remuskaos

Utter nonsense. I'm in Germany, and by law all displayed prices must include tax, groceries, gas, everything.

The gas station operators sometimes do put stickers like "this is how much tax is in the gas price you pay" on the actual pumps as if to blame the government for the greed of the large refineries. But here, after the strait of Hormuz debacle, we've actually had the government lower the gas tax for a while so that people who need their cars for work arent stuck with the higher bill so much. And what do you know, somehow the gas got a little cheaper, but not nearly by the amount of lowered tax. Guess who pocketed the difference.

Worse still, the government then enacted a rule that the gas price could only be raised once a day, but lowered any time. And in average, gas was even more expensive than before.

So yeah, I have trouble blaming the taxes for the high gas price.

But only vertically, certainly not horizontally!

I really appreciate the answer and the detailed breakdown.

I should've stated more clearly what particular part of that statement I found untrue: the "computers being cheap" part when you pary 3k for a decent, but not great, gaming pc ;)

I absolutely believe that you paid 75k for 22 machines (I've used 20 in my post above in error). From the photos I can clearly and quite enviously see that no part of that setup could have been cheap.

And then it's - objectively! - not even true. That amounts to 3750 per computer. For a 4070, that's insanely expensive. You can get decent gaming pc with this card for less than a thrid of that, even in 2024.

I mean I have to admit this house looks live every geeks dream, but come on... Seven figure house price... In my country, most people don't make that much money in their entire working life. I do mean that literally, let's take "seven figure" as 4.5M. Evenly divided by 40 working years, that's 112.5k a year. That's almost double the median income. And I live in Germany, a nation that's considered rich.

You've hit the nail on the head. That's why I strongly preferred email and password login, backed by a keepass(xc) store to hold the data. Owned by me, backed up, impossible to take from me, the works. Sure, most of the time I have to verify my mail address, but after that the account is mine. Well, okay. On some services, I have to "confirm the new device" I'm loggin in from, so I still need access to my mail.

Weeeell... Some services I use seem to have switched to a magic link EVERY TIME for login. No password anymore at all. And all of a sudden, my mail account is the single point of compromise for these accounts.

And there is absolutely nothing that I can do. If the mail is hosted by someone else, they may terminate my account at a whim. Or give it to someone else who happens to have convinced my phone provider to hand them a sim card with my number on it. If I do self host I still need a domain, and I can never really own a domain, only rent it from somewhere. So, whenever that lease goes up, my account is compromised by default.

I really hate that this problem seems still unsolvable. Keybase had the right idea, but no one used it and they got aquihired by zoom during the pandemic...

When I try to use it, I have to sign up for at least the smallest AI subscription for 5 bucks a month (as opposed to the 2 I currently pay for storage). But when I do that with my regular account, I get the error message that my Google Pay money can only be spent in Germany, as if my account hadn't been registered in Germany for the past 20 years...

Top notch UX Google, as always.

Maybe you're working with the wrong people? It's uncommon among younger people, but I frequently hear craftsmen say it (who are over 50).

That actually also exists in German! Bärendienst, although it is not 100% the same as Verschlimmbesserung.

Man you're missing the mark.

If I want to tell a cable that can do only USB 2 from one that can do 3 from one that is actually thunderbolt, the treedix is a godsend. So. Many. Devices. Come with some unknown usb cable. Can it only charge? Transfer data? How fast? Stuff like signal integrity, dispersion, differential timing, phase shift etc are totally out of scope for this simple thing - telling apart these cables.

I first read that as 0! = 1, which, incidentally, is true.

fucking legend

I studied physics, did a PhD and postdoc, the whole science shebang. When I got into software development a few years ago, I was put into a well functioning pizza sized team that developed an internal app for another company. The crew was as software-dev as it gets,:

- one architect who was there from the apps inception yen years prior, who knows all the ins and outs of the application - one project lead, who was with the project two years, who could also code in the classical sense, but was mostly the connection to the customer - a tester who could not code, but also knew the app in and out (from the user perspective) and found things or relayed and reproduced bugs reported by the customer - a technical writer who could also code (somewhat), but was more responsible to think of user behavior, undefined app behavior, edge cases, logic issues etc - and several disposable code monkeys, who were exchangeable and expendable, who did most of the tickets. I joined as one of these

The work was great, the team functioned great and we delivered what the customer wanted. But what really struck me was that software dev is not science, or engineering, or an art form, it's most akin to a trade like plumbing or carpentry. I had computer science as minor in university and pretty much none of what I learned there helped for "real" work. I learned SVN in university, but obviously the team used git. And all of the software development and programming courses I did taught me nothing of how real software is structured or how a team works.

That impression only more strongly once I had to train new hires, PhDs in comp science, who knew basically nothing about real software development.

Again, it's a trade, something you learn on the job from someone who already knows it, like a master carpenter.

"I grew up in Europe" can literally be any one of over 40 different countries, and even more education systems.

