Yeah, I have a node that’s just a RAK Wisblock kit just hooked up to a USB power adapter and taped together. Works great. Looks like the ESP based boards are a bit cheaper, and should be fine if you don’t need to run off battery (they use considerably more current).

I think ublock origin hides that for me (might need to enable cookie notices lists if it doesn’t).

It pretty much is the same thing. In theory, shorting the ETF will drive the price of gold down (until the short needs to be covered; like all shorts), because all accounts must eventually be settled. The price of gold is literally set by the futures market, which people with the appropriate approval can also short. Gold dealers literally look up the price on the futures market and add/subtract a few percentage points to determine how much to buy/sell physical gold for.

I don’t think it’s been proven that the nitrogen the beans/bacteria fix is available to the corn (before the bean plants die and decompose). Though, I have done this (along with squash), and it does seem to work pretty well. I think it gives you more vegetables per sq ft, than if you were to grow them all separately.

I’m not involved in the “scene,” so don’t know the accuracy of the content, but I’ve heard they do it something like this before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene

Librewolf disables some canvas features because they’re a good way to fingerprint your browser. A lot of map and image manipulation stuff won’t work correctly on LibreWolf. I usually just open a Chromium private window when that happens. There’s probably a better solution, but I also have to use some sites for work that only work on chromium-based browsers as well.

Humans lived in what could be described as a sort of primitive communism for most of the species history.

Basically, the society needs to be decentralized. If you can keep it sufficiently non hierarchal, there isn’t a lot of power people can get over many others. A problem I see with this is defending against large, centralized, outside organizations. So, I guess you’d need some federation-like structures. Some communes are pretty democratic and decentralized. The Zapitista territories are the best example I know of, of a large non-hierarchal federation of communities.

Small local businesses fuck over their employees too. Capitalism incentives it. It also incentives monopolies. And it seems when the wealth disparity gets large enough, it captures government and starts transforming into fascism.

You can short gold ETFs. Gold is highly speculative and has crashed taking decades to recover (~1980-2005). It’s basically boomer-bitcoin.

I think Jay-Z funded part of it; not sure if he’s still involved or not… Looks like Block owns the vast majority of it now, and they’re a particularly shady and shitty enterprise as well.

The Fediverse is social media. Wouldn’t instances be required to do age verification? I mean, I guess that’d only be enforceable on Australian instances, but it seems like the whole world is going in that direction.

Are you sure? I remember seeing other legitimate roofing companies selling solar roof tiles too. I think I even remember watching an installation video. They weren’t rigid tiles, they were flexible and nailed down similarly to shingles.

I think Paramount is in the process of a hostile takeover of WB Discovery, and Kushner is involved, so they’ll probably get it, IMO. I think the fascists really want CNN at least.

I think there are probably enough collectors, AV nerds, and people without consistent high bandwidth unlimited internet to keep physical going for a while. It’ll just be niche, like vinyl, I suppose.

It is kinda weird that optical stopped advancing. You can fit more data on a MicroSD card than BluRay. You can fit something like 240 blurays on a consumer HDD (and much more if you further compress).

I think the situation in Appalachia is more about poverty and hopelessness than structure and identity. I.e. “shit-life syndrome.” Community is a big one too, but that’s already severely lacking in most of the modern world.

What I personally think will happen is that wages will get driven so far down where it doesn’t make sense for the capitalists to automate. I.e. global south-like living conditions and slavery. The capital owners will not let go of their power or support anything like decent UBI/USI. They’ll opt for company-towns and “charity” that serves their purposes.

It’s fair to think that automation will continue to improve. I imagine it will improve quite a bit in the next 20 years. There may even be breakthroughs in that time that result in AGI or ASI.

Port forward/poke holes in firewall + dynamic DNS.

Never had one fail. Bought a faulty one once. Took me months to figure out why I was having data corruption issues. Thought it was one of the old HDDs I was using in a ZRAID array, so I would swap one out and try again until I’d eventually get a corruption error again. Finally found the issue after about 10 minutes of running a memory test of a bootable USB.

I think California recently passed the Digital Age Assurance Act, which was backed by Google,Meta, and OpenAI. I think it goes into effect in 2027.

I find it detrimental to my productivity when integrated into an editor/IDE. I’ve found the “autocomplete” causes subtle bugs that I end up overlooking because I’m trying to go fast and putting too much trust in the generated lines/snippets. Tracing down these bugs becomes a huge time-sink. I do use chatbots in the browser for various things; mostly as a kind of “search” for alternative ways of doing things, frameworks, libraries, and algorithms. Agentic vibe-coding is ok for small one-off tools/scripts you wouldn’t need to maintain, IMO.