Blech, I've heard stories in my industrial automation days of people being clipped by invisible high pressure steam leaks. No frickin thank you, regular stovetop steam jacks me up frequently enough.
There's precedent for it, that's exactly the (thankfully moronic) dumb shit that happened the last time they had majorities like that. This feels different this time, with the Supreme Court and such, but who knows. Lotta self centered people imagining themselves on top...may amount to little. One can hope.
Yeah, I hear that. I do think his extreme narrow focus is a legitimate and severe neurodivergence, he's not going to like...stop being that way, ever, to any degree. It's how his mind is shaped I think, he doesn't even enjoy music, laughter, actual human warmth, even just alcohol, all things broadly considered to be the most human things. There's no room for anything but his bizarrely narrow drive.
Whether there are people in his orbit who have learned dangerous things is a more troubling question, one we can only really hope is tempered by his unique extreme toxicity (and hopefully in this case the massive inertia of all the many people in branches of govt who've made that their career and have a personal interest in the status quo).
Yup! Weirdly Trump's own worst qualities also tend to neuter his ability to deal damage somewhat (only somewhat! Goddamn is the man just a pandimensional wrecking ball). He attracts some of the very worst people, but then he chews through them for whatever purpose he had in mind for them, and then invariably even those people leave his orbit and go "wow everyone, that guy really is a piece of shit". Pretty incredible stuff.
Similarly, his only actual ambition is personal greed, specifically his own wealth and fame. There's no ideology or barely even planning in him I don't think. Pretty sure his life is really best described as just the series of the nastiest, most self-serving moves he could think of at each moment along the way, with zero purpose except his own enrichment, both in dollars and fame/what he probably perceives as "power".
Of course what he seems to see as power or something desirable, everyone not trapped in his S-tier narcissism distortion field sees as just him stating the terms of his own manipulation to whomever wants to take advantage, for mutual benefit. Right in the open. But sure, he's the tough talker we need on the world stage, lol. Amazing. Sorry, just realized I have reached full tangent mode now, I regret nothing but I'll end my rant heh.
I do understand what you mean, but I think you're probably significantly overestimating the difficulty of using the tool. One of its major strengths is its ability to just understand you, like you'd talk to anyone human, with the benefit that you can even instruct it to use a style you prefer. Just say "I'd like your answer to be terse, let's see if we're on the right track before getting into details". Just as an example.
With all that said you know what you want and need better than anyone else, that's all I've got to say on it, cheers!
Just throwing this out there, but the problem you're describing sounds like a good fit for an LLM I've been using for similar purposes, Claude.
I've found it to be really good at helping me slog through what would be a burdensome and wasteful amount of reading, in order to answer specific questions OR to get a baseline understanding of a thing.
It's a bit hard to know how much value comes from my engineering background and my tendency to "know what I don't know" and thereby ask focused questions, but it's definitely worth a shot. I have found it to be surprisingly sophisticated and much better than slogging through the wasteland of bad search results + too much unrelated but real info.
A topic like this where there's a tremendous amount of legit docs, articles, and forum activity - it's really the exact use case where it's very difficult for a human, and very easy for an LLM to effectively digest that info.
Some caveats I've noticed:
it sometimes is overly agreeable / "friendly" when it should be more direct
it does sometimes hallucinate or say BS with casual confidence, which sucks because the more you need the info the less well you can spot that. It hasn't hampered usefulness too much for me, but then again I'm usually able to spot the mistakes even in ~unfamiliar subjects
they've moved the free tier back to a less capable model at the moment...most of my good experiences are with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, but Claude 3 Haiku (present free tier) is still good
If you're really curious but the volume of reading and documentation to get started is presenting a big barrier, try using Claude to see how quickly you might be able to clear that obstacle. It's been removing those exact barriers for me very effectively lately.
Edit to add: a particularly useful way I can imagine folks in your shoes using this - as a "companion" while you try to follow a guide in an article somewhere. It can answer questions about terms you don't understand, even reasoning behind doing certain steps or what to do if it goes wrong. In fact, you could almost certainly just feed it the written procedure itself (telling it that you're doing so) and really get it to reason about the process with you. Just help get you through whatever implementation.
Argh, this is exactly the scenario that I've anticipated and has kept me away from similar (home automation as well).
That's what I want, high reliability, local only storage, remote view of some kind, and minimal (ongoing) fuss. Sounds like you did not quite land on that if the thing you bought grosses you out? Or do you mean something different?
Oh man, that's hilarious. "Our business model doesn't actually even work where we live. But I know what we'll do about that, we're going to do it exactly the same in a place we don't have a clue about!"
You're right, but I will say the federal govt has a sometimes magic way of greasing certain wheels and getting things done in a hurry, if the right person is pushing on it.
Not disagreeing and I like that approach. I do want to say, though, that I've committed myself to keeping track of some of the egregious stuff that's going to come and addressing it with the people in my life who voted for Trump and did not properly know / accept what that entailed.
To bring them back, I think we have to find (effective) ways to show them bad things they did not want to happen, that they helped enable, as they occur. It's tough because I don't want to turn every interaction into political badgering (and I won't), but there's no chance I can stay quiet as the great shitshow unfolds, either.
That's definitely part of the problem. I had an incident recently where an older family member had a minor panic. Because I left my (mfg in 2006!!) vehicle running in the driveway while I ran inside. During the day. In a very safe suburban neighborhood. Just a flat out absurd concern and she leapt right to it, instantly. She's always been concerned, she's a grandma, but she wasn't pointlessly terrified like this years ago.
I think many of us don't realize how badly this irrational fear has taken hold, or maybe I should say how effectively this irrational fear has been deployed. Otherwise ~reasonable people are walking around thinking the worst is going to happen everywhere at all times, based on absolutely nothing - worse than nothing, it's based on weaponized deception.
Blech, I've heard stories in my industrial automation days of people being clipped by invisible high pressure steam leaks. No frickin thank you, regular stovetop steam jacks me up frequently enough.