Skip Navigation

tal

@ tal @lemmy.today

Posts
42
Comments
3416
Joined
3 yr. ago

Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • Roku OS’s home screen now features a large, permanent ad

    Jump

  • Are you familiar with Kodi?

  • Everyone in the world now has the same values and morals you do; how does the world change?

    Jump

  • And when the musicians don't want to be performers!

  • Everyone in the world now has the same values and morals you do; how does the world change?

    Jump

  • I'm pretty sure that the world would have a lot of problems, since everyone would want to do the same things I would, which isn't really what the world needs...

  • In the US, why doesn't a personal savings account make more sense than health insurance?

    Jump

  • In broad terms, you don't buy insurance because it has a positive expected return.

    You buy it to hedge against risk, to spread risk out.

    Let's say --- completely pulling numbers out of the air --- that there are 10,000 houses in a town. On average, one of them burns down each year.

    What the insurer does is take money from all of those people, pool it, and pay out to the one person who gets impacted.

    You buy insurance and pay maybe, I don't know, 1/5000th the price of the house per year. In the long run, you'd expect to come out behind on that, since that's more than 1/10,000th the price of the house.

    But...people don't necessarily value things linearly.

    In the absence of insurance, the person whose house burns down is out a house, which he may consider to be really bad. He may not consider 1/10,000th the price of a house a year or 1 in 10,000 possibility of losing his housing entirely to be equivalent.

    If you'd rather have a predictable expense that you can plan around, that's what insurance provides for.

    There can be some other benefits --- like, an insurer has time to evaluate relevant factors, like to determine things that might reduce fire risk and to say that you have lower rates if you do X, Y, and Z. An individual probably doesn't have the data or time to do that. But it's really the risk mitigation that's the driving force behind insurance.

    In general, you want to take the highest deductible you can afford to take on insurance. If you can afford to cover a $5k unexpected expense, then you want a $5k deductible, so that in the event of an incident where insurance pays out, you pay the first $5k. That way, you're not paying for risk mitigation that you don't care about, on that first $5k. Your rates will be lower.

    If you can afford to cover an unexpected expense at any level, then you may well not want insurance at all, since you don't need risk mitigation.

  • Can I replace Lead-Acid batteries with LiFePo4 or equivalent in my UPS?

    Jump

  • Why am I not surprised to hear APC is crap compared to Eaton?

    Keep in mind that this isn't my personal experience talking here. I also don't know if the user in question is correct, or if it might be specific to some portion of the respective brands --- both make a wide range of UPSes, from inexpensive to pretty pricey. But I did remember reading that, and it did seem potentially germane to OPs problem, so...shrug

    Someone with a multitester or oscilloscope or something and some of those units could probably examine further, see what the actual behavior is for a given model.

  • Can I replace Lead-Acid batteries with LiFePo4 or equivalent in my UPS?

    Jump

  • My UPS (APC)

    https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/117oa9i/why_is_eaton_ups_so_much_more_expensive_than_apc/

    Why is Eaton UPS so much more expensive than APC and Cyberpower?

    In what ways is Eaton so much better that it can demand nearly 2x the price?

    UK person here, so not sure how it differs country to country, but every APC UPS we've had has excelled in utterly trashing the batteries. Where I have to change batteries in an APC every 18-24 months, an Eaton will go five or six years without killing them.

    There's some further discussion talking about how the APC units hold the charge voltage at a high level, and the Eaton ones, once the batteries reach target voltage, bring it back down and only bring the charging voltage up occasionally for brief periods to maintain the charge in the battery.

  • What if you dropped a bowling ball in the Mariana Trench?

    Jump

  • Water's not compressible, so the density doesn't change with depth. Either the bowling ball is denser than water or less dense than water.

  • California moves to exempt Linux from its upcoming age-verification law after backlash over forcing operating systems to collect users’ ages

    Jump

  • IIRC from past reading, the driving factor behind the California bill was that some places were passing laws that would have placed responsibility for age verification on websites. Meta --- probably correctly assessing that anything they did was going to be defeatable and not wanting to engage in a big fight with regulators over that --- drove the California effort to create an OS-level responsibility. It's not that this especially solves anything from the standpoint of people who want age restrictions, but that it dumps the legal problems on the OS vendors, like Apple and Microsoft, instead of on Meta.

  • Did you have your Weight and Height recorded in school?

    Jump

  • Man, I'd forgotten about that. I do recall really enjoying that relative to other PE stuff.

    https://www.weareteachers.com/parachute-games/

    Parachute day in P.E. class is the best. Watching that parachute float up and down is mesmerizing. Running around a parachute is great exercise. And working together to keep all the balls on a parachute during a game of Popcorn encourages cooperation.

