“I say your 3 cent titanium tax doesn’t go too far enough!”

It’s a bit long, but one of my favorite authors recently gave a keynote speech that focuses on art and AI, and I think it actually holds the answers to your question.

https://youtu.be/mb3uK-_QkOo

Basically, you have to learn to find satisfaction and fulfillment in the process of creating the art. Realize that, by creating the art yourself, the art holds a part of you. Your experiences, your perspectives, your soul. No matter how technically perfect AI art becomes, only art that you create yourself will truly be a reflection of you.

That, and just enjoy the experiential elements of making the art. Whether it’s having fun tinkering with different sounds as you try to write a song, exploring different colors and brushstrokes as you paint, or simply giving yourself time to imagine something truly exciting or meaningful to you as you prepare to write a chapter. The process of creating art has to be fun or you’ll never stick with it.

I think it depends on the context.

Sometimes, friends can say something like this from a somewhat well-meaning place. Not necessarily that they’re mad at the situation, but more as a confidence booster to help that friend potentially get out of a bad relationship. (Sometimes this can be done in a bad way though).

Other times, it’s a jealousy thing. Like, if a guy sees a woman he finds attractive with some other guy, he might start commenting on how she’s “out of his league” (regardless of the other guy’s qualities) either because he’s frustrated he can’t find a partner he finds attractive, or maybe even in hopes of competing with the other guy for the woman. This is mostly a toxic thing and rarely has much to do with how well the couple fits together.

For me, it often just makes me wonder what positive qualities the person might have that make them a worthy partner. As someone who is not conventionally attractive at all and dating someone who is extremely attractive, seeing other couples that maybe aren’t an exact match in terms of looks gives me hope and confidence.

As a side note, I’ve actually had a few well meaning friends tell me that my partner is “out of my league”, which was a bit hurtful, but I think they were just trying to be protective.

TL;DR: Yeah, people say it (and mean it) for a variety of reasons. But it’s usually not that they object to it conceptually, but more that they have their own biases involved. Don’t let it affect your opinions though. There’s a lot more to a relationship than just how someone looks (or how much money they make).

This actually happened with my father. Not only was the missing rent due, but they also had a lawyer argue that by dieing, my father had broken the lease, so we had to pay the fee for that too. The judge reduced the fee a bit, but we still ended up having to pay thousands out of his estate to that shitty apartment complex’s parent company.

So yes, at least in the state this happened, the missing rent was required to be paid out of the estate. Not sure what your role is in this scenario, but if someone died, consider kindness rather than trying to secure every last dollar possible.

This is something that would really frustrate me if I was still on reddit. It feels nice to not care at all.

What an exciting time to be building software! With AI, we’re able to achieve production outages with unprecedented frequency!

For the FAANG companies, they do it in part so they can then turn around and make those flashy claims you see in headlines like “95% of ours devs use [insert AI product they are trying to sell] daily” or “60% of our code base is now ‘written’ by our fancy AI”.

Maybe we will lose low effort artists but gain great music by passionate people.

This is such a bizarre take.

I wouldn’t characterize musicians who depend on some financial return as “low effort” at all. Almost all the best musicians, going back to classical music and beyond, were dependent on their music as a source of income.

If anything, the people who do music as a side hobby are usually more “low effort” than those who actually make it their main career. And if artists can’t make money of their music anymore, we’ll really only get music from rich people who can afford the lessons, instruments, recording studio, production, etc. as an expensive hobby rather than a source of income.

This isn’t really an answer to the ‘universal negativity’, but for a somewhat reasonable analysis of the pros and (surprisingly high number of) cons as well as some interesting grey areas, there’s an old LWT episode on this topic: https://youtu.be/AJm8PeWkiEU

Essentially, no one uses prions as a weapon because if you’re going to carry out a bioterror attack, there are much easier to acquire and more effective agents.

When I saw your long comment, I was really hoping for some reassurance around how many safeguards would prevent what OP described. Now I’m twice as worried. 😥

Any company that pays for ads closely tracks the efficacy of ads and can more or less prove that the ads are worth it. There’s no guess work.

Oh, nice! Thanks for explaining that. I didn’t realize there was a way to run a cluster without HA.

I’m not sure how well that works if the cluster is only designed to be temporary, since removing a productive node from a cluster is a bit risky

Good callout. Just did some reading on the concept of maintaining a quorum, which I didn’t know about. Definitely need to be careful if I go with that approach, but it does sound interesting! I’m not entirely opposed to leaving the old laptop as a node and then using it for experimental stuff or maybe running just one specific standalone service on it after moving the critical stuff to the new server.

Sounds pretty straightforward. Thanks for the info!

That’s a fair point, but I kind of want to tinker around on the laptop without worrying too much about breaking things and figure out what all I actually want to self-host. That will help me figure out what sort of hardware I need.

Unfortunately sometimes it’s really hard to avoid. I’ve been to restaurants that don’t even have physical menus. You could probably find a menu on their website, but not always.

I wouldn’t call myself a frequent flyer, but I fly at least several times a year, and I’ve taken a lot of different airlines. To your point, I honestly haven’t seen much difference in terms of cancelation or delay between budget and regular airlines. There are 3 main differences in my mind.

First is that budget airlines nickel and dime you. Carry-on isn’t free, it’s an add-on. Your backpack size is thoroughly checked. And if you mess any of that up and they catch it, the upcharge is huge.

The second point is sort of a continuation of the first: on-flight service. Depending on the duration of the flight, non-budget airlines will give you some snacks and drinks for free. Budget airlines charge you for them. (I once had a budget airline try and charge me for water when I was fighting off a headache…) Some of the nicest airlines will even have entertainment consoles built in to the seats, even in economy.

Third is seat space and comfort. The seats on the nicer airlines have noticeably more leg room and more cushion. A lot of them have adjustable headrests and recline a bit. Sounds like a small thing, but I have pretty long legs and a bony ass, so it makes a huge difference to me.

For shorter flights/trips, I’ll still do budget airlines sometimes. For longer flights or if I have a lot of luggage, I usually have a strong preference for the nicer airlines. Of course, depending on how big the cost difference is, I’ll occasionally go against my preference.

Thanks for the source. After watching the video, the “Mr. Japan” bit was honestly much less noteworthy than the completely incoherent rambling about sending letters to countries congratulating them on the privilege of being able to “shop in the USA”. He just kept repeating that and then naming random percentages. It felt like I was having a stroke trying to understand what he was even trying to say.