If you have to “cut a deal” with your spouse, you are not in a healthy relationship.

$3.4M is too low of an estimate. If you assume someone works from age 18 to 65, that’s 47 years of employment at an average of $72,300-ish per year. Now assume time for college, plus people make less early on in their careers. You’re looking at a $100k income.

$100k is probably enough to support a mortgage, two kids, insurance, essentials, bills, and retirement savings in some LCOL areas, but not in many places. In many parts of the US, that might cover a modest house and monthly bills, but there won’t be much left over; forget retirement.

My old brain still looks at a 6-figure income as “you’re rich.” In 2024, you’re not even close.

People really underestimate how bad a cold can be. When I’m sick, it’s so hard to function mentally that I can barely do my job.

I believe he was sick, and I believe this was just a case of unfortunate timing. What matters in politics is perception, though, and the perception isn’t good.

Depending on how accurate you need your energy usage data to be for individual devices, you might be able to get away with just using a whole-house energy monitor. I’m using one of these:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08LV8DDFP

I already have a large number of Zigbee plugs, so by looking at the power usage from my energy meter before and after one switches, I can get a general estimate of how much power a device is using. Of course, the rest of your home is going to to skew the results, but you can mitigate this a bit with some of HA’s statistics functions. It’s been a while since I tried this, but I did test it with a 3.5kW heater a while ago. I took a median from a certain number of samples before and after the heater switched on (I think 10 seconds worth of samples), and the result was generally accurate to within about 100w.

Even when I’m by myself, I often get the feeling like I’m in a “bubble,” and everything I’m looking at outside of myself is some other reality different from my own. It’s not a positive or a negative feeling, just kind of weird.

So to answer your question: Yes.

I don’t consider myself a Republican or a Democrat, although unless things change drastically in American politics, I can’t see myself ever voting Republican by the time I’m dead and gone. With that said, I mentioned to someone yesterday that if I didn’t have the experience of living through Trump’s time in office, this debate would make me seriously consider voting for him.

I really don’t believe that this debate is going to sway many undecided voters toward Biden. If you compare their performance at face value, Trump was unusually well-spoken, and Biden seemed like he belonged in a nursing home. Half of what Trump said was complete bullshit, but how many undecided voters are actually reading articles that show how full of it he really is?

What you have is a person who stated lies as fact and did a decent job of being convincing and a person who was generally truthful but seemed like he “wasn’t all there.” Undecided voters who “don’t follow politics” are going to see this and say “You know, I think I understand why people support Trump.” That’s a very scary prospect.

I don’t dislike Biden, but my personal opinion is that the best thing he could do for the country is step aside and let a different Democrat take the nomination. Geriatrics like Trump and Biden need to retire, do whatever they feel like in their golden years, and let someone else take the reins. A competent politician in his 50s or 60s would absolutely destroy Trump, and that’s exactly what we need right now.

I have a decently-sized homelab, and a large home network. I also have IPv6 disabled everywhere. Compared to a normal home network, my config is very complex. (Extensive firewall and routing rules, multiple gateways, multiple subnets and VLANs, inbound traffic filtering, and plenty more.) With the exception of VLANs, IPv6 would require reconfiguring EVERYTHING. What’s the advantage?

In the US at least, most equipment (unless you get into high-and datacenter stuff) runs on 120V. We also use 240V power, but a 240V connection is actually two 120V phases 180-degrees out of sync. The main feed coming into your home is 240V, so your breaker panel splits the circuits evenly between the two phases. Running dual-phase power to a server rack is as simple as just running two 120V circuits from the panel.

My rack only receives a single 120V circuit, but it’s backed up by a dual-conversion UPS and a generator on a transfer switch. That was enough for me. For redundancy, though, dual phases, each with its own UPS, and dual-PSU servers are hard ro beat.

I probably should have specified I’m using libcurl, but I did try the equivalent of what you suggested. I even tried setting a list of user agents and having it cycle through. None of them work. A lot of anti-scraping methods use much more complex schemes than just validating the user agent. In some cases, even a headless browser will be blocked.

Speaking from experience, be careful you don’t become over-zealous in your anti-scraping efforts.

I often buy parts and equipment from a particular online supplier. I also use custom inventory software to catalog my parts. In the past, I could use cURL to pull from their website, and my software would parse the website and save part specifications to my local database.

They have since enacted intense anti-scraping measures, to the point that cURL no longer works. I’ve had to resort to having the software launch Firefox to load the web page, then the software extracts the HTML from Firefox.

I doubt that their goal was to block customers from accessing data for items they purchased, but that’s exactly what they did in my case. I’ve bought thousands of dollars of product from them in the past, but this was enough of a pain in the ass to make me consider switching to a supplier with a decent API or at least a less restrictive website.

Simple rate limiting may have been a better choice.

What is human connection, though? It’s your brain releasing dopamine because you spent time with another person. It matters to you because it makes you feel good. Other things can make you feel good, too. The difference is that hobbies and activities won’t let you down. They won’t stop being your hobby because they’d rather spend time with someone else. People are unreliable and ultimately selfish at heart.

