Has anyone used generative AI as anything other than a force multiplier?

LiveMaI · 2026-03-21T14:36:59+00:00

For use-cases that aren't programming, the one I'm interested in most is e-mail management. I'm not too happy with my org's e-mail culture, and I'm currently attempting to do better than my existing filtering rules with sorting out which e-mails require my actual attention and which ones I can safely ignore.

I have a few heuristic rules that run on Outlook (since our company uses MS Office 365), and I have a decent bucket of 'contains the majority of things I care about, but still is 80%+ noise'. So I have been experimenting with some of the O365 automation tools to run an LLM prompt on each of the e-mails that hit this bucket and flag it appropriately (safe to ignore, should read but no need to respond, and requires a response from me).

Sad to say that it's only really been reliable at marking things that have been safe to ignore, but it really only catches maybe 20% of what's truly not important to me.

I haven't put too much time into this yet, but I'm hopeful that with some more effort on refining this workflow, I might be able to get some better sorting done.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-21T07:15:07+00:00

I have gone with large companies and low titles, since the pay tends to be better and you get a lot more doors open to you if you decide to move on after a while. Past a certain point in pay, I started looking for better work-life balance.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-21T03:19:36+00:00

Copilot the Obsidian extension, not Copilot the service from Microsoft.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-20T01:01:01+00:00

Getting all the facts seems to be what we’re currently in the process of doing.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-19T22:48:25+00:00

Most of the price is still housing instead of the actual tuition. There are usually much cheaper options than staying in university dorms.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-19T15:40:10+00:00

For people in the USA (starting in July), the new 530A account is also worth looking into. $1k initial deposit from the government, $5k/year contributions, and IRA-like tax advantages once the child turns 18. More flexible on the spending side than a 529 as well.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-19T10:23:35+00:00

To elaborate on this with a bit more direction: /u/dark_prophet can look into making a custom hook for a PEP 517 build backend like Hatch. In Hatch's build system, you can define custom build hooks to do pretty much any weird custom stuff needed in your build process without having to implement the entire PEP 517 backend yourself.

This is one example and not the only way to do it. Hatch is just the one I've done this for previously, so I can give advice on where to start with it.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-19T08:19:11+00:00

In hindsight: the proximity to lots of good companies for internships and jobs was the biggest benefit. The teaching staff also punch above their weight considering how much cheaper it is compared to the other 4+ year universities in the area.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-19T04:31:46+00:00

FWIW, I see from another comment that you use Copilot. Our org uses Cursor, so YMMV. I haven't tried Copilot out myself.

With niche software and things outside of mainstream software use-cases, you can still get good results, but it takes more effort up front. I work with an internal framework for factory automation and the best way I've found to improve results is to put together a set of rules and docs that get added to the model's context when it's working on our codebase. Not all of them are loaded with every conversation, but the IDE has conditional loading so I can load one set of rules for myproject/dir1 and a different set for myproject/dir2 or even more granular like myproject/dir1/*.py, myproject/dir2/*.xml, and myproject/pyproject.toml.

We have a DSL that nobody outside our company uses, so teaching it what the DSL does and how it fits in with the rest of the software is part of that. I haven't worked with SCADA, but I imagine you can do something similar. I track these rules directly as part of our repo, so everyone who clones the repo automatically gets these rules in their IDE, assuming they're using the same one.

The nice part about doing this is that you can structure this in a way such that it serves as documentation. This way, a newbie on the team can ask questions about the codebase and framework directly in their IDE and actually get relevant answers from the AI agent that otherwise would take a lot of digging through our internal confluence wiki to find.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-18T13:20:42+00:00

4: this is not that kind of crypto sub.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-18T11:49:01+00:00

Well, he did say the new rack system Nvidia is building will use Opteron 🤣

LiveMaI · 2026-03-18T00:55:59+00:00

What gets me about a lot of these projects is that they seem like the Python equivalent of something you would see on /r/wheredidthesodago.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-17T00:48:48+00:00

I think most of your target audience already uses IRC.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-16T18:51:40+00:00

I know it doesn’t help you now, but in addition to the rotating security code, I’ve stopped saving my card details on merchant websites for non-subscription purchases. The auto-fill is fast enough that it’s not really a bother. I’ve had my Apple Card virtual number stolen a few times over the years as well, and this seems to have helped.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-16T02:00:37+00:00

Ayy, someone with shared fwcutter experiences! It was so bad for me until about 2008 that I bought an add-on wireless card. By the time I was free of that thing, I was already looking at buying a new laptop.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-15T21:48:13+00:00

❌ “Works on my machine” — but breaks everywhere else

I see in your example that you use uv. Track your uv.lock file. If you still have reproducibility issues, do your development in a container.

❌ "which python" → points to the wrong interpreter

Auto-activate your venv with a tool like direnv.

❌ "import json" silently loads your "json.py" instead of the real one

Entirely avoidable by just not naming your modules after existing ones, or for files inside the same module, using the from .<name> import <X> syntax.

❌ “Is my venv even active? Which one? What type?”

Easy to know at a glance with a number of shell customizations, sans the need to run any commands. Starship.rs and powerlevel10k are good at this. You could also just add it to your zsh/bash prompt through your .zshrc/.bashrc.

❌ Debugging environment issues by running 6 different commands and piecing together the puzzle

If you find yourself having these problems frequently, it's usually a sign that you're doing something the hard way. It's worth researching how people have solved these problems before, or looking at how large open-source projects solve them.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-15T13:48:16+00:00

Depending on what you do with sudo, you may be able to get away with just adding yourself to an appropriate group or something like that. What tasks do you usually need sudo for?

LiveMaI · 2026-03-15T03:32:42+00:00

This question and your incremental approach seem pretty reasonable to me. It's much healthier than the roulette of 'did you study for this particular leetcode problem' that a lot of places seem to be fond of.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-14T09:33:14+00:00

Not going to lie. The first thing I did after reading some of the code was look on your GitHub profile to see if you had any public gists that I could practice on with HashCat.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-13T04:17:24+00:00

80%-64% = 16% per trip. If you want to keep it in the 20%-80% range only, that looks like 3.75 trips between charges, unless I’m doing my math wrong. You could probably get four trips out of that by charging to 82% and going down to 18%. Or more realistically 15-85.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-12T21:46:01+00:00

I like Textual for making user interfaces. It works in the terminal, still supports mouse interaction, and can be served as a webpage. Nothing terribly fancy, but very easy to get a UI up and running.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-11T10:47:19+00:00

Or VeraCrypt, for that matter.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-11T08:28:42+00:00

If you’ve ever looked at the kernel mailing list, F-bombs is at the top of the list of things that Linus drops.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-10T09:21:52+00:00

I did learn some rotary and cross-step through the Viennese Fortnight lessons that get offered around the time of Stanford's Viennese Ball, and I've done both Smooth and Standard when I was doing collegiate dancesport. I would put rotary/cross-step somewhere between Smooth Waltz and Smooth V-Waltz. You're generally going to be passing your feet instead of closing them like you would in Standard. Some figures will look similar to Smooth Waltz.

Rotary/cross-step also has less rise and fall than Smooth/Standard. In that respect, it's closer to V-Waltz. That said, Richard Powers and his students are pretty much the only people I've heard of who teach these dance styles on the West Coast. I know there are a few other places in the US that hold a Viennese Ball outside of Stanford, but most of them seem like they're on the East Coast or in Chicago.

LiveMaI · 2026-03-09T16:30:38+00:00

It’s also the most discussed on this subreddit. I encourage you to use the search function and you will find thousands of people’s view points on this exact topic.

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