Hmmm, an RPi with a camera might well work. The problem there is more the amount of work I’d need to do - I haven’t got that kind of time right now.

An honest answer that it’s not currently easily doable is in and of itself useful.

This is a “nice to have”. I figured I’d ask preemptively so that I didn’t go down a blind alley. Thanks!

I would be buying. The cam I borrowed wouldn’t fit the setup I want, I just mentioned it because I want that functionality but without the hassle of pulling the SD card.

So far it doesn’t sound like what I want exists, unfortunately.

That essentially boils down to “build your own solution”, which under my current circumstances amounts to “don’t do it”. Not that I lack the skill or will but the spare time and energy I have is used on my baby daughter. I can’t justify rabbit holing on something like this.

It’s why I created this thread - to see if there’s a software and hardware combo that solves this with minimal additional work.

WiFi would be easily sufficient. We’re talking a distance of 10m from my router, tops.

I borrowed a camera - it’s not the one I would be using for this.

That’s why I’m asking. I haven’t bought anything yet and don’t want to get the wrong thing.

That would be possible, yep.

If it can only handle tasks I can do myself it’s not very useful.

My experience has been that more complex cases it simply cannot manage. It’ll swear blind that it’s got it right and the result will be super specific to the example provided. If I knew what the strings would be exactly, in advance, I wouldn’t be writing regex 😂

That’s the thing though - I find that what it saves me in time writing it costs me in reviewing. I hate reviewing.

Shall we ask it to write functional regex too while we’re at it?

If so, is it any good?

I imagine if one writes janky spaghetti then it’s easy to think that LLMs will result in redundancy. My experience is that they’re like having an over-enthusiastic junior who doesn’t learn. Useful when one can’t be bothered to write something with very limited scope but is quickly out of their depth on anything involved.

So you think that 90-100% of programming jobs WON’T be replaced by AI within a decade?

Stop, stop, I can’t breathe!

This really hammers home how naff the rats in Dishonored were. They’re slightly prettier than these but with eleven years of additional technological progress my expectations were a smidge higher.

I tend to find them useful for taking nebulous, multi-faceted situations and turning them into a better understanding of what’s going on and then determining actual actions.

As in “different customers want us to do different things, some of which overlap, some of which take ages, some of which are quick, some of which take a load of work to even understand, and who have we got ready to tackle this stuff?”

The meeting takes a while and melts everyone’s brains by the end, but the result isn’t loads more long meetings.

Without being a capitalism apologist, I opted into being employed after years of being self-employed or a freelance contractors. I don’t have to do the admin and work gets delivered to me on a platter. The pay isn’t as good as it could be but I also don’t have to worry about taking time off for illness and I get holiday time too.

Crucially though, I opted into it. It wasn’t my only option.

If she loves it, why does she want to do less of it?

Despite all the awfulness, it can be kinda nice to be amongst a lot of humans celebrating something.

I mean, I’m not doing it, but it’s not all bad.

I’m pretty open. I’ve been using the internet this way for about 25 years and to date it’s never been a problem. I’ve got clothes with my handle across the shoulders, etc. so it’s not a secret who I am. I try not to be too specific about some stuff that I don’t feel are mine to talk about, or that might be professionally problematic (I don’t really talk about my current employment anyway - I’m not ashamed of it, it’s just not very interesting and doesn’t particularly define me so it’s not very relevant).

In various online communities over the years I’ve been one of the biggest fish so I’m occasionally recognised which varies between flattering and a little uncomfortable (usually in terms of " You clearly want something so what is it you want me to do/not do or wish I had done/hadn’t done?" but with socially awkward pleasantries). This has resulted in someone trying to use an FAQ I wrote to argue against me, not realising - meaning I effectively had to dust off the old “don’t you know who I am‽” type of response (albeit minus the diva overtones).

In the past the odd person has been a bit stalky and then been surprised when this information doesn’t intimidate me (I recall a particularly memorable one being “I know what you look like” to which my response was a photo of me with a shocked face). I do care what other people think but disapproval doesn’t bother me all that much. I try to be true to myself so when confronted there’s nothing to use against me - there’s no cognitive dissonance (so if I was an arsehole, no, I meant to be, it wasn’t an accident, it’s what I felt was an honest response to the situation).

I can only tell the difference when I see the two together!