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dave78

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To each their own, but I've been using Brave for a long time (5+ years I think?). It was one or 2 clicks to turn off the crypto stuff when I first installed it. It was straightforward and no dark patterns were employed. It has never come back, unlike what Google and Firefox tend to do with their annoying features. It even syncs my preferences to any new browser I add so I only had to do it on one computer once and never worry about it again.

The web's dependency on Chromium engines is deeply concerning, I agree. I used Firefox for a long time. But at this point, IMO Brave is the most pragmatic choice if you want a browser that's not Google but "just works" with the modern web.

Can't there can be over-current issues if you are not using a dedicated wall outlet for backfeeding the solar?

Consider a situation where the plugged-in solar inverter is capable of providing 15 amps into the circuit, but so is the breaker feeding the circuit from the panel. If you plug in something that can consume 30 amps, it will be able to do so by pulling 15 amps from each source without tripping the breaker, so you can end up with 30 amps traveling in your building wiring that is only sized for 15.

At least that's how I understand it. I don't know if any of the grid-tied inverters that can plug into a wall have some way of detecting and compensating for this. Clearly other countries have been able to come to a decision to allow it. I vaguely remember someone explaining that the 230V systems in Europe somehow mitigate the issue but I don't remember how.

Our lease agreement has some concessions for potential satellite dishes and external TV antennas.

This may be because the FCC has pretty strict rules that require apartment buildings to permit dishes and antennas on personal areas like balconies.

Lack of similar laws for solar panels means that most landlords are going to just say "no" rather than take the risk.

Jeff mentioned in his video that just loading the front page of CNN would take something like an hour and a half (20+ MB).

33.6Kbps is not practical for much on the modern Internet in 2026. As mentioned in a sibling comment, Starlink (even in standby mode) would be much better. lite.cnn.com would load in about 10 seconds which is pretty good, but there's not much else like it left anymore.

What's amazing is how great the Internet in the 1990s managed to be despite these limitations. Just like with RAM and disk space, developers back then had to be very mindful of bandwidth - today's devs (and agents) have the luxury of paying much less attention to that.

If opinion polling were to be done on this issue, I bet we'd find that the general public would be almost unanimously united in agreement that elected officials should not get special treatment in the airport or when flying. Instead, they should be subjected to the same awful experience (that they all created) as the rest of us. If it were up to me, I'd even ban them from being eligible for TSA Precheck. Stand in the normal TSA line like everyone else.

which doesn't get you all that much

After college I moved from the far western edge of one timezone to the far eastern edge of another zone. I grew up with 5-5:30pm sunsets in winter, and now I live with 4-4:30pm sunsets. I moved here 25 years ago, and every single year when November/December come around and I get those early sunsets I hate it. It's one of the reasons I'd like to move away from here.

I know it's just one person's opinion, but to me those extremely early sunsets in the middle of winter are a huge quality of life reduction.

I believe part of the problem is that if you're in the middle or western edge of your zone, the winter sunsets aren't so bad. I suspect a lot of people who would prefer DST year round live on the eastern edge.

Nebula just had a major release that added IPv6 support for overlay networks. Hardly maintenance mode.

The main company working on it now seems to be adding all the fancy easy-to-use features as a layer on top of Nebula that they are selling. I personally appreciate getting to use the simple core of Nebula as open source. It seems very Unix-y to me: a simple tool that does one thing and does it well.

My Truck Desk 9 months ago

I got much better at this when my kids were born, because it was the only way I could get work done on some of my (computing) side projects. I went from having hours of uninterrupted "in the zone" time during evenings and weekends to having much less time overall, and what time I did have was broken into smaller chunks.

I got much more thoughtful about how I used my time and also got better at pre-planning what I had to do so as to make the best use of it. Mostly the key was to just try to tackle smaller tasks and accept that progress would be slow.

also:

- tons of sensors with limited lifespans

- more complicated transmissions with more gears

- auto start/stop

Pretty much all of these reliability reducers are manufacturers trying to eek a little more MPGs by throwing lots of complicated technology at the problem, which introduces a lot more failure points.

