I’m really trying to avoid using for-profit 3rd parties. CURRENTLY I could sign up as a free user and probably be fine. But Tailscale could wake up any day and decide to start charging, or put restrictions on the free tier that would force me to a paid tier.

Part of the reason I bought a Blu-Ray drive, some big HDD’s, and started collecting discs in the first place was to take back control from tech companies. It’s why I chose Jellyfin over Plex. Going with Tailscale would defeat the principal.

I would probably be this guy if I ever got around to doing the research into how to make my Jellyfin available over the internet safely.

Oh yeah I never accused it of being a good deal. But I also try to avoid microtransactions as much as possible in general. I would say to justify $30 you need to add significant new maps, enemies, maybe even some new systems to justify something that costs almost half the price of a new AAA game. Or if it is just cosmetics, charge in the $1-$5 range for those.

You can run LineageOS with a specific AndroidTV version on a Raspberry Pi.

It largely depends on how you want to control it. If you’re fine with using a mouse and keyboard, even some sort of tiny little Bluetooth combo that uses a track pad or gyro mouse, then that opens up tons of Linux distros.

There are also Linux distros like Ubuntu for TV that can work with a remote.

Currently I have a Shield, but when the day comes to replace it I’ll probably use a mini-PC and I expect to be using SteamOS at that point, mostly using a controller, as long as I can find a good way to add streaming apps to my steam library on it.

It’s almost as if the economies and balance of single-player games are different from MMO’s.

Probably a mini-PC or SBC like a Raspberry Pi to be honest.

Eh even before the Internet people had other tools to help with this. Physical books with people’s addresses and phone numbers. Specialized holders for various business cards. Yellow pages and white pages. I suppose a lot of incidental memorization is lost but I don’t think it’s really a skill lost so much as the tool changed.

And those tools pre-date the invention of the telephone, so it’s not like people spent hundreds of years memorizing phone numbers before writing was invented.

So you’d rather be spies on by the formerly largest panopticon ever created AND not be able to side load?

If you think Apple is some paragon of privacy you might want to do some research on that lol.

I mostly agree with you, but I don’t think this is just a distraction story. The more interesting thing is the rift forming between MAGA influencers. Candace Owens clearly has beef with Erika Kirk.

This article really reads like an ad for this GigaCopper product rather than actually giving much real info.

They claim that the way the house was wited necessitates this, but don’t really go into details about how the house was wired or how this product overcomes that.

I did something similar to my own house several year ago- without buying a product like this. I had existing Cat5 cable that was originally installed for phone service. I cut the lines near the box from the phone company and terminated them with RJ-45 connectors then put my router there and plugged them in. Replaced the face plates with RJ-45 ones too. I didn’t have any daisy chained lines, but even if I did a simple and cheap switch would solve that problem AND give you some extra ports you probably need anyways.

Maybe there’s some other esoteric way of wiring phones that was used. I’ve heard of cases where they split out wires from the Cat5 (phones can get by with just 2 wires, but Cat5 has 4 pairs). Even then I’ve only heard of that being used for stuff like more than one phone in the same room, or having phones on either side of the same wall.

I’m sure there are some scenarios where this product is necessary but the article doesn’t really explain why it was in this case.

Bigotry is bad. Segregation is bad.

In progressive spaces this is USUALLY met with agreement. That’s easy whenever we are talking about equal rights for people who have been historically been oppressed. However, a dark corner of progressive spaces likes to hate. Hate on men, cis people, white people. It’s usually just one or two people, who have probably been personally hurt by people who happen to fall into those groups, and the rest don’t feel like they can say anything.

I strongly believe that things like segregation are fundamentally wrong and make the world a worse place. Not that they were tools that were used for evil and can now be used for good in the right hands. Not just temporarily as balancing measures for society. Equality isn’t just something you can pick and choose when to believe in, when it’s pretty and convenient and makes you feel good.

I know the general idea is to make it easier for your body to enter fat burning mode “ketosis” which iirc means that if you hit a calorie deficit

That is not the goal of keto at all. People can choose to add calorie counting, but that’s an additional step. Calories are a unit of thermal energy. It’s how much energy is released when the food is burned (more technically, oxidized). The most basic way to measure this is to burn it in a way that directs the thermal energy to a container of water, where it’s then pretty straightforward to measure the temperature change and do the math.

