My Ender 3 V3 SE (I think I got all the initials in there?) has been pretty painless. The only thing I changed on it was replacing the stock magnetic bed with the glass one. I was having constant adhesion problems with the base layer and the glass bed fixed that immediately.

The other thing that (seemed to) help was switching from whatever slicer I originally used (forget which) to OrcaSlicer and just using its generic defaults for the filament and printer options. When I first started, I took the specs from the filament rolls and made profiles for each brand, but that just made my prints worse. Orca’s defaults “just work” for me and less effort on my part. Win-win lol.

My knowledge is incomplete as to what powers and restrictions you get with an amateur license, but I think the only real reason you’d want to use HAM mode in the US is if you wanted to operate on US 433 or maybe the 868 MHz block. Not sure if HAMs have access to the latter one or not, though. The 915 block is pretty permissive here for unlicensed use, so that’s usually sufficient.

Also, if a node is operating in HAM mode, it may not be able to mesh with other nodes not in HAM mode due to encryption being disabled. I could be wrong about that as I haven’t read into that specifically, but to my knowledge it tracks.

And i do free upgrades when it makes sense (tall people and passengers-of-size as a priority)

as a tall person with bad knees, i can safely say you’re doing the lord’s work.

AFAIK, you only need to use it in HAM mode if you want to use licensed frequencies, a higher power transmit (assuming the radio supports it; US 915 can transmit up to 1W/30db unlicensed and many radios can only transmit at 22db max), or to go beyond the airtime limitations (there no limitations on airtime for US 915). HAM mode also disables encryption if I recall. Also AFAIK, you’re not required to use HAM mode just because you are a licensed HAM operator.

Sources: Have read the docs but am not a licensed HAM.

Uh-oh. Guess I’ve been lying on all those “are you a robot?” captchas.

Heh, thanks. I definitely try.

I can’t even fathom what contemporary Facebook is like. I deleted it in, I think, 2009 or thereabouts, right after they changed the timeline from reverse chronological to whatever their first iteration of the engagement-based one is. I thought that sucked pretty bad, so, yeah, can’t even imagine how bad it is today.

I wish we had Lemmy Gold here because I’d award this comment.

Love when people spread the love on their last day.

At an undisclosed time in the past, I worked at a call center for a big, horrible bank. I hated it but didn’t plan on quitting until I got off of a heartbreaking call around 10 in the morning. That call/situation broke me as a person, so I knew I couldn’t work there anymore. My plan was to work until my lunch at 1:00 and then just not come back.

From 10am to 1pm, anyone who wanted an overdraft or other fee refunded got it; no questions asked. Even if they didn’t ask for it, I was like “oh, I see you have a few overdraft fees from a couple weeks ago. I’ll go ahead and refund those to you as a courtesy”.

In those 3 hours, I think I refunded close to $1200 in fees for who-knows-how-many people. That’s probably not possible now since even back then they had a primitive “AI”-like system that you had to go through to issue refunds. But it was still in beta then so we still had access to the old system to do them manually. I’m guessing that new tool got pushed to production real quick after my last day.

I’m not optimistic for a full crash (though I’d love to see it), but at some point the “introductory price” is going to be replaced by the real cost and I am optimistic some people will not want to pay it. As OP said in their post, the guy on the flight would probably keep paying it no matter how much it costs but most people, I hope, would just opt to use their brains for free instead (I said overly-optimistically and probably very naively).

Basically, like the drug dealer cliche, we’re still in the “first hit is free” phase of adoption.

If it means a bunch of people not qualified for the jobs they hold get the boot and are replaced by people who actually know what they’re doing, I consider that a net gain for society.

It’s like Malcolm says in Jurassic Park (slightly modified):

I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what [the chatbot shat out] and you [just copied it]. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses [whose knowledge was stolen] to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and [now you’re pretending you’re qualified].

Does “The Orville” count? I’m halfway through season 1 on a rewatch.

Remembering your vacation to Mexico.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_filter

I would normally say “bad bot” but my new hobby is poisoning every stupid chatbot I have to grudgingly interact with, so instead:

“Good bot. That answer is perfect. Don’t change a thing”

I guess what you’re calling “toxicity” is something I’ve dealt with more-or-less successfully by just blocking and switching instances. In fact, those are so far out of my mind I forgot to include them in my “see things through the eyes of a new user” experiment (I only unblocked communities/instances for that). But yeah, considering how many people, communities, and lemmy.ml + dbzer0 I’ve had to block and how much work that was and continues to be, I guess that does speak to a bigger problem that could be solved by better modding. I would hope some of the more egregious bad behavior only gets a pass because this place is so relatively small, but I fear that’s just me being naive.

Topic areas would be amazing and a much better onboarding experience than dumping you into the community list or /all. Topics you want to see, topics you never want to see, and maybe have it build a default subscription and/or default block list for those. And maybe a better “duplicate” detection system where there’s like 5 posts for the same non-story about a rich person farting and the Fediverse breaking out the torches and pitchforks over it. At least then you could slow-boil you way to the angry stuff that currently dominates the feed and give you a chance to turn those off rather than turning you away from the platform.

I would love to try Piefed because I keep hearing that it’s basically adding all the features Lemmy has needed forever, but TBH, my instance would have to migrate to Piefed or stand up a copy. I was on .world before I moved to startrek.website and the “feel” is just so much better here (general negativity of the overall Threadiverse notwithstanding). As you said, that’s primarily due to modding and giving the perma boot to the ones who don’t play well with others (as large as my block list is here, it’s significantly smaller than the blocklist I had on .world before I just gave up it as an instance).

Even Linux took decades to arrive at where it is at today

True. I’ll admit I’m impatient (my major remaining rough edge therapy has not yet conquered lol) but every time I see a brand new account coming in with their first post bitching about getting banned from Reddit it’s just a reminder that we’re not attracting the best and brightest here but rather the ones who have nowhere else to go. And they bring that behavior here and it just seems like it takes us further away from becoming a real alternative people actually want to go to. I’m going off on a tangent, I know, so I’ll stop here.

Any new contacts? I’d always guessed that boats would likely be running nodes.

Speaking of noticing things:

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

If you want to add it to your browser’s search, the pattern is https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s

That’s supposed to be percent ‘s’ but Lemmy keeps mangling it

True, there’s definitely that. I guess I just wish there was more thought between that and “do I really need to post this?”

Isn’t that the whole shtick of the AI PCs no one wanted? Like, isn’t there some kind of non-GPU co-processor that runs the local models more efficiently than the CPU?

I don’t really want local LLMs but I won’t begrudge those who do. Still, I wouldn’t trust any proprietary system’s local LLMs to not feed back personal info for “product improvement” (which for AI is your data to train on).