Headlights and taillights on my current vehicle are supposedly around $1500 each, mostly due to a bunch of sophisticated sensors being built in.

Back in the 80s headlights were standardized (in the US at least) - you either had rectangular or circular. They were available at every auto parts store. Now they're a special order item from the dealer.

Litestream v0.5.0 10 months ago

Interesting tidbit regarding LiteFS/Litestream:

But the market has spoken! Users prefer Litestream. And honestly, we get it: Litestream is easier to run and to reason about. So we’ve shifted our focus back to it.

Raspberry Pi 500+ 10 months ago

According to Jeff Geerling's video, the main PCB in the 500+ is identical to the 500, same revision and all. Presumably they planned both the 500 and 500+ at the same time so they designed a single PCB that could accommodate both, and then only populated the m.2 parts when building a 500+.

So I don't think they "backed out" rather just didn't have the 500+ ready to launch yet.

Raspberry Pi 500+ 10 months ago

Second paragraph in the article:

"Raspberry Pi 500+ boasts ... an internal M.2 socket pre-fitted with a 256GB Raspberry Pi SSD"

so I'm not sure what your point about SD cards is in this case.

There are plenty of IoT devices that people want to execute commands on (anything remotely controlled, basically). Polling for commands on a periodic basis introduces lag into that process which is irritating. Furthermore, polling at a frequent interval can end up using a lot of power as well versus waiting in a receive-only mode for an incoming command.

I'm 24 years into my career now. I think you just get used to this after a while.

I've worked on several big (at the time) software products that our company built and shipped to customers for a while, that we have since abandoned. And in those cases, the entire organization within the company that owned the code was disbanded, so there was no one left to know about it or care about it. I'm not 100% certain but I strongly suspect that there is not a single copy left anywhere in the company of the code for those products - code that I worked on for years.

It's strange thinking that there is basically no trace left of something that I put years of professional work into, but I think it happens more than most people realize. I suppose it's no different than startups that fail and everything disappears.

I also think this is why so many software people end up enjoying hobbies that revolve around physical things, like woodworking or restoring old cars. Having some physical object that you can point to and say "I built that" is kind of nice compared to everything else you've done living on a flash chip somewhere.

Agree in spirit, though again if it does go viral and they become embarrassed the most likely thing is they'd shut down public access to the cameras - which would be a lousy outcome for everyone.

My county has traffic cameras available online, though it's only static images updated once a minute or so. It's not that great but I still appreciate it, especially during winter weather. Every now and then if the weather seems bad I check the cameras to see what the roads look like before I head out. It's not a big deal, but I'd be a little annoyed if they took away public access because someone was trying to make some sort of statement or game out of them.

I'm sure if they have opinions they would share them with NASA and probably their families, and of course if it comes out that NASA ignored their concerns and they perished that would be pretty bad.

However, I imagine that part of becoming an astronaut means that you really have to get comfortable with trusting others to make critical, ultimately life-affecting decisions on your behalf all the time. So perhaps their mindset is more of "we trust that all the smart people on the ground are doing their best to make the safest decision for us, and we'll go with what you say".

If I were one of them stuck up there, though, I'd probably want to get on a video call with the Boeing engineers and look them in the eyes, show them pictures of my family, and ask if they are confident their vehicle will bring me home safely.

At this point, now that the SpaceX alternative has been officially acknowledged, I really don't see how anyone at NASA would be comfortable risking the return on Starliner. If they do and it fails and the astronauts die, everyone will be (rightly) outraged that a viable rescue plan was available and not used. It could become an existential crisis for NASA.

My belief is that the fact that they're publicly "considering" the SpaceX plan means that they've probably already decided to do that and what we're seeing in the media right now is NASA just letting everyone get used to the idea before they formally commit to it.

SQLite being released in the public domain has to be up there as one of the greatest gifts ever given to the global software development community. I'd love to know what led to the licensing decision. The wide-open rights to use it however you see fit have undoubtedly enabled countless applications to exist that otherwise would have been very, very difficult to create - especially mobile apps.

Whatever money Dr. Hipp makes from SQLite it is surely not enough relative to the value that it has provided to millions of people.