I am absolutely terrible at managing chores at home by myself.

Unironically I have found Choreops to be a wonder. It is an app in Home Assistant and it let’s you define chores and assign points with them. My tasks for a day add up to about 800 points if I do everything, with bonuses for hitting streaks of 3 days, 5 days, and the full week. I can cash out those points for $25 towards a 3D printer, that is the current goal.

This means I see a clear list of tasks and they are linked to a monetary reward as well as having a single consequence, not getting that reward. This kills much of the stress around not doing things but also makes streaks fun and motivates doing at least the minimum.

To be clear, some of these tasks are not really negotiable, for example I am not going to skip feeding my cat, but that is actually a compound task which includes cleaning his food area so if I am actually completely ruined I can skip the extra and not mark it as done. This means I still feed him, I still put his old plate in the dish stack, but I don’t have to clean the area, but then because the only thing I have to do to get the points is wipe the area down it is a waste of having done all the other stuff to lose those points so I get it done.

It works well, it ties in with my home automation, and it is a nice visible progress bar towards my goal of buying a 3D printer so I can make cool things and fix little problems while learning to 3D model. For you it may or may not help, but I find it motivating and my partner has been an absolute boss helping me by setting it all up and making the tasks and their point scales.

When I think of dad jokes I think of adding jokes to my quiver for kids up to around 12 years old, not that I would ever stop telling them. They are jokes that don’t require a huge amount of context like who a politician is or historical events and so on, nor are they talking about sex and sexuality. The jokes should never be hurtful to anyone, and should never punch down for sure.

They should also not be morbid but definitely can be gross, so no to death but yes to poop. Appearance is also not ideal, so low hanging fruit like fat jokes and blonde jokes that are reductive and cruel are not good. In general cruelty is not acceptable for me, it stops being a dad joke and becomes a mean joke. The jokes have to have a level of cringe in them, something groanworthy.

I also think the joy of a dad joke is that the kids can join in. The structure is simple enough for kids to understand and over time replicate, so it goes from you making the joke and them working to understand it to you starting the joke and them predicting and eventually responding with an extension of the joke. This is how they learn to make jokes in the first place and this is why they can’t be cruel of mean, it teaches what is and is not acceptable to joke about. My parents made fairly bad jokes, but my partner’s family made racist jokes and cruel jokes, so my partner has spent a lot of time working to remove those from their process for jokes. It is hard work we don’t need to give the kids around us, so I feel that we should avoid it as much as possible.

Early on I wrote a script for my user account to run df and save the output to a file, then a second script to read that file and if the drive was full send me an email.

First, it failed because it couldn’t send the email because the email service failed under full disk conditions.

Second, it failed because it couldn’t write the file to disk because the disk was full.

Third, it failed because outbound SMTP was blocked by my ISP.

I learned a lot about how well you can fail if you really put your mind to it. Now I have Home Assistant grabbing the disk stats for my machines and flagging anything over 90%.

In the short term all voting follows the same basic process. Look at the good each candidate will do, being sceptical of claims and looking at their history, and do the same for the bad, how much bad have they done, how much bad are they promising. Compare each of them with each of the others and find which you feel is the best overall. Sometimes the less evil is the winning vote because they are all worse than that person. Sometimes there are two very similar people who are close in goodness and are similarly likely to win.

If your voting system sucks you may have to also incorporate some degree of strategic voting. Voting for a slightly less awesome candidate because they are much more likely to win than the candidate you actually prefer is crappy, but it must be borne.

That all said, longer term if there are no candidates you actually like you could consider running! You are unlikely to be the only person feeling that way, and in fact in many places the competition is extremely slim. A candidate from outside major parties can win at times, so putting your hat in the ring is a real option for some people. If not that, get involved in the campaigns of people and organisations you align with. If they aren’t running a candidate in your area you may be able to help them get one up and running. It may be you, it may he someone else, but it has to start some where, what better place than here? What better time than now?

What you are struggling with is medicalisation. The medical system acts as a gatekeeper to people doing what they want with their bodies and requires you to jump through hoops. Some of the very first gender clinics actually saw this and understood it. I can’t remember the names involved, but essentially they would have clients come in and say what their experience was, some said dysphoria and got support, others did not and didn’t. After a short time everyone was saying they had dysphoria. It turns out if you won’t provide what people want without them saying they have dysphoria then they will say they have dysphoria! What a shocker!

