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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • On the one hand, Project 2025 is deeply terrifying. It’s a recipe book for full-blown authoritarian fascism in the US. And its stance towards climate may actually herald in an ending of this phase of human civilization because of how monumentally, mindblowingly stupid and evil its contributors are.

    On the other hand, Trump would never do what he was told. He would never be organized or deliberate enough to carry it out. He’d just keep tweeting all day and being completely, psychotically capricious. So at least I know that particular cake is unlikely to be baked.

    The really obnoxious thing about all this stuff is that Biden’s record on climate is excellent. It stands on its own, even before comparisons to the pure anti-science madness of Trump. Which progressives mostly don’t even know about, and even the ones who have a vague idea he’s done something often hand wave it all as insufficient or misguided without bothering to know even the most basics of basics about the policies.

    Climate is an existential threat and it would be hard to come up with any more effective policy for addressing it within the American system than the IRA and other actions Biden has somehow managed to get through a majority climate-hostile Senate. It’s been excellent. Get out and vote for more of it or else we may all be doomed.


  • Musk told workers that Tesla “will continue to build out some new Supercharger locations, where critical, and finish those currently under construction.”

    Sounds to me like the plan is to finish what is already under contract and do no more. I sure am glad the US authorities committed to that north american charger standard… what’s even the status on getting a full specification for it including third-party development at this point anyway?

    I can’t pull a quote for the new vehicle development team’s situation because Tesla basically just keeps making the Model 3 with barely even incremental improvements to it, and even that one has totally inconsistent build quality vehicle to vehicle. Unless someone thinks the Cybertruck is going to save them – hah.




  • Not really. With the super easy, friendly distros it basically just goes.

    I switched to Linux Mint Cinnamon a while ago expecting to just fool around a bit but mostly boot back into windows to do stuff. I’ve now found that the ONLY thing I need to go back to windows for is when I’m forced by dumb policies to use an MSOffice product, which fortunately doesn’t happen to often (and no, LibreOffice is absolutely not a sub for MS Office. The spreadsheet app is worse than google docs, and I’d rather work in typst than have to deal with the libreoffice writer – especially as soon as I need to display an equation/figure/table of contents. Of course, I’d rather work in typst than deal with MSWord too…)

    That said, I don’t really play games anymore. Games may still require frequent windows visits. But… I’ve been looking forward to a complete edition of horizon forbidden west and all accounts say it’s linux compatibility is near perfect, so maybe things aren’t so bad these days on the gaming front.



  • That was the point that hit my limit, now that you mention it – getting it to show up on a duckdns address on the https public internet. Not being able to make that work after fiddling with all kinds of contradictory guides nor with 2 or 3 completely different reverse proxy tools just left me mad. Especially since a regular ngix reverse proxy manager container works fine on the same computer, but for some reason was just refusing to connect to HA (SSL issues, I think).

    Having HA just working locally didn’t really make it a replacement for the big tech solutions that already work fairly smoothly. I’m sure I’ll go back to get it the way I want one day, but the learning curve on any selfhosting is still pretty rough.


  • I had it briefly up and running and can only say… it’s a bear, at least if you are trying to use it as a drop-in replacement with existing hardware. I’m sure I’ll go back and sort it out at some point, but it left me just feeling tired and frustrated even when I had it doing most of what I wanted.

    If you were thoughtful about hardware from the ground up, maybe it would be more straightforward, but I tried getting it running on just an old workstation with ubuntu installed on it that I use for very basic stuff like syncthing and it was just painful. Mix of Kasa/Wyze/Philips devices that are just what I’ve somehow collected over time.

    It would be nice to see better first-class add-on support. I found myself needing to SSH into a VM to get stuff into it, and even then it was twitchy in all the wrong ways. Would also be nice to see better support for the containerized version, because that’s so much easier to distribute and execute compared to a VM. Next time I’ll probably just try to do it all with docker and see if it hurts less, since I don’t think any addons I was using were critical to begin with.

    That said, if you’re doing HA, get a dedicated piece of hardware for it. I suspect it vastly simplifies things.




  • For what its worth, lower speeds are one of the most straightforwardly effective way to reduce congestion. Road capacity is higher at lower speeds. Errors are less likely to cause serious incidents at lower speeds. Traffic controls don’t need to be so aggressive, causing you to spend less of your trip fully-stopped. For most trips, going a bit slower has a completely negligible effect on drive times, especially when you can get most of traffic to do it leading to more laminar flow.

    The problem is, only road design is effective to lower speeds. You can’t just ask drivers to slow down or change the posted signs, you have to re-engineer roads. People tend to just drive at whatever speed feels comfortable on the road.


  • God I hate so much the technowizards who think all of our society problems around cars are going to be fixed by self-driving cars. My dad always does this – any time you point out the issues with expense and congestion near him in the city downtown, he’ll start talking about how any day now the self-driving cars will fix it and won’t need to park and it’ll be sunshine and roses.

    Nope. The geometric problems of cars are not solved by fleets of vehicles that park in huge lots at the edge of town. It may mitigate issues, but it does not fix them.

    Want to get rid of downtown congestion? Putting people in automated cars won’t do it. Only getting rid of the cars will.

    The only upside is it will make it that much easier to get rid of mandatory min parking rules which are totally unscientific and should never have been codified to law in the first place.