Over in the ol’ ShopTalk Discord (that’s what our Patreon thingy unlocks) our editor Chris Enns was venting about some streaming gear woes. And I said:
Nothing Ever Works
Chris ultimately blogged the situation and used my reply as part of the title of the blog post.
Then shortly after, Jason Rodriguez’s post made the rounds in my circles: Why doesn’t anything work anymore?
I’ve officially reached “old man yells at cloud” age.
Same, Jason.
I feel like this should be one of those viral blog post topics! Like the “good newsletters” one that went around or “why I started blogging” before that or whatever those were. Let’s make it happen people.
Here’s my list from the last week or so.
I was trying to log into Paramount+ on my AppleTV, but was getting some kind of unclear error. I wasn’t even sure if I had an account or not, so I tried the signup flow from my laptop. Another unclear error. Tried a different browser and the same. I just wanted to watch the Packer game and this service I either already pay or wanted to pay just wouldn’t let me.
I bought a Gandalf costume for Halloween for like $50. The picture has a guy, ya know, dressed up as Gandalf on the cover of the package and it looks fine. Big grey beard. Small text on the package: beard not included. Come the heck on.
.HEIC file format. I use TablePlus (which I get through SetApp) for local database spelunking. I had some data I was trying to get at that I knew was going to be a fairly complicated query to write. It was a count of entries on a column that wasn’t the index but then I needed the index to join onto another table while having where filter and also filtering on that final count as well. I could probably reason it out, but it would probably take me an hour. So I was like: AI! Turns out TablePlus does have an AI assistant built in, so I tossed in my OpenAI API key and…
You exceeded your current quota, please check your plan and billing details.
Fair enough. Figure out where I can put a few bucks into my account and… I get some “unknown” error. WHY WILL NOBODY TAKE MY MONEY. I tried another browser and another credit card and turned off any “blocker” extensions I had in case of interference, but nothing worked. So I tried to use the Anthropic integration instead, and it was behaving the same. (In retrospect, it was probably the us-east-1 downtime period.)
I tried the Gemini integration last, and it worked and I got my API key properly. I got my prompt together explaining exactly what I needed to do and…
I am sorry, I cannot fulfill this request. The available tools lack the ability to query data or cross-reference tables. I can only retrieve metadata such as database lists, schema lists, table lists, and table creation statements.
What in the what. The AI tool built into TablePlus can’t… query data? Like, wouldn’t that be the entire point of an AI assistant in a tool like this? I tried using the built-in tool rather than just going to an AI tool because I figured it would be all extra-smart, having access to the actual local database structure and stuff to use as context. I get that it might be a saftey concern (you don’t want a tool like this sending actual data over to an LLM) but that wasn’t a concern here and I didn’t need that anyway, I just needed a query that I’d run myself.
Anyway I just Zoomed Marie and she helped me write the query in like 2 minutes. We brain coded it.
I bought a little cheap remote control car the other day from Fred Meyer, for me and Ruby to drive around and torment her cute new little puppy.
The car took 6 AA batteries. The package came with 4 AA batteries. What in the what. Can you imagine being in the meeting where this is decided? Everybody at that table was either stupid or mean. I can’t even say greedy because someone greedy would just advocate for no batteries at all which at least is understandable. (As a consumer you’d just assume they adjust the price accordingly and you don’t have to worry about cheap junk batteries that have lost their power after sitting in a warehouse for 3 years. How far we’ve fallen.)
I needed one of those like 4-cup measuring cups the other day, so grabbed a GoodCook brand one from the grocery store. After one usage and trip through the dishwasher, the markings on the side are unreadable. What in the what. Just complete garbage. Not sure why I would forsaken Pyrex, I just assumed the competition would have caught up, but apparently they have not.