Now we have more research and it seems there is a wide range of experience. Some people have primarily negative feelings driving their desire to transition, having high levels of dysphoria which go down as their process unfolds. Others have the exact opposite motivation. They have no dysphoria, just the euphoria when they engage with their gender in a trans way. Others have a mix of the two, and this is actually the larger population in the stuff I have read, however part of that may be the same effect as before, people performing dysphoria to get what they need.

In no way am I saying any of this is invalid. Your gender is yours alone, you have to live with it and you get to engage with it as you will. The responsibility of those around you is to not be a bunch of dicks about it and to support you as a human being worthy of respect. If you present as a woman it would be really rude of me to refer to you as a man, just as it would be really rude of you to refer to me as a woman though I clearly present as a man. Regardless of whether I dimple or dangle I am performing male gender and the same, though reversed, applies to you.

So if you don’t feel huge amounts of dysphoria you don’t need to worry you are an imposter. I don’t feel dysphoria about my gender at all. I occasionally feel fairly euphoric about it and have a good life. The fact that I am cis just means I got lucky, mine align fairly well, but making your body align with your gender will likely give you the benefits I get from my body aligning with mine, a sense of stability and rightness which makes life more tolerable.

Also, I have long hair and look nearly identical to my sister in the face, I have actually been misgendered quite a few times, and it doesn’t bother me when it happens, it did bother be when I was bullied and called a girl because I like having long hair, but that was because people wanted to make me feel bad about myself which is mean, not the gender itself. It is much more nuanced than “girl things make me feel bad” and it doesn’t have to fit a pattern.

If you are more comfortable, happy, and fulfilled being seen as a woman then you are a woman, end of story. Nice to meet you miss, have a great day.

Microdousing

You’re welcome

I agree, you would have a hard time pushing for the intent part of a crime, however manslaughter does not require intent, nor do many other crimes, and discovery would being many documents to light which may show the level of intent or reckless disregard. Also, what is the difference between intent and callous disregard? If you know your actions will cause deaths and you do not act to prevent those deaths then are you not choosing those deaths? If there is a discussion documented where the possibility is raised and then disregarded it would show at least knowing disregard for the safety and wellbeing of others.

If I, and Australian citizen, had gained access in the same way I would be facing charges. Those charges would likely be under the Cybercrime Act of 2001.

s.478.1(1) Criminal Code—unauthorised access to, or modification of, restricted data;

That carries a maximum 2 year sentence and it clearly a significant threat to an individual.

Will Sam Altman face this charge? No. The purpose of the AI in this situation is not to do the actual hacking. The purpose it to abrogate the blame, to shield the owners of it from legal repercussions. Altman and co can do whatever they want and shift the blame to the AI.

“We didn’t fire missiles at those children, the AI made a mistake and identified them as hostile actors”

“We didn’t deny your dead partner’s healthcare, the algorithm incorrectly labeled the procedure as unnecessary and due to the delay your partner died, but that wasn’t our fault, it was the algorithm.”

I think your situation is exactly what a cooperative is built for. You have a bunch of people who work together and have a shared ownership of the business, tying their outcomes to the success of the business. You organise democratically to delegate the work and get the results you need. Someone good at sales can handle the sales side of things. Someone skilled in web design can make the web site. Someone such as yourself may work on a specific project for a client. The structure all together can do the work required while also managing having visibility, discover ability, and reputation. And if it isn’t working you can vote to change what you are doing.

I agree. I have run a few models on my phone and server and they are interesting but on such weak hardware they are slow and less capable. That said, a project like KDE has a certain amount of funding which could be put to use in part finding bugs using AI tools. They could be run on reasonable hardware with all the ethical safeguards we could come up with and have it be the least awful version possible. Some would argue it would still be unethical and I can see their perspective. That said, for me this is the line we should not cross. Keep the development by humans and for humans, and if we are to use AI models then we should be doing so to find problems to work on, not to solve them.

