SAN SERO Vented Microwave Cover. I was just thinking about this the other day. I've owned this thing for over 9 years and use it nearly every day. At the time I think I paid like $20 for it (it's $34 now). And I thought that might be silly for what is basically a piece of plastic.
But holy crap, it's got to be my highest value-to-dollar ratio item EVER.
With it, I hardly ever have to clean my microwave. It keeps splatters to the cover itself, which is trivial to wash out.
And it helps with energy efficiency too, keeping heat close to the food, instead of it being lost as waste heat.
It comes with tiny vent holes at the top, so it won't steam up much or pop off.
And it has a nice handle built into the top middle of it, so most of the time you can grab that without burning yourself.
It also fits perfectly onto your typical round dinner plate. I mean perfectly.
This thing has been with me through four different homes/house moves, and hundreds of times of cooking or re-heating items on bowls and plates.
It's easily the best thing I've bought in my life.
Cool. I remember a buddy showing it to me in his college dorm room. I was more interested in Unreal Tournament (which released a year later) at the time and probably couldn't afford to buy another game anyway. But I was positively obsessed with Half Life 2 a few years later...
Honestly there's not that much one can do, but I will:
Hope Trump is thrown in prison
Vote straight ticket Democrat
Hope another Jan. 6 doesn't occur
Try not to lose my shit when idiots say stuff like "both parties are equally bad"
I live in a solid blue state, so my national-level votes don't do much (though I'll cast them anyway).
In past years I've thrown a few hundred dollars at close senate and house races. In 2020 I volunteered for a phone/text bank sort of deal to make sure people were registered to vote.
It's good to be cautious. I agree. Indeed, as I have deep expertise in programming, I recognize when it is over-complicating things or outright hallucinating. And I'll double check output when it's important.
But that doesn't discount the incredible usefulness of these tools. I've noticed a 20-30% productivity boost in my work, and googling for things now feels like a step back to the dark ages. Stack Overflow laid off 28 percent of its staff.
Even as just a sounding board, mentor, coach, and idea generator, the tools are so helpful. And that aspect doesn't require 100% accuracy. And if you think about it, it's not like pre-LLM documentation on the web or chatting with colleagues was ever flawless. We've all run into a post online that was confidently wrong, or a coworker that stubbornly insisted on something stupid.
Here's another thing to consider: while the tools have flaws and limits, this is the worst they'll ever be going forward. There's constant new improvements, like like tree of thought prompting and multi-modality. Just the other day, I took a photo of a wire mess near my home router with GPT Vision, and I had the LLM suggest cable-neatening products and methods (I've always struggled with cable management).
In fact, the biggest limit I've noticed is simply people's lack of creativity in using the tools (or willingness to use them), not the tools themselves.
They're here to stay. ChatGPT became the most-used / most-quickly adopted product of all time for a reason. Those who are willing to work with them and learn about them (both their strengths and weaknesses) will benefit, and those unwilling to do so, and who are too-dismissive, will fall behind.
help with learning a new programming framework/language
questions about basic home repair and issue prevention
when I feel anxious or vaguely depressed but can't put my finger on exactly why or what's causing it, it's a great sounding board
nutrition questions about specific foods or meals
things to add to a simple meal to make it more interesting / complete
weighing pros and cons for an important decision, getting ideas I may have not thought of
conducting a mock interview for me when I give it a job description and my resume
random *nix commandline recipes where I don't want to spend 10 minutes googling and inevitably landing on SEO garbage blogs and just need a quick snippet
rip_art_bell @ rip_art_bell @lemmy.world Posts 12Comments 170Joined 2 yr. ago
Yes I did. And it’s brilliant.