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What are the "trusted sources" that are better than Amazon (which is itself no better than Aliexpress)? Or Walmart, or target, or Newegg, which, ditto?

I buy straight from brands I trust whenever possible, not even trusting Amazon as an intermediary between us. Those brands aren't selling alibaba-dropshipper stuff.

I'd say my trust in stores that sell more than their own brand is at an all-time low. You have enshittifying mid-range department stores where you can't trust a thing, fake "outlet" stores, et c. I sort-of trust REI. I sort-of trust Costco. End of list, maybe?

Like if there's value being delivered in the "trusted source" sphere for a general retailer, I'm not seeing much of it. Quite the opposite, that's all gotten worse steadily this century.

Yeah, it's great if you have money already, or are willing to roll the dice on your family's health. Or have another country to go back to if anyone in your family gets really, really sick.

Wrong. For that, we’d need universal healthcare.

I had a disk in my ZFS pool (a relatively tiny one, among the kind of people who have a home ZFS RAID5 array) go bad earlier this year and bought a used disk for the first time ever. Never even considered it before.

Still cost me as much as a pair of new drives the same size that I bought to transition from mirrored pairs to a four-disk RAID5 array about 16 months earlier. Like, god damn it was expensive.

A new disk would have cost me almost as much as all four disks did, originally.

> Eh, more like cringe.

Yeah, true.

> They'll get over it.

Has not been my experience.

> You'll also get better.

Ditto.

I am not gifted at music but my affinity for it and ability to play music is above-average (not hard, most people just don't ever even try) but if I try to dance, somehow where I think each movement should start or end is entirely wrong, like, to such a degree that it's like I'm trying and wonderfully succeeding at doing it wrong.

Somehow, even with the objective criteria of sensors ensuring I am indeed hitting things when I should be, I can even get pretty damn good at something like Dance Dance Revolution, and feel like I'm moving naturally and smoothly while playing it, yet apparently look like I'm having a seizure even as I'm landing "perfects" across the board.

That's how constitutionally incapable of dance (or, if you prefer, how "white") I am.

For some of us, attempting to dance causes greater amounts of depression in those nearby than it cures in us.

Meh. I never have more than one at once, and destroy my access to old ones before creating a new one (often taking weeks or months off from posting in between). I'd be a lot more "dangerous" or "risky" if I were sitting on an old tens-of-thousands-of-karma account, which is what I'd have otherwise.

People routinely create alts just to post sensitive stuff and seem to do fine, and presumably they are keeping multiple accounts active at once.

[EDIT] I mean plus if I gave that many shits about being able to post on HN, I'd probably care a lot more about holding on to my precious karma in the first place, no?

I abandon accounts when they get way into the hundreds of karma, generally, or a couple times I’ve let it get a ways into the thousands before destroying the password. I prefer not to become attached to it, and find the minor clout of recognition (upvoted comments that probably ought not have been…) kinda gross.

> Also, sarcasm isn’t welcome here. Please read the HN guidelines.

Ah yes, I didn't couch my post in any of the various, rampant HN-friendly versions of shitposting. I'll try to follow your example from here on out. Excellent touch citing the guidelines at me after your role in this thread, A+.

Re-reads this thread, taking notes

I've build some moderately sophisticated server systems up on "bare metal" (as the kids say), know my way around a shell better than most programmers, understand networking better than most programmers, et c., and I still find restricting and monitoring kids' devices to be a huge pain in the ass. The only places it's not extremely shitty are the Switch (which still isn't great) and Apple devices.

Options between "we don't have tech in the house" and "wide-open tech, we have it all" are all some amount of painful, usually for no good reason.

(I remember once investigating how to do some pretty basic stuff for this in Linux, hoping to find something nicer than manually setting some executable permissions and firewall rules and then having to go back and change them all the time, and the closest thing to a guide I found was an old article from Red Hat that basically lead with "LOL, good luck you poor sap, Linux sucks at this" before going on to explain the various bad ways available to sort-of, but not entirely, accomplish it with a lot of work, and significant ongoing time-burden)

Oh good, nothing's possible then, we should give up on regulating bad things because hitmen think murder isn't bad when they do it.

"Accept all" always makes it go away immediately.

Some variant on "reject" takes more effort like 70% of the time. Which is on purpose, of course. The ones that aren't maliciously-complying have a "necessary only" button that insta-closes it, but tons pretend that you might want to allow some spying but not all of it and make you go through another screen if you don't just "accept all".

> To me, having a browser setting for cookies is the only sane way to handle this, it's surprising that this was not considered from the beginning.

