felbane

We live in a time where functional electric service is a necessity for life. We also live in a time where extreme weather patterns are getting more frequent and more intense.

The very least Texas could do is implement the equipment and procedures necessary to enable importing power from the national grid in an emergency. The cost to implement interconnects at key locations is infinitesimal compared to the costs incurred when there are systemic outages.

The "we can do it better ourselves" argument only works when you don't repeatedly catastrophically fail at "doing it better."

Was considering just doing some RPi based dongles on bedroom TVs and a higher spec gaming PC with Steam Big Picture on the main TV, but with all the innovation recently I feel a bit of choice paralysis.

Anyone willing to share what their setup looks like, or what they're planning to do in the coming year?

Then again, I guess you have to store all those textures for the $9.99 exclusive hot pink and baby shit yellow digital camo shotgun skin somewhere...

If only my insurance covered mental health...

Nothing is forcing you to go buy double everything each time you shop.

If cash is tight but you want to implement this scheme, buy an extra unit of one household item (e.g. laundry detergent) your first trip. Hext time, choose another item (e.g. trash bags).

Eventually you've got a backup unit of every item, and you're now just buying your one item on the same consumption schedule, except now instead of replacing the item you're replacing the backup.

All you ever wanted to know (and some things you probably didn't) about percolators.

Key difference being that the moka pot separates the brewed coffee from the clean water, whereas percolators re-heat brewed coffee to be circulated back through the grounds (thus burning a significant quantity of the resulting brew).

It's a worthwhile tradeoff, in my opinion, to inconvenience a branch of science that's unlikely in the near term to produce research that immediately benefits humanity. Conversely, projects like Starlink solve an immediate problem (access to communication infrastructure in underdeveloped areas) and are sufficiently designed to account for the eventuality of their purpose expiring. These satellites were never meant to be permanent fixtures in the sky.

Astronomers complaining about streaks in the sky seems a bit like a retiree complaining that the new hospital they're building across the lake ruins the view from his kitchen window.

Parallel evolution is amazing. Developing complex communication between human and octopus would be an amazing feat and would likely answer some of our questions about the nature of consciousness.

I flatly disagree with this statement. I have experienced first-hand how conversation analysis can turn into targeted advertising... and there are many others who have shared similar experiences.

You can say this about the majority of Google products. They gain momentum because Google, but under the hood they're crap.

One of the best decisions I made was dropping Google and self-hosting my public-facing services. In this day and age, it's much easier to set up reliable, available services without needing an in-house data center. IMO, it's worth the small extra hosting cost to be the master of your own domain (heh).

Or something.

Hell, I thought Flask's root directory was getting a bit fluttery with .gitignore, .venv, .flaskenv, __pycache__, and requirements.txt...

It's not as trivial to set up as Lockwise or 1Password, but I prefer this setup because:

- 100% Open Source - I own the keyring and can sync it across literally all of my machines, plus the cloud storage provider(s) of my choice seamlessly - The keyring is protected by a key that only I know, no third party is handling the unlock on my behalf