It really should work that way then, instead of letting them have their cake and eat it too. They and others have fought hard to make that logic work to their own ends. When publishers can enforce artificial scarcity of digital goods upon public libraries, like limiting the number of active e-book loans at any time, those same publishers should find themselves bleeding on the other edge of that sword. But since corporations are “persons,” the large ones belonging to that class of untouchables, it’s “rules for thee, but not for me” as always.

I overbuilt built my NAS/container server for $1262 excluding the price of the rack chassis, PSU, cooler and two 1TB NVMe SSDs I cannot recall the price I paid for. B550 board, Ryzen 5, four 10TB Red Plus HDDs, Intel Arc A380, 64GB of DDR 5 ECC. Those listed components are now $3381. When or if you can even find them. The Arc is unobtanium as far as I can see. Of course the RAM and HDDs went up the most in cost, but it’s still like $65 and $75 more for the mobo and chip.

Whoop, decided to check and I found the SSDs: I paid $60 a pop for Samsung 980 Pros and they’re $240 now. So $1382 then vs $3861 now. Almost triple. The bubble can’t pop soon enough.

I’m not too familiar with Blink products, just that a wall wart bell showed up in a quick search, so it is possible. Most camera doorbells I’ve seen that do have a pair of terminals, they’re to do as you described: connect to the bell circuit to get power and ring the existing bell. I’m doing a bit of inferring, since knocking sounded like the only previous option, that there’s no wire at their door to utilize. Couple that with their being in an apartment and it is likely the only way they’re getting one there is to surface run it. Or run behind any crown molding/baseboard trim they have, but that’s a labor-intensive pain in the ass.

They don’t have a traditional doorbell which is why people previously knocked. Since they added the Blink doorbell, people ring the bell. Except there is no bell apart from the speaker built into the Blink… outside the front door… where it can’t be heard by people inside. So you can’t know if someone has rung the bell without having a phone on you to receive the notification. Blink sells a chime that can just be plugged into an outlet. Doesn’t have the best reviews but I would’ve given that a shot first. Maybe it isn’t sold in their market or something.

What you’re describing works but probably not for me as you acknowledge. The “PC loses AC while running” part is what I actively try to avoid as part of the greater goal of minimizing risk of damage/data loss. It might be superstitious at this point, modern hardware and filesystems being a bit more resilient, but I feel better not risking it. Since I’m shutting down before the UPS battery dies, and power could restore before it does, there’s a real chance power will never be totally lost as far as the motherboard sees it. In that case a boot on AC restoral won’t get triggered. Otherwise I agree. It’s a lot of work. Or rather a lot of research, RTFM, and understanding before you can even do the a little bit of work to implement it.

I was actually working on an edit to further clarify but that context helps. You’d think for a single machine, just run NUT (or whatever) directly on said machine. The two big reasons, even in that case, for using NUT on a RPi or other low power machine are actually what my edit was going to address: Power Consumption and Wake on LAN. After shutting down any power hog server(s) a decent UPS can probably keep a Pi Zero and travel router running for half a day. Ideally long enough to send a WoL packet to the server(s) once the UPS says power is restored. That can be pretty important, even in a “single” (ignoring the Pi) machine setup, if you’re out of town and nobody else has access to manually power it back up.

I will admit NUT was one of the more convoluted things I ever set up, and one has to write their own scripts and such for it, but I find it worth the peace of mind knowing things shut down cleanly. Having them wake back up automatically is icing on the cake, even if my own setup is local only. There’s never a need, if I’m not home, to walk anyone over the phone through identifying which nondescript black rectangle needs its power button pushed.

I’m not sure if there’s a fundamental misunderstanding but I felt a need to clarify that NUT works with a UPS. It isn’t either or. Whether you’ve got a homelab or a single desktop PC, you need some piece of software which can see when the UPS goes “Oh shit, power is gone” and instruct the machine(s) to shut down cleanly. NUT is that software. If it wasn’t NUT then it’d be whatever software the UPS manufacturer either provides or recommends for your combination of UPS and OS.

