While I don’t exactly intend to run RAID, I ended up choosing nas drives for the 24/7 intended usage,
The purpose of a NAS drive is to be LESS reliable than a regular drive, not more reliable. Explanation: if a regular drive gets a read error on a block, it will retry for quite a while before giving up. The host, meanwhile, has to wait for the data to be retrieved if the retries work. That's all it can really do, wait and hope. Meanwhile, the waiting slows the application down.
A NAS drive instead will fail once or twice, then give up immediately, since it knows that it's in a RAID system and that the data is also present on other disks. The RAID then puts the data together from the other drives and gets it to the host, logging the error. It will also hopefully mark the bad block on the drive with the read failure, and rewrite the recovered data to a spare sector. So this is faster than all the retries even though the drive that had the bad block gives up on it rather than attempting recovery by repeated reads.
So if you buy NAS drives, put them in a RAID.
Drives are currently around 2x as expensive as a year or so ago but they are available if you can afford them. I guess that's better than shortages where they're hard to find even if you can pay. We've had that before too.
I like to think the current situation will settle out. Who knows though. Drive space is still way less expensive than in 2010 or anything like that.
IDK but they've done that for a very long time. I remember wondering if ebay had some exclusive deal with them for annual plans. For a while, the website only had monthly plans. Or maybe, they are adding some friction in the hopes of getting some less careful shoppers to pay more.
If you can establish that it was written before 2021 or so, it's probably not from an LLM. That kind of text has been compared to "low background steel", typically salvaged from ships sunk in WW2 or earlier. Low background steel is a valuable commodity used for some types of highly sensitive instruments. Steel made in August 1945 or later, especially post 1950-ish, always has trace amounts of radioactivity from u-know-what.
Note that contamination is contagious. Even if you know that a human wrote something post-2021, for example because you wrote it yourself, you still can't say it's guaranteed AI-free, because of how AI has warped language and to some extent everyone's minds.
I've never heard of one of those with no recurring charges (typically you get a service plan that expires after 1 year), but yes, that type of phone is super cheap. Like here's two flip phones each with 1 year of service, $70 for both:
I think there's a way to do two sim activations on one phone, so you get two years of service. r/nocontract on spezzit would have more info about this.
QVC used to have tons of cheap Android phones (search "tracfone") with similar deals but they're all OOS now, I guess due to AI semiconductor shortages. No idea about Walmart. I haven't looked at ebay recently.
I think Helium Zero is long gone, and has to have been a privacy invasion scam or something. But other stuff starts at $2.40/month which most people can manage. Redpocket is fairly decent these days and they have a $30/year plan on ebay.
It's $30/year for unlimited voice and data plus 200MB/month of data, which is comfortably enough to check email and Lemmy now and then, though not enough for video watching or heavy web surfing. I'm on a $10/month T-mobile plan from them and it's mostly been ok.
Hmm, another idea might be a data-only plan plus your google voice number and a VOIP client. That's going to be pretty annoying though.
What you're asking for has never existed in the US as far as I can tell. There have been some prepaid plans with rollover, so every payment you make gets added to a credit balance that you draw against by making calls, but you have to keep adding money every month or every 3 months or else you lose it all.
Simply having a phone number costs money (like a domain name), so any plan that allows you to receive calls is going to have recurring charges. If you don't need a phone number and have internet access, you could use something like linphone and a SIP plan. Those are around $.01/minute with no recurring charges depending on where you enroll. You usually have to make a minimum payment in advance, like $20, which gets drawn down as you use it.
I've heard Google Voice assigns you a phone number at no charge, but you have to figure that if you aren't the customer, you're the product. Otherwise, phone numbers at least at retail in the US are around $1 a month depending. You can get them from the same places that have SIP plans. I'm on vitelity.net which is more like $1.50/month but it's been ok for me. Twilio seems to have pivoted towards enterprise. voip.ms is another well known one.
One can support a social media age ban (similar to the porn age bans that have existed since forever) while opposing the implementation proposal (invasive age verification needed for nearly everything).
From what I can tell, the definition of social media in the ban proposals amounts to the presence of algorithmic amplification of clickbait and outrage. It's not too big a stretch to support banning that altogether, not just for minors. Traditional forums would still be fine, and Lemmy would be fine if it changed a few features that are arguably bad anyway.
This is a bunch of stuff that you can order from Adafruit, so idk where Steam comes into it.
Also the screen is 5.83" which is a yawner. It's a drag that e-ink screens are still all so small. Wake me up when there's an affordable 14 inch one or larger, that doesn't take 20+ seconds to refresh. 1 second is tolerable. Motion video is not required.
There are very few lemmy communities with enough participants to be anything like reddit. There is or was a NSFW lemmy server (lemmynsfw.com) though, which might be an ok place for your NSFW stuff, if it's still around. I'm not trying to be discouraging of unwelcoming but Lemmy is simply not a bustling metropolis like some of us might wish for. It's more like some random lost souls wandering around in the desert, with a few slightly populated areas here and there. Ask Lemmy, where you are right now, is one of the denser such pockets and there's not much going on here either.
Anyway, welcome to Lemmy. There are things to like about it but it's more like sitting around a campfire with a few other people, than being in a dance club. Join us and toast a few marshmallows.
A garbage collector is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?