As a long time climber, watching that documentary is really gripping/terrifying. The bit at the end when he says what it was like walking over the top; no one noticing what he had done, because he didn’t have ropes and a harness etc…wow.

I’m on the border of nerd and geek

Not necessarily, a wonk (e.g. a policy wonk) is not analytically intelligent but may be emotionally intelligent.

A nerd and a wonk may have the same area of interest, but different approaches.

Mental health care in NZ is abysmal.

I’m not sure about Christchurch, but my small town of 25k people, has people begging. Homelessness in bigger centres is visible.

We do try to help, but it’s getting worse.

Getting my ollama instance to act as Socrates.

It is great for introspection, also not being human, I’m less guarded in my responses, and being local means I’m able to trust it.

Reading the list, NZ does pretty well… Right to the end…

• good treatment of mentally ill, homeless and impoverished people…
  We don’t do that here

When I was young and worked in a supermarket, I’d buy a 1.5l coke at the beginning of my shift, I’d finish it before I went home.

4 days a week, for years.

Stopped around 20 year ago, I still have it occasionally, but it is like a glass or two a month.

Add hot sauce, seriously. Cheese + Sweet + Hot = Epic

I have been extolling the virtues of this for years.

A global day off on NYD and every four years two days off. Really nice!

23:59 28/13/xxxx -> 00:00 NYD -> 23:59 NYD -> 00:00 01/01/xxx(x+1)
or 23:59 28/13/xxxx -> 00:00 NYD -> 23:59 NYD -> 00:00 ENYD -> 23:59 ENYD -> 00:00 01/01/xxx(x+1)

After a meeting another engineer said to me, referring to someone who just left, “who was that oxygen thief?”

I replied, “my manager”… Putting the laughter in slaughter with that comment.

I only have one monitor so I didn’t have this issue when I upgraded my GPU a few weeks ago.

Shutdown -> remove/install GPU -> startup #JustWorks

In fairness, I did have to update to the latest kernel (6.14) to get all of the features of the GPU working.

Looks great.

I use Firefox, so I can’t give it a try.

The idea that you could do this isn’t a bad one.

It could be interesting, to build a generic recommendation algorithm. Would it be like a browser add-on?

Something like a news feed, but you have all the data under your control, so you could see why something was recommended.

I tried the Reuters app a while back, I couldn’t deselect sports as a category of interest… Why the fuck not? Why do they care of I like sports or not… Uninstalled pretty quick.

Tell me you are not in New Zealand, without telling me you are not in New Zealand.

A few years ago, I installed mint 21.1 on my mum’s old NUC; a 2013 model; was running Win7.

I said, it doesn’t meet the minimum for Win10, so it was either buy something new or try Linux.

Just got back from visiting them, I updated it to 21.3, still running fine. It still does everything they need.

Mum even said, “it always just works”. A great endorsement, as a non-technical user mum needs a no fuss distro, mint works so well in this regard.

I was going to ask the same.

Those goals are not even that “out there”, but to play the devil’s advocate here for a moment.

Is it because your family know you, and you tend to flit from one “big idea” to the next, and they are worried about you putting in a lot of time and effort, to then get bored and move on to the next one. Or perhaps you have always been an outdoors kinda person, the idea of you sitting in front of a computer for hours on end, just is way out of your “normal”.

I’m not saying they are correct, but if they genuinely care about you, maybe ask why they think it is a bad idea.

In saying that, maybe they are just cunts.

There are so many variables, like an you just out of school or university, are you mid career on your 40’s and looking for a change, are you recently retired and have always held an interest…

Weird, I have 100’s of thousands of files synced.

Been using it for years.

Linux, windows and Mac in the circuit. Never a problem that wasn’t user error.

Philosophy.

Ask it to act as Socrates, pick a topic and it will help you with introspection.

This is good for examining your biases.

e.g. I want to examine the role of government employees.
e.g. when is it ok to give up on an idea?

I started on Ubuntu, tried 8.04 and went back to windows XP, tried 10.04 and stayed.

20.04 was my last Ubuntu, bounced around for a while, but I have settled on Mint. Been running it for 3 years now.

Mint isn’t too fancy, it is just there and lets me get my work done, very much the way Ubuntu used to be.

I’m running the 6.14.2 kernel, to get the latest drivers for my RX 9070, I’m playing around with local AI… Mint isn’t fancy, but you can do almost anything you want.

that is exactly what Syncthing is, my desktop to my server to my laptop to my phone…