To the example of how one provides media to other devices inside (and possibly outside) the local network, although I get the broader idea, it really becomes a matter of scope, scale and taste. If my goal were to provide access to family members outside my home, friends, possibly friends of friends (either by intent or as a result of account sharing) then I’ll probably want monitoring. I’ll want a dead simple app any of them can install and point to a memorable URL. I’ll want alerts if someone in Romania or Shanghai attempts to log in with a friend’s account… You get the gist. If it’s not something that matters outside my house and I’m not going to repeatedly need to setup VPNs and map network drives for people, I could just spin up a Samba share and add it to the handful of devices in my home network and let those devices decide what application opens whatever media.

In actuality I’m extremely small scale (serving only my home) and still prefer Jellyfin for its simplicity and transcoding. It’s simple enough to slap on cheap Android TV boxes and hand someone the remote. No real reason to watch it like a hawk. Nor to track bandwidth; I’ve got an excess for the house. The GPU is capable enough; an Arc A380 that’ll never have enough simultaneous transcodes to be a bottleneck.

To answer the “why?,” I am one of those people that enjoys learning things that often feel like (or factually are) work. Maybe it’s self flagellation and I just refuse to admit it. I am a Factorio addict. But it’s also because tackling those things usually means the other users have an easier time. Mamma don’t wanna learn to drive the network to her laptop or search the app store for a file thingamajig what can connect to that tango or salsa or whatever just to scroll through a bunch of video file icons with the text so small she has to break out the Walgreens readers. She wants a shiny interface that’s swipe-able on a phone or tablet or navigable with a remote control. Pretty movie posters and bold legible titles. And I haven’t touched my config in months for that matter. Just a little bit of work has propped up a really enjoyable, ongoing show/movie watching experience. Definitely worth.

American mindset, and probably more broadly speaking, “ban thing” when thing isn’t widely understood (to be bad, or even in general) usually gets reactionary backlash because people don’t like when decisions are made for them or options (even those they’re unaware of) are either taken off the table or forced upon them. It’s teeing up Microsoft to spend a few bucks on a country song and cowboy character ad campaign to brush the issue off.

“New thing better” doesn’t always work well either because people need a reason to change when things seemingly already work as-is. Leading with outrage is unfortunately the better way to win over people who aren’t going to make an effort for themselves to investigate the problem. Tell them why they should be angry, why Microsoft is a threat to their children, etc and then, if you can convince them, is when you add “…and that’s why we should ban MS products.” Even that is still insufficient without a clear course of action. If the solution isn’t drop-in and painless, it’s going to disrupt the education of the generation when the change is made. The argument needs to be compelling enough to worth unsettling the status quo.

Last up, our education system is headed by a carny. Our administration swung the doors wide open for Mecha Hitler. Our president loves the uneducated and the uneducated clap like a pack of trained seals when they hear it. Even if Microsoft failed to backroom deal or blackmail their way into maintaining their stranglehold, you’d have to be on Elon levels of ketamine to believe the current admin would adopt open standards or invest the US equivalent of Venezuela’s Canaima Linux. We’d get gaudy gold TrumpTops preloaded Grok, nationalist propaganda and government spyware.

All that isn’t to piss on the parade. I’m for open standards, open operating systems and improving technical literacy while stripping away the invasions of privacy and stopping the dumbing down of our youth. I just think “ban thing” is only ever going to appeal to bandwagon radicals and the folks that already agree with you. If you’re not winning over the opposition (and more importantly the idiots who don’t even know they’re opposed until their indignant inner sleeper cell is activated by the word “ban”) you’re in for a losing fight.

Not a programmer either but I’ll throw in my anecdotes:

• I was writing a “cog” for pycord (Python Discord bot framework). I wanted a slash command to hit an API for some reason or another. Whatever AI I was using hallucinated a non-existent endpoint to achieve that so, of course, it didn’t work. I wasted a half hour reading past and upcoming specs of the API to find that endpoint never existed and wasn’t going to exist in the next release. The code was structurally sound, pretty much identical to other functions I’d written by hand, but it reached out to something that does not exist. It did this with a popular, well-documented piece of software.
• Speaking of structurally sound, there’s no real time save if I have to double back to make sure it filled in all the blanks correctly. If the AI can fuck up with an API that it should “know,” it’s a guarantee that will be necessary to correct everything when an AI has no knowledge of it whatsoever. So now time is spent making sure it isn’t referencing variables it failed to define, pointing to API endpoints that aren’t there, etc. I can define boilerplates and snippets in any decent text editor. An autocomplete plugin will fill out the entire structure of a function being defined the second I type def and leave me to fill in the blanks - all without deferring to a water and energy sucking, data mining, douchebag of a company. What’s being gained that isn’t costing me privacy, depriving myself the use of my own cognitive abilities, and ultimately making the world a little worse off?
• Last one, I wrote a bash script years ago using exiv2 to pull the EXIF data and sort unsorted photos into ../YYYY/MM/DD/. directories. When the AI hype started gaining traction I tasked one with doing the same to see what it would do differently. Aside from some capitalization and variable names, it was identical. Now it’s not exactly a complicated task but my takeaway was either I’m a better programmer/scripter than I thought (not likely) or AI is just as bad (or worse) of a programmer as me. I’m leaning towards worse, considering I manage to actually know if an endpoint or variable exists before referencing it.

