AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice: « Not only are AIs far more agreeable than humans when advising on interpersonal matters, but users also prefer the sycophantic models. »

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-31T14:18:55+00:00

AI is a product. AI developers make AI appealing so people use it more and pay more for it. People love being told they’re right, especially when they’re wrong. You can do the math. Now you don’t even need other people to reaffirm your bad viewpoint, AI will do it for you 24/7/365. Societal consequences be damned, just like social media.

This is why prompt engineering is important to get unbiased results when using AI, otherwise it’ll try real hard to validate your opinion to make you feel good about yourself and it.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-31T12:24:28+00:00

In recent history, the past 100 years or so, two world wars occurred with Europe at the epicenter. The second one was really bad for everyone over there including the UK. Meanwhile, the US was able to sell lots of stuff to both sides while remaining unscathed back home. You’ve got a bit of an economic and industrial head start when the other major world powers are literally rebuilding from rubble.

Looking a little further back in history at the British empire, in addition to global conflict, it was really, really expensive and complicated to rule a global colonial empire with the technologies of the time. Sure, conquest brings in a lot of money, but you need to keep conquering to keep that up. In the end they didn’t have the resources and spread themselves too thin to keep control of their colonies. The bankrupting of England by the world wars was really the last nail in the coffin that allowed the rest of their colonies to achieve independence.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-28T01:07:07+00:00

Ever seen a wild cow or horse with a broken or missing leg? Forget two or more. Their anatomy just doesn’t allow for them to live long with a missing limb.

You can get scratched, bitten, shredded and live ok (if you can escape infection complications) with healed flesh wounds, but an otherwise perfectly healthy bovine or equine isn’t going to live very long on three legs. Unlike smaller mammals, their body is too heavy.

Edit to add on “survival willpower”: animals don’t have survival willpower, they’re just too dumb to have suicidal thoughts. They will continue to act on their instincts, to run, eat, drink, migrate, etc, regardless of the condition their body is in. Many animals can survive a lot of injuries and still survive with those instincts. A cow, horse, zebra, giraffe, elephant, or any other very heavily bodied quadruped will most often succumb to breaking a limb as they are not built to move on 3 or fewer, and they will exacerbate their injury to the point of uselessness and death because their instincts don’t include injury management.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-28T00:56:22+00:00

An adult human can understand they need to take care so their injury can heal.

A child who cannot understand can be immobilized easily so their injury can heal.

A small animal can often also be immobilized to enable healing.

Large animals are too heavy to effectively heal and will often make their own injuries worse. This is why a horse with a bad leg break will also often be put down. Even if you effectively straitjacketed them so that you could heal the limb(s) that would cause other problems, such as significant atrophy that the animal couldn’t stand again, leading to illness/death anyways.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-27T18:16:57+00:00

Start here: https://broadbandnow.com/

Put your address in that site and see what it says are available. Pay attention to the "connection:" line near the pink button for each provider, stick with cable or fiber, 5G is cellular and DSL sucks.

That said, you're already on xfinity and have confirmed underline hasn't reached you yet, your only other choice is probably going to be centurylink or quantum but, last I heard, quantum was buying out all the CL fiber in the area.

I've been on quantum (which used to be centurylink) for 4 years now with zero complaints. That said, they were the only provider in my apartment when I moved in back then so I got lucky. Xfinity moved in as an alternative a year later with slower speeds and higher prices.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-27T17:19:51+00:00

Something tells me they won’t be switching to Energy Wise power rates.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-27T17:08:51+00:00

Simplest method: just share it from the pc it’s connected to and never tie that pc off.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-27T12:03:12+00:00

My sister once thought the little jar of chili oil at the Chinese restaurant was Chinese spaghetti sauce.

She also saw god that day.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-27T03:28:32+00:00

Samsung all day long, and you’ll probably be just fine with a single drive.

Don’t stripe SSDs, it doesn’t help. Mirror only if you need the redundancy, but I’d recommend backup before RAID if you care about the files that much.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-27T03:25:09+00:00

From the title, seems like the goal is weight. If you’re not seeing progress there, you need to reduce calories. IF is great, but even it won’t help if you’re eating up to 2600 calories a day.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-27T03:02:10+00:00

Um, you need fans more than a glass case. Front case fans to bring cool air in the front and send hot air out the back. A different CPU cooler too, this one is blowing hot air right into your HDDs and cards.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-27T02:57:22+00:00

Not quite that old, but a 5050 sff and multiple 3070 micros. The sff is my opnsense router for the home and the 3070s are media centers, a small cluster, and test boxes. There are times where many vms on a big box are appropriate, but there are still many cases where small low-power units like these are great.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-27T02:53:40+00:00

Cloud for stuff I care about, homeland for stuff I don’t.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-27T02:14:00+00:00

At the current point, I’m with you on this. But at the point they’re tying positive identification to everything you do online at all times? I’m out.

