I'm not going to worry about voting on election night. Because I will have voted days/weeks earlier through my state's effective vote by mail system.

Remember: elections have consequences.

Also remember that --- as much as disaffected and/or malicious actors (or Simpsons and South Park, for that matter) will claim otherwise --- the two major political parties in the US are not the same.

Lot of comments about RTGs, but I don't think that's what OP is asking. RTGs convert heat to electricity, same as a conventional power plants --- they just do it in a solid state way instead of steam. In RTGs it doesn't matter where the heat comes from; they are not really analogous to solar cells, as the title asks.

In fact, there are consumer products that use the same technology --- you can buy a little electric fan that sits on top of a wood stove and, once up to temp, will start spinning. The electricity is generated by the thermal gradient using heat from the stove, essentially the same as an RTG.

I think I saw this earlier on Lemmy, but without the red text spelling it out. I think I prefer that ever-so-slightly more subtle version.

Credit scores are often required for things that don't necessarily incur debit --- it can be a requirement for renting, and for credit cards (which, if paid off monthly, don't accumulate debt).

The credit system is far from perfect, but this is a step in the right direction it seems; I view it as a statement on "healthcare as a right," rather than as "good credit scores as a right."

After setting up my own network, and trying to (kinda sorta) do it the right way (multiple SSIDs, vlan segregation, restrictive firewalls for iot, VPN to a VPS, etc.) --- I have so much respect for network engineers. First month with my new router, felt like I "broke the Internet" every other day.

As others have mentioned, a few possibilities (I'm in the US, not sure how specific this is):

• Payment isn't always monthly, it is often every two weeks. So sometimes you get two paychecks in a month, sometimes you get three.
• Compensation isn't just salary, even if you're salaried. Bonuses, stock grants, etc. might be done yearly/every 6 mo./every quarter.
• Expenses aren't always monthly. If you own a place, you probably pay property tax which isn't due every month AFAIK. If you budget for vacations, holiday travel, etc., these are costs that vary wildly month to month, but have some stability on a yearly basis.
• ETA: taxes are based on annual income, too.

Probably referring to their ~$50B endowment.

Just curious --- how would you like this to work? If you want high quality journalism, you need to pay journalists.

You can pay them through ads, but 1) this is annoying, and 2) people just install ad blockers.

You can have state-sponsored media, which can work reasonably well...or can end up a propaganda machine.

Or...you can pay.

Journalism is not a crazy lucrative career for most. Financially, most of the folks writing for NYT would be better off in PR --- and I don't think that's a good thing for society.

If, as an adult, you have a kid and send 'em to daycare...you're probably going to be getting sick "pretty regularly" again! (It's worth it, but it does suck.)

When I was in college, working for Google was a dream job for a lot of my friends. I have to think that hiring from that position is awesome --- lots of really smart, motivated, enthusiastic grads, and you get to pick the best. I wonder if all that has changed?

Old article, and yes, "corporations are not friends" yada yada: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-companines-that-havent-had-layoffs-job-cuts-yet-2023-1

If I'm ever in the market for another job and have the luxury of choice, the layoff question will be pretty high up.

As an ordained minister of The Church of the Latter-Day Dude...that's just, like, your opinion, man.

What's the difference between a dentist and a sadist? Newer magazines...

--- via Seinfeld

Yeah all the EEE/"Threads will kill us" talk reminds me of how Slack killed IRC by first offering an IRC gateway, and then killing off support. And after that IRC literally died.

/s

I saw a post here about how Threads' biggest enemy at this point is antitrust, and a federated approach is a clever way around that. I think that makes much more sense than the EEE narrative.

It's at a much, much larger scale** than that --- our local group is collapsing in on itself, and it's ~10M lightyears in diameter.

** talking about length scales only makes sense in reference to the specifics --- two bananas separated by 10M lightyears, with no other matter nearby, would (I'm guessing) be expanded away, but a cluster of galaxies will not.

Kissinger was on the board of Theranos, which feels a little anachronistic to me.

It's not "endless suburbia." It does end --- the state is just huge!

You can hop on a bike in downtown San Francisco after breakfast, and end up in the middle of nowhere in the Mt. Tam watershed before lunch.

And if that's too urban, go hike the Lost Coast. Or check out Yosemite.

Kinda like abortion --- not sure the brains of the GOP wanted a win on that one.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/25/the-dog-that-caught-the-car-republicans-brace-for-the-impact-of-reversing-roe-00042387

I grew up collecting mushrooms (US), but definitely restricted to only a few varieties which basically couldn't be confused with anything deadly (some lookalikes maybe, but gastrointestinal distress --- not death --- would probably be the worst case). And yep, learned by going on mushroom hunting walks through the woods with local old timers who knew what was what.

