but I would not expect the stock prices too reflect that.

Agreed. One rule of the stock market is that while it might theoretically rely on sound fundamentals, it can stay irrational longer than you (or anyone) can stay solvent. It will inevitably fall screaming towards reality eventually, but there’s no guarantee it will happen within any reasonable timeframe and expecting it to is dangerous. It’s a rigged casino, the house always wins, and when they don’t their goons will grab you when you try to leave. At this point the billionaires own pretty much the entire house, and their goons are running the world’s largest military and police state. “Invest” at your own risk.

An important lesson that you can learn from the Gaza bullshit that’s going on is that all media has an ideology and cannot ever be trusted to be completely unbiased, especially the ones that present themselves as unbiased.

The truth is always found somewhere in the middle. But sometimes it’s really, really far away from some of these propaganda outlets. Often times it’s really, really close to a particular news source. Sadly, we can’t just say “the BBC is often really-really-close to the truth”, therefore they are always really-really-close to the truth. Sometimes, on certain topics, they are just spouting propaganda, and they always will be, because that’s their ideological position and what they are posting will always be consistent with that ideological position, not with truth. They can still, as part of the ideological position, post a lot of stuff that is if not exactly the truth, very very close to it. But they can never be trusted to always do that, they will always have an agenda and an ideology.

Consider the source doesn’t mean “find something truly unbiased and ignore everything else” it means understand why the source is saying the things they’re saying, the way they’re saying them, and why they’re omitting what they’re omitting, and compare that against other sources doing the same things, or different things, based on the understanding that you’ve developed of their biases, and also to develop further understanding of those biases. Media literacy is critical, especially with how much we’re getting bombarded with fake news and how much the rug has been pulled out from beneath legitimate quality journalism. We need to thoroughly consider and understand sources these days. It’s not easy, it’s also a lot of work. We shouldn’t have to do it. But we live in the information age, and information is a battleground, so we must. Those are the skills we need to survive in this world now.

Redundancy. I have two independent firewalls, each separately routing traffic out through two totally independent multi-homed network connections (one cable, one DSL, please god somebody give me fiber someday) that both firewalls have access to. For awhile was thinking of replacing the DSL with starlink until Elon turned out to be such a pile of nazi garbage, so for now DSL remains the backup link.

To make things as transparent as possible, the firewalls manage their IPs with CARP. Obviously there’s no way to have a single public IP that ports itself magically from one ISP to another, but on the LAN side it works great and on the WAN side it at least smooths out a lot of possible failure scenarios. Some useful discussions of this setup are here.

You’re absolutely incorrect about IRC. Would you like to learn? Open IRC federation is basically never used anymore and the few networks that exist are very stable (if not completely calcified), but it is a core feature of the design, and in the old days, massive interconnected networks of IRC servers like EFnet and Undernet spanned the globe, there were even some servers that allowed open federation (EFnet is actually named for it – eris-free-net referring to the last server “eris” that supported free federation), and at some points Netsplits were a frustratingly daily occurrence. Like with any federation, abuse is the reason we can’t really have nice things anymore, but IRC absolutely supports federation. Not very well from a modern standpoint since it didn’t really keep up with the abuse arms race, but when it was first conceived it was way ahead of its time.

It does work, I have seen it working on another site. Again, I don’t have personal experience but I don’t see any reason to assume it doesn’t work. The comments including the comment closing the issue you linked describes how to get it working. When they say it is not “supported” they mean they are not providing tech support for it, but I can’t imagine it’s that hard or poorly documented.

IRC and XMPP are infinitely less painful, honestly, and both were designed around federation from the ground up, long before it was cool.

https://ghost.org/ supports ActivityPub and is open-source so can be self-hosted, I don’t know if it’s a good platform for what you’re trying to do though as I don’t have personal experience with it.

It is really difficult to get consistent optical properties using additive manufacturing techniques. There’s a reason optics (lenses, etc) are basically universally made from uniform pieces ground down and polished smooth, and compound lenses are avoided unless absolutely necessary and to make them optically clear enough requires exceptionally complex and expensive methods. With typical additive manufacturing, you are making something that is basically hundreds or thousands of compound lenses stacked onto each other, and the optics are always going to be pretty awful no matter how much care you put into the process. There is no easy answer, except to not use additive manufacturing for this. For optical properties, you really want to stick to a single shot of consistent material as much as possible, to minimize internal refraction (which happens at every material surface transition if it’s not perfect, which it won’t be). Cutting material away is fine, you’re getting rid of the old surface transition and creating a new one, you always have to interface with the outside air at some point, and that’s the minimum number of refraction layers you’re going to get. Adding material to it creates another layer of internal refraction for the light, making many of those is very not good.

While there are people working hard to make additive manufacturing methods that can do this as well as possible, and in a few cases they’ve gotten quite impressively good at it, they’re still starting from a compromised beginning, the deck is stacked against them and it really is a challenge. If at all possible, don’t use additive manufacturing for this. It’s the wrong process for the job. The traditional approaches of molding or cutting or machining or polishing to create the shape you want, is the right way to do it. If you really need something unique you may have few good choices, but if you can get something off the shelf, it’ll save you a world of headache. This is only something worth doing for the challenge of it, and you should go in with the expectation of failure, and prepared for joy if you succeed, and I’ll be happy to know that you’ve proven me wrong.