Say you make a friend. 60 years from now, you and your friend are both dead, and what’s left behind? Nothing. I’m not old, but I’m certainly not young either. It took me a while to realize that other people just don’t matter. In the end, nothing matters at all; everything you and I do is ultimately going to fade into irrelevance when we’re dead. Might as well make the most of the time we have alive, then; do something that makes you happy. Don’t rely on another selfish human being for your happiness.

You don’t. People need fulfillment, not human interaction. Find something you are passionate about and pour your time and effort into it. Buy a classic car and restore it. Learn how to make your own furniture. Start learning photography. Write a book. Develop a program or app. Start a fitness routine. Brew your own beer. Learn a foreign language. The list is endless.

What matters is doing something that brings you satisfaction. A hobby that involves creating something or improving yourself is so much better than wasting time with other people. Spend a day hanging out with friends, and what do you have at the end of the day? Nothing. Spend a day planting a garden, and what do you have at the end of the day? You have a nice garden.

This seems like a weird and convoluted way to charge for content. Why not just make it a paid DLC?

Outside of obvious ethnic names, which isn’t an issue here, how does the seller even know what a potential buyer looks like?

I never spoke to the previous owner of my home, and I have no idea what they look like. The opposite is also true. I have a name on various forms, but that’s it. Our only correspondence was through various documents sent between our agents. I didn’t even see the seller at closing; we signed the closing documents at different times.

It sounds like her real estate agent is on her side, so unless the agent was trying to sabotage the sale, how does this happen?

I think one thing that’s very important for the worldwide audience to consider is what the involved countries count as “peace.” Peace for Ukraine is “give us our land back and stop attacking us.” Peace for Russia is “We’ll stop attacking you if you let us have a significant portion of you country as our own.” Obviously, the Russian “solution” is not an acceptable one. Sadly, I feel like China and other Russian-aligned countries probably support the distorted Russian version of “peace.”

I will never buy a Tesla. I’m not normally one to pay attention to brands, but Elon Musk has tainted the brand to such a degree, that I’m disgusted at the idea of being associated with it.

That being said, the company still makes some decent technology. From what I understand, the motors, motor controllers, and battery packs are fairly decent pieces of kit. There seems to be some kind of disconnect between their engineering teams, though, because the cars themselves are so bad. I’ve seen internal panels fall off, interior components break at the slightest touch, misaligned body panels, and any number of other fit-and-finish issues. Not to mention, every single one is hideous. Make them look like an EV or make them look like a luxury car, not some half-assed abomination between the two.

I have to wonder why there’s such a disconnect within the company. It feels akin to building a Ferrari drivetrain and installing it in a Kia.

People do this because they’re crackheads (or heroin addicts, or methheads, you get the idea). It’s not a poverty issue, it’s a drug issue. The person working a minimum wage job and sharing a studio apartment isn’t going to dispose of their old bicycle in the river. The person who steals a bike and realizes they can’t sell it to get their next fix probably isn’t going to have a problem dumping it in a lake or river. They’re already leaving needles on the playground, shitting on the sidewalk, and assaulting innocent people for not giving them a cigarette. Do you really think they give a damn about the environmental impact of dumping their stolen goods in a waterway?

I’m old enough to remember the 9/11 attacks. It was never in question that Saudi Arabia was complicit in what happened. The majority of the terrorists were Saudi. It took a bit longer for the fact that the Saudi government was complicit to emerge, but we knew within a short time that at the very least, they provided financial support to the terrorists.

The argument for starting the “war on terror” was that Al-Qaeda planned the attack, so we should attack the countries that harbor them. At the time, the majority of the country supported this; I remember George Bush Jr.'s approval ratings being in the 90s for a short time. Even then, most of us knew that Saudi Arabia was at least complicit in what happened. The lust for revenge, as much as it was justified, made people forget that.

Over the last 23 years, I feel like a lot of Americans have forgotten the role that Saudi Arabia played in the events of 9/11; after all, they’re our “ally,” right? I have always been on the fence regarding whether or not invading Iraq and Afghanistan was a good idea. Back in 2001, though, I felt like invading Saudi Arabia was a great idea. 23 years later, I don’t feel any different. Should the United States have attacked Iraq and Afghanistan, I’d say “probably”; should we have attacked Saudi Arabia? Absolutely. Yet it never happened.

Or perhaps people are starting to realize that you don’t need a new car as soon as your 5-year loan is paid off.

I do okay financially; if I wanted a new car, I’d buy one. I bought mine brand new off the lot 15 years ago, and I intend to keep driving it until I can no longer repair it. Why would I possibly want to buy a new, 5G-connected, spyware-infected plastic shitbox when what I have works perfectly well and probably has another 100k miles of life with a few minor repairs and maybe an engine swap at 2-300k or so?

C++ is just as “safe” as Rust if you use modern language features (std::unique_ptr, for instance). I would argue that anyone who says Rust provides better memory safety than C++ most likely is not familiar with modern C++ and still sees the language as “C with classes.”