Rudism

I've been paying for Premium for a while, but I was behind a VPN when I signed up and apparently they charge you the rate for the country that your IP address resolves to instead of the country your account is actually associated with for some reason. I got an email just a couple days ago though saying that they're canceling my account since my payment method isn't also issued from that country (why they couldn't detect that when I first signed up is anyone's guess). I probably won't bother re-subscribing though. I've started self-hosting an Invidious instance instead, which not only strips Google's ads, but also has the Playlet app on my Rokus, which supports SponsorBlock to auto-skip sponsored ad reads in the videos themselves.

For a few years I've been running a couple self-hosted instances of Uptime Kuma from two different locations (a Raspberry Pi at my house and on my VPS) which monitor a few things I care about plus each other, and haven't had any problems.

Due to their app store monopoly, Apple is probably one of the few companies whose version of enshittification often involves enshittifying the products and services of other companies.

It's too bad the author didn't think to restore the factory RAM before shipping it. My unrelenting cynicism always makes me very careful to hide any evidence of tinkering on the rare occasions when I need to send a tech product off for warranty repairs.

I think the answer to your first point is easily explained by the fact that the major news orgs typically have paywalls that check the user's IP, cookies, and so forth to decide whether they're allowed to see the full article for free or if they have to pony up first. There's no way to really incorporate that functionality into RSS feeds so they're just pushing out the bare minimum as a Hail Mary to drive their dwindling RSS user base back to the website. Smaller personal blogs that don't rely on advertising or paid membership revenue to stay afloat are far more likely to provide full article content on their RSS feeds (since there's no reason not to).

Some feed readers have "scraping" support where they request each article's URL internally and figure out how (or can be configured with CSS selectors) to extract the article's text content and display it in the reader, though it can be pretty hit or miss whether that can work for a given site.

As for formatting, there are a couple possible explanations--the reader could be ignoring or mangling HTML tags in the content when it's displaying it, or the site itself may be generating its RSS feeds with mangled or missing formatting elements. In my experience both possibilities are equally likely.

If an email has a rich, HTML view; it should be required to come with a text-only, non-HTML copy of the body as well; for accessibility, compatibility, and privacy reasons.

I can't imagine this working. The plain text section would probably something like "Upgrade your email client to view this message" 90% of the time and be completely pointless.

Maybe it's an unpopular opinion but if I were rebooting email I'd forego HTML entirely and either say it's strictly plain-text, or use some Markdown-like formatting spec that looks fine even when viewed as plain text (email clients could provide WYSIWYG editors for less technically-inclined email authors). The evils of HTML in email (phishing, impersonating companies, and other scams) far outweigh the benefits (none, as far as I'm concerned).

The thing I'm most confused about is I thought xkcd was one guy named Randall's webcomic, but this post makes it sound like there are several people involved in creating the comics. Is that the case? Does Randall still draw them or is it like a company with a whole creative team now?

Individuals choosing to live an energy-conscious life is commendable, and if enough people did it it might even ripple some small effects upwards, but ultimately I don't think that would ever be enough to actually solve anything. It has to be a top-down solution where lawmakers force the big corporations to be energy/environment conscious, but of course with the politicians (in the U.S. at least) being in the pocket of those very companies that's a tall order.

Another killer feature for me is its built-in support for Wallabag. I host my own server and routinely save longer articles to it so that I can download and read them on my Kobo later.

A while ago my wife applied for a home equity loan. At some point I got a call from someone claiming to be from the bank she had applied through (I forget which one), calling to make sure I approved the loan since the home is in both our names. He asked for my name, which I gave him, and then the last four digits of my social security number, which I also gave him. He then proceeded to ask for my full social security number, at which point alarms started going off in my head and I started sweating about even giving the last four digits to a stranger who had called me out of the blue. I told him I wouldn't do that, and was there a number on the bank's website I could call in order to get back to him, in order to verify that he actually worked for the bank. The guy started acting really annoyed, and said he didn't think there was any number on the bank's website that could reach him, and that if I didn't give him my full social security number he would be forced to reject the loan application. I told him I didn't feel comfortable giving that information to someone who had phoned me, and if there was no way for me to call him back through an official bank phone number then the call was over. He hung up angrily.

Turns out he actually was from the bank and he did cancel the loan application.

Maybe I'm being cynical, but as long as it doesn't require me to connect to the internet and I can just plug an HDMI cable or two into it and treat it like a monitor, I guess I don't mind so much if the price of a smart TV is supplemented by other people having to look at ads. I get the lower price benefit without the negative side.

I've got a couple Vizios right now that are basically just glorified monitors because they stay offline, and they work just fine for me.

As far as local games, if you're into retro gaming the G-Cloud is also powerful enough to play PSP games at 2x or 3x resolution (as well as anything else you can find emulators for up to and including the PS1 and N64 generation of consoles). I got a G-Cloud around when it first released and still use it quite a bit for both emulation and streaming, though I use Steam Link to play games running on my desktop instead of GeForce Now.

