It's been a damned minute since I posted here. I've been kind of busy dealing with this and that project, the largest and most demanding of which is to produce a local-first self-hosted LLM environment.
I know that will turn a lot of people off who are my 'peers' on this site, but here's the thing you have to understand; it isn't going away. When we get to that truth, then we can move on to questions like 1) what is useful about it 2) what is definitely not useful about it 3) how to get the most out of it without spreading yourself all over the internet 4) how to avoid enriching the asshats and 5 how to not use BIG AI to do it (well, mostly).
I've been doing other interesting things too, like discovering that my BP meds increase my risk of skin cancer by 30%, and installing commercial refrigeration in my garage (it was only a few hundred bucks more per unit, is more efficient, and is twice as big as anything we could get of a more residential orientation), and hey, a first for me: I actually fixed a laptop. Every laptop I have attempted to work on previously just, well, I destroyed them.
This one, a 17" dell i7, I replaced it's internal battery. Bricked it. Threw it across the room ontho the shag carpet where I actually stepped on it a couple of times; and as I went to take the battery out to return it, I said to myself 'see if it comes on one last time', and I did, it did, and it's been charging, booting up reliably and holding a charge ever since.