As a vague heuristic to measure the energy in food this is… Sometimes useful, sometimes not. What your body actually does is break down carbs into glucose, and things like protein, fat, and alcohol to ketones. Those eventually get broken down further into Adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which is the basic fuel source your cells mostly use to do things. This is not the same as an oxidation reaction.

More importantly though, when you reduce caloric intake you risk some negative outcomes, which is where we start to mix between physiological and psychological. A lot is based on genetics: if you are lucky enough to have the right genes, you can reduce caloric input or increase caloric output and see weight loss results. Unfortunately, a lot of people like myself don’t have such genes. Instead, when we reduce calories are bodies starts to use processed designed to survive famines- slowing the metabolism, reducing the amount of energy expended, storing as much energy as possible (as fat). If you stick to it long enough, you will lose weight eventually. The problem is that your body makes it harder to stick to it.

Hunger is one of the most basic, primal driving factors baked into the relationship between our body and mind. Caloric restriction can make people hungrier. It causes a lot of diets to fail. It also makes it hard to keep the weight off.

What keto does is gets your body used to treating fat as a source of energy to be used rather than stored for later. So I don’t have to count my calories, I just make sure that what I’m eating has relatively few carbs. Personally, I prefer protein-heavy foods over fat-heavy, although some keto people would argue that doesn’t count as strictly “keto” anymore. It’s not because I’m a gymbro who needs protein, but because protein makes me feel full and satisfied. I don’t have to count calories. I don’t have to be hungry. I don’t have to keep track of every little thing that I eat and think about whether I can afford to have a drink at the end of the night. Compared to caloric restriction (weight watchers), the minute-to-minute decisions are way easier and the day-to-day decisions go away.

It’s not for everyone of course. The academic research, like with every other diet, is mixed. When you get off keto you’ll probably gain some weight back. I’m sure there are some medical conditions that it makes worse. My wife happens to have a lot of issues that are improved by keto (epilepsy and PCOS. Kidney stones too, though the research on that is more mixed).

Started with guitar 21 years ago. Don’t remember the exact timelines, but I picked up bass and piano within a couple years. Then drums and singing. Dabbled in mandolin, banjo, cello. Most stringed instruments, especially those in western music, are pretty similar so they’re pretty easy to switch between. I even dabbled in clarinet because my older sister left it with my parents when she moved out, but I never put that much time into it.

My talents in each have waxed and wanted over the years. Guitar was always my primary preference.

The problem is that everyone and their mother can play guitar. It makes sense- tons of households have guitars lying around. Acoustics are a really cheap and easy entry point- any college student can pick one up and learn a few chords and start trying get attention. It fits in your dorm or in the car you’re halfway living out of. There’s also plenty of cheap box kits of really low-quality electric guitars + small practice amps that are affordable for parents, with the added benefit of making kids use headphones so you don’t disturb the neighbors. Drum kits, by contrast, are expensive, big, difficult to move around (band practice pretty much always has to be at the drummer’s place), and loud. So drummers are usually hard to find.

So I spent time in bands as a bassist and keyboardist. Two separate times I had wealthier friends who played guitar and had younger brothers whose parents purchased a drum kit, but those brothers never learned to play, so I ended up behind the kit even though I couldn’t really practice on my own time. For a while I was the basisst in a band where the left-handed drummer didn’t have room in his house, but there was room in my basement so I ended up messing around and learning to drum left-handed a bit too. I’ve been the lead guitarist, but only rarely outside of my solo stuff.

Bass is very similar to guitar. Different style, and I do think it’s important to change your approach and technique (I don’t use picks on bass), but a lot still translates. With keyboard I was never classically trained or anything- I mostly just learned guitar, bass, and vocals parts on keyboard. I put a lot of time into programming software synths. Often I would just match what those instruments were playing with a different texture, or just play chords underneath. As a keyboardist I would also be in charge of like, punctuation and sound effects. The kind of little extra things you don’t notice on an album and often gets cut out of live shows.

I think I’ve been a decent singer. I initially took lessons with the intention of just being a background vocalist and maybe doing some acoustic open mic nights. I joined the choir in college and got selected as the best Bass to represent the school at an event one year. I kind of accidentally ended up as the lead singer of a few bands just by being the best singer in the band. Never just the lead singer though - always play drums or bass or guitar too. Singing is a lot of work- I needed to stay in shape, watch what I ate and drank (especially on the nights of practice or performance). It’s easy to identify mistakes as you’re playing an instrument, but for singing I would have to record myself and listen back to it a ton. I learned from my choir director all the little details to listen for- pitch drift, sloppy pronunciation, breathing issues, etc. And Satan forbid I catch a cold before a show. Right now I’m out of practice, so while I could totally rock out a karaoke night at a bar I would need a couple of months notice before playing a real show.