I've been eyeing an Orange Pi 5+ for my RPi4 upgrade --- think I may stick with that route, but glad to see RPi putting out another model.

My experience with RPis over the years was that the multimedia was way better supported than alternatives, but for self hosting that's not really relevant for me (headless, and don't really care about transcoding).

In grad school I picked up a free used HP LaserJet. It had Ethernet, and could use generic/off brand cartridges. Yeah it was big and noisy but it was an awesome workhorse and it Just Worked (with out-of-the-box CUPS/Linux support too, IIRC).

How the mighty have fallen.

My ex is ATT fiber which, despite having zero love for ATT, was pretty great.

They are trying to get me back...but they don't offer fiber (or any service!) at my new address.

Behind in specs? Depends on which specs I guess --- but CPU/GPU performance is AFAIK pretty great? https://www.tomsguide.com/features/iphone-15-pro-benchmarks

Features, yeah, depends on what you're looking for. AFAIK iPhones are the only mainstream phone to offer satellite texting though.

I have both an iPhone (work) and an android (personal), and they both...kinda just work 🤷

...aaaaand it's gone.

Yeah, possibly the most expensive wedding I've been to was one where they (rather, the parents) could afford it. And it was lovely --- it was first and foremost a party for friends. No dress code, great food, and the only "micromanaging" by bride and groom was to make sure guests were enjoying themselves/remind us that the bar was open. Vows weren't even a part of the wedding (small, family-only).

I'm fortunate enough to not be in a position where money is tight for food, but re: beans and rice, I absolutely love my instant pot!

Mexican-style beans are, IMHO, delicious, easy to make, and dirt cheap. I love them, our toddler loves them, and it's easy on the wallet. Dry beans are really affordable, and a 25lb bag of rice is great to have in the pantry (note: careful with bulk brown rice as I think it can go rancid). A stove and a pot can do both, but an instant pot and a rice cooker makes it so easy.

I also drink a fair amount of coffee, but again, bulk or even just "make coffee at home" is very affordable. A few cups at Starbucks costs the same as a pound of beans (which yields many cups).

I don't think this level of snark is exactly called for in his instance --- it's not some fundamental right to consume Netflix content. If I want to, I pay their price, simple as that.

People often talk about media consumption the way the left (rightfully so!) talk about housing or healthcare --- as a fundamental human right.

I'm sure he's learned his lesson and will always check sources more carefully before posting inflammatory material in the future...

Electric heater with more steps.

I'm guessing that's because you're using software decode? If you use HW decode it runs wonderfully in my experience. I could play raw 1080p h264 or VC1 Blu-ray rips over the network just fine**. You have to pay for VC1 and MPEG2 IIRC --- otherwise it will try to play in software which is no good. This was an rpi3 with Kodi on Raspbian.

Interestingly I believe they removed MPEG2 and VC1 HW support in the 4, so those files play better on a 3 than a 4. But if your media is in h264 and you use a supported player it should work great on a 4.

** I think NFS worked best, and of course over Ethernet. Maybe http also worked (iirc samba would stutter occasionally).

Keep in mind that there is, in general, a scheduler tradeoff between latency and throughput.

So, if you're doing audio recording and mixing, this is likely to have very different scheduler requirements than something churning through batch jobs. The former wants low latency, the latter high throughput.

*chef?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_dispute

Not sure how that compares to the response from other companies though. But I would guess favorably, from a user privacy perspective?

They also have faced pressure to scan iCloud content, but have afaik refused https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/victory-apple-commits-encrypting-icloud-and-drops-phone-scanning-plans

Not a lawyer; would this likely stand up in court? Obviously I wouldn't risk it were I the dev, but just curious.

Hopefully they didn't use expired carbon fiber in the construction...

Meanwhile, over in godless California: https://www.cmqcc.org/

Yeah...when I cancelled Apple TV (as a paying customer) I had access until end of pay cycle.

As far as malicious subscription practices go, this doesn't even register. If anything, the fact that there's a button right there to cancel is almost refreshing...

Is power consumption a consideration? I want my self hosted server on 24/7, so a low-power single board is much more economical for me.

Also, are resources a problem? If your game is maxing out your rig and some batch job on a self hosted service starts, that could be annoying --- or it could be a non-issue, just depends on your usage both as a desktop and a server.

Cannot be overstated --- the US is huge, and the difference between one state and another can dwarf the difference between two European countries. Same de facto language, same currency...but that's about it.

RTGs aren't radioactive-specific, they are just a solid state way of turning a temperature difference into electricity. The better way to do this (at scale) is e.g. a steam engine, which is what big power plants do.