Yeah, the old “strict parents make sneaky kids” thing is unfortunately very true. You won’t stop the kids from doing it. You’ll just lose the ability to monitor them when they inevitably do it behind your back anyways.
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Audiobooks mostly, and I know it's not the same
FWIW, studies have found that reading and speech activate different language regions of the brain… But oddly enough, audiobooks activate the reading parts of the brain, not just the speech parts. So it may be more similar than you’d initially think.
I finally got my AudioBookShelf instance up and running last year, around March. In those remaining 7 months, I “read” (listened to) over 50 books. I used to be a voracious reader as a child. But at some point I lost the spark, as finding time to read got harder and harder. Audiobooks have reignited that love for reading, in a way I can’t even put into words.
I find myself looking forward to my daily commute, because it means I can listen to another two or three chapters in the car. I’ve even started taking the longer route home (which is technically more fuel efficient, but adds like 10 minutes to my commute) because I don’t mind the extra time in the car. I find myself wanting to wash the dishes or fold the laundry, because I can have my earbuds in while I work.
I still doomscroll on YouTube shorts or Instagram reels occasionally, but that doesn’t mean I have to give up long form content like reading. They fill two entirely separate niches.
It’s both, but the honey trap provides both motivation for the traffickers and it means everyone involved should be considered compromised by foreign states. If it were only a pedo ring, it would be bad but that’s pretty much where the conspiracy would stop.
But with a verified honey trap, it needs to be assumed that the named people are now (and have been) acting on behalf of a hostile foreign nation who has mountains of blackmail on them. And reframing those implicated peoples’ motivations from “they’re just seeking power for themselves” to “they’re aiding a hostile foreign nation” shifts things from “selfish and power-hungry” to outright “high treason”.
That’s a whole lotta words to say “I have no fucking idea what Home Assistant is, but have strong preconceived feelings about it.”
Never bought a Windows license… But happily paid the Apple Tax.
They’re the same picture.
Home Assistant is entirely self-hosted. No third-party required. It can run in a container or on a raspberry pi, but it’s typically easiest (and most functional) when you use a dedicated Home Assistant Green. It connects to Zigbee, Matter, etc via USB adapters. Or if your devices are networked (instead of using a hub), it can often find them directly on your network via local device discovery. It integrates with Alexa really well, so you wouldn’t need to immediately ditch your existing smart speakers.
If you really want to get fancy, you can even set up a local machine to do local LLM processing for self-hosted smart speakers.
I personally started using it after my smart light provider (Sengled) had a few extended outages. There was no communication from the company, and lots of people were speculating that they had gone kaput. It was literally cheaper to just get the HA Green and a Zigbee dongle, and set that up (instead of replacing all of my lights with a different brand). And since it’s entirely self-hosted, it even keeps working when my internet goes out during storms.
The funny part is that blue LEDs were historically the hardest to make. Engineers tried for years, but the shorter blue wavelength was elusive. But one Japanese dude managed to figure it out, and they exploded in popularity because they were the new futuristic thing. And now they’re actually one of the cheapest colors available, because every single manufacturer was rushing to jump on the bandwagon and has the equipment to make them. Sort of like the flatscreen TV crash in the early 2010’s, when TV prices suddenly crashed because every manufacturer was getting better and better at making the (historically very expensive) screen panels cheaply.
And to answer the question on why they’re so fucking bright, it’s because blue is a very short wavelength. It takes less power to produce shorter wavelengths. When you compare the relative brightness of two different colored LEDs, shorter wavelengths will be brighter. Like if you send 1 watt of power into two different LEDs, a blue LED will always be brighter than a red one (if everything else about them is the same). That’s why so many of the cheap RGB LED lights tend to be sort of blueish when they’re set to “white”. The “white” is just all of the individual diodes at 100% brightness, which means the blue tends to beat out the other colors.
But the engineers who design those things don’t stop to consider that a blue LED needs less power. They’re just checking the “has a power light” item off of their design punch list. They could undervolt the diode to make it dimmer, but that requires extra circuitry. Just get a diode that works on the same voltage as what you’re already using (probably 5v or 12v for a wall charger) and hook it up to the same voltage that you already have. And use a blue one because they’re the cheapest option. Congrats, you’ve just designed a charger that has a fucking blinding blue LED. The whole “people will want to use this in their bedroom in the dark” thing was never even a consideration.
This is also why red (and infrared) light is better at heating things up. Longer wavelengths carry more energy, which means they heat things up more when they come into contact. The wave takes more power to make, which means it is able to carry more energy to whatever you’re trying to make. Trying to design a blue heat lamp would be an exercise in frustration, because you’d be fighting physics. It’s also why the sky is blue during the day but sunsets are red. The blue light tends to get scattered by air molecules, (which is why the sky looks blue) but red light is able to punch through and reach the surface when the sun is at a steep angle (like during a sunset).
Yeah, my linked comment was actually in response to an earlier comment I made, basically saying “this app’s explosive rise in popularity feels astroturfed.” I caught a couple of downvotes for that original comment. But the more I tried using it, the worse it got. It will 100% contribute to the normalization of Nazi viewpoints.
