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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I believe it, but I’m still debating whether something like Kagi is worth paying for. On principle, I strongly feel like it is, but in practice I’m still evaluating. So far, I’ve played with it a few times and I haven’t observed any notable improvements, but I’m trying to keep an open mind. First impression is that it’s definitely a little quicker and cleaner to get at the information I’m looking for. And taking a step back, I have to say it’s impressive that they can replicate a behemoth like Google’s accuracy already. On the other hand, I’ve felt like Google has gotten so crappy at search recently that maybe I’m simply not going to be satisfied with anyone simply “meeting” them and maybe what I want simply isn’t possible, in which case I’m just paying for disappointment.


  • I’ve moved to an “infrastructure as code” approach, not using any fancy tools in particular, primarily just bash shell scripts. Basically almost everything I setup or do gets documented via shell scripts, I write them as I go when I’m learning to install something new, and before I commit to something to new, I take extra care to make sure the scripts are idempotent so that when I want to do make any changes, all I need to do is add it to the appropriate script and re-run it.

    The idempotent part takes some effort sometimes, but is not actually as hard as it seems, particularly if you don’t mind that it sometimes spends some wasted time doing things that have already been done, and occasionally spits out some harmless error messages because something is already done, but I also try to minimize that when I can. The consequences of doing too much by re-running are rarely serious. Yeah sometimes the scripts can break, but as long as they fail properly (set -euo pipefail) it’s usually pretty obvious how to fix it and it won’t leave too much of a mess.

    Doing this has transformed my homelab from a mess of unknowable higgledy-piggledy spaghetti-services that was always teetering one small failure away from total collapse and frantic rebuilding, into something repeatable and reproducible that I can actually … wait for it … test. Just firing up a Linux ISO in a VM is all I need to test everything I’m doing in a perfect sandbox, and I can throw it away when I’m done with no regrets. Plus it makes rolling out new servers, and more importantly, decommissioning old ones, a breeze, you know exactly what’s on them and how it was set up, because it was all in your scripts. Combined with good data backups (which are also set up in the scripts) and restores (which I also test with scripts) it really takes the drama and stress out of migrations and even hardware failures.

    Yeah there are probably easier ways to accomplish what I’m doing using some of the technologies like terraform, ansible and nix/flake that people have mentioned, and I’ve dabbled with those, but for me, the shell script approach strikes a nice balance of not just documenting but also learning the process myself so that I understand enough of what it’s doing to effectively debug it when something goes wrong, and it works on almost everything and in most cases requires no installation or setup. Bash is everywhere. I even have an infrastructure-as-code setup for my Steam Deck to install stuff and get it set up the way I want.


  • Literally any old PC is likely fine. It may be slow, it may struggle or even fail with some of the very complex software (perhaps you will encounter timeouts, or you will spend so much time waiting for memory to swap in or out to disk that it won’t be worth using) but you can run Linux itself on a potato and if your machine isn’t powerful enough, maybe you can get a second one and run different stuff on each, or just scale down your expectations and don’t try to self-host LITERALLY everything just because you can. Certain services are very intense, others will run on a very small piece of a potato.


  • You’d be better off doing actual genealogy, which involves research, reaching out to family members, combing through dusty family heirlooms, following up on leads and stories, gaining access to historical documents and records, and more and more and more research. It’s not so much a conclusion you’ll come to as a process of discovery you’ll go through and a story you’ll piece together, potentially over a lifetime. If you’re lucky the pieces will be very solid and well supported, but more likely they’ll be hazy and questionable and quite possibly completely false. It will often lead you in directions you never would’ve suspected, and you may discover serious surprises, some of which you might wish you hadn’t discovered. But that’s the risk you take.

    DNA can sometimes play a part in that process, but it’s no substitute for it, and it’s often way overblown in significance by the companies making money selling it to you. Especially it can help connect you with distant or not-so-distant relatives who may be able to fill in huge pieces of the family puzzle, or may be no help at all, but maybe it will not be about the answers you get as much as the friends you meet along the way. Trite but true.


  • It’s aggressively privacy-first in some ways. It doesn’t do any self-updating which could be considered phoning home, so you have to make sure you have a way to keep it updated, through a package manager or otherwise. There’s a separate update monitor if you want that, for Windows at least. I tend to dial back the anti-fingerprinting a bit because it just makes browsing frustrating to me. I understand the risk of fingerprinting, and it’s good that they do everything they can to avoid being fingerprinted, but it doesn’t strike the right balance for me. Particularly forcing light mode, I absolutely fucking loathe getting light blasted unexpected into my eyeballs, I always have. The biggest mistake technology ever made in my opinion was trying to pretend an actively illuminated screen was paper and make it blinding white.

    I’ve so far resisted the urge to enable DRM. If something won’t show me stuff without DRM I’m willing to just say I don’t want to watch it.

    And obviously as per the topic, I turn on sync, which is not on by default, but that’s easy and a sensible default. Honestly it’s mostly sensible defaults.



  • And you can still only take off from a registered airport in most places, because silly laws. So you still have to drive to the airport. Oh also don’t forget they’re hilariously dangerous in a collision at basically any speed because they’re basically made out of paper compared to the rampaging 2 ton behemoths regularly speeding down our roads. So good luck getting to the airport safely!

    And getting back on topic, it’ll also need a license plate for the roads, and a transponder in most airspace, so you can still be tracked whether you’re on the ground or in the air. Flying cars are great at combining the worst of both worlds!



