I remember when phones used to be good.

Telemarketers have been around for a long, long time (Wikipedia claim “…the practice of contacting potential customers by telephone originated in the late 19th century.”).

I personally recall a lot more telemarketing in the 90s, though I was a kid and just passed the phone to mom or dad. But that was also a time when caller ID was a luxury, and not everyone had answering machines.

Inconceivable! Some also look like Winston Churchill.

Hopefully you can publish in an open-access journal — if not it would be great if you could share an arXiv preprint :)

It’s nerf or and nuttin’

FTFY

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.

— Richard P. Feynman

I think the same is true for a lot of folks and self hosting. Sure, having data in our own hands is great, and yes avoiding vendor lock-in is nice. But at the end of the day, it’s nice to have computers seem “fun” again.

At least, that’s my perspective.

That’s what I heard about Chevy’s, too.

Whatever you decide for your laptop, I’m a proponent of a barebones off-site setup if you’re trying for 3-2-1 backup or similar.

I use a raspberry pi 3 with a single HD (ZFS) retaining some number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots. Daily rsync, everything over WireGuard+VPS (TailScale would work too).

Same — rsync to a pi 3 with a (single) ZFS drive at family’s house. Retain some daily/weekly/monthly snapshots.

I have a (free) VPS with static IPv4 which is how I connect everything.

Both the VPS and the remote site have limited network speed (I think 50Mbps for VPS), so the initial sync was done sneakernet (well…“airplane net”). Nightly rsync is no problem bandwidth-wise, and is mostly just any new videos I’ve uploaded to my local Immich instance.

At work on a slack it just means “I’m watching this discussion.”

Crash Team Racing PS1 was IMHO better than Mario Kart N64. The wumpa fruit added a neat dimension, and the ability to select weapons for battle mode was great.

Once I pulled an HDD out of an old TiVo for a desktop build (Gentoo, I think — this was a while back). I called the machine “voit” because it was an anagram of TiVo — but I particularly liked that it’s a homophone for Voight, of Voight-Kampff fame.

Oh, I tried that once or twice — I’ll have to try it again!

There’s so such thing as starter “discard”! Add water, oil, sugar, salt, baking soda and you’ve got some vegan sourdough pancakes. Or use any of a number of other recipes — but no sense in wasting it.

It’s one of the reasons I hate having one person cook and the other clean — the incentives are misaligned, and it just breeds bad habits and reckless cooking IMHO. If you do both cooking and cleaning, you’ll hopefully learn to clean as you go.

For all the problems in the tech industry, having a large chunk of your compensation be in the form of RSUs does address this meme’s complaint. Company does well = you get paid more.

Some cities offer guides or services for native plants! https://sfpublicworks.org/services/plant-lists-and-palettes

It’s even divided across the city’s different climate zones (San Francisco is small, but can have huge differences in weather from one side to the other).

I recall a SoCal city even offering free consultation for native gardens.

We still use leaded gas for aviation, as does (I believe) the EU (I’m guessing RoW, too).

(Supposed to be banned this year in the EU but AFAICT pushed back until 2032.)

Fail2ban config can get fairly involved in my experience. I’m probably not doing it the right way, as I wrote a bunch of web server ban rules — anyone trying to access wpadmin gets banned, for instance (I don’t use WordPress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be accessible from my public facing reverse proxy).

I just skimmed my nginx logs and looked for anything funky and put that in a ban rule, basically.

My favorite is Barry Marshall. He thought there was a connection between bacteria and ulcers, which was an unpopular opinion at the time. So he intentionally drank the offending bacteria, got sick as expected, and then people believed him.

More here, including (which I didn’t know until now) cardiac catheterization.

I’m sure better sources exist but https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/these-five-doctors-experimented-on-themselves-and-made-big-breakthroughs

Innovation, perhaps; progress…that’s something else.