People really underestimate how bad a cold can be. When I’m sick, it’s so hard to function mentally that I can barely do my job.
I believe he was sick, and I believe this was just a case of unfortunate timing. What matters in politics is perception, though, and the perception isn’t good.
It’s certainly possible (and probably even likely) that you’re correct. Most of the people I’ve spoken to about that are somewhat tech-inclined and probably much more likely to be using an adblocker than the average person.
So many years of ad-free media has just ruined me on ad-supported content. I sat down in front of a public TV tuned to a cable channel the other day, and it was absolutely unwatchable.
The problem I have always had with cable TV, and now with streaming, is the advertisements. I understand why free services inject ads into their video stream; they have to make a profit somehow. I don’t like it, and I’ll block the ads, but I understand it.
Having experience what ad-free entertainment is like, be it from Netflix years ago, renting movies online, or Youtube with Adblock, I will never pay for a service that’s going to show me ads. Either make the service free and cash in on ad revenue or sell the service for an appropriate price that you can afford not to show ads. Sticking to the old model of “pay for cable TV and watch commercials” is never going to work, be it cable or streaming. I don’t think I’m in the minority here, either; I’ve heard this sentiment from plenty of others.
Depending on how accurate you need your energy usage data to be for individual devices, you might be able to get away with just using a whole-house energy monitor. I’m using one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08LV8DDFP
I already have a large number of Zigbee plugs, so by looking at the power usage from my energy meter before and after one switches, I can get a general estimate of how much power a device is using. Of course, the rest of your home is going to to skew the results, but you can mitigate this a bit with some of HA’s statistics functions. It’s been a while since I tried this, but I did test it with a 3.5kW heater a while ago. I took a median from a certain number of samples before and after the heater switched on (I think 10 seconds worth of samples), and the result was generally accurate to within about 100w.
I was actually thinking about something similar today. We’ve already had an actor as president, then with Trump, we had a reality-TV star. Social media is the new “TV” for the younger generation, so it’s only a matter of time before we have an influencer or a YouTube creator as a candidate, right? Let’s see MrBeast go toe-to-toe with Trump.
I don’t consider myself a Republican or a Democrat, although unless things change drastically in American politics, I can’t see myself ever voting Republican by the time I’m dead and gone. With that said, I mentioned to someone yesterday that if I didn’t have the experience of living through Trump’s time in office, this debate would make me seriously consider voting for him.
I really don’t believe that this debate is going to sway many undecided voters toward Biden. If you compare their performance at face value, Trump was unusually well-spoken, and Biden seemed like he belonged in a nursing home. Half of what Trump said was complete bullshit, but how many undecided voters are actually reading articles that show how full of it he really is?
What you have is a person who stated lies as fact and did a decent job of being convincing and a person who was generally truthful but seemed like he “wasn’t all there.” Undecided voters who “don’t follow politics” are going to see this and say “You know, I think I understand why people support Trump.” That’s a very scary prospect.
I don’t dislike Biden, but my personal opinion is that the best thing he could do for the country is step aside and let a different Democrat take the nomination. Geriatrics like Trump and Biden need to retire, do whatever they feel like in their golden years, and let someone else take the reins. A competent politician in his 50s or 60s would absolutely destroy Trump, and that’s exactly what we need right now.
In the US at least, most equipment (unless you get into high-and datacenter stuff) runs on 120V. We also use 240V power, but a 240V connection is actually two 120V phases 180-degrees out of sync. The main feed coming into your home is 240V, so your breaker panel splits the circuits evenly between the two phases. Running dual-phase power to a server rack is as simple as just running two 120V circuits from the panel.
My rack only receives a single 120V circuit, but it’s backed up by a dual-conversion UPS and a generator on a transfer switch. That was enough for me. For redundancy, though, dual phases, each with its own UPS, and dual-PSU servers are hard ro beat.