I used a Light Phone II for a few years, which is essentially an expensive e-ink dumbphone (it runs Android under the hood, but you can't actually run any apps outside of some minimal built-in ones for stuff like directions and music).

My main gripe was that I like to listen to music and podcasts while I walk, and the LP2's apps for that are rather lackluster (nearly to the point of unusability for me). It drove me back to my smartphone a few times (a OnePlus something-or-other), which would usually last a few weeks before I'd go back to the LP2 again because the smartphone was too distracting (like I'd pop open a web browser to look up an actor while watching a movie, then getting sucked down a rabbit hole and missing the whole movie before I realized it was happening).

I'm trying a new experiment now--I've got a smartphone again but it's a super tiny one (a Jelly Star which has a 3 inch screen). It's very annoying to actually use for typing or reading because it's so small. It's only been a month or so, but so far I'm finding it's a very nice compromise. I can listen to all my podcasts and music using my normal Android apps, and I can fire up a web browser in a pinch, but it doesn't suck up my attention because it's so uncomfortable to use for any period of time.

PostGraphile didn't have any first-class migration solution back when we started using it. It looks like they have a `migrate` tool, but I can't speak to that since I've never used it.

The way I set everything up, there's one schema containing just the bare tables and data, and then everything else (stuff that PostGraphile generates and all of our stored procedures with business logic) are in a separate schema. That way the migration process is a shell script that essentially 1. drops the entire non-table schema, 2. runs through all of the SQL files that define the application (there's some custom logic to control dependencies by looking for a `-- PRIORITY N` comment on the first line of the source files), 3. attach all the triggers to the tables (since they live in the schema that was dropped). It means we didn't have to worry about figuring out what all needs to be dropped to make a change because literally everything is dropped and recreated from scratch each time we deploy a new version.

I'm speaking in present tense because this application still exists, we've just (more or less) frozen the code base and are slowly migrating all its functionality piecemeal into a ASP.NET Core WebAPI project.

I worked for years on a massive PostGraphile project where 99% of the backend application code was written as stored procedures and table triggers, and let me tell you, once the complexity of the system moves beyond basic CRUD operations this kind of system is an absolute chore to work with. The code base is extremely difficult to organize and manage, code completion and compile-time error safety is virtually non-existent, deploying new versions will probably be non-intuitive and confusing for everyone, training new programmers on the code is chaos... it is absolutely something I would never recommend to anyone under any circumstance.

That being said, I do fully agree that things like Redis, ElasticSearch, RabbitMQ, and Kafka are probably unnecessary in a large number of projects that decide to add them to the stack if those projects are also already using PostgreSQL as a database.

I think if you're happy with the experience that the IDEs you mentioned provide you, then there is very little reason to switch.

Being familiar with vi keybindings can be useful if you ever find yourself on a minimal system with no other editors available, but the subset of knowledge you need in that situation would be much smaller than if you wanted to use Neovim as your primary development environment. I think Emacs/Vim/Neovim and the like are better suited to users who actually enjoy the process of configuring stuff like LSPs and code completions in a way that's fine-tuned to their personal preferences and works the same across all programming languages.

Are you implying that we would assign a public /64 subnet to a collection of nanites that were designed to be absorbed after a week in the human body, and then retire that subnet forever? This seems like an unlikely scenario, but I'll assume it's just an intellectual exercise and take a stab!

- Total number of /64 subnets available: 2^64

- Total number of humans in this future: Let's say 16 billion (roughly twice what we're at now)

To get the total number of months before we'd run out of /64 subnets, assuming each human is absorbing one every month, we divide the number of /64 subnets by the number of humans:

2^64 / 16 billion =~ 1,152,921,505

Divide by 12 to get the total number of years:

1,152,921,505 / 12 =~ 96,076,792

So by my math, assuming the human population stayed steady at 16 billion (which seems just as absurd as the initial premise) we'd have about 100 million years to figure out how to start reusing some of those old subnets before we started running into trouble.

The Quest 2's resolution was almost there for me--I could even spend a few hours at a time working on code in Immersed before I started to feel the eye strain. The Quest 3 has made it good enough that I could go all day if I wanted to. The only real sticking point now is the discomfort of wearing it on my face for that long.

I think that while authors are obviously free to make whatever stylistic choices they want, it's also valid for readers to point it out when those choices are so distracting that it interferes with the intended message of the writing (as long as it's done civilly). It reminds me of another recent-ish article that was posted to HN that used uncommon ligatures looping between certain letters, where a large part of that discussion was centered around how distracting that was.

As an author, if you notice that your style choices are generating more interest and discussion than the actual content of your writing, it's probably worth considering whether the reasons that led you to those choices are really worth taking away from the messages you're trying to convey. Seeing as how the author of this post chimed in here to call their use of lowercase an "asshole filter," I suppose it's clear where they stand on that question.

