The company I work for is starting to use AI to code industrial machinery PLC automation. We just used it for a system after refining what it spit out.

Sorry you lost your arm there bud, the code is still “learning”

The power supply is only going to output what it needs, nothing more. The wattage is a max rating. Oversizing will never harm anything

I didn’t go with speed queen because they’re nearly double the price of all other washer/dryers. I know they’re built like tanks and don’t really fail, or if they do they’re easy to fix. But I’ve also heard they can be tougher on clothes and wear them out quicker.

Ultimately ended up going with Maytag. It’s been solid for the past 6 months, no issues at all and I got a free 5 year warranty from the small local appliance store I bought it in, so maybe check them out opposed to the big box stores. They fix it if there are problems, not Maytag.

Also look for one with a “deep fill” option. All new washers have a federal requirement now that makes them “high efficiency” which really is just using way less water and spraying them for an hour. Whether this fully washes your clothes is a bit of a debate, but I guess that’s how most are in Europe now. The “deep fill” option is supposed to be if you’re washing bed sheets or very soiled clothes, but I still use it to soak my clothes.

It does this natively on Linux.

Some folks on here said they have problems with the EA launcher on Linux. Is the steam deck different or did you just work around it?

https://www.protondb.com/app/1237950

The last half of this is some doomer nonsense. Please still choose how you want to live and make the best of it. I surround myself with those that I love, build the home and future I want, enjoy my career to some extent, travel, exercise, go to shows and events, hang with friends and enjoy the company of my own little community. The fact that humanity might go extinct within the next couple hundred years does not change that and is completely out of my control.

My city only has the bus, which is super unreliable and the times might as well not exist half the time, or what happened to me recently was they changed stops for a route and Google maps never updated. It’s typical to wait for an hour for a bus, sometimes they zoom right past you, or you need to transfer between lines. They’re also planning on cutting 35% of bus lines next year, raising the fare, and stopping service at 11 pm, all due to lack of funding. You can read more here:

https://www.rideprt.org/2025-funding-crisis/funding-crisis/

There is a train, but it only goes to the suburbs outside of the city. The bus is your only option when you’re in city limits.

I would take some more confusing steps over there not being an option at all.

I’ve worked technician and design roles for like 10 years in manufacturing, now I just test and do QA and field work, but there are some good engineers out there. It’s like anything, there’s some boneheaded ones that you wonder how in the world they’re getting paid more than you and have more responsibility, but when you get a good engineer who knows their shit it’s like night and day. There are a few I really respect and like to bounce ideas off of and talk because I do have a genuine interest in this field.

That being said, the kids coming out of college are the worst. I should not be teaching you how to read a wiring diagram when you’re in charge of the project. And don’t even get me started on hands-on work they’ll do haha. I went to take 480v power off something the other day, they had left it on overnight.

There are a few countries like Sweden and India that are pushing more and more towards all digital payments and slowly trying to wean off cash. I think this is terrible for a number of reasons.

The big one is I work on the side as an electrician from my day job. I get paid in cash (it’s usually only like 5-10 hours a week). I save up that money and have been paying my plumber or tile guy for work that I don’t want to tackle on my own at my house. There’s a whole undercurrent of labor and an economy that gets paid in cash that does not need uncle Sam’s prying eyes. I imagine it will be a long time before banks would stop taking cash in countries pushing for everything to be digital, but who knows.

The other reason is the more vulnerable people in society. You can’t tell me that making everything cashless and only payable via smart phone doesn’t massively screw someone over who’s homeless. A lot of people only get by via panhandling and if suddenly they can’t buy food or ride public transit without a phone that is connected to cell service, that is a massive barrier.

Lastly, all cash restaurants and bars. They’re still common in my area. Things are usually a little cheaper there and I like paying cash for a few drinks. Or like the one bar I go to is still kinda lawless haha, a PBR is $2.

1890 here as well. I love it, it’s nestled in the woods and built into the hillside so these massive retaining walls surround the first story. With all the trees and shade and basically being underground, this makes the first floor naturally cool. I’ve gone whole summers without AC. What’s also interesting is there’s a door on the second floor landing that goes right out into the hillside. There’s like a 2 foot wide platform and then the hill. Not much up there other than a steep overgrown mountain though.

Another thing I love is being able to see the river from my front stoop. I’m still in city limits of Pittsburgh though, so I can easily walk or bike down to more of the city type stuff. Or I can bop across a bridge to a couple other towns.

I’ll definitely spend my life here, as I’m slowly remodeling the place. But of course, a house this old comes with its own slew of problems. I try to tackle as much as I can myself tho.

Connor fucking lamb is the “resurgence” lmao what. I live in the city limits of Pittsburgh. He got elected in the suburbs right outside of the city, in the most liberal white collar suburbs. He is also the most plain white toast nothing burger of a politician. Complete and total centrist in every meaning of the word in American politics. If he’s the resurgence then the Dems are cooked

I came back to Lies of P after playing it for maybe 8 hours about a year ago. I remember getting frustrated with the mechanics but I was also playing a lot of elden ring at the time. I just don’t think I realized at the time that rolling constantly is not what you should be doing. I honed in on guarding (and perfect guards which will stagger) and occasionally rolling, and went all in on a Technique build this time. I love it. I’m probably gonna crush the game in about a week, and then move right onto the DLC that just came out

I don’t have this issue with proton either but I can’t imagine that’s the best solution. I can’t exactly tell my insurance or customer service at a company to whitelist my email.