Is Creative Cloud a requirement for using Adobe products these days? Surely someone can just save data locally instead. Media files (especially raw video) can be enormous.
This seems like a weird and convoluted way to charge for content. Why not just make it a paid DLC?
Microsoft knows that the addition of adds to Windows, Recall, data mining, etc are not suicide. As far as tech news goes, Lemmy really exists in an echo chamber. The vast majority of us at least have some interest in technology. For the majority of the population, though, this isn’t true. The typical person sees a computer as a tool to be used for other things. They’re not reading articles about the latest release of Windows, new CPU technology, the latest GPU, etc. They’re using their computer, and when it’s time for an upgrade, they buy whatever suits their needs.
If I was to ask any of my family, or most of my coworkers, about any of the latest “controversies” surrounding Microsoft, they would have no idea what I was talking about. Microsoft obviously thinks that the added profits gained by monetizing their customers will offset the loss of 1% of their users that switch to Linux. They’re probably right, too.
I like Windows, personally (well, Windows 10 at least). My unofficial rule has always been if it needs a GUI, then it runs Windows, otherwise, it runs Linux as a headless machine. Once Windows 10 is no longer a viable option, my unofficial rule will be “it runs Linux.” Most people will not make this switch.
Outside of obvious ethnic names, which isn’t an issue here, how does the seller even know what a potential buyer looks like?
I never spoke to the previous owner of my home, and I have no idea what they look like. The opposite is also true. I have a name on various forms, but that’s it. Our only correspondence was through various documents sent between our agents. I didn’t even see the seller at closing; we signed the closing documents at different times.
It sounds like her real estate agent is on her side, so unless the agent was trying to sabotage the sale, how does this happen?
Yes, a lot of my movies are 50GB or so. Not everything has a 4k repack available, though. I’d say the vast majority are around 20GB.
1080p would just not be acceptable for me. There’s a clear difference between 1080p and 4k on a 4k screen, especially if the screen is large.
If I’m in a situation where I don’t have connectivity to stream from my server, then I can always just start a Handbrake queue the night before and transcode a few videos to smaller size, or just dump a few onto an external drive. I have never been in a situation where I had to do this, though.
Any sort of media, including videos, I always go for the highest possible quality I can. I do have a number of 4k displays, so it makes sense to a certain extent, but a lot if it has to do with future-proofing.
Here’s a good example: When personal video cameras were first starting to support 1080, I purchased a 1080i video camera. At the time, it looked great on my 1920x1080 (maybe 1024x768, not sure) monitor. Fast forward over 15 years later, and it the video I recorded back then looks like absolute garbage on my 4k TV.
I remember watching a TV show when 1080p video first became available, and I was blown away at the quality of what was probably a less-than-1GB file. Now watching the same file even on my phone has a noticeable drop is quality. I’m not surprised you saw little difference between a 670MB and a 570MB file, especially if it was animation, which contains large chunks of solid colors and is thus more easily compressed. The difference between two resolutions, though, can be staggering. At this point, I don’t think you can easily find a 1080p TV; everything is 4k. 8k is still not widespread, but it will be one day. If you ever in your life think you’ll buy a new TV, computer monitor, or mobile device, eventually you’ll want higher quality video.
My recommendation would be to fill your media library with the highest-quality video you can possibly find. If you’re going to re-encode the media to a lower resolution or bitrate, keep a backup of the original. You may find, though, that if you’re re-encoding enough video, it makes more sense to save the time and storage space, and spend a bit of money on a dedicated video card for on-the-fly transcoding.
My solution was to install an RTX A1000 in my server and set it up with my Jellyfin instance. If I’m watching HDR content on a non-HDR screen, it will transcode and tone-map the video. If I’m taking a break at work and I want to watch a video from home, it will transcode it to a lower bitrate that I can stream over (slow) my home internet. Years from now, when I’m trying to stream 8k video over a 10Gb fiber link, I’ll still be able to use most of the media I saved back in 2024 rather than try to find a copy that meets modern standards, if a copy even exists.
