I'm commenting on Hacker News, and I believe that getting access to a community of engineers, programmers, whatever, successful people, has been a net positive for me. So many good ideas get shared here.

Hobbies that you want to discover more in, but no one in your immediate friend group knows. You want to go deep in programming, basketball, golf, whatever. There's multiple Youtube videos, subreddits, etc. for it.

Video calling? Chatting with a person from literally thousands of miles away? My grandpa used to literally write a letter on paper to his brother who was in the States. Now I can just call my parents with video calls.

I'm almost always on perplexity now, it has supplanted Google search.

Curious what you're using chat GPT on and not perplexity? I feel that its free tier offers more than ChatGPT. It is particularly helpful for the "tell me how ..." kind of queries and to confirm understanding with concepts I'm learning

> And then run an Ansible script which installs a series of Brew items (ansible has a brew module) along with other stuff not on brew.

Yes, this is what I have right now. I have it set up to install some non-Brew stuff as well (Chrome, Firefox, Whatsapp, etc.). I intend on using this even for my non-tech family's machines, ideally should just be 1 script to install `homebrew`, `pip` (or `uv` like the other fellow said) + Ansible, and then 1 script to install everything else via the brew module.

Awesome, I think this is kind of what I am going for re: the goodies. I am a tmux guy as well but will try them out.

I'm leaning towards Ansible as I wanted to learn it this year for VMs too. So there is some overlap with the local machines + am still on MacOS.

Curious why you went with fish over zsh? (Zsh is more common in my circles)

Hey, thanks - I don't think it's a good idea to time machine my personal laptop to my new work laptop. And definitely I would try to follow the guides if the company has them.

> I wonder why complicate your life?

I wouldn't say it's complicating life? I'm quite having fun tinkering around with it. I intend to use the playbook (or maybe Brewfile as one of my friends recommend that as well) for setting up future machines for my family and I.