Yeah, “serious” cycling — a sport where a $1k bike barely qualifies as a bike, $5k gets you something rideable, and $10k gets you a pretty decent bike — is so anti-consumer!

(I love cycling, and I’ll defend spending more on my power meter pedels than I would spend on a decent used bike. More bike lanes everywhere please!)

Area 51 in shambles.

I always say I have a 1969 Wayne Industries Batmobile. Usually a sheepish, “oh, um, we don’t cover that, sorry. click”

No, they make a profit if your premiums are more than your care+overhead. Preventative care is sometimes offered with no co-pay — presumably because you end up costing them less over the long haul if you keep up to date with your Dr. appointments.

It’s not a great system; but it does work very well for some customers, and failing to recognize that tends to preclude having a productive discussion.

It’s not all bad, though!

I ran Linux in 2004, and it was great, but it was such a “second-class citizen” desktop OS. The fact that Unreal Tournament and sequels actually worked on Linux felt amazing because it was such a break from the norm, whereas now gaming on Linux is actually a viable option.

Maybe you could flash the ROM on your phone in 2004, but afaik nowhere near the vibrant community you have now.

And self hosting then kinda meant, “I have an Apache server and IRC daemon listening” (the irony is that the self hosting community is so good now in part because of enshittification).

Programmable microcontrollers — with freely available, to ust IDE+libraries — are literally the price of a nice cup of coffee (3x ESP32 can be had for $14 on Amazon). How cool is that!?

I think there’s a lot of shitty stuff out there, and the shitty stuff probably outnumbers the cool stuff — but there’s world full of really, really cool stuff out there.

Right — plenty of fog, but not a lot of salty spray.

Or go full CW, and just transmit source code in binary as dits and dahs. (So long as you document what you’re doing it should be legal, though I’m not sure if you should use the CE portion of he band since it’s nonstandard…)

My university was pretty zen about this — essentially, “don’t use your own access point/router please. But if you do, please talk to your resident (University employed) student IT rep and they can probably help you set it up correctly.”

This joke is where the Led Zeppelin song name comes from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D'yer_Mak'er

While this uses potassium chloride to cut down on sodium, does a mix of sodium chloride and MSG have the same effect? MSG has sodium, but it looks like not much per unit weight.

Not at all the statement of a moron: in colloquial usage yeah, salt is sodium chloride, but in in a chemistry setting it is not just sodium chloride. In this case it probably has potassium chloride — a sodium-free salt.

But the most expensive gear isn’t necessarily more dangerous than the entry level gear, and in some cases, may even be safer.

…but was it the “Windows Uninstall” button…or the “format /dev/sda1 as ext4” button?

Just don’t try plugging it into a Raspberry Pi 5.

No data loss, but won’t work without changing your kernel. The other way around is much worse though — you can use an RPi5 to make a BTRFS drive which essentially only works on RPi5s.

I think (?) it’s generally true that the root user should never mess with users’ files.

Imagine your home directory is shared across many systems on a network (my alma mater did this). It would be really bad if a sysadmin for alpha.university.edu removed a program, and suddenly your personal settings were removed from beta.university.edu — even though that computer still has the program.

This is one of the “UNIX on the desktop” issues — a lot is designed for a sysadmin/multiuser situation, and it has some gotchas when using it as a desktop machine (I’m used to/really appreciate the directory structure and settings management at this point, but it may take some getting used to).

They’re just popular ETFs which contain a lot of $AAPL. I was just commenting that even if someone doesn’t explicitly hold any $AAPL, if they own ETFs/mutual funds, they are likely exposed to $AAPL.

Doesn’t apply to you though since you said you don’t own any stock :)

…or $SPY, or $QQQ, or…

Posted this in another reply, but their entry level hardware has decreased in price over the years I think:

In 1999, the iBook was US$1599 (equivalent to $2925 in 2023) (source).

The 2010 13" Air was $1299 (more in today’s $) (source).

The current 13" M3 Air is $1099 (source).

In 1999, the iBook was US$1599 (equivalent to $2925 in 2023) (source).

The 2010 13" Air was $1299 (more in today’s $) (source).

The current 13" M3 Air is $1099 (source).

So yeah, they may well raise prices, but the cost of Apple’s entry-level hardware has decreased in absolute terms over the years, and has decreased substantially if inflation is taken into account. Not to say the margins aren’t higher (no idea about that), but it’s interesting.

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