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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • That’s the thing, he might live a bit longer but at what cost? I would much rather enjoy my life than by a slave to a miserable routine dedicated to promoting longevity that will potentially buy me an extra decade. Like I can just eat a somewhat reasonable diet, exercise, sleep okay and with decent genetics based on my parents and grandparents I will probably make it to at least mid to late 80s, maybe longer if medicine advances. If I had genetics that suggested a strong likelihood that I would die in my 60s I would maybe be more interested

    With this guys routine I could maybe push that to 100ish? I would certainly love to extend my life but not at the cost of it consuming my life. I assume he’s banking on getting to the theoretical max though, which is probably closer to 120ish, and that is substantial but then it’s like a few decades of extremely decreased mobility and mental acuity? Eh

    And of course this all disregards the potential that you get cancer, murdered, car accident, etc.



  • Most people won’t close their facebook account. if it ever does happen it will be because the accounts are purged (highly unlikely given facebooks raging hardon for data) or that the site undergoes a massive transformation after losing a ton of value and rebranding ala myspace.

    That likely wouldn’t happen for many many years until a solid competitor arose that grew enough to overtake them and that’s real challenging given their size. It was one thing when user counts were in the millions or even tens or hundreds of millions but facebook has several billion users. That’s like a sizable chunk of the entire population of earth.

    It would take a very novel approach to overcome those numbers and then you also have to consider momentum: at this point there are a great deal of people who consider facebook “the internet”. Like they open their browser/phone and that’s what they do. It is their habit. Then in second place you have instagram so even if you knocked facebook off meta would still ultimately be ok. And with the incubation period of social media they’d probably have another one up and coming long before your threat became viable that would have the benefit of starting in like 7th place simply because of their massive market share (see: threads). By the time your social network had the 10ish years it takes to get to hundreds of millions of users they’d potentially have that one at a billion, or have pulled the plug and moved on to another trial with a massive head start

    Doesn’t mean to give up on the fediverse stuff, just that the gross corporate social media likely wont go away for a very long time, if ever. Barring outside influence like regulatory change of course



  • The audio improvements are more impressive than the video improvements but they’re niche

    8k is a boring upgrade. We’ve officially reached the point where pixel density is like “well that looks better but only a little”. 1080p was dramatic, 4k was solid, 8k is eh

    The audio improvements are really for people who have external sound processing and want ultra low latency. This is cool but again only impacts really niche use scenarios. They use the example of AVR and headphones. I will use the example of gaming with an avr and games that rely on on low latency sound like bemani/rhythm games.

    I have an avr and playing rhythm games on it requires calibration every time, and often changing settings about muting player sounds so I don’t disorient myself with sounds that are triggered late by my own playing. The game I’m currently into shows an audio delay of just over .1ms with the calibration tool, mostly imperceptible for media watching and playing easy songs but a nightmare on hard difficulties.

    Certainly not worth upgrading my tv, avr, and cabling though


  • Moving to a rack is nice, I love my rack. If you’re in or near a city I suggest keeping an eye on Craigslist and ebay (search by distance nearest and lowball ones that have been sitting for months) because it’s not uncommon for nice racks to go real cheap as long as you come get them. I got my rack realllll cheap ($40, 42u, fully enclosed with massive pdu) because it’s a 90s ibm rack and it’s welded steel so it’s like 450lbs. Moving it was a nightmare but it’s real sturdy and I’m never moving it again now that it’s in my basement

    For my goals in the short term I have to replace a sas cable that caused a crc error on one drive, it only happened once per smart data but still want to get that done asap. I also have another drive that’s beginning to show some smart issues; it’s on the same sas cable so it may be related because the errors didn’t increase (they all were related to an unclean shutdown, confusing things) but it’s old anyway so better safe than sorry I guess.

    Medium term I want to finally upgrade my ups. The one I have now is not a rack mount which is part of what led to the unclean shutdown. It’s also a bit undersized. I have a generator for my house so I don’t need something massive but the one I have is 450va and several years old so with the tired battery I only can get about 5m of runtime. It’s more than enough to cover the transfer from power cutting out to generator power but I want something that’s a bit more reliable in case of generator failure. This is pricey though because my array is pretty huge so it’ll probably be held off unless I find a good deal on a dead one that has cheap batteries available

    I also want to put the rack on its own circuit. This is something I should do asap because it’s cheap, just gotta find time and rearrange my panel a bit because it’s pretty full. This would be the other part of the unclean shutdown as the outlet would be in a much better location and I could also install a locking outlet

    Would also be nice to pick up a super cheap monitor locally, like something for $15-20 from a pawn shop or Craigslist or something for the rack. Earlier this year I had nginx crash on my server and the webui became inaccessible, I had to drag my nice and kind of large desktop monitor down to the basement to solve the issue, would be nice to just have a shitty small monitor on the rack for that

    Speaking of nginx I keep meaning to setup some kind of reverse proxy or mdns for all my dockers so that I can just do whatever.whatever instead ipaddress:3993 which makes my password managers barf but I’ll probably just be lazy and edit my hosts file

    Longer term I want to add a secondary low power server that can run something like pfsense to handle my routing, then turn my current wireless routers into access points because they kind of suck as routers.

