Haven’t had a chance to really look into it, but there’s also spacebar chat which is an open source selfhosted reimplementation of the discord backend that can be used with existing discord clients and bots and stuff. Which depending on how solid the rest of if is, could really help existing discord people move with less effort.

One big downside to ham radio (as someone with my license) is that you can’t use encryption. Which is fine for some use cases, but does limit the usefulness in the “government shut down the internet” kind of scenario.

Which, I suppose if you’re already using back-channels to circumvent some broader government censorship, maybe abiding by FCC rules isn’t a priority anymore, but IMO this is an area where large mesh networks of “consumer” devices with encryption very much still has value.

“Low-energy beverages” sounds like a dumb Trump insult for caffeine-free diet soda.

I’d argue America has shown it’s the one country that other countries do have a right to interfere with. After ~70 years of being the drunken, overconfident, asshole that’s ruining the experience for everyone at the bar because we’ve decided we’re the bouncer. On some level we’ve kinda made ourselves everyone’s problem.

It’s not a perfect analogy, because in a bar everyone else could just leave, and that’s not an option when you’re sharing a planet.

I know not everyone is in a position where they can just ignore management, and maybe I’ve just been in more blue collar jobs where ignoring management is normalized. But unless they’re literally looking over your shoulder, what they don’t know won’t hurt them. It’s not like AI is more efficient once you count the extra debug time.

Was nice that they mentioned some of their terminal utilities for scripting/automation. I ported my own scripts over just before Plasma 6 released and haven’t looked back. And having those utilities made my own move to Wayland a lot easier.

There are still occasional things I miss from X11, like Barrier for example, that made using a single mouse/keyboard across multiple systems work like you were just on an extended monitor. But my move was very smooth, and I’m sure it will only get easier between now and the actual end of X11 support.

The thing is, I think if he would just wear that saucy Hugh Hefner meets Scrooge look he wore recently, and owned sucking horse dick. I think the nation would get over it.

Even if he owned sucking off Bill Clinton, we’d mostly go, “I mean, yeah, he’s a real charmer, who among us can say we wouldn’t?” At this point, I think being a pedo creep to kids with Epstein is the only sex scandal that could actually damage him. So few of his sex scandals have really stuck (aside from some real financial penalties in the E. Jean Carroll case).

He blew a microphone on stage when it stopped working in the lead up to the 2024 election. He’s got some instincts from somewhere.

Squatters rights?

They’re just applying their business tactics to Christianity now. They realized that religion wasn’t going away as fast as they hoped, and have fallen back on the old embrace, extend, extinguish playbook. I doubt they’ve realized the power of religion to drive them certifiably insane during the “embrace” phase.

Depending on how much you have set aside it can work, if you don’t have anything set aside and break a leg in a freak accident you can get stuck making massive payments on $20,000+ of medical debt and set yourself back several years. I’m sure it’s gotten more expensive now too, that was 6 years ago, and while I don’t have the debt any more, I also have complications from the surgery that still bother me that I feel like I can’t afford to get fixed.

That said, a high deductible plan can also leave you screwed, and doesn’t save you as much money as they act like it does. The pricing is different for insured vs uninsured patients, and your insurance company has basically negotiated the rates higher so you think they’re more useful than they actually are.

Started moving to Element/Matrix this weekend when I attended a protest and wanted to have some kind of communication, but also wanted to leave my primary phone at home. I was using a de-googled android fork and an e-sim, but being a data-only e-sim, I couldn’t use Signal due to the phone number requirement.

Annoying to have try to get contacts to get another app, but at least it’s decentralized and comes with the option of being self-hosted once I’m ready to tackle that.

This has been a Microsoft wishlist feature since the 90s. I remember being a kid and reading articles in my dad’s copies of PC Magazine that Bill Gates wanted a computer without a keyboard that you could just talk to and tell it what to do.

So yeah, C-level intelligence is exactly right.

I have a bunch of different zigbee models, but my overall favorites are the Sengled Zigbee plugs. They have power monitoring, which can be really useful for automations.

For example, my computer monitor makes an annoying high-pitched squeal when in standby mode, so I have it and my PC on separate Sengled smart plugs and if the PC plug is drawing low enough wattage for 10 seconds that I can be sure it’s off or asleep, my automation turns off the monitor smart plug, and when the PC plug wattage jumps back above the threshold, the monitor plug gives power to my monitor again.

Obviously that specific use is a bit niche, but the ability to know when not-smart devices are using more or less power and run automations accordingly can be really useful.

There are other brands besides Sengled that have power monitoring, but I’ve found theirs to be pretty reliable, just make sure you get the zigbee plugs, because they also make wifi plugs that look basically identical to the zigbee model.

If anything eventually it’ll be like gardening seeds. Where yeah, there’s a lot of hybrid seeds that might be good for certain traits, but what a bunch of gardeners really want are heirloom varieties that are more naturally-selected and therefore more reliable over multiple generations.

Without hardware decoding, it will take more compute to decompress, but sites usually wait to fully roll out new codecs until hardware decoding is more ubiquitous, because of how many people use low-powered streaming sticks and Smart TVs.

It’s not for the end user at this point, it’s for YouTube/streaming companies to spend less on bandwidth at existing resolutions. Even a 5% decrease in size for similar quality could save millions in bandwidth costs over a year for YouTube or Netflix.

Even as a 90s kid I only heard half of those from the Super Mario World Special Zone level titles (along with Mondo).

I would imagine they mean something like jellyfin/plex, which don’t necessarily get you away from torrents. Unless you want to go the slightly more legal route of ripping DVDs and Blu-rays and re-encoding everything for yourself. I say “slightly more legal” because while you are legally allowed a backup or archival copy of your own media (in the US), you still usually have to violate the DMCA to break encryption so you can rip your archival copy.

I’ve had in-person jobs where I was on the clock for 12 hours and did probably 30-40 minutes worth of actual tasks over that time. I guess what I’m saying is that it isn’t only wfh jobs that can feel almost too “easy.” Only advice I have is enjoy it while you can, because if and when it ends, getting thrown back into a “normal” job can feel overwhelming for a bit.