Finally, torrenting Linux distros becomes a thing, rather than a curiosity

Five years ago I splurged on a higher end laptop than I’ve ever had, and regretted it from the beginning. Even when new, the battery barely lasted an hour, and hyper-v was unable to do the VMs I wanted

But I needed Windows for two reasons: tax software and gaming with my kids. Well my tax software also supports Mac and my kids are in college, so there goes my reasons.

So I booted up the windows laptop to do my taxes. It started with not knowing my pin, my bad. But the alternate login was to use the mandated online account that I don’t use. That password change sent email to my ex: yikes. Then ad after ad after popup, so crazy how unusable it became

So yeah, laptop sucks and is showing its age, big waste of money, no more reason to be tied to windows, poor experience ……. Really selling me on a Mac for my next one

My NetGear router still has a uselessly incomplete implementation of VLANs after 5+ years of updates, I was ready to replace it out of frustration. Gen 6 wireless is getting old hat anyway

It’s preferable to remove unused wiring.

But as long as they’re in a junction box and it’s accessible, then it’s ok. But once it’s at least safe and you forget about it, eventually someone else will have to spend the time to figure it out. You saving a little time now could be someone’s much larger expense in the future

Confession time: I have a circuit halfway removed when the project got interrupted and now it’s been a couple years. People panic at the sight of bare wires, understandably, but only I know that most of it is removed so it could never be hot. That would fail an inspection and block a home sale. Do NOT do this

That’s crazy. I’m seeing as long as 15 seconds ads and considering no longer wasting my time on YouTube

the US continues to artificially prop up its EV market ex-China.

It’s not even that: a little protectionism is normal trade policy globally. This would be fine, if it were temporary and if there was a goal to develop the domestic industry.

The real problem is the combination of protectionism, while also rejecting the technology change and shrinking down to the home market. The protectionism will stop at some point. Realistically it has to. But when it does, American legacy manufacturers will find themselves struggling to sell buggy whips to a world that sees them as museum displays. We’re trying to milk a few more years out of the legacy technology at the cost of totally ignoring the future

Yeah, I have to say, I still see Tesla as the leader by far here in the us. And given how price of cars has skyrocketed, teslas are now also “affordable”. It’s a shame they seem to be abandoning the car market. There’s finally some EV choice but not much, half of the choice was just cancelled, and most are not good.

Rivian is our best choice for the next compelling EV, but R2 cost significantly more than Tesla.

• A lot of people online like the Equinox and it’s inexpensive, but poor efficiency, horrible software and no CarPlay. Also I’ve never seen one. GM cars in general don’t do well in my part of the US so it would be challenge to get people to see they exist
• Lucid looks great on paper and I’m excited to see their mass market vehicles in a year or two, but they e really been struggling. I hope the saudis continue to see it through
• Hyundai/Kia have been kicking ass on choice but low efficiency and still haven’t kicked their historical reputations for poor quality and easy to steal

It’s at least scammy but I don’t see how it’s aboveboard at all. It was only like $200 so not worth the cost of finding out

I did spend like a decade trying startups in the hope of one making it, without any luck. Interestingly the only buyout that got me anything was a midsized company, not a startup, purchased by a large company. The only options that have panned out was a midsized company bought by a private equity, where they’ve paid cash

You definitely take both. Apply for unenjoyment asap because it can take a few weeks for the money to start flowing. Also unenjoyment is much lower than pay, so you can’t expect to pay your bills with it

Last time I had to do this was a startup. We all worked insane hours trying to get the product off the ground but then

• layoffs just short of a year so can save on severance
• unemployment lower than my current mortgage
• paid money to buy out my options in case the company made it, but a couple weeks later they reissued them to zero

My experience with a Pi4B has been rock solid and plenty fast for what I’ve tried so far, at low power consumption.

While I had problems in the beginning, it was all from the micro-SD card. People here will recommend staying away but I’ve had no problems since buying an “extreme” card. Well, starting to hit the size limit now - I can no longer kick off multiple concurrent updates because limited free space available on, I think, 16G card. Get bigger

If you’re starting with ha, don’t feel confined to only one.

