There is at least one TV application that doesn’t support local streaming without first logging into Plex’s servers. I have an LG tv and it’ll hang at the loading screen, then error out if I don’t have Internet connectivity. I love the TV but LG as a company sucks. I wouldn’t buy it again.

Their daughter is 16, the boyfriend 18.

Edit: it clicked after I posted. You mean it’s more than “mildly”. Agreed.

Brain no work today.

I don’t know how to put this more gently. You’re speaking about a subject that, for anyone familiar with it, it’s pretty clear you don’t know much about, and are getting defensive and doubling down when anyone contradicts you.

It seems like you’re more interested in feeling right than actually being right, and I’m just not interested in wasting my time with someone who would rather write paragraph after paragraph about how other people are wrong than spend 60 seconds first looking online to check if they’re actually right themselves.

In the US and that’s absolutely the norm here. I’d know - I went through it.

Your edit expands the context outside of what we’re discussing - losing 10,000 STEM PhD candidates. People don’t often do part-time PhDs in STEM as they’re not frequently offered. People aren’t keeping their full-time jobs when getting a STEM PhD because that becomes their full-time job.

Looking at it from a super high level, universities apply for funding to complete research, which is completed b graduate students with assistance from faculty. Their tuition is covered to give the graduate student the necessary skills to complete the research while also furthering their other educational goals as time and funds allow.There are often constraints on how and when this research is performed which can make it incompatible with a part-time schedule. The time requirements can also be massive - between classes, teaching, lab research, field research, and being the de-facto lab manager, I easily put in 70-80 hours a week. I even had to sign an agreement that I wouldn’t seek outside work or I’d lose my funding, which ultimately was comical given I wouldn’t have the time

Most PHDs of the type referenced, and most STEM PhDs in general, are fully funded. In other words, tuition and generally some degree of living expenses are covered in exchange for work performed for teaching and research assistantships, fellowships, and grants. This is also true for many STEM masters degrees, though with fewer funding opportunities.

If you’re going post-graduate in a STEM field with a thesis requirement AND are paying tuition, you’re getting fucked.

Not a one. I am disappoint.

https://archive.ph/ki0cB

Lol I was just teasing but I appreciate your very compassionate response.

My partner and I split. Want a roommate?

I have mast cell issues, so a bit similar. I still get the occasional food flare up, but just giving my guts a break works wonders.

I intermittent fast the majority of days and have done so for nearly the last decade. I have a chronic illness that affects my GI tract, among other things, and it helps a lot.

Not getting hangry is a huge perk. Once my flight got stuck for hours in a small town airport with no food nearby. I was watching people get so weird about not eating for a few hours, but I was able to just be okay.

You’re spot on regarding how AI operates.

AI is stupid story time!

I recently helped a friend with a self-hosted VPN problem. He had been using a free trial of Gemini Pro to try to fix it himself but gave up after THREE HOURS. It never tried to help him diagnose the issue, but instead kept coming up with elaborate fixes with names that suggested they were known issues, like The MTU Traffic Jam, The Packet Collision Quandary, and, my favorite, The Alpine Ridge Controller Trap. Then it would run him through an equally elaborate “fix”. When that didn’t work, it would use the failure conditions to propose a new, very serious sounding pile of bullshit and the process would repeat.

I fixed it in about fifteen minutes, most of that time spent undoing all the unnecessary static routing, port forwarding, and driver rollbacks it had him do. The solution? He had a typo in the port number in his peer config.

I can’t deny that LLMs are full of useful knowledge. I read through its output and all of its suggestions absolutely would have quickly and efficiently fixed their accompanying issue, even the thunderbolt/pcie bridging issue, if the real problem had been any of them. They’re just garbage at applying that information.

Archive link for anyone who doesn’t want to deal with the “not a paywall”:

https://archive.ph/XeWFy

I would be shocked if he cared. It’s just not amongst his concerns.

The ads seem to be pretty variable depending on usage so I suspect not everyone is seeing the same thing. I rarely use YouTube in any form. When I do and I’m rawdogging it for whatever reason, it seems like I get a few short ads, like 30s or less. They’re annoying but not awful.

A friend keeps YouTube running constantly on his TV in the background while he works. He gets so many ads and they’re so long! Like several minutes of ads, mostly unskippable, over the course of a 15 minute video. I don’t know how people deal with that shit.

Interesting. You’re saying you can tell the difference between 320 kbps and FLAC? How long ago was this?

Anecdotal, but… I’ve been a musician for 36 years and have fantastic hearing not just for my age but for any age. I know, I have to get it quantitatively tested twice a year!

I can’t tell the difference at all between FLAC and 320 kbps from the same source. I can tell a difference between FLAC and 128 kbps, but it’s not huge. It sounds a bit dull, but I have to be looking for the difference and comparing the two. If you just gave me one or the other with no reference, I might suspect the 128 if it was a simple recording of a single instrument or a song I’m intimately familiar with, and even then I wouldn’t be sure of it. It just sometimes “feels” weird.

So I converted over 4 terabytes of my music stash to 320 kbps and cut the total space into less than 2. Feels good.

I’ll give AI this much credit. I have a rare disease that took me nearly two decades to get diagnosed. I saw over 20 doctors during that time, most of which had no idea while the rest misdiagnosed me.

I had a little intro script I wrote that explained my symptoms to keep it consistent. My roommate is a big AI proponent while I’m AI critical. At his suggestion, I signed up for a free trial for his favorite and gave it my little intro script. It processed for a few seconds, then spit out the correct diagnosis and subtype, then started asking if I had symptoms for a related comorbidity, which I do. That would have saved me 22 years of pain and confusion. WTF.

I’ve had a related chronic injury for this entire time that even my condition-aware doctors have been baffled by. I explained it in detail and AI barfed out its best guess. I worked with it until I had a possible rehab program, which is actually working.

So now I’m AI ambivalent. I strongly believe humans are at best passable doctors, but that the breadth of information for even one discipline is already more than most humans can properly understand and utilize. That’s how you end up with orthopedists that just specialize in one joint or dermatologists who concentrate on just a few conditions - there’s just too much knowledge for one person to handle all of it and that knowledge continues to grow. As medical science becomes even more advanced, I think practitioners will have to lean on technology in some form as the practice of medicine further outstrips human capabilities.

I couldn’t agree more. I got interest in higher-end audio equipment when I was younger, so I went to a local audio shop to test out some Grado headphones. They had a display of different headphones all hooked up to the “same” audio source.

60x vs 80x sounded identical. 60x to 125x, the latter had a bit more bass. 125x to 325x, the latter had a lot more bass and the clarity was a bit better. Then I plugged the 60x into the same connection they had the 325x in. Suddenly the 60x sounded damn similar. Not quite as good, but the 60x was 1/3 the cost and the 325x sure as hell didn’t sound 3x better. They just had the EQ set better for it.

I can’t help but see their comment as a joke. One can only hope

He’s not awful, but his entire schtick is 100% manufactured and not indicative of who he is whatsoever, much like Kid Rock.