Anyway, the only conclusion I can draw is those “programmers” are developing unmaintainable blackboxes out of twigs and playing cards. If some big bad wolf by the name of “Intellectual Debt” doesn’t inevitably come along to huff and puff, they’ll just end up collapsing under their own weight.

I stopped paying however many years ago it was that they killed Play Music. YouTube Premium was just a benefit to a music service I felt was worth the money. Once they sucked all the humanity and soul out of Play Music and pushed YouTube Music on everyone, I bounced. Been using NewPipe on mobile, TubeArchivist and Jellyfin at home for videos I want to retain and watch on my TV or whatever.

So I’ve heard! Popular Jewish American cuisine. I’ve only been to NY once and it was middle of the night so just about everything was closed. Maybe one day I’ll have a proper trip up there to take in more sights and food. Meanwhile the nearest bagel shops to me are like 20-30 miles away… so none in my immediate future. :(

Can’t believe I forgot that one. I found a jar of green olives recently that were stuffed with blue cheese. Would recommend.

I guess, in a culinary sense, it’s not “raw.” In my head it’s still hard to see it as “cooked” since it’s chemical cooking rather than heat. Same reason I’m inclined to still call ceviche “raw” even when I know the acidic juices are doing whatever with the proteins and the end result is very different from truly raw fish.

Bagels and lox. Sushi has seemed to steadily grown in popularity here in the states but there’s still plenty of aversion to raw (or cured, brined/smoked) fish. Also capers are like angry little olives on steroids. Definitely not for everyone. I haven’t had any since the only bagel shop around, an Einstein Bros, closed some years ago.

I loved greens as a kid and still do. Stewed spinach, Brussels, broccoli, etc. Seems like it’s usually a visual and/or texture aversion for the folks that don’t like stewed greens (spinach, collared, kale). Does kinda look like a chunk of dark, wet grass left behind a lawnmower.

Dutch licorice. I haven’t been brave enough to try Swedish Bastards but I have to make a conscious effort not to eat a whole bag of Gustaf’s dubbelzout coins. I told the person that introduced me to them that they taste the way a litterbox smells… then they grew on me and I kept eating them.

Fresh hot mustard. A local Chinese restaurant makes theirs fresh and it’s damned potent. It honestly reminds me of nail polish remover. I haven’t found anything that’ll clear my sinuses the way it can.

Reads like the typical NWO, Great Reset conspiracy nuttery. Maybe a sprinkle of Bill Gates population control, eugenics, etc. I’d say I’m surprised but I’m not. You can street view their location and it looks like shared office/warehouse space. They probably employ less than 10 people and, if SprocketFox reached out to the correct email or whatever, the company clearly isn’t concerned about PR and such. Obviously don’t have an office clerk or the sort handling the emails when the reply includes whataboutism and conspiracy theories.

I don’t remember anything worthwhile but one alarm/camera installation I was on years ago was for two dudes working out of the loft above a household garage. Two-man hand-soldering operation assembling boards at a private residence in a major tech corridor (big name mil contractor offices up and down the main drag). Probably just bid on a contract, got lucky, and started cranking out components for god only knows.

Takeaway being they’re “regular” people, even if they’re manufacturing high-end hardware for weather balloons, so nuttery is still on the table.

Edit: But I too am deeply curious about cheese fortune telling. And again: Tyromancy
Oddly I’ve actually heard of oomancy prior to the article although I can’t remember where or why. Tea leaves as well, but that’s hardly obscure. At any rate I now have a literal grocery list of divination woowoo to read up on.