Yeah agreed. What’s going on in my state of Pennsylvania is they’re reopening the Three Mile Island nuclear plant out near Harrisburg for the sole reason of powering Microsoft’s AI data centers. This will be Unit 1 which was closed in 2019. Unit 2 was the one that was permanently closed after the meltdown in 1979.

I’m all for nuclear power. I think it’s our best option for an alternative energy source. But the only reason they’re opening the plant again is because our grid can’t keep up with AI. I believe the data centers is the only thing the nuke plant will power.

I’ve also seen the scale of things in my work in terms of power demands. I’m an industrial electrical technician, and part of our business is the control panels for cooling the server racks for Amazon data centers. They just keep buying more more and more of them, projected til at least 2035 right now. All these big tech companies are totally revamping everything for AI. Like before a typical rack section might have drawn let’s say 1000 watts, now it’s more like 10,000 watts. Again, just for AI.

Working a trade fucking rules and you get to build something and see it in front of you and hone your skills and knowledge personally outside of capital W Work. I wouldn’t trade it for any other job.

Man so how about I had to have a soft inquiry of a background / credit check just to get on an industrial site to do my job recently. Like how is that in my control at all lol. Thankfully that’s not the norm, most of them just do a piss test, but like what if every time I traveled it was another credit check? Wouldn’t that hurt my score if it was a frequent thing?

The “trick” is to only mention you’re paying cash at the end. I went through this after hitting a deer and totalling my car last year after I received my settlement. They’ll usually offer something small like a few hundred dollars off or whatever when you casually mention your price when test driving. He basically tried to walk it back at the end when we sat down to discuss financing when he found out I was paying cash, which was incredibly shitty, but he had to “go in his boss’s office” or whatever to commit to what he said previously

It’s all such a stupid song and dance that’s pretty much on par with birds mating.

I guess heads up, trades can really further destroy your body, but in a different way. I’ve worked one for about 10 years and I’m doing fine but some of the older guys absolutely have blown out their knees, backs, etc. Expect to be digging a trench or running up and down flights of steps for tools and materials, lifting the heavy shit etc when you start an apprenticeship.

Fortunately I’m at the point now where I do way less hands on work (for better or worse, I miss it sometimes) unless I’m in the field on industrial sites. Then it’s go go go, work 14 hours a day get it done and it’s heavy dirty hard electrician work, etc. But when I’m in the shop, all I do now is test our systems and do QA. So I feel way more like an inspector than I do a technician, despite that being in my job title. That’s also a love/hate relationship if I’m being honest haha, but it sure beats working at a desk all day.

I’m at the point in my career where I’ve turned down a promotion to a desk job multiple times for the simple fact that I can’t commit to cubicle life and want to be on my feet all day and physically looking and working on things to make sense of them. I also make way more money with overtime pay anyway. Maybe when I get into my 40’s I’ll consider making the jump.

Sure

I built it out of old PC parts when I upgraded my desktop. I wanted to go full AMD for both the CPU and GPU for the new build so I used the old mobo and got an Intel i3-10100 open box along with a few other random parts like a small nvme drive for a cache drive. I got four 8TB drives to start from a few places, one of them being Mac bid.

Then I found an absolutely massive heavy duty 48u server rack on Craigslist for like 50 bucks. I cut it in half with an angle grinder so it would fit under the steps and gave the other half to my fiance for his music production gear in our studio. I took din rail home from work and drilled & tapped holes in the rack to support it since the top frame was now missing. I put some din rail on the sides to mount my old NUCs and ran game servers on them for a while.

I have a rack mounted UPS on the bottom, the NAS above it in a rosewill case that can take up to like 16 spinning drives I think. I have a 10gb/s fiber connection for loading steam games as fast as the disk can spin. Games really don’t have many loading screens nowadays so it works great for storing smaller games that load you in once or twice. The real complicated massive games I still store on my NVME on my desktop.

On top I have my networking equipment. Eventually I’m going to get a full router and NVR with cameras to watch things like birds and the front entrance. I also have a pi-hole.

I have a KVM setup that easily lets me navigate my desktop from the living room and play games in there. It works great. I mounted a remote start button on my living room wall, so now I can turn my PC on, login, press a keybind in hyprland that runs a script I wrote. This will turn off both PC monitors, change sound over, and launch emulationstation-DE which is a front end for all of the emulators, steam games, pirated games, whatever. So now the desktop is doing all the heavy lifting in terms of its CPU/GPU for the game, storing the game on my NAS in the basement, and broadcasting it in 4K / 60 FPS in my living room while I use a controller with zero latency. All on Linux. If 15 year old me who was using Ubuntu could see my setup now he’d geek out. A side note is I love Arch Linux now, and never want to use anything else. But it took me a while to find my way.

This turned into a bit of a tangent about my homelab as a whole, but the OS for the NAS I use is unRAID. The flexibility is unparalleled. You can throw whatever random drives you find in it and they’re protected so long as they’re the same size or smaller than the parity drive. On the NAS itself I run an *arr stack, Plex, a torrent client, etc. I also use it to download YT videos and have a private collection of things like concerts. Quite a few people use my Plex. My parents are even on it now and they’re getting into their 70s.

Really though, the NAS is primarily storage first and foremost. But it’s been chugging along for years and is pretty crucial in doing a lot.

I learned a ton about Linux building a few servers. A simple NAS can be a great starting point.

I have my NAS mounted as an NFS format. Since I use Linux on my desktop and server, the storage pool integrates seamlessly into things like my file browser and terminal. And don’t underestimate having “basically unlimited” storage capabilities. I have thousands of old games stored on my NAS, I play them via emulators or on steam.