BOSL is a massive improvement over the barebones OpenSCAD functions, and if you need to do stuff like fillets and chamfers you should check it out. There are probably other libraries that do the same but I know BOSL(2) does, through functions like cuboid() and prismoid() and edge_profile() among many other things.

You missed OpenSCAD but that might’ve been intentional if you’re looking for something with low barrier to entry and a purely “visual” workflow. It’s the diametric opposite of Blender, basically. Surprisingly non-comprehensive with very limited options of primitives to work with, but laser-focused on building precise, constrained, parametric models out of said primitives. The downside is that you have to code it. Like, in actual code. For the artistically-minded designer, it’s probably not the right tool. But for people with the appropriate mental model and skillset, it’s an extremely effective tool, and infinitely extensible. If you need to do something particularly complex, chances are someone’s already written the functions and libraries to do it, and if you need to know how to do it too, you can just look at their code. Assuming you can read it.

The actual coding language itself is a bit janky and for me, counterintuitive and unpleasant in some ways. It certainly wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’s workable, and the elegance of the overall idea makes up for it. It’s worth the extra investment in learning, and I can’t go back to wrestling with what I find are clunky visual workflows anymore. I crave the hard numerical precision of actually and accurately defining the shapes I’m working with.

As someone who lives near a major international border, I also run into this problem, but I’m also fucking confused why this is even a problem. The phone has a fucking GPS built in. It knows exactly where it is at all times. There is no excuse for this except greedy providers and cowardly regulators.

If I am standing on my country’s soil, using an unmodified cellphone, within a reasonable margin of error, I should pay my country’s local rates. Full stop. That should be a legal obligation. If telecom providers want to bake that into their roaming agreements with international and specialty providers like that, so they must accept my calls and bill me accordingly, fine. If they want to make the phone refuse to connect to the roaming tower at all and force it to connect to a lower strength local tower, also fine. If because of technical reasons or interference they really cannot do that so that it would just lose service altogether, maybe a popup saying that my national connection has been lost and asking if I want to start roaming, rather than a text saying “Heads up! You’re roaming suddenly and we can charge you whatever we want now!”

It’s not that fucking hard. Make. It. Make. Sense.

Yes, until we bring the light of civilization, it will be the wild west and the natives are trying to kill us.

That sounds like a great idea. I think the independence of the old web is something we should aspire to, it’s a big part of what gave the internet its soul, and that’s what big tech has suffocated with ads and monetization and platform-control.

I use Odysee and Peertube where possible but yeah they’re somewhat awkward, and the biggest thing I typically miss is the comments. As awful as most Youtube comments are, the critical mass is there, if you’re looking for a quick link to something in the video, the summary that the author should’ve included but didn’t, the correction where the author was wrong, or something else of actual value, chances are whatever it is you’re trying to find somewhere on the top heap of Youtube comments. As with most social media, the value is not in the service itself, it’s in the community. Steering that community towards somewhere where it will actually be appreciated is a herculean task when someone has to be the pioneers and live in that desert and put in the work to prepare it for the ones who will come after them.

I’ve always felt like this is an area with a huge gap. I’ve got my own fragile, cobbled-together bullshit that works for me, but it’s far from ideal or reliable if I’m being honest. I do love Ansible’s general idea of relying on standard, always-ish available protocols like ssh as a universal connection method, and I think it could work well as the bulletproof lower layer when you want to use direct control over the CLI tools and configuration files, like what git provides for anything requiring version control, but ansible needs a slick management interface like github/forgejo provides on top of git, to fill in the higher level UI for when you need a wider scope to get an overview of what’s going on or to make general configuration changes without needing to get your hands dirty. Ideally it would look a lot like Proxmox itself does, just, not specific to Proxmox. Like if I want to add my Steam Deck, and I’ve got ssh enabled on it and it’s not asleep, it should be able to ansible its way in there somehow to at least get whatever basic details it can. Maybe that’s only basic system information at first, but from there I could work on customizing it. That’s what I would consider the ideal, for me at least.

You should try being the only source of revenue for media organizations if you want them to pay attention to you. I understand it works really well, especially if you have a complete monopoly.

That’s taking “legal suicide” to a whole new level. I’m impressed.

Yes, all three are supported configurations. Technically all four, since “I don’t know” is apparently a completely valid and functional configuration too.

These security companies are hilarious, truly. They have to know they’re literally just posting a free advertisement for this guy, right? But the stupid CEOs and CTOs they’re shilling their security-theater-ware to obviously don’t, and I guess that’s the important part for them.

Yeah, but that was because in those days most people were actually illiterate, which in recent history we considered a bad thing and tried to avoid, but it seems to be making a comeback unfortunately.

(Nothing against audiobooks specifically, you gotta do what you gotta do, just suggesting the decline in literacy in general is worrisome)