It’s the same thing the right does with government. It is a truism that there is all sorts of “inefficiencies” where the money is going to the wrong people for the wrong stuff.

In both cases, it’s sort of correct and sort of wrong. Corporations, governments, and any human institution beyond a certain scale (a few hundred people), will leak wealth into places it shouldn’t. It’s an unavoidable feature of our species as best I can tell.

It’s fine to accept it, it’s fine to be angry about it. It’s silly to blind yourself to it in some places and whinge about it in others.

Ha, I roasted you for having the good sense to let somebody else handle some of this stuff for you.

Nobody in crazy rabbit hole club is allowed to do anything the easy way!!

I definitely did not claim it was braking privacy. As far as I can tell it was just querying an update server but for some reason it was doing it with such frequency (hundreds a minute for hours out of the day) that I deemed it was broken and that the OS was not managed well.

Other people took a more suspicious view but mostly they just lost my trust that they had any business running a system on my network. If you google around you can get more nuanced takes I don’t actually know if they ever fixed it.

HAOS is a managed operating system, which is perfect for people who want to automate their home but don’t want to manage a Linux machine. It’s a little wild to me to see a person in this community advocating a managed OS. Like, what are we even doing here??

I killed HAOS and set it up in docker because it was phoning home a lot. Sometimes there were hundreds of dns queries a minute to HA servers. No thanks.

Well… a tablespoon is 3 teaspoons and a cup is 48 teaspoons. You did get the 16Tbsp per cup right though.

This was a good try!

When I first read your comment I wanted to say that managing with these units isn’t really all that difficult. But, then I remembered that I have a magnet on my fridge that converts teaspoons to cups to quarts etc. I don’t know anyone who keeps that info in memory. Doubling or halving an American recipe can be an exciting math project

It’s fun to see what metric conversions an American has memorized. If a person can quickly convert miles to Kilometers, they are probably a runner. If you ask a group of colleagues how many grams are in an ounce, the dude who quickly say “28.3 give or take” is a pothead.

This is a thing that sounds like some crazy uncle bullshit but it is actually completely true and non-controversial.

The scariest thing to a central banker when it comes to inflation is that wages might start to go up. When that happens the inflations is basically permanent.

This year we deployed a CURE for sickle cell! Cured a congenital disease with gene editing. It’s hard to do and crazy expensive, but the end of suffering from this disease is actually in sight.

The mRNA vaccine tech that got a boost from Covid is now being used to cure certain melanoma cancers. This is a potential sea change in the fight against cancer.

More and more of our energy is coming from fully renewable sources. We are behind (way behind tbh) but humanity is actually moving the right direction at this point. We could honestly be seeing peak carbon in the next few years. The climate will change, probably already has, but we might actually survive this.

We’ve got problems, lots of them, and some pretty nasty. But you are almost certainly better off living today than just about any time in human history.

When we start making excuses for violence we abandon any hope of a peaceful world. There is always some slight that requires reprisal which will begat further reprisal. No party in this conflict has the strength to resist. No part has the moral high ground.

Might as well hunt down Churchill and Truman’s descendants and murder them to avenge their grandfathers casting the first stones in this conflict.

Did we used to conduct war in a way that was safe for civilians? I’m not aware of that history. The war in Gaza looks like war to me. The same way we have been practicing it since we picked up our first sticks in anger. Murdering civilians is a consequence of war. The “good guys” fire bombed Dresden and nuked Japan.

I would give more examples but being honest I am straining to think of other wars in human history that were worth fighting. I am drawing a blank. All of it is pointless slaughter. At least in Gaza you can understand that the Israelis were provoked to war. Can’t say the same for the US in most of our wars.

Stardew Valley will probably be the game that looms largest in my kid’s nostalgia. They have both played the life out of that thing. Other things that come to mind: Minecraft, phasmaphobia, fnaf, Skyrim, duck game, BOTW, and Nidhogg 2.

There is no guiding aesthetic driven by the technology, just whatever is available and cool.

Re: loot boxes, there is no denying that fortnight is(was?) a huge deal in this gen of kids. I’m sure at least some kids are going to have fond memories of getting v bucks for their birthday.

Another vote for home assistant. It is not just the best FOSS option, it might just be the best option altogether.

Some advice, think carefully about what you want to achieve with automation before you start. Take some time to draw up what you are going to do before you buy anything. Think about extensibility and don’t force yourself to lay out big money and time all at once. Will Smith (tested.com, tech pod, not Independence Day) recommends doing one room at a time and focusing on spaces that are primarily yours first.

Things to consider: If you live with other people, it might be wise to make everything transparent. Meaning the light switches still turn the lights on and off on demand etc.

Wi-Fi is sort of a poor solution to communicating with devices, especially ones that don’t have access to mains power all the time. Consider if you are going to deploy zigbee, z-wave, or a matter mesh. Matter, being very new would be challenging but it is clearly the future of low power wireless communication for home automation.

Set a goal that NOTHING requires a external service or internet connection and stick to it. That might mean giving up on some types of devices but it’s YOUR house, not google’s.

Think automation first. Phone and voice control is cool. But having things just happen the way you would want without have to do anything is even cooler. Be smart about complexity though. How would things have to change if your partner started working a different schedule for instance?

Finally, get creative. Lots of silly problems can be solved with this technology. My favorite automation turns the damn hot glue gun off after 30min so my kids don’t start a fire if they get forgetful after a craft project.

All computers are named after dogs. My dogs, dogs in the family etc. the dog name should be carefully match to the computer’s role and characteristics.

My peerlessly reliably golden retriever will almost always have a server named after him. The most powerful computer in the house is named after the monstrously large golden my parents had when I was young. My sons gaming pc is fast but perpetually broken, named after our greyhound. Laptops are named for smaller dogs, SBC devices get named after toy size dogs.

Wi-Fi ssids should always be named after cats.

This is the natural way of things.

So. If I understand this correctly it’s possible I do not)

Your mastodon account is on a server that is federated with threads

A threads user, your mom for instance, decides to follow your mastodon account.

When you mother sees your cool post, she will probably have an ad in line with it.

Is meta monetizing your content, or your mother’s attention? Is there a difference?

Is the optimal outcome 1: your mom cannot see your cool post, or 2: your mom joins a mastodon server?

Is 2 likely? Seems to me the real concern here is that non corporate fediverse systems are finally getting some traction and the users (us) are afraid that meta will steal all the users away. I’m not sure if defederating them from a server will make a damn bit of difference.

Meta is going to win the fight for user numbers. Full stop.