They’re offering to pay you to watch ads, same as what Brave does.

You’re going to get people who fall for the “free money” aspect, same as always.

(Also replacing a site’s ads with their ads is exactly the same shit Honey is doing, so it’s nice to see that the founder has a single idea and is going to keep going after it.)

Not quite.

We’d need the waymo cab to start screaming about how the robot just jumped right out in front of it, and how they should stay the hell out of the way.

Then we’ll have reached parity.

Stuttering and texture pop-in makes me immediately wonder if your SSD shit itself.

Maybe see if there’s anything in the system logs and/or SMART data that indicates that might be a problem?

The $95 million is about nine hours of profit for Apple

I’m sure this will stop them from ever doing something like this again.

(Also I can’t wait for my $0.48 check three years from now.)

Sir Lord President Muskovitch owns an ISP, so he’s on the side of whatever makes him more money, which is always going to not be the one that you’re on.

US yes, maps no.

There are less dumb dumbphones that do a bit more, but I went for quite literally phone-calls-and-sms-only.

I have navigation in the car that works fine, so I personally don’t need that, and am using an iPod, so I don’t need any media functionality.

The camera is shit, but again, if I’m going somewhere specifically to take pictures then I’ve got a reasonable DSLR.

Like I said, not for everyone but works great for what I want and makes it where I basically spend zero time on the internet unless I explicitly sit down at my desk.

I’m with you on phone reduction, and I’m closing in on like 8 months of using a dumbphone.

If you’re really serious about removing distractions, a Nokia that feels like it fell out of 1996 is a shockingly good way to do it.

A bit harsh, perhaps, for a lot of people and I won’t deny there’s a lot of compromises you have to make, but if your goal is to reduce distractions and be in the present, it’s pretty much the gold standard.

No social media, no group messages, no email, no push notifications, no advertisements masquerading as ‘important’, nothing. If you want me you can call or text, and if you don’t want to do either then I guess whatever it was turned out to not actually be that important anyways.

Also mine lasts like 10 days on a charge, and doesn’t cost $1000.

My compromise to survive in modern society was an iPad mini. It’s loaded down with all the crap my phone used to have, but it’s also something I do not take to bed or out of the house, so I can still do banking apps and totp 2fa, and take and send pictures via email and all that stuff without it being a device that’s attached to my hip most of the time and thus in easy reach of noise and nonsense.

Not shocking? There’s probably zero ROI on bothering to invest in R&D for consumer gear.

You can’t sell enough premium drives to offset the fact they’re down to commodity pricing now: the market for a $45 1tb SSD is much larger than a $100 one, and frankly, I wouldn’t be on the premium side of that business either.

High-spec big and expensive enterprise drives are 100% the way to go.

Same thing already has happened with GPUs and CPUs, so storage being next is not surprising.

Cloudflare tunnels are the thing you’re looking for, if you’re not opposed to cloudflare.

You run the daemon on your local system, it connects to cloudflare, and presto, you’ve bypassed this entire mess.

I think the thing a LOT of people forget is that the majority of steam users aren’t hardcore do-nothing-but-gaming-on-their-pc types.

If you do things that aren’t gaming, your linux experience is still going to be mixed and maybe not good enough to justify the switch: wine is good, and most things have alternatives, but not every windows app runs, and not every app alternative is good enough.

Windows is going to be sticky for a lot longer because of things other than games for a lot of people.

A thing you may not be aware of, which is nifty, is the M.2 -> SATA adapters.

They work well enough for consumer use, and they’re a reasonably cheap way of adding another 4-6 SATA ports.

And, bonus, you don’t need to add the heat/power and complexity of some decade old HBA to the mix, which is a solution I’ve grown to really, really, dislike.

The chances of both failing is very rare.

If they’re sequential off the manufacturing line and there’s a fault, they’re more likely to fail around the same time and in the same manner, since you put the surviving drive under a LOT of stress when you start a rebuild after replacing the dead drive.

Like, that’s the most likely scenario to lose multiple drives and thus the whole array.

I’ve seen far too many arrays that were built out of a box of drives lose one or two, and during rebuild lose another few and nuke the whole array, so uh, the thought they probably won’t both fail is maybe true, but I wouldn’t wager my data on that assumption.

(If you care about your data, backups, test the backups, and then even more backups.)

You can find reasonably stable and easy to manage software for everything you listed.

I know this is horribly unpopular around here, but you should, if you want to go this route, look at Nextcloud. It 's a monolithic mess of PHP, but it’s also stable, tested, used and trusted in production, and doesn’t have a history of lighting user data on fire.

It also doesn’t really change dramatically, because again, it’s used by actual businesses in actual production, so changes are slow (maybe too slow) and methodical.