  • It’s not a critical flight control surface, it’s a secondary control surface that adds extra lift at the cost of efficiency. Lightning is not inherently dangerous to airplanes. They are struck all the time, and it is fine besides alarming passengers and occasionally causing some minor concerns and repairs. Composite aircraft like the 787 need significant additional lightning protection though, this is a known risk for them, and Boeing intentionally decided to decline to lightning protect non-essential areas of the aircraft despite the potential for lightning damage, and that is a perfectly safe albeit probably financially and reputationally stupid decision.

    For the aircraft, having slats stuck in either position is obviously not great and not having it available potentially limits the available landing options but it is not a safety issue. Efficiency concerns may result in the flight being unable to continue, but again, not a safety issue as they carry extra reserve fuel for unplanned contingencies like this and have alternate airports available to land at anywhere along their route. As a mechanical issue where a single incident cost the airline in question hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue and delays and shuffling around other aircraft and flights to cover for the loss, it will be investigated and addressed if possible. But nothing unsafe happened here, except to ANA’s revenue. Inconvenient, frustrating, maybe even alarming, but not unsafe.




  • The US was the world police. It was often joked about, but it had some legitimacy. Particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union, their unquestioned military hegemony kept the awful parts of the world cowed into Pax Americana. Every time the US shows weakness, dictators and warlords and terrorists become bolder. Putin’s seizure of Crimea and the Donbas and Trump’s Afghanistan withdrawal all made America look very weak, and they started preparing their own plans.

    Now, with Trump dismantling the US from within, in ways that are probably irreparable in most of our lifetimes, the age of Pax Americana is certainly dead. The world will return to widespread conflict until somebody else steps up with enough military power to police the world to some approximation of their standards (maybe Europe, maybe China), or until it fractures into relatively stable rival groups at cold war with each other (Putin’s much desired “multi-polar world”) or until conflict becomes so violent and/or widespread it is simply the new normal which we’ll probably call World War 3, or some combination of these possibilities.


  • I wouldn’t stress about it. People are overly delicate with their hard drives in my experience. They’re surprisingly sturdy and failure tends to be pretty random. There might be a slight statistical correlation in failure rates with minor vibration, but anecdotally I’ve got drives that vibrate the hell out of themselves (probably due to some other manufacturing defect) and have lasted decades with no errors, and plenty that fail completely for no perceptible reason at all. Spinning disks are just inherently unreliable, not that any storage technology is perfectly reliable. This is why backups are never optional.


  • You’re trying to move something with the inertia of an entire planet’s economy, which represents an incredible, almost incomprehensible amount of effort. Inertia becomes an incredibly powerful force that inherently maintains the status quo when you’re talking about huge systems with vast complexity. Yes, there are real challenges (which can be overcome) and yes there is real opposition from entrenched interests who stand to profit (or lose) significantly, and yes there are governments who are myopic and moving far too slowly. But most people underestimate the size of the role that sheer inertia plays. Not even just in this situation, but in all sorts of different situations, especially when you’re talking about global issues or societal progress. Human minds and values cannot be changed with the snap of a finger. Individuals perhaps can, but as a civilization it often takes decades, or even centuries when the change is massive enough, even when technology itself moves much faster than that.

    Even when the danger is clear, and the solution is obvious, and almost every government in the world agrees in a matter of weeks or months what approach they need to take (COVID-19), you can’t push directly through the inertia of society itself without consequences. Look how shocking the backlash was, and arguably that backlash is still occurring and potentially contributed significantly to serious things like the spread of measles and even the re-election of Trump.





  • What makes you believe that? Sensationalized unverified nonsense is just as bad as fake news, in fact it’s worse because people like you think “well it’s a big official news outlet what they say must be happening for real as I’m sure they’ve researched it” but their only motivation is money and being “first to report”. Explain your analysis of the quality of the fact-checking, access to legitimate sources and on-the-ground reporting of any not-directly-involved media organization that’s reporting on this and I’ll give you a pass. There’s nothing from Al-Jazeera, and not even any opposing propaganda available because as they admit, “This claim could not be independently verified by Al Jazeera. The Indian government has yet to comment.”

    So far, I don’t see a single corroborating source with any sort first-hand information at all. It’s very easy to copy and paste what government propaganda says and present it as news, and when it’s sensational it can get lots of clicks and ad money. That doesn’t mean it is real and I can’t see any reason you would have to believe any of this, and if you do, maybe you’d like to buy this bridge I’ve got for sale.


  • They keep doing this because there are scammers and grifters getting rich pushing this content to lots and lots and lots of people because of the view-based revenue they get from doing it and big tech’s algorithms reward it with more views and more success. And sometimes they also get rich taking some of those people’s money, specifically the dumb and desperate and paranoid delusional people who are terrified of “the man” and the government and think they have found the secret cheat code of avoiding government.

    People do it because they’re dumb, but they’re dumb because it gets shown and promoted specifically to them over and over again because Google et al have gotten really good at identifying people susceptible to nonsense and constantly shoving things like this down their throats until their brains literally rot. As the saying goes, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” And big tech keeps doing that, individually and specifically, to many people including children, possibly without even any particular intention to cause harm besides the idea that it will keep them watching even more videos and earning even more ad revenue. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt that they are not intentionally causing harm, their apathy and apologism for the harm they are causing is horrific and unforgivable and sovereign citizens are just one of many highly destructive content funnels that modern algorithms empirically promote.

    Content discovery is utterly toxic and it is literally, not exaggerating at all, destroying civilization.



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