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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Absolutely agreed. The situation is almost never black and white. The reason I put this as my answer to the question is that we had a scare this weekend with one of our dogs. She ate something that gave her a blockage in the outlet to her stomach. In the end we spent around $4000 on the surgery required to save her life. Even though we chose to go forward with it, it was still a hugely stressful situation and one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make. We were lucky that a local vet had time to rush her into surgery. If they hadn’t been able to, the cost would have been over $13,000 and we would not have been able to afford it at all. As it is, we had to borrow some money from family to do the surgery. When I wrote this, it was up in the air whether we would be able to do it or not.


  • It’s a prank riddle. Basically you make two statements about building bridges. They can be from anywhere and to anywhere else. My nose to your forehead, Baltimore to Seattle, it makes no difference. In one sentence, you use the word “okay” and in the other you don’t. The sentence with “okay” in it produces a good bridge. The sentence that doesn’t, doesn’t.

    When you ask a person to build their own bridge, if they say “okay” in the sentence, it’s a good bridge. If they don’t, it’s a bad bridge and it falls down. This setup is built to make people frustrated because “okay” is one of those filler words that people don’t really pay attention to in sentences.

    I’ve also heard of a similar setup where a person hands an object to another person (again, the object doesn’t matter) and says “This is a bean, okay?” And if the recipient says “okay” then they have done the task correctly and can pass it along to another person, declaring the object is something else. If the receiver doesn’t say “okay,” then something went wrong and one of the people who is in on the joke interrupts and starts the process again. with a new object.




  • This must have changed with 23.04 or something then, because when I set up my home server a little over a year ago, ZFS as root was not only not a part of the install, but also heavily recommended against as something that could be hacked in. Basically you could do it, but you shouldn’t was my impression. I ended up doing EXT4 as root, then mounted my ZFS storage in my home directory.


  • Every day when I come home from work, I kneel on the top step of our stairs and call our dogs over. They sit on the landing and put their front paws on my shoulders while I scratch their sides and pet them. My wife has taken to calling this ritual “motivation.” The dogs really love having a couple minutes of solid attention when I come home and it’s a good way for me to switch gears into home-brain, since my work is very stressful and tends to take over.



  • A lot of folks are talking about how a centralized repository would be a big target for governments, ISPs and rights holders, but I have a different angle.

    Who is going to pay for all of that development and maintenance? We are pirates. We don’t pay for stuff. It’s kind of our thing.

    Additionally, you are proposing an option with social features and algorithms. Both are a negative because they necessarily encourage users to explicitly say what they have been downloading or uploading in a way that is being logged and therefore is evidence against them should a media company want to push for legal action.


  • All of my passwords are in Bitwarden and important ones are shared with my wife who has her own Botwarden and has shared her important passwords back with me. If one of us goes, the other will have access to everything. I don’t (yet) have any descendants to inherit anything of importance, so I’m not worried about anything beyond my passwords so that if something happens to me, my wife can manage all of the accounts for bills, banking, communication, etc.

    If/when I have children, I will likely make a new plan that builds on what I already have, with directions to access my password vault that can be given to my brother and his husband and my parents, should they outlive me and my wife. With my passwords, everything else of import is accessible. Thankfully, my brother is very tech savvy, so if my wife and I both go, I can trust him to be able to log in to everything and pull important media down.






  • A raspberry Pi is a very good emulation device using the RetroPie image. A Pi 4b can go up to PSX/N64 fairly easily.

    On the handheld side of things, most of them that “come with” ROM sets will have them loaded on an SD card. These manufacturers often skimp on the cards though, so expect it to die quickly. You can usually just clone the whole SD to a new one and it’s fine.

    Most of these devices use RetroArch and software emulation. However, there is another option. The Mister project and devices sold by Analogue use field programmable gate arrays - chips that can change their structure according to software. This means running an NES game on one of these devices is more literally like running it on original hardware. For accurate emulation, this is the best option by far. However, it comes with a significantly higher price tag.

    In general the easiest and least expensive startup for emulation is on the PC. With fairly modest hardware, emulation of everything up to PS2 is possible with some newer platforms also being very emulatable (notably everything Nintendo puts out is easy to run because their architecture is largely straightforward, their systems are lower power, and there is significantly more demand for their games)

    If you specifically want something hooked up to your TV, a first generation (launch window, before they increased the battery life) Switch can happily run a fair amount of stuff, including everything up to N64/PS1. The (new)3DS/2DS is also a great emulation device and can run basically everything up to SNES/Genesis handheld.

    Oh and one more option. If you have Android, you can easily install a variety of emulators and use a Bluetooth or wired controller with them utilizing a controller phone mount.




  • When I’m talking about leaks, I’m not talking about the extra energy required to constantly run vacuum pumps. I’m saying that HSR infrastructure needs inspection and occasional repair, but not nearly to the extent that a vacuum tube based solution would. Any savings made via efficiency are pissed away by having to pay more maintenance crews and material cost to maintain the infrastructure. The tubes are also much less likely to be able to be automatically inspected like rails can be using inspection cars because any train moving through the tube can only inspect the interior walls. Besides, rail already exists across much of the US for use as freight infrastructure. These same rails, if inspected and tested properly, can be used for high speed rail much more immediately than waiting for tubes to be built. Besides all of this, more aerodynamic trains can and have been built, but are not in use in the US. Instead, we send bricks down the rails. The “immense” efficiency gain from 0.5 atmospheres of air pressure is likely significantly less impressive when compared against well designed trains with regards to aerodynamics.

    All of this is also completely ignoring how dangerous tunnels are for fires. Even with proper safety precautions, fires in tunnels are exceptionally dangerous. By venting out the smoke that kills people, you increase the intensity of the fire that also kills people.