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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • The point, in one sentence:

    If you are the product, not the paying customer, then not only is there no incentive to cater to your needs, there exists incentive to make the product worse for you if it means the paying customer extracts more from you.

    Users of freemium software are basically nothing more than willing cattle. Housed and fed for free only to be slaughtered.

    Maybe people just can’t help themselves? I fear we can’t have a fair and free market if people are so easily manipulated.


  • I broadly agree with your sentiment, in particular computing equipment that I purchase and ongoing trends in tech (like smart TVs) that are abusive to consumers.

    However, I find this argument not terribly persuasive in this particular case. The content of a website isn’t an extension of your property. It is not even public property. Visiting a site is voluntary. You clearly didn’t pay for accessing the site, nor was it subsidized through a social program. So exactly how should content (regardless of how trashy it is) be funded? Statements like “rights” (i.e. temporary government-granted privileges) suggest you are espousing libertarian views, but at the same time, you are not expressing willingness to pay for a service privately?

    I dunno, it just comes across as demanding a handout. Meanwhile, not visiting websites that don’t meet your vision for how funding content should be done seems like a perfectly simple and reasonable approach to have for this problem.



  • Let me take this a step absurdly far:

    You may be slightly more buoyant (and therefore apply less force on a scale) everytime you breath in. It’s not the presence of air that has this effect, it’s the decrease in density of your total body (mass/volume) that has that effect. (Helium just contributes a fractional more difference in density compared to air, but how much you breath in probably matters much more than what you breath)

    Except, maybe not. Because the air you breath in partially dissolves in your blood. Dissolved matter does not decrease density, rather the opposite: it packs tightly into the voids, increasing mass for the same volume.

    How much of an effect this has is hugely debatable, probably depends on a dozen biological and circumstantial factors, and this is where my knowledge ends. But it’s fun to imagine.

    However, if you can imagine inhaling but holding your breath at the same time, creating a vacuum in your lungs, then yes, you would be more buoyant, even more than inhaling helium, and the scale would read slightly less.





  • Before I understood Docker, I used to have HA installed directly on bare metal side by side with other “desktop” apps.

    To be able to access devices, HA needs many different OS-level configurations (users, startup, binding serial ports, and much more I don’t have a clue about). It was a giant mess. The bare OS configuration was polluted with HA configurations. Worse, on updating HA, not only did these configurations change, the installation of HA changed enough that every update would break HA and even the bare OS would break in some ways because of configuration conflicts.

    Could this be managed properly through long term migration? Yeah, probably, but this is probably a ton of work, for which a purpose-built solution already exists: Docker. Between that and the extra layer of security afforded by dedicating an OS to HA (bare metal or virtualized), discouraging the installation of HA in a non-dedicated environment was a no brainer.









  • Eating healthier is not nearly as complicated as this post makes it sound, unless you have unusual underlying medical issues or are aiming to sculpt your body in a very specific way.

    • To lose weight, eat about 5-10% less than your daily caloric requirement (there are tons of free calculators and counters online). Water helps to feel full. Increasing exercise can help if changing dietary habits is a struggle.
    • To eat healthier overall, eat less processed foods, more fresh stuff.

    That’s it. This is all the advice most people realistically need to lose weight/eat better. The hard part is being disciplined about it. Now, discipline, on the other hand, that’s a very personal matter.