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wopwops

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How I Left YouTube 7 months ago

I said "F-this" 20 years ago, moved to the middle of nowhere, paid cash for my property and live on next to nothing. Best decision ever.

Why do the images look like someone took pictures of dotmatrix printer output?

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Update: for whatever it's worth, I just asked the Magic 8 Ball (Perplexity):

Low-tech Magazine uses the option to display images as dithered primarily to reduce the energy consumption and data load of their website. Dithering is an old image compression technique that reduces the number of colors in images to just a few shades of gray (black and white with four levels of gray), which dramatically decreases the file size. The black-and-white dithered images are then recolored via the browser’s CSS, which adds no extra data load.

This approach makes images roughly ten times less resource-intensive than full-color high-resolution images, which supports the magazine’s goal of having a low-energy, solar-powered website. However, some images, such as graphs or those with crucial color information, may become less clear under dithering, so the website offers the option to turn off dithering for individual images to reveal the original, heavier images. This balances energy efficiency with the need for clarity when visual information depends on color or detail.

Thus, the dithered image feature is both an energy-saving measure and a distinct stylistic choice that aligns with the philosophy of reducing the environmental impact of web usage while maintaining visual storytelling appeal.

Draw salary as long as you can, save as much as possible and buy land outright somewhere cheap. No mortgage. I saw where it was all headed back in the early 2000s. I was in my mid 30s and feeling the grind back then.

Rent? Fuck that. Your life is on the line and this is for all the marbles. You find a way to go rent free. Maybe do like the bums are doing all over the place, live in a van, etc. Nobody seems to care. Save that money and then get out.

I did this, ending my career in IT back in 2006. Best move ever. When they fired everyone on the last contract I was on, I can't tell how good it felt.

By the way, the house I lived in at the end... Remember the house in Fight Club? That would have been an improvement.

It's not going to work. I happen to be friends with a top AI researcher and he laughs it off completely. "No way." He referred me to this:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-tesla-self-dr...

"It's all hype," said Steven E. Shladover, a retired research engineer at the University of California, Berkeley who has been involved in efforts to create autonomous driving for 45 years. "The technology does not exist to do what he is claiming. He doesn't have it and neither does anybody else."

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It's not close to working at all. Musk must know it.

It's a great life! I just wish I'd been in a position to do it earlier. (I'm in my late 40s now.) I do a bit of IT, but nothing like before. Very basic. It amounts to desktop support and basic networking. I do other stuff too. I sold solar power systems for a while, for example. We have a solar power system and a Tesla Powerwall 2. That has almost totally eliminated the electricity bill. We produce a lot of our own food and we have no debt, so we don't need much money to survive.

People I know who are still in California tell me I wouldn't believe how bad things have gotten there. But the thing is, it was already "that" bad to me back in the early 2000s. I feel very lucky to have gotten out of there.

I've just had my "last straw" moment with Firefox after over a decade of using it. Several addons broke with their developers saying, in effect, F-it, and then it lost all of my saved logins. So, yep, F-it. Firefox has been moving toward becoming a clone of Chrome for years. I just skipped to the chase and started using Chrome. Congratulations, Mozilla. Nice work.

Tesla actually underhypes the Powerwall 2. It's better than most people realize. See: capabilities of the backup gateway. It islands existing grid tie solar systems and allows these systems to generate electricity for household loads and/or Powerwall charging during grid failures. Usually grid tie solar systems are disabled during grid failures to prevent them from exporting electricity to the grid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxAbd-kanI8

Tesla mentions this capability, but most people shopping for energy storage don't realize what it would cost to do this with gear from other manufacturers (SMA for example). Some storage providers don't offer any backup capability at all. Enphase is the saddest example of this. Enphase tried to convince customers that they shouldn't demand backup capabilities from their solar energy storage systems, and Tesla is actually towing a Tiny house around Australia that uses Enphase microinverters with a Powerwall 2 offgrid. Enphase's own AC Battery provide no backup capability at all or a way to run off grid.

I sell solar power systems in New Zealand and the Powerwall 2 makes every other storage solution look stupid at the moment when considering price per warranted kW/h and features. I can't sell my customers a Powerwall 2 yet, but I advise against buying systems that I can sell them from Panasonic, LG, Sonnen, Enphase, etc. The whole storage industry needs to understand that the Powerwall 2 is real (get over the shock) and that if they don't cut their prices roughly in half---look at Aquion.

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/03/15/aquion-energy-files-cha...

Nice battery. Too expensive.