Edit: I wanted to point out that I realize not everyone has the time or financial resources to set up huge NAS with enterprise-grade drives. An old motherboard and a stack of cheap consumer-grade drives can still give you a fair amount of backup storage and will be fairly robust as long as the drive array is set up with a sufficient level of redundancy.
I think one thing that’s very important for the worldwide audience to consider is what the involved countries count as “peace.” Peace for Ukraine is “give us our land back and stop attacking us.” Peace for Russia is “We’ll stop attacking you if you let us have a significant portion of you country as our own.” Obviously, the Russian “solution” is not an acceptable one. Sadly, I feel like China and other Russian-aligned countries probably support the distorted Russian version of “peace.”
I still enjoy the second-wave stuff from time to time, but you’re absolutely spot-on with what’s been coming out in recent years. I’m really into groups that have kept the original BM music style but embraced modern production. A few that come to mind are Faidra, Spectral Wound, Asarhaddon, and Funeral Winds; fantastic bands that play “true” BM but have good recording quality.
Like you mentioned, the big change is just how many “crossover” bands there are, and I’m all for it. You didn’t ask for suggestions, but I’m going to offer some of my favorites anyway:
I will never buy a Tesla. I’m not normally one to pay attention to brands, but Elon Musk has tainted the brand to such a degree, that I’m disgusted at the idea of being associated with it.
That being said, the company still makes some decent technology. From what I understand, the motors, motor controllers, and battery packs are fairly decent pieces of kit. There seems to be some kind of disconnect between their engineering teams, though, because the cars themselves are so bad. I’ve seen internal panels fall off, interior components break at the slightest touch, misaligned body panels, and any number of other fit-and-finish issues. Not to mention, every single one is hideous. Make them look like an EV or make them look like a luxury car, not some half-assed abomination between the two.
I have to wonder why there’s such a disconnect within the company. It feels akin to building a Ferrari drivetrain and installing it in a Kia.
People do this because they’re crackheads (or heroin addicts, or methheads, you get the idea). It’s not a poverty issue, it’s a drug issue. The person working a minimum wage job and sharing a studio apartment isn’t going to dispose of their old bicycle in the river. The person who steals a bike and realizes they can’t sell it to get their next fix probably isn’t going to have a problem dumping it in a lake or river. They’re already leaving needles on the playground, shitting on the sidewalk, and assaulting innocent people for not giving them a cigarette. Do you really think they give a damn about the environmental impact of dumping their stolen goods in a waterway?
This might be an unpopular list, but I’m ranking games in terms of overall enjoyment.
I will resort to ChatGPT for coding help every so often. I’m a fairly experienced programmer, so my questions usually tend to be somewhat complex. I’ve found that’s it’s extremely useful for those problems that fall into the category of “I could solve this myself in 2 hours, or I could ask AI to solve it for me in seconds.” Usually, I’ll get a working solution, but almost every single time, it’s not a good solution. It provides a great starting-off point to write my own code.
Some of the issues I’ve found (speaking as a C++ developer) are: Variables not declared “const,” extremely inefficient use of data structures, ignoring modern language features, ignoring parallelism, using an improper data type, etc.
ChatGPT is great for generating ideas, but it’s going to be a while before it can actually replace a human developer. Producing code that works isn’t hard; producing code that’s good requires experience.
$3.4M is too low of an estimate. If you assume someone works from age 18 to 65, that’s 47 years of employment at an average of $72,300-ish per year. Now assume time for college, plus people make less early on in their careers. You’re looking at a $100k income.
$100k is probably enough to support a mortgage, two kids, insurance, essentials, bills, and retirement savings in some LCOL areas, but not in many places. In many parts of the US, that might cover a modest house and monthly bills, but there won’t be much left over; forget retirement.
My old brain still looks at a 6-figure income as “you’re rich.” In 2024, you’re not even close.