I’ve only encountered one other! I might still be the only VN Lemmy instance, but probably not. I used to be.

Well, usually competition creates more efficient prices. So I guess somehow your telecoms companies are using strategies to avoid competing somehow.

On our end, we still have quite some parts of the economy that are planned. For example, I applied for my business license according to a particular 5-year plan, and there are only certain areas of the economy I’m allowed to participate in. I can’t just one day pick up and decide that I’m going to start a butter factory or something.

The best Internet provider is literally the Army, but they weren’t granted a monopoly. The post office and three or four other major providers exist in every city. So there’s actually quite a healthy competition for customers, it seems this too was planned for. Things don’t always work out this well, but at least for Internet it worked out pretty great.

As an aside, back when there wasn’t enough money to fund State organs, they would sometimes be granted profitable businesses to stay afloat. Some bits of this are left – you can stay at a beach hotel run by the police department in at least one city. It always seemed to me a smart way to get the country out of a bad situation. This is why the Army or the Post Office are licensed to to a bunch of profitable consumer services.

Ooh, study for 14 hours straight and forget to eat! That’s usually what I do. Wild times.

Well, Tunak Tunak Tun of course.

North America is insane with their internet costs.

Here in VN, I can get unlimited 4G for 40$ a year, and 100mbps symmetrical fiber for about 50$ a year. The biggest provider is the Army. Their customer service is actually pretty fast and good too!

Mine is supposed to be 100 / 100 and actually is. In Vietnam, symmetrical fiber-to-the-home is actually pretty common. I think I pay 5$ a month, or maybe a bit less.

I’m a magister, scholar, and merchant. (I own a technology company).

I never actually noticed. It’s always been like 25MB for stuff I do. Is that a lot?

Takes a huge amount of storage on my production machine to store the various libraries to produce that file, to be fair. That is a minor pain.

No, although I’m outside the US and not familiar with their medication names or medical system.

I think it would be a bad idea to do otherwise. Children need to learn about useful tools, and the shortcomings of those tools.

16 year old me would have had a great time getting an AI to teach me things that my teachers in school did not have expertise in. Sure, it would be wrong some of the time, but so were my teachers at that age. It would have given me such a head start on university!

For this kind of thing, I use Godot and write a quick and ugly one-off app. That way it works exactly how I imagine and I just send myself the APK over messenger and install it :P

Although it would be a joy to implement in hardware.

I never did work it out myself. Sometimes I was fine. Other times I didn’t sleep for 3 days. Was “sort of” independent of stress and so on, although higher average stress levels made it a little worse. Or maybe stress just feels worse combined with sleep deprivation. I tried various changes to my habits over the next few years, none of which made any difference – although some were good for other reasons (e.g. getting into better shape, eating better, and so on).

Went to go see a doctor. They brushed it off, so I went to go see another doctor. They prescribed a low dose of a sleeping pill.

Problem solved forever with no noticeable side effects. I think I’m on 1/2 the pediatric dose or something. Amazing how so little of something can make such a big difference in my life. Wish I had gone to see 2 doctors earlier.

Well, I had heard of someone that got a little amplification out of them at 3.3V and a weird configuration. It was a different tube, but I figured I’d give it a go at 5V.

My tube was old and originated from a junk pile in Japan. I figured it wasn’t enough entropy to just use an unknown tube the wrong way, so I added some random scrap parts from the Soviet Union. The tube produced amplified output, but the output impedance was way too high when being used this wrong way (in other words, it couldn’t drive a speaker). So I added some completely unknown Chinese amplifier IC as a buffer.

It’s approximately pocket-sized. For a large pocket, anyway. The tube heater gets the whole thing warm. It produces hilariously distorted (but sort of cool) sound. I call it a ‘themionic pocket warmer’, arguably not so useful here in Vietnam. The audio function is secondary. I suppose if you are a half-deaf Antarctic explorer with a deep love of stovepipe hats, it would be a good hat-warmer as well. I guess that’s the target market :D

I threw some photos up at voltage.vn. It was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

None of them! Numbers are a poor way to communicate with most of my clients.

On the rare exception, it depends on the number of significant digits of the measurement I (for example) multiply it with. Digits past that don’t communicate any useful information.

Well, the dumbest reason I’ve seen people get murder-y for is typically fighting over inheritance.

It’s like… now there’s even more inheritance to fight over. Then also you just paid for one funeral, and now you want to pay for another?

Ah, small talk stresses me out. Why can’t people just open with “tell me something you accomplished or learned this year”?

Then we cut right to the things that matter.

I don’t have ordered lists of favorites for trivial things like colors, integers, and so on. Also no ordered list for less trivial things. No favorite songs, movies, books, historical figures, etc.

I don’t judge people (or myself) based on having or not having these lists, because that itself would be me creating a list – my favorite thing would then become not having favorite things, and that would of course be silly :D

I found a neat set of old ink blocks from a famous manufacturer in China. It’s technically worth a fair sum of money, I paid 8$. Also an old vacuum tube for 3$, got it working. Neither of those are useful though, just neat.

In terms of materially useful things? Well, someone taught me how to use old, no-electronics camera lenses. So I bought a used DSLR for 135$ and bought antique lenses for very cheap (again 8$ for something that was originally nearly 1k after accounting for inflation). Now I can do my own product photography, documentation, etc. and it cost me very little, but looks great! Also my vacation photos have skyrocketed in quality.

Prototyping. I just checked and my slide rule has a notch for pi. So, all of them.

It’s predatory garbage – I’ve had some VCs as customers and I guarantee that if the IPO was expected to do well, they would not leave a dime on the table for contributors. Generally if you don’t know who the bag-holder in these schemes is… chances are it’s you!

I still help out people on Reddit, because a lot of foreigners don’t know how to do things in my country (e.g. find medication they need) and that’s where they ask. If it vanishes tomorrow, I don’t really care though, haha.