I am in Germany, and school starts at 8 in Berlin, 8:05 in Wiesbaden, 7:45 in some small cities in Baden-Württemberg... And those are only the ones that I, personally, experienced. I'm sure Poland and Spain have different times, not lastly owing to timezones etc.

Please don't treat all of Europe as one single country with one set of customs.

The play store is pretty bad. About half the time I search for an app, BY NAME, without any way to confuse it with another app, the top result is a scam or copy cat, or adware. And always, without fail, they are paid-for ads instead of real search results. How can it still be somehow advantageous to trick your users into installing an app they clearly don't want. I wish there was a real alternative to the play store.

F Droid comes close and can even auto update now (never understood why that didn't work on the past), but most apps I want or need like banking, health insurance etc aren't on F Droid.

I have never seen an open source comic before, publishing the full res Krita files and all.

Mad respect for that. I've donated a couple of bucks.

This sounds fantastic, but I'm utterly surprised that Google, of all companies, only releases this for macOS and iOS, but not Android.

Your username is butlerian jihad, and yet you advocate FOR the tell tale LLM writing style that the rest of the internet seems to loathe?

So while I'm still on the fence about whether you're being meta-ironic or whatever, I am very certain that I will always prefer honest, human written blog posts (including wrong idioms, phrases etc) to slop that was "improved" or downright written in full by an LLM.

Oh I absolutely loved those. In the early 90, when I was maybe 6 years old, I had this one, the left half at least:https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kosmos-electronic-sy...

It came with over 20 electronic schematics, pictograms how they were set up in the box, an explanation how they worked and a kid compatible story about a professor, a robot and I think some kids. I absolutely loved it. And I can say with absolute certainty that I wouldnt have chosen my current career and hobby trajectory had it not been for this electronics set.

I've moved cities multiple times now and the kit has disappeared over the years. You can still get them on ebay some times, but I was too cheap to buy one.

Through an incomprehensibly unlikely coincidence, someone put this exact kit on the sidewalk for grabs a fee houses and away, maybe a year ago or two. Naturally I took it, and it's complete and seems even unused.

I am now a father and I hope my daughter will find this kit just as interesting as I did 30 years ago.

Should've clarified: not much else from my collection of favorite games. And that's because of the limited GPU power of the M2 Air, not strictly because the game wouldn't start.

I've only recently gotten a MacBook after using Linux Pretty much exclusively for over twenty years. And I have to say I'm really surprised how much I like it. For gaming it's all right, but not great. Factorio works but not much else.

But for that I still have my Bazzite or Steam Deck. I really encourage you to try Linux for gaming. It's incredible what Valve has achieved on that front.

parakeet is amazing, it has completely ousted whisper for me. On Linux, both handy.computer and epicenter Whispering (using parakeet of course) work incredibly well for set-and-forget STT. I use it constantly to write messages on Slack/Teams, do debate with claude code etc. Both have minor bugs, but I can easily accept those, these apps being FOSS and all.

On Mac, I've been using VoiceInk and it's even better. VoiceInk (and MacWhisper too, IIRC) use the neural engine and the delay between dictation and appearance of the typed text is almost imperceptible.

I believe Kennedy is much older than 1 year.

Anyone can do construction, blue collar jobs? That hasn't been my experience with contractors.

Parakeet doesn't require a GPU. I'm handily running it on my Ubuntu Linux laptop.

Man, today's xkcd hits hard...

I've played it on the Steamdeck without issue.

I've been using my own domain for mail like that for over fifteen years now, and it happened only once that I've had to explain "no I don't work at $drugstore" when giving my "drugstore@mydomain.tld". And even that one time only got me like a weird look, but no further discussion. I enter my mail address into some form myself most of the time, after all.

While I don't know much about centeifuges, I'm still in awe that this Hikoki handheld blower does 90k rpm: https://www.hikoki-powertools.com/products/powertools/li-ion...

That's not a typo, I actually own this device and couldn't believe at first this thing spins with ninety thousand rpm. A lot has happened since my last 5400rpm hdd bit the dust.

Well the inconvenience is kind of the point. I don't want another app on my phone to allow me to indulge.

The point is that I have to walk, physically move, to the corner where the plug is, push the button and be allowed to procrastinate. That is the design hurdle, not so high as to block completely, but just high enough that I don't get sucked into the endless feed each time I'm bored.

Edit: Also I want the granularity. Ads should always - without exception - be blocked. Social media should be allowed on demand and within the rules.

Thank you, I really appreciate this!

Alas, none of it is made up - honestly. My wife and I kept finding ourselves in the garden on a beautiful day scrolling reddit and instagram for up to an hour, on several occasions. We kind of know we're wasting our time, and we kind of want to, too. It's kind of a constant struggle of uber-me against animal-me and I really hope this moderation tool works how I image it.

After I read Neils post I've completed the entire setup - including blog post - in maybe three hours. So if this keeps me from doom scrolling for an hour at least three times, I've gained some time back.