    And of course the array could always be bigger, especially if drive prices fall

    I will probably realistically only do the drive and cable replacement, the circuit thing since that’ll be like $40 and a half hour of work, the monitor if I can find one, and maybe the hosts file thing. If I run into cash (unlikely) or a crazy deal (you never know) the ups would be my next priority but there’s a million other things going in life (deductibles just reset for health insurance, hooray)


  • Cobra is just the right to pay the employer portion of your health insurance after you leave your job so you don’t lose health insurance. Most americans skip it because they’re shocked to see just how much their employer subsidizes their health insurance

    This is part of why there is such a push to decouple insurance from employment. Especially as corporations increasingly recognize they can both escape the tax demand of socialized health care and also escape the social contract of providing health insurance by moving more and more jobs to 1099/contractor positions

    So remember when you are eyeing up that contractor job at amazon/doordash/uber/zocdoc/etc that is probably never going to unionize (if they have their say anyway): the 30-40k you earn there is really like 6-12k less (more if you want good insurance or support a family) because you will have to supply your own health/vision/dental (or you can just let yourself ignore all preventive care and/or keep your fingers crossed that you never have an inevitable health issue that will bankrupt you with your meager salary). Also keep in mind you get no retirement benefits. Good luck relying on social security/the national pension with musk and co continuing their assault on it. I don’t blame you if you take the job, we all gotta make ends meet, but try to get out asap because they will literally work you to death for a pittance



  • Diesel will last a while (way longer than 6mo) but it’ll get pretty nasty after a few years. As the other commenter pointed out you technically can still run it but it will ruin your shit and eventually things will just seize up and at best will need to be completely torn down and thoroughly cleaned, at worst scrapped

    Not a hospital but I have a generator on my house. Runs on liquid propane. I live in an area with terrible infrastructure. I lost power twice today (only 20 minutes each time, thankfully) because it rained. It typically runs about 3-400 hours a year and we typically have at least 1 >6hr outage every 2 months or so and at least one outage longer than 4 days a year during snow season, two if there’s a nasty hurricane season in the northeast.

    We have no services available to our house aside from internet (eg no gas, no sewer, no water, etc) so we just have a large tank for the liquid propane. We originally just had them come twice a year but that was insufficient. We then had them come after serious run times but that was a pain to remember to call. I now have an ultrasonic tank monitor on there, it was like $50 and connects via Ethernet to home assistant, uses some magic ultrasonic nonsense to detect the level of the tank, once the tank drops below 40% I have it ping me and I call them, repeats at 35%, 30, etc just in case I forget then more rapidly like 28, 26 because it’s really bad for the generator to run out of gas (so it’s also a reminder to just shut it off if I truly drag my feet). I wish I could send them an automated request but the companies around here are pretty “phone only” situations for the most part

    I imagine the industrial solutions are fairly similar except they’re probably using the $350 generac (or equivalent) tank monitors

    Someday I’ll have the money to just convert to solar. The house came with this setup and it works for now


  • oh my god Pokémon! For sure. This is just making me think of more: the games from when i was really young, like leisure suit Larry, police quest, day of the tentacle, sam and max, the dig, grim fandango, that are ultimately like 1-2 hours if you know what to do but in the absence of a walkthrough take like 600 hours of trial and error with endless save hopping

    Those old adventure games used to be punishingly difficult


  • Red dead 2, persona 5/royal, sekiro, Elden ring, Stardew, Skyrim, tekken 7 and 8, botw and totk, animal crossing games in general going back to the gamecube one. Sank a lot of hours into taiko no tatsujin too

    That also makes me think of all the games that didn’t track playtime or where my saves are long gone. Like really that’s just modern era stuff. The snes and psx final fantasy games, chrono trigger, secret of mana, earthbound, parasite eve, etc are all fairly long and I’ve played through them multiple times. Then there’s games like streets of rage and sonic 2 that aren’t terribly long but i played them to death. Oh and stuff like street fighter 2 and tekken, mario 64, so many hours of my youth that I probably should’ve been studying



