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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Meh. I got one for free from a job’s tech allowance, and it’s never really a problem. It charges fast and the OS warns you early enough to plug it in on a lunch break or at the end of the day well before it runs out. Not ideal but def not garbage. Honestly, I get more frustrated with noise canceling headphones and keyboards dying at inconvenient times than I ever do the mouse.

    I dont use it daily, but it is a pretty good mouse for my laptop bag. Charge holds a long time for once/week use. If it’s dead when I get to the coffee shop or wherever I’m working, itll be usable in 15 mins or less anyway. It also works nicely with Linux out of the box, which is a rarity among Bluetooth mice (in my experience).

    The other elephant in the room: not having multitasking gestures on a mouse when using macOS is a serious drawback for any other mouse out there, so there is a reason people are willing to put up with the annoyance (if they ever get annoyed in the first place)




  • I mean, the issues were present and widely reported for several months before Intel even acknowledged the problems. And it wasn’t just media reporting this, it was also game server hosts who were seeing massive deployments failing at unprecedented rates. Even those customers, who get way better support than the average home user, were largely dismissed by intel for a long time. It then took several more months to ship a fix. The widespread nature of the issues points to a major failure on the companies part to properly QA and ensure their partners were given accurate guidance for motherboard specs. Even so, the patches only prevent further harm to the processor, it doesnt fix any damage that has already been incurred that could amount to years off of its lifespan. Sure they are doing an extended warranty, but thats still a band-aid.

    I agree it doesnt mean one should completely dismiss the possibility of buying an Intel chip, but it certinally doesn’t inspire confidence.

    Even if this was all an oversight or process failure, it still looks a lot like Intel as a whole deciding to ship chips that had a nice looking set of numbers despite those numbers being achieved through a degraded lifespan.


  • Yup, unfortunately there is still a premium on linux-specific manufacturers. You get better driver support, but without scale things will stay a bit pricey.

    The other longterm solution is postmarketOS, but there aren’t a ton of android tablets out there right now that can really compete on the drawing front so the supported devices aren’t very compelling.





  • I was a roku fan for s long time until they really enshittified (which sucks, since their UI overall is superior and their products are supported for a really, really long time)

    I dont see moving away from android any time soon, and i’m not quite ready/willing to take the plunge into alternate ROM’s (the pixel festures are really nice!) so I figure google TV at least isnt going to learn much about me that google doesnt already know. The newer OS iteration isnt that bad a UI, either.

    I do think all this will motivate me to get a kodi device set up and use the smart TV stuff a lot less, though, and I dont think I’ll be in a rush to replace my existing roku TV’s/boxes for secondary room use. I can tell they have a bit of targeted ads, but it mostly seems based on content I watch on the TV itself. Probably helps that most of my online life on home-based internet usage is very filtered of tracking through my router, though i haven’t put a ton of effort into blocking roku specifically.


  • I’m in a swing state with an abortion measure on the ballot, and while all the polls claim it’s close, I’m not really sure they are properly accounting for the number of voters that have been activated by the possibility of enshrining pro-choice into the state constitution.

    These polling strategies are complex and a lot of thought goes into them, but they rarely can account for uncommon circumstances that increase voter turnout in local or state elections and how that will effect the national election.

    While this is entirely personal reexperience bias, I also wonder how effective these polls are at reaching a representative survey group. I know at least on my phone basically all survey calls and texts go to spam and I wonder if older, more conservative voters are getting overrepresented due to their likelihood of not having those kinds of spam filters in place.



  • NASA does a hell of a lot more work than just build rockets lol. SpaceX and all the other private space companies focus on a few of the wide array of programs and services NASA does. They certinally have some poor decisions in their history (as does every space program of the 20th century) but comparing SpaceX’s spending with an appropriate context of NASA’s spending is ludicrous. Its not something you can just put into numbers and any comparisons I’ve seen thus far have been wildly skewed in SpaceX’s favor for marketing reasons.

    NASA (and ESA, RosCosmos, others) funding provided decades of R&D SpaceX uses to build its products with and the university curriculums all the engineers at SpaceX learned at.

    Also, we dont know how a NASA that wasnt so de-funded since the 80s would have operated, but it’s well established that the budget cuts and uncertainty those created have been a major factor in its ability to build new programs like Artemis, Orion, SLS, etc. in a manner that would be efficient. SLS was bogged down for years waiting for congressional approval that was repeatedly blocked or maliciously modified last minute by congressional and senate republicans, a form of efficiency knee-capping that the agency never faced in the Apollo or Space Shuttle days.

    have you seen the plastics industry? Let alone consumer packaging

    Not an apples to apples comparison. Check out the many lawsuits and reported criticism of the more careless Starship test flights



  • Also, do you know who built the Saturn V?

    I’m not even going to get into a discussion of NASA competence. There are more than enough records available through widely accepted reporting and media to disprove any of the nonsense Elon cultists spew. Whether you subscribe to the Elon cult mindset or not is your prerogative and not an accusation I’m making…

    Additionally, a significant amount of the funding for starship is coming from NASA, specifically from the Artemis program, to the tune of nearly $4 billion.

    Elon can scream “mars” all he wants but he has virtually zero progress to report other than some wild plans to just throw people in tubes in the general direction. Last I checked, unless I’ve missed something, SpaceX has not put any amount of work into what is required to keep people alive on mars, much less alive on the trip to mars, and seeing as Elon’s track record on delivering promises by self-imposed deadlines is basically 0%… We’ll see if it ever even happens. Especially since he changes the goal post upon “delivery” (see: full self-driving basically never happening on top of killing more people per car than any other self-driving technology, cybertruck having a fraction of the features and capabilities that were promised on top of being extremely unsafe, semi being a massive failure, that ridiculous re-invention of the subway but for cars that makes 0 financial sense, and probably many more items I’m not thinking of at this moment)




  • As a side note, if you work somewhere that uses 1password, you can usually get your personal subscription comped as an individual. Only need to pay for it if you leave your company or they drop 1password.

    I dont know that I’ll stay on 1password forever, but on the scale of things I’m most concerned about self-hosting vs using a reasonably private SaaS, 1password is nowhere near the top of my list to ditch. Otherwise, its a solid recommendation for non-self hosters who want to make some progress.