My daughter learned that lesson when she was around 3 years old, the first time we let her shower by herself. She washed her long hair with her wash cloth. It was a miserable night for everyone that night.

But yes, I love discovering something that you feel is something you should have already known. I had a realization in my 30s that maybe not everyone gets little sores all over their body all the time… I changed my body wash and the problem went away. I feel like most people would have known that was a problem much sooner.

Reblog?

I went all in on it… I fully drank that Koolaid and was an early backer, got an extra controller and really thought it was going to be amazing. But their whole launch was so bungled that by the time I actually got it I was so disillusioned with the whole company that I couldn’t enjoy it. It sucked to have bought into the kickstarter and financed the project, and then see the product on the shelves at Target while I was still waiting on mine to be delivered. I had mine for a couple of months before reselling it at a loss.

Several years later when Stadia was announced I felt that little familiar glimmer of hope pop up, but I didn’t let myself get too excited for it. I did eventually get a couple of Stadia controllers and really enjoyed that service (and I still use those controllers today).

Oh, I agree and that’s one reason why I think putting it into Windows is a huge mistake!

I am having fun with it because I find the tech interesting and I love seeing what I can get it to do… but it is so dumb and frustrating. But so was 3D printing 12 years ago, you’d have to fiddle with the settings, do some test prints to make sure everything was setup right, deal with a warped bed, and every print was an experiment. It was shitty, but when you got a good print, that was the best feeling. That’s how I feel about LLMs, it mostly sucks but when it works, it’s great.

I also support several open source LLM projects because that is where I think the real innovation will come from, and the technology is only going to get better like 3D printers now.

Who said that this world isn’t also an existential threat to me? I’ve never implied that things shouldn’t change, in fact I said that they should. My statement about having to live in the world we have is merely a statement of fact, but I was hoping to imply that for many this still means investing for your future. Just because it isn’t useful advice for some, doesn’t mean it isn’t still helpful for others.

Great points, but not the world we currently live in, nor on any track towards. I’ll just let my mom know she can stop working because society should be taking care of her and I’ll go ahead and liquidate my 401k and IRAs since they won’t be needed.

It’s great to work towards those goals of having better social programs, but you still have to exist in the world that you actually live in.

Agreed, the bailout should be targeted and very selective. If OpenAI can’t survive, then fine, let it ‘die’. It won’t actually die, it’ll get scooped up by someone else and their assets will be picked up by one of the surviving companies. It’s an interesting way to innovate… burn money to push the industry further along, knowing full well that you’ll never turn a profit, but that a future company will end up with your tech and they might eventually make a profit.

The problem is most Americans with retirement savings are shareholders of these tech companies whether they know it or not. My mom lost a HUGE part of her retirement savings when WorldCom went under and was never able to recover from it and is now in her mid 70s and still has to work full time. She’s almost blind and can hardly walk and she’s worked her whole life and tried to do everything right but her financial advisor was giving her what was thought to be good, safe advice in the early 2000s and completely changed how her twilight years are playing out.

I added Opencode to my Linux terminal and have it powered by Ollama and it has made my Linux computer even more amazing. I just tell it what I want it to do and it does it. It knows all of my servers, services, applications and scripts, has access to all of my config and data files. So when I tell it that I have some files stuck in the ‘download’ directory inside my ‘movies’ directory, I don’t have to tell it which computer that directory is located on or how to access it. I also don’t have to tell it that the files get into that directory using Radarr. So when I was having issues of my files not properly being moved from ‘download’ to ‘organized’ it could have just moved the files, which is what I was expecting… instead it looked at the config file for Radarr and suggested how I can fix it. That was pretty incredible.

Now, if Windows had done that using Copilot I wouldn’t be thrilled because that means that Microsoft has way too much knowledge about my personal network structure.

Adding agentic AI to the OS can be amazingly powerful, but it really should only be done with an LLM that you control.