  • Pretty simple, he funds a “moderate” (read: right leaning basically republican who will obstruct regularly) democrat who will play the game for money, will say the right thing, play the role, and openly lie. Even if the funding is traced back to him a great deal of voters don’t pay all that much attention to nuance, they pay attention to headlines

    So watch out for a bunch of democrat challengers with a shocking amount of funding following the fetterman playbook: initially appears as an “Everyman” with unclear politics (unless you dig), maybe says some promising sounding stuff about income disparity, cops being too much, the climate, or whatever’s the hot topic at the moment during the election, wears a hoodie! Then gets elected, has a fairly uneventful year, then starts to shift hard right when they need them to.

    It has a huge chance of being successful, it’s worked many times. And when it works again what the fuck are you going to do about it? The incumbent has an inherent advantage once installed because people don’t pay attention, recall elections basically never ever happen, there is no accountability for them whatsoever so they will do whatever they want

    He doesn’t need people to switch registrations. He just needs the currently registered voters to continue to be mostly low informed and the help of the media to keep them that way




  • Theoretically possible but someone would have to reverse engineer the protocol and write a new service that works based on that

    There are some projects but all that I’ve seen are open source head units that either: are terrible and aren’t android auto/carplay (eg they only have the most basic of integration, can show notifications and play music via Bluetooth) or they emulate android auto/carplay without the necessary licensing/hardware (so you still ultimately rely on google/apple)



  • Every game for the year?? That’s crazy

    Highlights:

    Tears of the kingdom: amazing game, sunk an absurd amount of hours into this

    Like a dragon: infinite wealth: so good, favorite franchise, rgg consistently puts out quality and is the only studio ill bother to buy full price games from

    Tales of arise: really good

    Hi fi rush: extremely good, but no jet set radio

    Bomb rush cyberfunk: not as good, much closer though. actually felt like next gen jet set radio. just wish they bothered to improve the formula at all from 2000 or whenever

    Dead space remake: I found myself having to push through the end of this, got very tedious

    Silent hill free game on psn (I forget the name, the suicide one): so heavy handed, awful writing, awful voice acting, but it was free so whatever

    Silent hill 2: pretty great remake but wish I waited for a price drop.

    Persona 3 reload: basically same as above

    Ff7: solid overall, really liked it

    Spider-Man 2: not as good as the first one but decent

    Unicorn overlord: really good

    Forspoken: not amazing but not nearly as bad as I thought it would be based on the initial reactions

    Tekken 8: love it even though I fucking suck

    Smt: vengeance: great

    Dave the diver: played on a whim without knowing anything about it, sucked me in

    I know there weee more but that’s what I can remember off the top of my head

    Excited to play metaphor, hellblade 2, Indiana jones, riven remake, erdtree dlc for Elden ring, cyberpunk dlc, Alan wake 2, god of war ragnarok dlc, new taiko no tatsujin, armored core vi, like a billion more


  • It was about a year ago and I’ve found general prices have gone up on basically everything, even stuff for parts, in the past few years, but more importantly it was also a local sale in person with a vendor I know. I find that’s the only way to actually get deals anymore. If you buy stuff like this and are stuffing a network rack at home it makes sense to befriend a local electronics recycler or two if you live in an area where that’s a thing.

    I actually moved about two years ago to a less developed area but I will still drive to where I used to live (which is like 90-120 minute drive) 1-2x a year for stuff like this. It’s worth it bc these guys still know me and they’ll cut me deals on stuff like this where ebay sellers will list it for 2-3x as much. but if you watch 8x out of 10 their auctions never sell at those prices, at best they sometimes sell for an undisclosed “best offer” if they even have that option. It’s crazy how many ebay sellers will let shit sit on the market for inflated prices for weeks, months, or longer rather than drop their prices to promote an artificial economy in the hopes that eventually a clueless buyer with fat pockets will come along. They get that and they don’t want to waste the space storing shit for ages

    Full disclosure: when I lived in the area I ran a refurbishing business on the side and would buy tons of stuff from them to fix and resell, that probably helped get me on their good side. From like 2013-2019 I would buy tons of broken phones, consoles, weird industrial shit, etc, fix it, and resell it. They loved it because it was a guaranteed cash sale with no ebay/paypal fees, no risk of negative feedback for their ebay store, no risk of a buyer doing a chargeback or demanding to return, etc. I wanted their broken shit and if I couldn’t fix it I accepted the loss, would bring it back to them to recycle and admit defeat in shame