Then it'd be possible to default it to "nope" (Firefox, and perhaps Safari, might do this) or to allow a "never, anywhere" setting the first time the question is asked, and malware and spyware vendors know that'd mean a much larger proportion of denials.

Anything with the Red Hat stink, these days. Which, yeah, a lot of that’s Poettering.

If they haven’t been executing a plan to make it extremely painful to maintain a distro that differs significantly from whatever Red Hat’s preferences and ways of operating are (so, making it harder to justify anything but “screw it, we’ll just use red hat, everyone else is just the same thing but with less ability to steer the direction of the OS”), damn the effects on UX, the traditional modular nature of Linux systems, and general open source ecosystem health… well, they’ve sure done a great job of it, so it’d be pretty crazy if that isn’t what they’ve been doing.

That is a weakness of sorts, but yes, unless one is attempting a particular, niche affect, an urge to nest parenthesis is usually a cue to re-write the sentence instead.

Bahrain is host to the headquarters of the US fifth fleet, a notable US airbase, and thousands of US military personnel. These assets are being used to attack Iran.

They’re involved.

I sometimes prefer parenthesis for very short asides—say, three words or fewer.

I find m-dashes easier to read for most other purposes. They’re nicer in longer asides because they’re a little more visually prominent, while also (for some reason) not breaking my mental flow quite so much. They’re far nicer looking when an aside comes at the end of a sentence, as you don’t need to close an m-dash. That always looks like crap with parenthesis, as if the author should have thought of a way to avoid doing that, while with the m-dash there’s no problem at all.

> Ecosystems are either too fragmented or too monopolistic.

In this case, it's actually both at the same time! No, for real, that's why it sucks so bad, both of those things are simultaneously problems with the streaming service market.

Another poster in this thread has already posted my personal preferred solution, which is to do the same thing we did to movie studios and movie theater ownership for many decades, ending only a few years ago: ban combined ownership of both production and distribution.

Thanks to Jellyfin + Infuse (on AppleTV), even family and visitors have no trouble using my "streaming service". And I can reach it on the road with TailScale. Takes me laughably little time per year to manage (maybe an hour in a normal year, perhaps two or three relatively "hands on" hours in a year I modify the zfs disk pool in some way)

My main motivation for having it is easy access to several things that can't be had legally at all (the best very-close-to-opening-day Star Wars movies in the 4k77/4k80/4k83 series, or uncut Beavis and Butthead episodes, or Northern Exposure with the original music, to pick a few examples) but once you've got it, adding everything to the server is arguably less effort and lost time than using a half-dozen streaming services.

I'd much rather pay, I dunno, $50/month or something for a service that had everything on it, but that doesn't exist, so I have this instead. It's a ton better than a pile of streaming services that are still missing most stuff, plus force you to play the ridiculous "which one had this, again?" game.

Haha, this thread has prompted me to follow some of the discussion about stupid bullshit like requiring "user is present" attestation and banning passkey programs (LOL wut?) if they lie about it, or resistance to allowing exports and portability.

I'm now on team "I am outright anti-passkeys and hope they fail and everyone pushing them cries a whole lot about it and never gets over it".

My usernames and passwords auto-fill with faceID already. Lots of forms even (somehow?) auto-submit after that, don't even have to press a button.

I’ve just been operating under the assumption passkeys are gonna lock me out unrecoverably in some way at some point, and have been avoiding them for anything important while allowing them for low-value accounts so they’ll stop nagging me.

I hate that I can’t just put a value in a plain text file somewhere (encrypted, let’s say, to preempt the inevitable and low-value response) and rely on that to work when I need it on any device and interface that can accept keyboard input.

LLMs really shine at speeding up corporate bureaucratic busy-work and nonsense.

We’re in a golden era when same busy work has not yet expanded due to LLM influence. Let’s appreciate it while it lasts.

I don't see how it's not him, Whitman (the timing of his work is a strong point in his favor, being so concerned with the civil war and that apparently-neveaending struggle in America's metaphorical soul), or maybe Melville though I think he's the weakest of those three. Most other plausible answers are too late in the country's history to take that particular title, for one thing. Irving and Poe are early enough but I don't think either's even close to the combo of clout, staying-power, influence, quality, and breadth of coverage of, specifically, Americanness that one would expect for this (and I like both of them!).

I would agree with other posters that if we allow the search to stretch into the 20th century, odds are we'd end up with a filmmaker or songwriter, but I think we've got our all-around best options already, and they're all (basically) 19th century.

Which of the proposed answers in the linked article would you characterize as one or both of "inaccessible" and "politically charged"?

I think a couple are bad answers (Wilder? She's fine-ish, but America's Homer? Very, very, no) but can't figure out which ones might be striking you that way.