  • America's tech-filled classrooms are facing a backlash against school-assigned devices

    Jump

  • Another mother, Jenny Sullivan, said she has noticed her fourth grade son capitalizing random letters and not getting corrected

    If it's good enough for the President...

  • Has/is there ever been a creature that reproduces with creatures of another species?

    Jump

  • It answers the question as asked. If you want something else, I think that it's reasonable to ask you to qualify your question.

  • Aggressive AI scrapers are making it kinda suck to run wikis

    Jump

  • That compressed database would have to be updated frequently

    They are.

  • Pope urges 'disarming' of AI in major manifesto

    Jump

  • Since the Catholic church now owns more land than anybody else on Earth (170 million acres)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_lands

    Federal lands are lands in the United States owned and managed by the federal government.

    The federal government manages about 640 million acres (2.6 million km2) of land in the United States...

    I'd also guess that the Russian and Canadian governments are up there.

  • Correct

    Jump

  • California moves to exempt Linux from its upcoming age-verification law after backlash over forcing operating systems to collect users’ ages

    Jump

  • I mean, it's not going to work, because your kids are gonna have a smartphone, and they can go to their friend's house or wherever and they aren't gonna have content filters. And then you think "okay, I'll install software on my kid's viewing device to censor stuff", but these days, it's probably not terribly difficult to get ahold of an old phone/tablet/computer, if all you want to do with it is view pornography. Everything's got a web browser in it, and that's been the case for long enough that there's lots of disused hardware just sitting around that can browse the Web. I've thrown out a PSP, phones, tablets, countless computers...I suspect that someone's parents are probably willing to hand their old gear to their kid, and they float around. If you live in an isolated cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, maybe access to Web-capable devices is a barrier, but if your kid has friends, I suspect that it's not all that hard to get ahold of one device that they have that can browse the Web.

    I mean, the realistic answer here is "you're not going to stop kids from viewing pornography if they sufficiently want to view it". One kid figures out how to do X, and it doesn't take long for word to get around.

    EDIT: I just hit Amazon looking for an example.

    https://www.amazon.com/HOTTABLET-Tablet-Android-Protective-Bluetooth/dp/B0F3XD9M6C

    That's a $39 Android tablet that can browse the Web, has 3 GB of RAM, 32 GB of flash (plus an SD card slot). That's gonna be fine for browsing all the porn you want out there.

    Like, it's pretty hard to keep someone from getting access to something like that. If there weren't a supply of old hardware floating around and new hardware wasn't this cheap, okay, but devices capable of browsing the Web are everywhere.

  • California moves to exempt Linux from its upcoming age-verification law after backlash over forcing operating systems to collect users’ ages

    Jump

  • California moves to exempt Linux from its upcoming age-verification law after backlash over forcing operating systems to collect users’ ages

    Jump

  • I think that the major current closed-source OSes today are busily harvesting all the data they can anyway, and the vendors probably don't care much about also grabbing age, but stuff like, oh...is it illegal under this law to distribute proprietary versions of older OSes now? Like, classic MacOS, say. That's definitely not open-source. And Apple is not going to go back and do a new release of classic MacOS to add age verification to it. But...there's still some old software that you need classic MacOS to run. So...is it illegal to distribute essential software required to run classic MacOS software in California as of the middle of next year?

    I mean, you might be infringing on copyright as well, but Apple may be okay with people copying classic MacOS around, as they can't really make any money off it today. But this is the State of California, not Apple, that would act here.

  • California moves to exempt Linux from its upcoming age-verification law after backlash over forcing operating systems to collect users’ ages

    Jump

  • Under the original law, operating systems would be required to request a user’s age or birth date during device setup, then expose an “age bracket signal” to apps and app stores. The law, which defined brackets such as “under 13,” “13–15,” “16–17,” and “18+,” immediately raised questions about how such requirements would apply to decentralized, open-source software ecosystems.

    I kind of wonder what software running as a service on Windows is supposed to identify itself as if it's non-interactively downloading software.

  • California moves to exempt Linux from its upcoming age-verification law after backlash over forcing operating systems to collect users’ ages

    Jump

  • The controversy became particularly heated after reports suggested platforms like SteamOS could still fall under the law due to their ties to proprietary application ecosystems.

    Ehhh. I think that'd be a hard argument to make. I mean, the OS is open-source. You can download it and modify it and reinstall it or whatever. Sure, it runs Steam, which is proprietary, but so does any other GNU/Linux distro.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS

    The core operating system is free and open-source software, while the Steam client remains proprietary.

    Like, the only way in which SteamOS differs from another Linux distro is that Valve, which makes the proprietary client, also happens to be distributing the OS.