Maybe I am the weird one but I have a split view on using AI tools. Using AI to find bugs and exploits makes sense. It can attack in ways humans will rarely think about and find bugs humans may not have considered. It can use used to fuzz large attack surfaces and find patterns which we can then fix.

Using AI to do the actual coding is far less reasonable in my view. Studies do show a decline in productivity, enjoyment, and quality of code when using AI tools.

So for finding problems to address AI seems great. It is one of many tools which can help us find problems worth addressing. But for solving those problems? No, it is not fit for that purpose. It does not produce good code with maintainability and legibility for the maintainers of the code.

Not the OP, but I have a different perspective you may find useful.

Productivity has increased due to automation and mechanisation. The same number of labour hours produces more output. That means that if we wanted the same output we could put in fewer hours to get it.

Wages have not matched this growth since the 80s. Productivity went up, production went up, but wages stayed flat. So for the same number of hours of work we get the same amount of money, but the produced output is higher. Where does the difference in output go?

It goes to the owners, the rich, the class of people who by virtue of owning the factory, company, means of production, and they get all of those extra bits of value without expending any more effort or innovating in any meaningful way. They bring in automation and mechanisation and increase the productivity of the employee without compensating them more for it.

They then continue increasing their wealth by turning everything into a comodity, something that can be made into a financial instrument and traded. They wrap housing up in REITs and healthcare in health insurance companies. They make everything work for their personal wealth and give nothing back.

So in a sane society if you wanted your cup of coffee in the morning it would cost half or less of what it did in the 80s, so you could afford it with half as many hours of your labour. If it took you an hour of labour to afford a week of coffee in the 80s then now it should take 15-30 minutes instead. You should have more free time.

So yes, people would still work at this point. In the future some things would be completely automated and you would not have to pay any meaningful cost for them, they would be essentially free. Other things would be harder to automate and you would still have to exchange hours of your time to afford them. One day everything would be fully automated including the machines to maintain the machines and no human effort would be required to have a decent standard of living, so you could spend time engaging with people, exploring the universe, learning about how things work, making art, and enjoying culture. Essentially, Star Trek.

It is key to remember that if it was one person or a handful of people the cars would still be beeping as they passed, driving way too close, and endangering the cyclists. Safety in numbers is real and in this situation anyone sane stays behind the group of cyclists or finds another route. It really is an effective strategy.

Also, if each of those people was in a car it would be absolute gridlock. That car would not have been getting where they were going faster in that case.

I was when I was more ignorant of the trans experience. I read about the process for transition as an outsider and read from resources not written by the community. They talked about it in terms of justifying taking steps, essentially gate keeping the process. Get a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, social transition for a specific period of time, then puberty blockers, more time, then hormones, then maybe surgery, etc.

After actually learning FROM trans people rather than ABOUT them all of that fell away. The same applies to my experience learning about autism and ADHD. There is a good reason for the phrase “nothing about us without us”.

Internalised ableism.

I work in support with autistic clients, my partner is AuDHD, and I am AuDHD. More than anything else the biggest difficulty I have in the internalised ableism that tells me what I should expect of myself and others.

Could my partner do a little better at managing their emotional state? The ableism tells me yes, that just trying a bit harder is a sustainable option. Should my younger client more more mature and spend less time on childish media? The ableism says yes. Should my older client be more progressive and less rigid in their application of religious doctrine? The ableism says yes. And should I be better at managing my time and able to work more hours? The ableism says yes.

The ableism tells me all sorts of lies that prop up the current layout of society, making it OK that people are bigots, making it acceptable that there are no accommodations in some places. It makes me feel like the problem must be internal to me, and therefore must apply to my clients. It is also sneaky and insidious, coming up with strong arguments around flawed premises.

No matter the situation the ableism makes me less able to understand and support my clients, my partner, and myself. Do I need ear defenders or should I just harden up? Does my partner really need the same breakfast and because I forgot the sausages yesterday I have to run to the shops before work and therefore get up earlier? Do I really have to listen to my client talking about a game character for 2 hours straight and actually pay attention the whole time?

The ableism makes people being cruel OK. I don’t want to be that person, so I fight it when I notice it. I am getting better at noticing it when applied to other people, starting with my clients, and it is helping with how I relate to my partner, and each time I choose compassion over judgement I make the ableism applied to myself a little more dissonant. It is the big thing I am working in at the moment and I think in time I will make good progress with it, but for now it is there and I have to work on it every time I can.