This is not a problem unique to keto. Plenty of diets have enough loopholes for you to technically follow them while being incredibly unhealthy. There’s a reason the term “junk food vegan” exists.

“Keto” itself has a ton of different forms, but the main goal is to move away from processing food into glucose and towards processing food into ketones. That effectively means cutting carbohydrates. A lot of these pretty much everyone agrees are bad for you: sugar, corn syrup, starches. That isn’t unique to keto. What is unique is cutting out other carbs. Fruits, and some vegetables (I’m using casual categories here), have been bred over thousands of years to have a ton of sugar in them. Grains like wheat, oats, and rice are probably the most significant and weird things that keto cuts: these have been efficient sources of calories for humans for thousands of years, the foundations of civilization, yet are not compatible with ketosis.

In order to maintain the same caloric intake, that means increasing fat and protein (technically alcohol too lol). If you increase saturated fats (dairy, red meat, coconut and palm oils) that’s unhealthy. The healthy way to do it is to go for unsaturated fats: fish, poultry, seeds, nuts, most other vegetable oils. It also happens that red meats are the ones that are significantly worse for the environment and economy. Seafood and poultry certainly have their own environmental impacts of course, and are more expensive per calorie than grains. If you can stand to get away from Western cuisine, there are plenty of insect options that are great sources of protein (shrimps is bugs after all). But articles like this (I can’t confirm because it’s behind a paywall) almost always project out the worst-case scenario that all of this increased protein intake is coming from beef, the worst source. Beef and pork should absolutely be reduced to luxury items people eat on rare occasions, or perhaps not at all. Fish and poultry can definitely be part of a sustainable future: there are a lot of conditions like epilepsy that BENEFIT from getting more protein from animal sources.

That’s all just talking about macronutrients. The other components are micronutrients and fiber. Leafy green low-carb veggies like lettuce, kale, spinach, broccoli, brussel sprouts. Dietary fiber is listed under carbohydrates on US Nutrition Facts but does not count towards the “Net Carbs” that someone on keto should be looking at. Mushrooms are good too.

Someone can eat nothing but Oreos and still be vegan, and someone can eat nothing but beef jerky and cheese and still be keto.

It’s also worth pointing out that the sugar industry spent decades and billions of dollars convincing Americans that fats were much worse than they actually are, which led to its own terrible consequences. There are healthy amounts of fat that a lot of boomers are still terrified of.

These food guidelines have always been more about economics than health anyways. It changes with the political influence of the various agricultural industries in America.

He co-founded Palantir with Alex Karp (and others). This article is about Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir. Peter Thiel is a chairman of Palantir’s board, not CEO.

How is Alex Karp connected to South Africa?

He had a reasonable voting record up until the stroke. He did well as Lt. Governor of PA although that office doesn’t do a ton. He did well as mayor of Braddock before that.

His own wife was an undocumented immigrant and now he’s supporting ICE. It’s wild what brain damage can do.

Most bad games aren’t really a terrible experience. Usually, it takes a few minutes, maybe an hour max, to realize “wow this game is bad and not worth putting any more time into”.

I think the worst games are the ones that can suck you in with the promise of being good. For me, that was Catherine.

The game has 3 main phases. The main “gameplay” is 3D block pushing puzzles that are presented as dream sequences for the main character. They start off simple, but add mechanics and complexity as you would expect from any good puzzle game. Then there is the time you spend with the main character awake hanging out at a bar, talking to other characters as a social sim game. The characters seem varies and like they could be interesting. Finally, there are animated cutscenes that are pretty good looking that show what your main character does throughout the day, between waking up and ending up at the bar every evening.

The biggest problem is the writing. The main character starts off as a pretty shitty, selfish asshole. At first I played hoping to see him learn and grow as a character. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen I instead started to hope that he at least suffered some consequences for his actions. But… No, he doesn’t. He just stays an asshole the whole time. None of the other characters really go anywhere either. And while the gameplay started off good, it quickly burns through all of the block pushing mechanics they thought of and turns into a repetitive slog. It really felt like they only made the first 1/3rd of a complete game and decided to just copy and paste that to pad out time instead of actually finishing the game.

I hereby grant you the title of “Gaytekeeper”