8TB external hard drive ($160) + old laptop + “H265 sources” = way cheaper than a bunch of streaming services

I’ve begun my switch over to Mint from Windows. Its kinda wild to suggest normal users to switch to Arch of all things. Netflix (and streaming apps in general) straight to Jellyfin is also a stretch because there are… extra steps

Or they’ll just build a backdoor into it (it probably already exists) and never talk about it again.

I put Google cameras on my house years ago out of convenience and this is it, I’m spending the money on a PoE system where my footage stays on my own hardware.

There’s sort of one in the US city I live in. The city manages it and as far as I know they don’t care if you go pick a few apples. It is part of a public park that used to be a farm/orchard, then turned into a small golf course, then was partially sold off for housing development and the core farm/orchard area was either given to or bought by the city. It also has a community garden which always has a waitlist for new plots.

That’s the weird thing about the US: we do actually have nice things, and communities that want to improve things. We also have suburbia hellscape.

My US city has a few parks with apple trees, herb gardens, and other edibles. I don’t think there’s any law or rule against people going out and harvesting small individual use amounts as long as you don’t damage the plant. They do send out volunteer crews at harvest time (for the apples at least) and donate the harvest to food banks.

I don’t buy rosemary because there’s a bunch of parks around with rosemary bushes.

I live in a rich suburb of a big city and as far as I can tell the city actually has control of the police, the police union isn’t run by a bunch of comic book villains, and the non-MAGA “good cops” actually want to work here, and do. Hop over to the big city and their police union acts as a 4th arm of government run by truly evil people.

Local PD can’t do anything because the second they do, Insurrection Act.

Minnesota has “permit to carry”, so you need a permit to legally have a firearm in public. Other states have banned open carry at protests. There are legal barriers.

With everything that is happening I’m questioning my state’s assault weapon ban. The feds are unhinged.

No, and if there were, it would likely give actual legal grounds for the federal government to invoke the Insurrection Act which would allow domestic deployment of the US military - not National Guard, full military. Local PD isn’t doing much for the same reason.

“Legal” doesn’t mean much anymore

Because at the same time they’re trying to implement age verification for app stores while also very vaguely defining what an app store is.

The Act defines an “App Store” as “a publicly available Internet website, software application, or other electronic service that distributes software applications from the owner or developer of a software application to the user of a mobile device.”

So… what constitutes a mobile device? Who is an owner/developer? Does github have to implement age verification for mobile devices?

The sommelier thing is at least somewhat real but it actually takes work. I don’t think anyone is getting much better sound than 320kbps with a good quality sound system. $300 studio monitors can give you pretty much peak sound quality at this point, no unobtanium wires required.

Totally agree. In my day to day work, I’m not dealing with anything groundbreaking. Everything I want/need to code has already been done.

if you have a Copilot license and are using the newest Visual Studio, it enables the agentic capabilities by default. It will actually write the code into your files directly. I have not done that and will not do that. I want to see and understand what it is trying to do.

The font was chosen in an effort to make documents easier to read for the vision impaired.

This is like removing the requirement of having curb ramps on new sidewalks because it makes it possible for people in wheelchairs to navigate

I’m really split with it. I’m not a 10x “rockstar” <insert modern buzzword> programmer, but I’m a good programmer. I’ve always worked at small companies with small teams. I can figure out how to parse requirements, choose libraries/architecture/patterns, and develop apps that work.

Using Copilot has sped my work up by a huge amount. I do have 10 YoE before Copilot existed. I can use it to help write good code much faster. It may not be perfect, but it wouldn’t have been perfect without it. The thing is I have enough experience to know when it is leading me down the wrong path, and that still happens pretty often. What it helps with is implementing common patterns, especially with common libraries. It basically automates the “google the library docs/stackoverflow and use code there as a starting point” aspect of programming. (edit: it also helps a lot with logging, writing tests, and rewriting existing code as long as it isn’t too whacky, and even then you really need to understand the existing code to avoid a mess of bugs)

But yeah search is completely fucked now. I don’t know for sure but I would guess stackoverflow use is way down. It does feel like many people are being pigeonholed into using the LLM tools because they are the only things that sort of work. There’s also the vibe coding phenomenon where people without experience will just YOLO out pure tech debt, especially with the latest and greatest languages/libraries/etc where the LLMs don’t work very well because there isn’t enough data.

I have an old laptop I use as a server, it sits on top of a cabinet in the corner of my room. One day I noticed it seemed like the space key was being held down all the time, but only past the login screen. I was about to buy a new laptop because I thought the keyboard was totally broken (and its kind of old anyway). Turns out an old Bluetooth keyboard in my closet that was paired to my laptop got switched on at some point and the space bar was being pressed.

They’re basically trying to find the time to create duplicate UUIDs. UUIDs are randomly generated and assumed to be so unique and actually random across… well, everything, that no one even checks if they’re actually unique. They suggested they found one in 5 hours. The only maybe possible way I could think of to do this legitimately is to use some ridiculously powerful computer and still get very lucky.

Russia probably won’t be finished but you can still punch a bully in the mouth.

Nuke this, nuke that, if my country actually held true to the Budapest Memorandum none of this would have happened. We already bailed on Ukraine once.