I can see a future where we'll have browser extensions that use generative AI to "correct" style and grammar of articles to match the preferences of the reader, at which point stylistic choices may cease to matter as much.

The Quest devices are all fully wireless and have a pretty decent existing library of Quest-specific games and apps that you can play even if you don't own a computer.

You could also connect them to a PC wirelessly and play any PC VR games that your computer is capable of running. It used to be a little more cumbersome to set up, but Valve recently released a native SteamLink app on the Quest store that vastly simplifies the whole PC VR experience.

Fair enough. Seems like the conclusions drawn are not that it doesn't improve security, rather it does not improve security enough to justify the added burden to users and support staff.

I'd venture that this 23andMe situation is one of the scenarios where password expiration could have significantly improved the outcome, but I concede that it was a poor example for me to use.

Is that true though? I agree they're annoying and in an ideal world where users don't reuse passwords or leaked hashes can't be broken they'd be pointless--but in this case I think it certainly would have protected at least some of the accounts that were reusing breached passwords. Is there actual evidence/research that proves password rotation has no effect on security in the event of breaches?

Those users signed up for a service with poor security controls (no 2FA, no requirement to rotate passwords at regular intervals) and then checked a box saying "share my data with other accounts."

So while I agree with you that those users are not responsible for the accounts that were actually compromised, they were fully responsible for sharing their data on that service without fully thinking the implications through. 23andMe is not blameless--it's their poor security controls that allowed it to happen in the first place--but I strongly feel people do not take security and privacy as seriously as they should and as a result do share at least some of the blame.

Today, kids in the U.S. don't even tote many (or any) books, most of the content and schoolwork takes place on a lightweight Chromebook that stays in the classroom.

This may be a regional thing, because my kids have to lug heavier loads back and forth to school every day than I ever had to when I was a kid, and that's on top of their Chromebooks and sometimes an instrument for band. They also don't get lockers big enough to store anything substantial so they've got to carry everything all the time. We pretty much go through a new backpack each year for each kid because they get so worn down from having their capacity continuously stretched to the limit.

I love the idea of this after playing with it for a few minutes. My main gripe is that the font size is way too small for my old-man eyes, and it doesn't seem to remember or restore the previous zoom-level when launching (meaning I need to re-zoom-in every time). If it were possible to set a larger font-size or if the previous zoom level was saved and restored on each launch that would be a greatly welcome addition to what seems like a super useful tool.

It should be noted that the repo you linked is for a deprecated image that's losing support at the end of this year: https://info.linuxserver.io/issues/2023-09-06-unifi-controll...

The note I link above discusses its replacement and how to upgrade.

I have a relatively inexpensive Seiko 5 mechanical watch that I really like, but as much as I love the idea of mechanical watches I simply don't have the patience to tend to it. Accuracy is a big problem (at least with my specific watch). Half of the time it's magnetized and running a few minutes fast per day, and the other half (shortly after de-magnetizing it) it's running a few minutes slow per day, meaning I needed to remember to adjust it every morning and always had to assume there's at least a minute or two margin of error one way or the other any time I read it--almost completely defeating my reason for wearing a watch in the first place.

For a while I wore a solar-powered Casio that self-adjusted every morning using the NIST atomic clock radio signals, and the peace of mind knowing that my watch was always accurate was such a pleasure in comparison. It was kind of cheap build quality and eventually fell apart, but I don't think I'll ever go back to a mechanical watch again after that.

I do contract work for NASA and the main project I work on is transitioning from PostGraphile to an ASP.NET Core WebAPI (currently targeting .NET 7, but will likely look at bumping that to 8 once it's released if it's not too disruptive). I work completely in Linux, coding using Neovim, with Omnisharp for language features and code completion, and our applications are fully built and deployed using Linux containers. .NET on Linux has come a long way since the early days of Xamarin and Mono, it's quite enjoyable to use.

In my experience trying to send email from any address with something other than .com, .net, .org, and most 2-character country TLDs automatically counts against it by spam blockers to the point where users have to whitelist the address to see any emails (and even then they sometimes don't get them). Even newer three-character TLDs like .xyz are practically useless for sending emails.

I agree. My opinion is that once you've trained yourself to use virtual desktops efficiently, multiple monitors becomes more of a hassle than a benefit.

I think multiple monitors is the solution for people who would rather solve the problem by spending their money instead of the effort it takes to configure and become accustomed to switching between virtual desktops. Given that it is a strict biological limitation that the human brain can only focus attention on one thing at a time, I don't believe there is any valid argument for why moving your eyeballs between physical monitors is any better than hitting a key combo to switch between virtual desktops on a single monitor once those key combos have become muscle memory. Additionally, the number of physical monitors you have is limited by how much money you have to burn and how much physical space you have to place them, whereas virtual desktops are theoretically unlimited.