The common complaints around performance and the mobile clients are all valid, but if neither of those really cause you issues then it’s a really easy way to handle cloud document storage, organization, photos, notes, calendars, contacts, etc. It’s essentially (with a little tweaking) the entire gSuite, but self-hosted.

That said, you still need to babysit it, and babysit your data. Backups are a must, and you’re responsible for doing them and testing them. That last part is actually important: a backup that doesn’t have regular tests to make sure they can be restored from aren’t backups they’re just thoughts and prayers sitting somewhere.

Spoken like someone who’s never even looked at the qualifications for a TS/SCI (which is what these “good jobs” are going to require you to get).

It’s an absolute giant investment in time and energy and the requirements disqualify a shitload of people - it’s not just “be a US citizen”.

And, even if you don’t step on any mines while getting it, keeping it is also not a guaranteed thing: there’s a lot of shit that can wreck you later, too.

Second time’s the charm, maybe?

Unlike incarcerated residents with jobs in the kitchen or woodshop who earn just a few hundred dollars a month, remote workers make fair-market wages, allowing them to pay victim restitution fees and legal costs, provide child support, and contribute to Social Security and other retirement funds.

Interesting if that’s really true, given how prison labor being slavery is pretty much how it works otherwise.

I’d love to know how fair-market the wages are, becuase I somehow suspect that:

1. They’re way lower than someone not in prison would get paid and
2. The benefits don’t exist (no PTO, no insurance, no 401k, etc.) and
3. The coercive incentives of being able to report your employee to their guards would drive all sorts of abuses

This reads to me as a feel-good whitewashing piece so fragile white liberals can point to it and go ‘See? Prison labor isn’t that bad!’, but perhaps I’m wrong.

I’d love to know if this was just some guy who went ‘let’s ship it to all our customers!’ or if this was a C-level 300 hours of meetings type of thing which concluded that spreading christmas malware cheer was the right move.

will never be widely accepted by the majority of the populatioj because it just isn’t what the vast majority of people want. They want communication methods that compliment their real world lives

I don’t think that’s strictly true, but I do think it would require their real world lives to get shockingly worse to increase the appeal of living in a “better” world.

This is usually how you see these kind of things presented in fiction: everyone uses a “metaverse”, but it requires a full on completely society destroying dystopia to also exist to make it sufficiently appealing.

I’d put money on the next round of VR worlds getting a lot more buy-in since you’ve got a generation of kids growing up that are already living mostly online, and a species that seems hell-bent on diving in to a nice authoritarian dystopia, so uh, the next 20 years will probably be real interesting,

There’s other use cases for that.

The immediate one, and applies to my own living room, is that there’s one switch for the lights and it’s in the far back corner by the front door, and like 15 feet and around behind the couch from where you’d enter the living room from the rest of the house.

The smart switch lets me turn the light on and off from the inside of the house without having to navigate the room and cats in the dark either via a voice command, mobile app, and ESP32 button.

Though, and this is the next use case, I really don’t have to do any of those. The smart switch facilitates lots of fun things, and in this case that room has a mmWave occupancy detector that’ll turn the light on and off based on the time of the day and if there’s a human in the room or not. (mmWave stuff is super accurate compared to the older motion detection crap you’ll find in use in that you don’t have to actually be moving, because it’s good enough to determine if a human is in the room motion or not.)

And, of course, since this is the living room and the TV is in there, it’s also tied into the media playback status of the TV to dim the lights when you turn the TV on, turn them off when you start playing a movie, and then turn them back on dimly after you pause, and then slowly increase the brightness over the next 5 minutes if you don’t resume playing the movie (unless everyone leaves the room, at which point it’ll turn the TV and lights off based on the occupancy sensor.)

Also it’s useful for setting a timer: the backyard and front porch lights go on at sunset and off at sunrise, and the controller is smart enough to grab when this is on the internet so it stays accurate and timely year-round.

So yeah, it’s maybe not life-changing by itself, but it’s seriously the backbone of a lot of automation I’ve got in place that simplifies having to even think about or do anything to adjust light levels based on where I am in the house and what I’m doing in the room.

Disclaimer: this was not trivial to setup, the components required to make it are not off-the-shelf and require electronics and soldering knowledge and you have to understand the ESP32 ecosystem and how to modify code and deploy them to do what you want. It also then requires you to configure all of this in HomeAssistant, and in my case, requires yet another piece of software (NodeRed) and a ton of webhooks to make everything cooperate and work. It’s not trivial, it’s not for everyone, and it’s not a product most people could build on their own, so I don’t entirely disagree that a switch by itself is life-changing, but if there was a proper ecosystem around them where you could do this shit I think more than a few people would hop in.

If only they made smart switches you could use, perhaps?

100% agree that smart bulbs are incredibly stupid and you should go with a switch if you want to smartify shit.