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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • I remember ordering some samples from them when they were a newer company, and how cool it was when they added metal as a material option. Sad to see them go. Seems like much more of another company ruined by going public than a failure of their business model. I guess the silver lining is that they simply went under rather than morphing into a worst possible version of what they were trying to squeeze every penny in the pursuit of infinite growth (or maybe they tried that for a while and it failed too, I’ll admit I haven’t been paying attention to the scene for the last several years).



  • Did you self-install the solar or could the company that did the install (or one of their installers) have added it? Also, I know it sounds crazy, but have you checked Bing maps? It’s been years since I did much with OSM, but I do recall one of the easier OSM editing tools using Bing maps due to licensing reasons, and sometimes their aerial/satellite view is more up to date in sone areas than Google.


  • I work night shift and use blackout curtains and earplugs to improve my sleep during the day. Rather than cranking the volume on my alarm so it’s loud enough to consistently wake me up, I use Home Assistant to turn on some smart bulbs as my alarm. When I started, and even now if I have to be up extra early, I also have an audible alarm set to go off a few minutes after the lights come on - just in case the light doesn’t wake me up, but at this point my brain has gotten used to waking up to the lights, and I usually wake up and turn off the other alarm before it goes off.

    Another useful automation for me is I have a buggy Samsung PC monitor that has all sorts of annoying issues; like not consistently waking from deep sleep which requires a hard power cycle to correct, and when it is asleep there’s some weird high pitched whine that beeps when the standby light flashes. I use a couple of smart plugs with power monitoring and monitor my PCs power draw to turn the power to my monitor on and off at the wall depending on if the PC is on.


  • In general, yes more tabs = more RAM used, but Firefox does have a neat trick compared to Chrome that helps lower memory usage for those of us with hundreds of tabs. When you launch Chrome with a bunch of tabs open from a previous session, it actually loads them all into RAM at launch, with Firefox, it doesn’t actually load the pages of tabs from previous sessions, until you switch to them. The page titles and icons get loaded into RAM, obviously, but if you have lots of old tabs that you almost never open, the memory usage impact of lots of tabs is minimized.






  • So, I in no way want to argue that algorithms are better, as they are often used to manipulate and their design to drive engagement at any cost leads to plenty of their own problems.

    That said, I was raised in a pretty strong echo chamber (that a good portion of my family is still firmly in). If I had been solely responsible for curating what content I got via RSS (which I did for a short period in the early 2010s). I never would have been exposed to content that challenged the worldview I was given. Ironically, it ended up being the YouTube algorithm that while it was simultaneously feeding people down the gamergate conspiracy tunnel was opening my eyes to the realities of climate change, making me less bigoted towards LGBTQ people, and helping me find the empathy that I had hidden to fit in with the world around me.

    I don’t know what the answer is. On the one hand, I know how bad echo chambers can be, on the other hand, corporations and algorithms manipulate people all the time and shouldn’t be trusted either. I do think RSS had potential to be better than what we have now (where social media sites like Twitter and Digg/Reddit/Lemmy essentially act as everyone’s shared feed reader and end up putting people into new echo chambers), but I think having the chance of seeing content that challenges our worldviews has also been a good thing, that I’m not sure would happen as often if we all only read our personally-curated RSS feeds.

    That said algorithms are getting more manipulative, and I may just be a lucky outlier that an algorithm happened to push in a positive direction.



  • Honestly, let’s bring geocities back (not exactly in that form). Anything that isn’t a throwaway post on social media goes there, and you can post links to it from all the social platforms for reaching a broader audience. Then there’s a place for getting the most up to date information about an event, that doesn’t require making an account, and the person putting the event on doesn’t have to make sure posts across multiple platforms are updated with the same new information.