• 5 Posts
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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Hopefully the Mastodon devs are paying attention to the features that bsky has that they don’t, and actually copy them rather than sit there and tell everyone that no, they’re wrong they don’t want that feature.

    I want to like Mastodon (or any platforms that are federated with them and trying very hard to be them) but they’re utter and total lack of interest in and development of features the community keeps asking for is going to keep it a niche option for weirdos while people keep hopping into corpo social platform after corpo social platform.


  • The biggest problem for smart homes for people who aren’t enormous nerds is that nothing works together with each other in a simple, coordinated way.

    And, of course, one of Apple’s biggest strengths is that they’ve built a cohesive ecosystem that, usually, works just fine with limited fiddling.

    Right now you’ve either got 14 apps for different shit, or you’ve built something like Home Assistant to try to glue together all this garbage into a coherent solution. I’ve gone that route, and it works mostly, usually, typically, fine-ish.

    It’s a shit experience, still, because it’s a pile of random plugins and code from random people glued into something that can’t stop fucking with existing and working features and thus is perpetually in need of updates and maintenance and fiddling.

    I wouldn’t bet against Apple being able to make a doorbell, security cameras, light switches, and a thermostat and then turning that into something that actually works properly in homekit, is kept updated, and is easy to configure and use and secure.

    That’s really the missing piece that nobody seems to have been interested or willing to go after.


  • You can share your wisdom and be of great value to the public without being in public office.

    At some point, though, you’ve gone from useful adult into honored elder, and while I’m not suggesting we put them all on ice floes, they shouldn’t be running the country, especially since more than a few of them clearly don’t even know which country they’re in, let alone how to run it.

    If you can’t walk, are having strokes, have developed dementia, and generally just sit around staring at the wall like my cat, perhaps it’s time to gracefully retire and go spend the rest of your life doing conferences and speaking engagements and whatever the hell else you want, not trying to legislate.



  • Honestly, I think we’re 3 years out from Windows being replacable for a gaming platform.

    Anti-cheat is a big one (sure, there’s “support”, but if none of the games people play are supported, is that support?), but VRR and HDR are also huge.

    That trifecta is the only reason I’m still sitting in Windows, and I find myself hopeful we land there sooner rather than later so I can dump Windows and never have to think about whatever dumb crap Microsoft is going to do next.


  • It is mostly professional/office use where this make sense. I’ve implemented this (well, a similar thing that does the same thing) for clients that want versioning and compliance.

    I’ve worked with/for a lot of places that keep everything because disks are cheap enough that they’ve decided it’s better to have a copy of every git version than not have one and need it some day.

    Or places that have compliance reasons to have to keep copies of every email, document, spreadsheet, picture and so on. You’ll almost never touch “old” data, but you have to hold on to it for a decade somewhere.

    It’s basically cold storage that can immediately pull the data into a fast cache if/when someone needs the older data, but otherwise it just sits there forever on a slow drive.






  • …depends what your use pattern is, but I doubt you’d enjoy it.

    The problem is the cached data will be fast, but the uncached will, well, be on a hard drive.

    If you have enough cached space to keep your OS and your used data on it, it’s great, but if you have enough disk space to keep your OS and used data on it, why are you doing this in the first place?

    If you don’t have enough cache drive to keep your commonly used data on it, then it’s going to absolutely perform worse than just buying another SSD.

    So I guess if this is ‘I keep my whole steam library installed, but only play 3 games at a time’ kinda usecase, it’ll probably work fine.

    For everything else, eh, I probably wouldn’t.

    Edit: a good usecase for this is more the ‘I have 800TB of data, but 99% of it is historical and the daily working set of it is just a couple hundred gigs’ on a NAS type thing.




  • Sure, but the way this usually works is that the government tells you to do something and if you don’t, they’ll find someone (or a couple of someones) on that list, arrest them, and charge them with a crime.

    Doesn’t matter if they did the crime, and it doesn’t matter if they’d be convicted, but the play is to keep your friends in jail until you capitulate to what they want. This is actually something that’s happened with tech companies before, like what they did with GoDaddy’s C-level in India.

    The problem is that there’s no damn way I’d want to be arrested by the upcoming US administration, because I’d bet $100 that their playbook will portray not doing what they’re demanding as a national security or terrorism offense, and if you’ve been watching ANYTHING for the last damn near 25 years, that’s a free pass for them to basically just vanish you until they feel like doing otherwise.

    It’s fantastic leverage against organizations that have US people and are, presumably, not willing to just let their friends spend who-knows amount of time in prison, and could probably result in some cooperation.

    And I’m about to both get downvoted and WELL AKSHULLY’d about how you can’t just vanish people under the US justice system, and sure, you’re technically correct. Except we’ve passed law after law after law since 9/11 that have basically given the government the ability to do any damn thing they please if they call you a national security risk or terrorist, up to and including Gitmo, in case you’ve forgotten that existed: which you shouldn’t have, because we STILL have prisoners sitting there.

    This is doomer as fuck, and horribly unlikely, but so is a demand to stuff backdoors into everything. But, if we head down that road, the only safe software will be ones that can’t be blackmailed like this which is essentially none of the major projects.