Also, agentic AI is going to cause a LOT of problems because as great as my above example is, I later had an instance where I added several .docx files to my Opencode directory and asked it to convert the files to a format it can read (plain text) and then ingest the information from them. It did that, and then it wanted to delete the .docx files. I told it to leave the files alone and I’d delete them later. A couple of minutes later it again tried to delete those .docx files (it was literally trying to run the command ‘rm **/*.docx’, which I really don’t like it using wildcards with the rm command). So again, I told it not to, then I told it that I do not want it to ever remove any .docx files without my explicit permission. It apologized profusely… and then immediately tried to run the rm command again.

It’s a handy tool, but if you get lazy and let your guard down it’s going to bite you.

This is what I did… I tried to ‘just move on’ without blocking them, but they had commented several times in a thread I was trying to read and it was such a distraction, so I blocked them and only ever think of them when I see posts like this. It’s a shame too because the person I blocked did seem to have worthwhile comments, they were just too annoying to try to read.

I keep seeing this assertion that Yahoo linkjacks stories, but that isn’t true. Yahoo is a news aggregator and pays to syndicate stories from a large number of sources.

In fact, Yahoo not only paid for the story, but at the very top of the page, and in the article itself, they attribute it to NBC News.

You can stand down from this mission of protecting online news sources from Yahoo and redirect your efforts to some other worthy cause.

The catch is it’ll be enshittified as soon as it can.

Is there a source for this?

My point is that just because you are living paycheck to paycheck doesn’t mean you can’t still save. It’s a decision that you have to make but it is doable because no matter how bad you’re situation is, there are other people getting by on 5%-10% less than you. By insisting that someone living paycheck to paycheck can’t also have savings is what’s doing a disservice to them.

Hey now, to be fair, all those many, many times when the Old Testament recorded the Israelites committing genocide, they were doing it because God specifically told them to do it. It’s not like they would EVER go against the will of God.

I didn’t say that the savings didn’t make a difference, I said that having an additional small amount of money available to be each part period wouldn’t have kept me from living paycheck to paycheck. Of course having the savings made a difference when something major happened, that was the whole point.

During the time I was getting paid around $25k a year I was bringing home around $700 a paycheck (every 2 weeks). Me putting aside 10% between my 401k and my savings meant that I had around $30 every 2 weeks going into savings. I often ran out of available money several days before my next check, and having an additional $30 would have been nice, but would have likely only given me another few days.

And yes, when I had unexpected bills, and later when I lost my job, I did dip into my savings because that’s why I had it, but that 10% want going to be the difference between me living paycheck to paycheck, or not. In fact, the transition to not living that way was a very gradual process.

So your view of paycheck to paycheck is likely even smaller than Bank of America’s because you wouldn’t count someone with a 401k?

But I would exhaust the money from my paycheck that was in my checking account, and I had many times where I would also empty my savings when I’d get hit with an unexpected expense.

My point was that even though I was saving money, it wasn’t ever money that I ever saw in my bank account. My 401k was taken from my paycheck and I couldn’t even think about touching that with a lot of effort and expense. I had my direct deposit setup to send most of my check to my checking account, but I always had a small amount going to my savings at a different credit union. My toughest years I was making around $25k a year and I had 5% of my income going to my 401k and 5% going to my savings. My rent, car payment and car insurance would be the first things I paid each month and usually that meant my first 2 weeks of the month were sparse and if I had stopped putting aside that 10% it would have been a little help, but not enough to get through to my next check. So yes, I had access to money, but I was still living paycheck to paycheck because I had strict rules on when I could access that money - and I tried to pay back to my savings anything I took out, when possible.

Would you consider someone adding to their 401k each check to not be living paycheck to paycheck?

I am surprised and would have expected that number to be higher.

Oh, that isn’t the definition I think most people use for the term “paycheck-to-paycheck”.

I think you answered your own question because you’re using a different definition than Bank of America. I have always been a saver, as a kid is squirrel money away in different places, and when I became an adult I kind of kept the same mentality, even when I considered myself as living paycheck to paycheck, I was still putting money aside in different places (401k, HSA, savings, Fidelity, etc). It wasn’t a lot going to any place, but it was consistent at around 10% in total. The way I saw it was that there are plenty of people surviving while earning 10% less than I do, so I just had to make sure I never missed the money. So my definition of living paycheck to paycheck is likely different from yours, if you don’t allow for saving.