A thing most people don’t get is that knowledge of how to prepare food and the time to actually do it are also key. My parents could cook 3 meals between them and poorly at that. I didn’t know anything about how to use a knife including the most basic things like sharp knives being less dangerous than blunt ones. I have learned later in life and I am fairly accomplished in the kitchen, including making a roux, making passata from scratch, fermenting and pickling vegetables, making yoghurt, making adaptable stir fry dishes, making stews and soups, and all manner of other things like breads and pâté. None of those things were taught to me by my parents or through schooling. All the access in the world wouldn’t make me able to use chicken liver without making it chalky and nasty, or cook a steak without ruining it.

Which devices though? All Pixel devices? Just a specific subset? Which specific modems have this vulnerability? No specificity at all, just Pixel devices, and also this is happening while they are slow rolling their updates being accessible to GrapheneOS and co.

Damn it, the racists ruin everything! /s

We need better terms for calling someone a coward that are not wrapped in bigotry of some sort. Calling someone a pussy? Mysoginy. Calling someone an f-slur? Homophobia. Calling someone a Zionist? Somehow apparently antisemitic, though I would dispute that.

Maybe we should go for the most clear language possible. Complicit, coward, genocide denier. What is happening in Gaza is not a military operation, nor is it peacekeeping or responding to a real threat. It is a genocide and it is being done by the Zionist government of Israel with majority support from the Israeli population. The non-zionist Jews who I know are actively against the genocide and trying to make change here, on the other side of the planet, so clearly we can see the issue is not being Jewish at all, it is being a Zionist, someone who believes that Palestine is not really a country with their own culture and people and is instead full of squatters to the land of the people of the book. It is inherently genocidal and, if the word means anything at all, evil.

We don’t need a solution to the conflict, we need an end to the genocide. How many troops have died? How many civilians? How many children? The culture, history, and lives of the Palestinian people are being actively destroyed and it clearly meets the definition of genocide. We are past debate on this, there is no valid argument, there is no just war here, this is intentional slaughter, pure and simple.

I want an end of the state of Israel but not of its people. I want the people of Israel to begin to open their eyes and see who they have been killing as people, just like them. I want them to feel the grief and horror that all of us can feel, and I want them to feel the internal horror at having supported it. I want them to grow and develop compassion and become better people. I want the state apparatus to be removed and a just government for all to be in place for the whole region, representing all of them together. I have wanted this since I was a child and I first learned about this in high school. 20 years later the only change is things have gotten worse, and with active support from my and other governments around the world.

I think this is the distinction of uses I canost get behind. If you find an attack using any tool, whether that be a CVE, a script kiddy, or an LLM, then you can go on to understand how the vulnerability works and patch it. This leaves the understanding part to the programmer, but not the arduous task of trying to find problems. If you use vibecoding to do the actual fixing you never have the understanding of how the code works and therefore what the changes will actually do.

LLMs can be useful in a lot of ways, but they should never replace thinking and understanding. Just like you do need to memorise some things but not others, there are cognitive tasks you don’t have to do all the time but others you really have to in order to actually be a good programmer. If you outsource thinking you stop doing it and get weaker at it. If you outsource meaningless tasks or use systems to reduce the need for them that is actually useful for freeing up your mind for tasks which cannot be automated.

So in my view using these tools to find bugs in code can be useful. Knowing that if a bug is found it may not be disclosed to you by the tool because the provider of the tool wants to keep some bugs hidden is something people should consider, I mean that is exactly what the NSA has been going for decades with zero day exploits in various operating systems and platforms, why would they not do so now?

Currently reading Buried Mage, book 4 of the Fledgeling God series by Michael Taggart. It is a slightly cracky a heavily gay modern setting fantasy progression series. The magic is explored in interesting enough ways to be fun, the characters are a little one dimensional sometimes, but the whole thing is a lot of fun. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and is just there for a good time, so it never feels to desperate or reaching.

I would give it a solid 80% rating, but I am very picky, I am currently listening to the series for the 3rd time so it is good enough to get repeated listenings.