IMPORTANT: a local area mesh is not just a low powered way of connecting devices but is inherently local-only. Highly recommended

The more common local area meshes include

• Zigbee - open standard, lots of inexpensive sensors
• Z-Wave - devices need to pay for certification but are more standard. I found more smart switches using this in my area
• Thread - the new standard. Same frequency as Zigbee but IPv6 based. Slowly rolling out.

The new Matter/Thread standard has support of the major players (Apple, Google, Amazon) so seems like the way to go for the future, but products are slow to roll out so you can’t count on it yet

Personally I found the strengths of each compelling so quickly added all three of the above to my ha setup. Ha is fine with it so why limit yourself

I follow the principle that devices must work “as expected” for my users, automation adds capabilities but does not replace them. This comes together with a focus on smart switches

• can be used interactively just like any switch
• continue to work as expected even if ha is down
• typically act as routers to strengthen your local area mesh. I have switches acting as routers for Zigbee, zwave, and Thread, so all my local area meshes are solid everywhere
• then I can automate

Yes and no. The problem pattern of ammunition production follows defense contracts: buy enough for stock, then don’t buy anymore. The industry is not configured for steady production.

Now we’re using a steady number but don’t have steady production to replenish stocks, but it seems like more of a production or industry configuration issue than a usage issue.

It’s also part of the reason weapons are so expensive: there’s no steady market to support steady production

Huh, and here I am thinking I’m dumb because it’s such a struggle getting the ai to produce usable code.

I mean. It clearly helps in some well defined areas, but actual code? like for a feature? Of a product you expect people to pay for? And you have to maintain?

That may be true and is certainly a well known concern …. Yet given the US government’s recent history, I have a hard time believing much of what they say

Cheap Chinese routers as a risk being true doesn’t prevent it from also being true that the current us administration is full of shit and likely more concerned about enriching someone connected to them, or tilt at windmills

I find it hard to believe the software gives a yes or no answer. It almost certainly gives some sort of score and it’s up to the human to interpret that.

This is entirely on Fargo police

That all sounds like a nightmare. I use curl api calls from DevOps where I’m not really doing much and time isn’t usually a concern. But I can’t imagine our product developers using it, it just doesn’t seem scalable, maintainable or performant

The problem is this is the way it’s being pushed. This is how it’s being sold. There are no guardrails.

…… and that’s the biggest problem. I’m frustrated as hell on the commits I’ve had to unwind because someone doesn’t know how to check the changes before committing, then has it try to fix itself, again without checking on the changes , then again. It’s horrible.

…… and I’ve seen it too. Trying to have it do only code reviews - the ai points out useful things but then wants to commit a crapload of changes without going over it with me first.

…… and people are playing with mcp agents, which are really great for letting the ai get data from systems and integrate with those systems . But with few to no guardrails. There’s no no review, the user doesn’t necessarily follow what’s changing, it just gets done. Sometime badly very badly

We’re all focused on whether the ai works, and it does do a pretty good job with coding but the tools don’t keep the human in the loop, or humans don’t know how to stay on the loop

I wonder if ai can actually help here. As the industry abandons consumer hardware in favor of datacenter equipment to profit from the ai bubble, perhaps ecc memory will become cheaper

For sure, any longer term presence outside orbit will hinge on finding resources. And i don’t think it even matters if we’re able to harvest helium-3 or something that might be worth bringing back, but to be able to use enough resources to make it affordable. Every pound lifted from earth to outside orbit will always be too expensive and local resources much much more affordable. While it starts with shelter and radiation shielding (ie live underground), we’ll need to generate bulk consumables like water, oxygen, fuel, and we’ll need to grow at least some of our own food

But we don’t even know if we can live on the moon. Microgravity has bad long term health effects such that we really don’t want to spend more than a year there. Does the moon have enough gravity to be substantially better?

If we do establish a larger off earth presence, we’ll have to compromise on enough gravity for long term health and livability vs as little gravity as necessary to keep space accessible