Could try hosting a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD). I tried to host an Evennia server last year but could never get it to work properly. Wasn’t a big deal though cause it’s not like I had any friends who wanted to play, lol.

What kind of world do we live in where folks are disappointed that their next kid will be female? It’s dumb society has been crafted this way, stupid af.

I’m probably giving more credit than is due, but:

I don’t think it’s inherently bad for a parent to have a preference for their kid’s sex. If a mother already has a son, I can understand her wanting her next child to be a daughter. Similarly, if a father already has a daughter, I can understand him wanting a son next. All parent/child relationships are special, but I understand parents who are particularly interested in cultivating a mother/daughter or father/son relationship.

Obviously no parent should ever be disappointed in their child for simply being one sex or the other; that’s not okay. But I can understand a parent being disappointed that things didn’t turn out how they had hoped in that regard.

Disclaimer: My father was very transparent that I was a last-ditch-effort for him to finally have a son after having 3 daughters. Thanks dad.

You could use PiVPN (you don’t need to install it specifically on a Raspberry Pi – this is just a handy all-in-one software solution). It supports both OpenVPN and Wireguard standards. Forward the relevant port in your router configuration, set up a single user for yourself in the VPN settings, and then connect via whichever client you prefer (OpenVPN if you use OVPN, or Wireguard if you use Wireguard).

I’ve used it before to access locally-hosted services from outside my home network and it gets the job done with fairly minimal setup.

It’s impressive, just not particularly useful,

I will have to disagree with this. I have found LLMs to be remarkably useful in a variety of circumstances because they are pretty good at regurgitating API documentation and man pages in a relatively small context (effectively making them a very efficient google search).

For example, last week I accidentally deleted a partition from a USB drive. I asked an LLM how I might recover my data using GNU/Linux tools and it pointed me in the direction of ddrescue (and subsequently, gddrescue) and showed me how I could use the recovered disk image to recover my lost files.

I was already aware of ‘dd’ as a tool for disk management, but was wholly ignorant of ddrescue or gddrescue because I haven’t had a data recovery use case in over 15 years. It was a fairly simple affair, and it was much easier than asking StackOverflow.

I dunno if I’d say I’m “unimpressed” with AI. I certainly find the technology itself fascinating. I worked with machine learning for years before consumer generative AI became mainstream and it’s profoundly impressive what decades of research and development have yielded. I genuinely do admire the painstaking work that underappreciated computer scientists have put in to make such things possible.

That said, “AI” is the new “blockchain” insofar as virtually every company on the S&P 500 has decided this is the new be-all-end-all feature that must be integrated into every aspect of every project. I don’t need AI to be part of my OS. I will open a new tab in my web browser if I decide I have a task for it. Granted, I am not a representative sample of a typical computer user (I use GNU/Linux btw).

To say nothing of the unethical manner in which these models are trained, using works produced by actual writers, artists, programmers, etc. Obviously profiting from their works while offering zero compensation (and actively taking work away from them by offering AI as an alternative to their craft).

I do love when this happens. I could probably think of more examples if I took the time, but the first that immediately springs to mind is Buffy the Vampire Slayer pulling a rocket launcher on a vampire.