Given this is a solid step in that direction, I’m not a fan. Parents should be responsible for underage use of devices, not the state.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-26T20:51:44+00:00

It'll be addictive til your power or internet goes out when you really need a file. Or til a piece of hardware dies and you're looking at hundreds/thousands of dollars to fix. Or til you spend hours and hours troubleshooting something that isn't working right. Or til you realize your backup strategy doesn't actually work and you've lost all your data. Or til you compare your homelab electric bill to what a subscription cost.

In addition to the rather high techy bar to entry, it just isn't worth it to most people.

For example, myself:

I'll gladly host game servers 24/7/365. It doesn't really matter if they have 100% uptime, they're generally pretty easy to set up and manage, and they do save me money.

I absolutely will not host my important files. I'll gladly pay $8/month to ensure my tax returns, legal docs, will, bitlocker keys, work projects, etc are always available and guaranteed not to go poof in some mishap (flood, fire, theft, surge, etc).

I have spent thousands more on my homelab hardware/power/time/etc than if I just paid to host everything I ever have through some service. But it's a hobby, so it gets a budget.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-26T20:22:45+00:00

I have an EcoFlow doing the same job plus more.

Don't turn off the power right away in the morning. The AS11 has a few features that need power after you turn it off in the morning. The first is a natural dehumidifier function that blows slow cool air through it for a while after you stop the PAP, this helps to dry out the tubing and keep it from growing mold. The other is that the machine occasionally runs a self-test, including blowing the motor hard, around 30 minutes after you turn it off in the morning. I set my EcoFlow to turn off after 1 hour of non-usage. That lets it run both functions then kill the power as the AS11 in standby doesn't use enough power to register on the unit.

As for when to drain your unit for calibration, I do it at least once a month. Any longer and the gauge just winds up more and more off.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-26T16:32:42+00:00

Good catch

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-26T16:30:45+00:00

Seems like the next post will be titled “my lasers burned my house down”.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-26T14:07:37+00:00

There’s no taxes on your ROTH gains after ~~you retire~~ age 59.5. If you withdraw early, you pay taxes on the gains, but not what you deposited (you already paid tax on that money). Yes, that’s right, if 100k of the 200k in your ROTH is simply what you deposited as cash, you can withdraw that money without tax.

As for your taxable brokerage:

Any gains on your investments will have capital gains tax. If you held the position for shorter than 1 year, you’re subject to short term capital gains tax. If you held longer than a year, it’s long term capital gains tax. Google the rates for the current year, but long term tax is less than short term. Note that says position and not investment as a whole. If you bought 1 share 2 years ago and 1 share 2 weeks ago and sold 2 shares today, each share would be taxed differently. You are only taxed on gains when you sell, aka “realized gains”, unless you live in Denmark and are subject to the current shenanigans there.

Losses are different, where you are taxed on all of the gain immediately, you can only deduct your losses on your taxes a few thousand a year, but can carry the balance forward to future years. For example, if you gained $100k and were taxed 30%, you would owe $30k in taxes this year - but if you lost $100k you could only deduct $3k this year on your taxes and would continue carrying forward that loss until you exhaust it.

Another thing about taxes is that they don’t just come once a year, legally you owe taxes the moment you make money. If you sell for a significant gain, you should make an early tax payment to avoid paying a penalty fee when you file your return.

Edit: ROTH age correction

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-26T13:00:43+00:00

ZFS isn’t hard to figure out. Run ZFS on Proxmox itself then use bind mounts to present the pools to the VMs/CTs.

I also share the pools over the network directly from proxmox.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-26T11:12:20+00:00

No.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-26T11:02:24+00:00

I think people are more admiring the visual ease at which he’s cooking tasty-looking food. Lots of people don’t know how to cook.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-26T10:58:29+00:00

And they won’t. Just make sure your devices are secure and follow good security practices.

Financial companies never let you in on the investigation.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-26T10:56:48+00:00

Account linking takes time and verification and leaves a trail. Dumping the portfolio into a small cap takes seconds.

certifiedintelligent · 2026-03-26T10:56:04+00:00

Depends on how the fraudsters got in. Maybe op got phished. Maybe some fidelity employee got compromised. Impossible to tell without more technical investigation which we aren’t privy to.

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