This is a pretty apt analogy, I think.

We’ve been using copilot at work, and it’s really surprised me with some slick suggestions that “mostly work”. But I don’t think it could have written anything beyond the boilerplate my team has done.

(I also spend way too much time watching Copilot and Intellisense fight, and it pisses me off to no end.)

Yeah, they’re a skip to endgame content. But they’re not any kind of “instant win.”

The couple types of pvp aren’t tied to your character level, and the most difficult raid content is best run with a group that you practice with. If you’ve never played, simply grabbing the game and one of those packages isn’t going to give you an immediate edge.

XIV is sort of a single player game with a bunch of coop boss fights.

And, not to be cliche, but you can play through the entire first two arcs (A Realm Reborn and Heavensward) completely free, with no real limitations. The only things locked out of the free tier are the more social aspects, and any content above level 60. A handful of jobs are locked, but there is a ridiculous amount of content available for free.

I’ve played a few other mmos and hated them all. XIV is something weirdly different. And the overwhelming majority of the community is chill and friendly.

This is actually a great theory. I’ve fixed several monitors and TVs that were just bad capacitors. It’s a logical conclusion with these, too.

I have my old Athlon fx lying around. Needs a case, psu, and the nic… Hmmmm

Yeah, those little micro units are what I had seen recommended. $300-400 is definitely pushing it for me. Especially when I would also want a bigger switch to accompany it.

Guess I need to stop eating avocado toast.

Edit: how is the stability/uptime for those little machines? Historically, I’ve always had problems with my routers needing to be rebooted at least once a month after they’ve been in service for 18-24 months. Even my current “business class” cisco router is crapping out on me every month.

I’m already using my own modem, none of that locked-down rental nonsense from my isp.

What hardware do you use for pf/opnSense? All of the recommended stuff I’ve seen is almost prohibitively expensive for my home networking budget.

I feel like it’s just me, but all of my devices with Open/DDWRT crap out after a couple years. Even well-reviewed prosumer-grade gear ends up becoming wildly unreliable in an unacceptably short amount of time. I had to double-check, and my order history puts me at a new router every 2-3 years. This “business class” RV260 will be hitting 2 years in the fall, and I’m already experiencing wonky behavior where it needs to be rebooted regularly. Maybe it’s just an unspoken truth that anything below true “enterprise tier” kit requires a weekly reboot. I should just put it on an outlet to cycle the power every Sunday at 2am or something…

That said, I do love DDWRT!

100%. I have some function nodes to do things in JS, especially for date checking. And I think you can even get it to call shell scripts? I’m sure there’s an add-on that would do it.

Agreed that it really is a pleasant experience.

I’m intending to upgrade to a pfSense router and some other switch in the future. This is just supposed to be a temporary-ish investigation into the potential fuckery coming from my ISP.

I’ve been using nodered with homeassistant for a few years, and have also used it to add minor integrations for some external apps to send push notifications through HA.

On the surface, nodered looks like “programming for non-programmers”, and I’ve seen it get knocked for that. It’s really not that at all. Yes, it’s a node-based system and you’re not “writing code” but it’s very robust and can do a heck of a lot. I highly recommend folks check it out, it’s a pretty powerful little system, and I’ve been running it on my ancient amd fx-6300 server (along side a bunch of other docker containers) without any noticeable system slowdown.

Ah. Good to know! I’m starting to dive down this rabbit hole, and we’ll see where it takes me. Thanks :)

It’s not easy, that’s for sure. Communication is always important, but what works for one kid may not work for another. Hopefully it continues well as she enters high school!

Good luck with your own in the future!

This is more or less exactly what we did with our kiddo. We had time limits and strict control when she was little. Then moved into similar time limits and a looser “over-the-shoulder” monitoring plus a monitoring app that we’d sort of look at monthly. Now she’s a teen with her own phone (13 when she got it, and it was my old device), an iPad, and a gaming pc. Time limits are sort of out the window now, and the monitoring app is more or less useless. But we do still have a tech curfew for everything except Spotify and offline creative endeavors.

She was 100% a part of the decision-making and understood the role of the “nanny” software. It’s always been a major point to discuss these things with her, and explain “why” at every step of the process. She’s also pretty sharp when it comes to identifying harmful things, and even comes to us when she stumbles across a potentially questionable video or something.

Open two-way communication has always been important and a focus in all of these issues. I grew up with conservative totalitarian parents, and learned how to lie and be sneaky just to be myself. I don’t want that for her, and while I know we’ve screwed up along the way (who doesn’t?), she seems a lot healthier than I was at her age.

I love Slothrust. Not only do they have my absolute favorite lyric ("I like cats, do you like cats…) but their most recent album, Parallel Timeline, is fantastic. It helped me survive 2022.

And it’s nice seeing someone else mention them for once!

I’ve been subscribed for a while. I don’t think I could ever go back to another launcher.

Combined with Tapet for subtle geometric wallpapers, my home screen is a dream.

My biggest issue with Octopath was the grind. Maybe I was playing “wrong”, but I hit a point fairly early on where I wasn’t high enough level to continue the story. I was sort of stuck in an in-between spot where I could win fights but get trivial amounts of xp, or die every other encounter.

The story had me hooked, I love the visual style, and I liked the combat system… But the grind destroyed me.