It only applies to steam keys though. Like if you want to sell on other storefronts (like Epic) for cheaper, it’s perfectly fine. You simply can’t sell steam keys on other storefronts for cheaper. It’s not really “price fixing” as much as it is “Steam ensuring their servers aren’t used to download the game unless the dev has properly paid them for the key”…
Like imagine a company wants to sell more copies of their game. So they set up their own site to sell directly to consumers, and it’s cheaper than buying on Steam. This is totally fine. Consumers can still choose to add the standalone version as a non-Steam game to be able to launch it via Steam.
It’s only a breach of contract if they start offering steam keys for that same (cheaper) price, which allows the game to be downloaded via Steam, includes achievement integrations, includes Steam’s friend list “join game” multiplayer, includes Steam Deck/Steam Machine optimizations, etc… If they want all of those nice Steam integrations, they need an official Steam key. And that Steam key can’t be sold cheaper than on Steam’s official store.
Yeah, I bought my own domain specifically so I could set up a catch-all email service. Everything sent to my domain hits the same inbox, but I can easily see who has sold my info. If I start getting spam addressed to “walmart@example.com” then I know Walmart sold my info. And I can easily set a rule to automatically mark anything addressed to that burned account as spam.
Lots of websites quickly caught onto the “just add a + after your regular email” trick, and set up an internal rule to remove any of the + tags. So that old trick is largely useless.
Yup. Privatize profits, socialize losses. It’s the way the capitalist machine is able to keep grinding up orphans for the 1%.
Yeah, it was over 30 points of swing in a huge upset. Republicans were confident they had it, by like 17 points. Then a democrat won in like a 13 point lead. That kind of upset should be a massive wake up call for republicans. But only time will tell if they actually adjust their messaging to try and avoid losing more.
Yeah, I tried to give it an honest shot. Made an account and opened the Discover page. The very first post was an antisemitic “the Jews are secretly running the world” conspiracy theory post. Whatever, it’s inevitable on an anti-censorship app. Not a great first impression, but I’m willing to shrug it off as a fluke.
Then three or four posts later, there was a blatant “Hitler was right about the Jews and the holocaust wasn’t enough” post, made by an account that was dedicated to glorifying Hitler. Again, this is on the Discover page for a brand new account. Meaning it’s what the algorithm is serving to users by default.
I made another comment about it (with screenshots) a day or two ago. Here is the link.
America bombed its own city 40’ish years ago, and the entire country just moved on without a care. And about 60 years before that, almost forty city blocks were razed to the ground because the inhabitants were black.
Yes, they 100% could risk it. America is an extremely propagandized country, with patriotism on the right reaching jingoistic levels.
the fact is, storage is very cheap now...
Lmao maybe a year ago… Storage costs have skyrocketed recently. In some cases, storage prices have increased by more than 200% in just a few months. Fuck the billionaires and their AI data centers.
TLS/https will be enough to hide your streaming activity. They’ll be able to see that you’re streaming something based off of the traffic patterns, but won’t be able to see what specifically is being streamed.
Yeah. Sort of like holding two ends of a chain and dragging it back and forth. Even if the chain isn’t traveling the full length, it’s still moving and you could still extract power from the system if you attached something to the middle of the chain.
More Epstein stuff. A document mentioned he was going to get his wife to start taking antibiotics because of an STI he picked up. The joke is that he wouldn’t want to tell her it was an STI, so he’d have to find some other way to justify the antibiotics.
My big concern right now is actually the fact that the “no censorship” part is already being weaponized by Nazis. I suspect it will quickly fall prey to the Nazi Bar Problem. I gave the app a fair shot. Opened it up, and the very first post was a “the Jews are secretly running the world” post from an account named something like @ItsAlwaysTheJews. It had a caricature of a Jew (big nose, long sideburns, and yarmulka) reaching out of a TV to steal a watcher’s brain.
Okay, not a great first impression, but that’s inevitable on a free speech app. Let’s keep scrolling. Three or four more posts down, and I was met with a “Hitler was right about the jews” post. Yikes. The fact that those were up front and center (on the default “Ranked” sort) for my brand new account was… Not a great sign.
Time will tell. I do hope it succeeds, because TikTok is clearly an awful choice. But it needs to succeed for the right reasons, and not just become a Nazi cesspit.
Edit: I just opened the app again after posting this comment, and the second post on my feed was a white pride “they’re trying to replace us/white genocide” (common white power talking point to recruit new members) post:
Edit 2: Looking at the account’s follower list, it looks like users are largely using the Palestinian genocide to justify Nazi imagery. Equating Israel’s actions with Jews in general. There are a few straight up Hitler glorification accounts on the follower list, which have “the Jews are genociding Palestine” types of posts right alongside 1488 posts, swastikas, and Nazi salutes. Here is a quick screenshot of some of the followers:And here is a screenshot of how those followers are using the Palestinian genocide to justify the holocaust:The upper post is a bunch of dead Palestinian kids and babies lined up in a row. The lower post is obvious. Both (re)posted by the same @HitlerTheHero account.
It heavily depends on your instance, fwiw. .world tends to lean closer to Reddit in terms of moderation. And then .ml leans the other direction, and heavily moderates in favor of communism.