I assume the answer is no, but do you have access to a more powerful desktop? If so, you could potentially work remotely on the desktop to have the benefit of portability with your laptop and more capability with the desktop. That’s how I play more demanding games on my laptop.

Since you don’t need a powerful GPU, if you have a little cash available, you could potentially get a more powerful refurbished desktop for that purpose for $300-500 (in the US). The low end of that range would get you 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage; the high end would potentially get you 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. If you don’t have a monitor, you could potentially plug it into a TV for setup and then just remote into it the rest of the time. (or grab a cheap refurb monitor)

I definitely agree with that.

This week at work, my team reported a major system outage. There was a lengthy conference call to solve the outage and afterwards someone (not from my team) ran a transcript of the call through copilot to generate an executive summary and sent it up to top level leadership.

Copilot misunderstood the relevance of various comments (surprise!) and effectively reported that my team reported the outage almost an hour after we became aware of it. This caused us to get yelled at by senior leadership for failing to report a major issue in a timely manner. We then had to waste time proving that we had escalated the issue appropriately within minutes and listen to the call recording again to figure out where the incorrect reference came from and provide quotes from the transcript to explain why the summary was wrong.

So far there have been some very small use cases where I have found LLMs slightly useful but mostly they cause me more work than they save (by a lot). And yet, I keep hearing more and more from my company that they want “AI” to analyze things for us.

When I moved into my house last year, the garage entry door handles were reversed so the key hole was inside the house and the little bit you twist to lock and unlock the door was in the garage.

I agree with you on both points there. Skyrim NPCs are definitely a weak point and there was some good content in the side quests of the Witcher series.

Depends on what you like. I love Skyrim and hate the Witcher games. The thing that I hate the most about the Witcher games is that using a main character from books locks you into certain parts of the canon that kills my vibe from an RPG perspective. In particular, I don’t care about Yennefer even a little bit but any time she shows up in the story, the main character throws away all prior decisions and chases after her. I prefer RPGs that let me imagine who my character is as much as possible.

I would say not all birds sing, mainly just song birds sing. Lots of other birds don’t sing either like crows, woodpeckers, jays, pelicans, eagles, hawks, owls, etc.

Note: I’m not any kind of bird expert, so it is possible some of the birds that I listed have a song-like call that I’m unfamiliar with or am forgetting about.

Everywhere I’ve ever lived in the US you tell the electric and gas company what date you’ll be moving in or out. The power and gas are normally already turned on and they just switch billing to whoever the new responsible party is.

In Georgia (USA) you have the illusion of choice in a “deregulated” market. In reality, there is a single gas provider and you get to pick which company provides billing service to you. Each company advertises a rate to “compete” with each other, this rate is added on top of the base rate that the actual gas provider charges and then they charge you a service charge on top of the that ($5-6 per month) that is not advertised.

The base rate is the same no matter who you choose. And the base rate plus admin fee make up most of your bill, so the advertised “competitive” rate is basically meaningless. Also, you have to sign a contract or you pay a variable rate instead of the advertised rate, which is MUCH higher. Also, there are big discounts for “new” customers (lower rate, monthly bill credit, cash back visa, etc.), so after the first contract period your price goes up quite a bit.

So you need to change providers every 6-24 months (depending on contract length) in the month before your contract expires. Otherwise your bill goes up because you either switched to the much higher variable price or lost your new customer discount. Or if you switch early, you pay an early cancellation charge.

Also, if you ever have any issues with your gas lines, you have to call the actual gas company to get assistance. The company that you pay doesn’t actually have any technicians or anything and provides no other service than billing you and paying the real gas company their share of the bill.

I’m so glad I don’t live in Georgia anymore for lots of reasons, including this.

Yes, this is the answer!

That looks like a super car with a healthy 6-figure price tag to me.

Yeah, I was guessing that one might be way worse than that. When my kids were born, it was cheaper for my wife to quit working than to pay infant rate child care, but that was a long time ago.

I was curious what this might look like, so I ran some numbers. It would be easy to hit this in a high cost of living area where rent will easily run 5-6k per month, but what about a medium cost of living place? I assumed a family of 4 with both parents working for 75k each and a 20% total tax rate (FICA, federal, state). All of this is based on what I know of typical cost of living items in the US.

After Tax Income (monthly) 10000

Housing 2500 Child care 1500 2 Car Payments (25k each) 1000 Groceries 800 Medical (incl. insurance) 800 401k (6% deduction) 750 2 Student Loans (30k each) 700 Utilities 400 Auto Insurance 300 Total Core Expenses 8750 Leftover for Discretionary 1250

So, you’d have 1250 per month to cover clothing, auto fuel, dining out, pets, fun money, subscriptions, activities for the kids, gifts, etc. You could easily run that to zero or below every month.

Now, there may be some room to cut in this budget, like not funding your retirement and giving up your 401k match or living in a much smaller home. But I would also say some of these numbers are very generous. Rent could be over 3k, most people don’t have a 25k car loan, if you own your home you can get hit with random major repair costs, and probably most parents would laugh at my estimated child care cost.

I think a key takeaway here is that kids are really expensive. Aside from the child care costs, most people with kids will want a little more living space than is doable in an apartment and kids go through food and clothes like crazy. You could probably chop at least 2-3k per month off this budget if it was a couple living in an apartment closer into the city core, with shorter commutes and maybe even options for public transit, biking, or walking.

You can pressure cook frozen chicken in an instant pot.

Oh, that makes sense!

The tall one in the back looks a little inconvenient. Are you growing native prairie grass in there?

Not even a little bit true for me. I listened to pretty much only country at 14 and I don’t listen to any country now, not even the stuff I liked then. By 16 I had switched to mostly rock & alternative. I will still listen to that occasionally, mostly for nostalgia, but it isn’t on any of my playlists. I suspect most everything on my regular playlists came out after I was 30, but it continues to shift forward over time. I suspect eventually most of my current playlist will age out too.

I love this cover!

If your unit is a heat pump, are you then paying for that savings in the winter when it doesn’t benefit from any solar warmth to help heat your house? If so, I wonder if it is a relatively balanced outcome or if one of the seasons has a bigger impact. I imagine it depends in part on which season is more extreme in your area.

To some extent this isn’t new. Lots of companies stopped hiring entry level positions ages ago and just hoped to hire employees that other companies had already developed.