When they added locations with local radio stations in PGR2, I thought it was coolest thing ever. Growing up in the DMV, “Elliot in the Morning” on DC101 was (still is) the big morning talk radio show. Hearing Elliot introduce tracks by Bif Naked, Trust Co., and such while racing past local monuments was wild.

I wonder what sort of nightmare it had to be for a game studio to get all the necessary rights. It was after Clear Channel (iHeartRadio) acquired a ton of stations in the US so DC101, Hot 99.5, etc were probably negotiated through a single point of contact. The international stations were mostly independent if I can remember right.

Geometry Wars was the one that was playable on the arcade machine, in the garage area, in Project Gotham Racing 2 on the OG Xbox. Got a proper release and sequels after that. I was a PGR addict as a kid. Awesome soundtracks, online play, and my first racer that wasn’t arcade-like or combat oriented (Road Rash, Twisted Metal, etc).

Closest thing I have to a formal education in IT is taking keyboarding, QB, then VB in high school in the early 00s. The only thing I came away with from that was the basic concepts; variables, integers, strings, loops, functions, recursion, etc. I remember nearly nothing about VB. Self taught some Python after that, went to Linux and started learning Bash, CLI tooling, editing confs, working on small portions of languages I didn’t know like Haskell (Xmonad) and eLisp (emacs), running containers… Long enough ago I remember manually setting up Apache and MySQL a few times, editing whatever init system I was using to ensure they started, etc.

Time and cost are big determining factors. Sometimes I’d like to know more but never enough to become indebted to educational bills for something I’m not making a career out of. Same reason I can install, remove, rekey and pick various locks, and have installed some access control stuff in the past under an employer, but I’m not shelling out to become licensed Locksmith or Security Systems Technician myself. Tools are comparatively inexpensive, and I have many from past employment, and YouTube is still free and archiveable… add in a bit of “dorking” to find manuals and whatnot and self-teaching just makes more sense for me. Same reasons I’m entering my shade tree mechanic arc these days - it’s not worth paying to become an auto tech but it is worth saving thousands on the repairs I can do. Plus it’s just fun to learn and work with my hands.

Why are you conflating…

If you’re struggling to view the reply chain, cytobit used disgust as a specific emotional response. They stated emotions are not something that can be chosen. A_Random_Idiot disagreed. I happened to agree with cytobit so I provided examples where emotions seem to clearly not be a choice.

…inability to practice emotional regulation…
Emotional response…

Who exactly is conflating? What you’ve said is in agreement with my position - that one can control, at least to some extent, how they respond to their emotions. What you’re calling “regulation” and “response” seem to be identical, yet neither have to do with controlling or choosing the emotions themselves - which was my only point.

If you need me to tie it back to food, in some parts of the world there is little-to-no concept of animal cruelty - extending to food processing and preparation. If you witnessed, or have knowledge of, what went into the meal in front of you then disgust might be what you feel reflexively. How intensely you feel that, whether or not you empty your stomach, is most likely outside your control. Assuming the reflex is mild enough that you can maintain your composure then what you call “regulation” and “response,” the actions you choose with regard to your emotional state, has a chance to come into play.

I don’t think this is particularly controversial. Emotions are not, so far as I can see, in any way chosen. Emotional response (actions) possibly can be, which you seem to reiterate, but those come after the fact.

That’s arguable. Setting aside determinism or whatever, what it appears we can choose is our actions (in response to our emotions). Not the emotions themselves. I’m not sure I could any more choose to be happy if a beloved pet died than I can choose what my eyes see when I look a particular direction. I might be able to filter those inputs through my own perceptions moments after the experience but that initial reaction is instantaneous and, as far as I can tell, uncontrolled.

Put another way: if some drunk shitbag, flying down the street, runs over my cat - my initial response is going to be some combination of horror, rage and sorrow all wrapped up in a sense of panic. Whatever I choose to tell myself after the fact, in an attempt to alter that state, will be reliant on me convincing myself of it before (or rather if) my emotional state can then change. Maybe I say to myself “at least Mittens was spared the pain of old age, organ failure and a slow death” and that silver lining is enough to curb the rage and reduce the sadness. Maybe it’s not. Either way it’s post hoc to the initial, visceral reaction.

Another example might be what’s humorous to you. Something “dark” or morbid might leave you in a laughing fit where it would leave others aghast. I don’t think either of us can choose that. I certainly can’t choose to find Seinfeld funny.