning into a deal breaker for me. A lot can be done with tags and queries, but i just haven't been able to make it match a system that treats tasks as objects.

re: ChatGPT configuration

Posted by Korkstand on 4/29/25 at 5:16 pm
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If I had to get rid of all my various subscriptions, ChatGPT would be the last.

It's the assistant I always wanted. Once they can get the agentic functionality correct, to the point where it can help me manage my nine different inboxes and related calendars, I might consider writing it into my will.

I used it to totally restructure my Obsidian vault into a more usable tool. I'm currently trying to set up a Notion-based version of my Obsidian vault because I can use N8N AI Agents to monitor my inboxes/calendars and automatically create notes, transcripts, attachments, in Notion.

N8N + ChatGPT is a powerful combination. You can even use open market Vector Databases with N8N to put all of your notes into a Vector Database for Gen AI usage. Powerful stuff, but complex.


I just started a chat today trying to flesh out a project I want to do. I'm not sure that I can manage it, but ChatGPT sure thinks we can get it done together. :lol:

I guess it will be sort of a combination of Obsidian and Notion (and others probably). I really love Obsidian for its flat file md+frontmatter as that makes my data mine and it also lends itself to git versioning, portability, etc. But as it's designed for PKM the interface does not lend itself to task/project management or user friendly interfaces for common tasks. And trying to morph it into something via plugins is a nightmare. I haven't tried Notion, but I think I'm shooting for a lot of its functionality just with an open architecture and data storage layer. Self-hostable.

I want user-defined object types with relations and methods and user-defined views to handle it all. Like a no-code/low-code app builder. It sounds absurdly complex the more I think about it, but then chatgpt lays it down for me how it's absolutely do-able complete with code samples of course. It even helped me work out how to, for example, have a yaml file full of timesheet entries with each entry digitally signed by its author. And of course we talked through the server and middleware layers to handle the shared file tree in a multi-user setup. I had it estimate the performance impact of using flat files instead of a database for this type of workload (it's negligible as a self-hosted app with a couple dozen users and ~100k files) and architected it to be easily loaded into a db if necessary.

I instructed it to follow the unix philosophy as closely as possible, where each part of the system is focused, tight in scope, replaceable, and the workflow is a composition of the parts. So far it seems to be doing that.

re: ChatGPT configuration

Posted by Korkstand on 4/29/25 at 3:08 pm
We all see the chatgpt memes that go around, all the trendy image generation stuff, the geoguessing, etc. And all of that is neat, but I think a lot of people are really missing the boat. I have only been using it seriously for a couple months, but it has boosted my productivity immensely. Not only for work, but also just life in general. Maybe I have more irons in the fire than most, but I get stuck on projects all the damned time and chatgpt has been getting me through so much stuff. My workflow used to be to google stuff, that turns up empty so I would google more stuff, etc. Then maybe eventually I'll run across some useful information and get unstuck. I can't remember the last time I have done that. Now I go straight to chatgpt and it just thoroughly explains my problem and offers solutions. No, it is not always right, but it does almost always give me enough information to point me in the right direction. Or, worst case, *a* direction, in which case even if it fails that is still an option eliminated, a lesson learned, and a win in my book.

Also, I always have dozens or hundreds of ideas floating around my head, of course most of them not fleshed out, but chatgpt is helping me to make sense of it all. It regularly makes connections between different topics or ideas that I had not thought of, but which make total sense and helps to keep me organized.

It is easily the best $20 I spend each month.

re: ChatGPT configuration

Posted by Korkstand on 4/29/25 at 1:43 pm
Really solid work here. How much of it did ChatGPT write? :lol:


Have you explored custom GPTs at all?
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What is the cheapest way to watch college football come August?
Go sit at a bar
Sounds expensive to me.

re: Who on here has starlink?

Posted by Korkstand on 3/31/25 at 10:25 am
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Anyone find they have issues with Starlink during storms and such?

Bumping to report my first experience with a significant Starlink outage. A storm came through this morning that was *very* intense and we lost connection for about 15 minutes.

re: Google Sheets Formula Question

Posted by Korkstand on 3/27/25 at 3:20 pm
Here's one way:
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=IFS(A1>5, 5, A1<-5, -5, ISBETWEEN(A1,-6,6), A1)

Put that formula in B1 for example, and A1 is the score diff cell. It says that if A1 is greater than 5, put 5 in B1. If A1 is less than -5, put -5 in B1. And finally if A1 is between -6 and 6, just put A1 in B1.


Seeing your sheet now, using a formula will be no better than manual calcs with that layout. I think you need to change your schedule and scorekeeping to something consistent. There might be some spreadsheet wizard who can use that layout and do lookups or something crazy, but I'm not that wizard.
My post you replied to specifically references Ubiquiti cameras.

If you're asking in general, personally Ubiquiti has long been my top pick for residential and small business. The ease of use blows everything else away. And lately they have been adding features at a high rate, features that have Protect competing with enterprise-grade systems that cost thousands for the software alone.

They seem to be addressing every shortcoming and criticism that users throw at them. They've added support for ONVIF cameras. They've greatly expanded the camera selection. They've offered a cheaper PTZ and cheaper 4K cams. Their new alarm manager which replaces the old notification system was kind of shite at first, but it has evolved rapidly into IMO the best notification system I've used. I have extremely fine-grained control over exactly what type of events (or combination of events) trigger an alarm, and whether each alarm triggers a standard notification, or hits a webhook (and from there I can integrate Protect with anything else), or both.

G6 cameras are out, 4K res plus face and plate recognition at the $200 mark.

re: Who on here has starlink?

Posted by Korkstand on 3/21/25 at 10:55 am
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How is starlink with multiple ethernet hardwired devices? (i.e. smart TV's, game consoles, etc.) Does it affect speed or wifi? I intend to buy but was wondering if there were any bandwidth problem or what I can purchase to strengthen the load I will be having?

We have the Residential plan at the office and it has been perfect for roughly a year now with 8 wired PCs and 8 wired VoIP phones and roughly a dozen wifi devices during working hours. We are using a 3rd party router so the starlink router is in bypass mode but I don't think you'd have a problem either way.

The only issue might be gaming as the latency on Starlink tends to fluctuate between 25-45ms whereas for gaming you'd rather a more steady ~20ms. But I've seen plenty of reports of people playing FPS on Starlink without much issue. Make sure you have 0% obstructions though.
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Yeah but the old receptionist working at the 6 person law firm isn’t moving to Linux.

Why not? What are the major obstructions aside from if they are using desktop Office?
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thing is i *JUST* migrated Plex to new hardware and migrated to a new torrent client (while keeping several hundred seeds intact) and it was P*I*T*A*
Baremetal install? If so you're doing it wrong!

Doubt anyone remembers or cares, but a while back I talked about a "hyperconverged" proxmox cluster w/ceph. There is a learning curve for sure, but once I got that set up everything else has been a breeze. I have at this point 7 machines of various specs and form factors in the cluster, and I can add or decommission one at any time. The "hyperconverged" part basically just means they share storage via ceph in addition to being a proxmox cluster.

Anyways, my plex container (lightweight VM) is backed by ceph block storage, and it accesses media stored in CephFS (so that other containers like the *arrs can write to it), so I can migrate plex to different hardware at will, and it happens almost instantly since the ceph block storage and media filesystem are accessible from any node in the cluster.
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I hear Linux Mint is a good Linux distro that maintains a Windows like interface and feel.
It's not so much the look and feel that is the roadblock, it's software support. The major one is MS Office compatibility. Hopefully that continues to be less of an issue as more move to the cloud apps. The browser is becoming the OS so the host OS doesn't matter as much.