Didn’t some cable companies get all butthurt that you could fast forward through the recorded commercials?

They could even provide an electronic box (for a nominal fee, or course) that shows me a menu of all the shows and movies that are available and what times they are going to play. That way I wouldn’t have to search through a bunch of streaming services. It could all just be in one place.

Door opener fluid. It’s a canister of fluid that you have to pump into the door to open it in an emergency. Then you get a replacement canister from the dealer for $150. I recently found out that that’s what passes for a “spare tire” anymore.

I subscribe to two newspapers. My local weekly paper (which is actually owned by our large statewide newspaper), and the state “business” paper. They both cover topics I’m interested in although the quality of reporting in the business paper is better.

On a separate note, if you don’t support your local print media, it will go away. The demise of local news outlets, throughout the US anyway, has been ongoing for a long time now. That has not been a positive development.

My personal experience essentially echoes what you’ve said. I’ve usually found that when I actually ask Trump supporters, which is probably most of the people I know, what they think and why, they are pretty candid about it. They will also voice frustrations, many of which I can understand or even agree with them on. There is a lot more common ground there than you might think.

The problem is that most of the issues are complex and nuanced. Not that surprising. Issues that impact the population of an entire country, or even a sizeable chunk of it, are bound to be pretty complex. Here’s where things go off the rails.

Kind of like you said, Joe Blow from Louisiana is often uneducated at best or a complete moron at worst. Joe Blow does not understand all the complexity surrounding the issues he’s upset about and figures that if he doesn’t understand it, neither does anyone else. He’s also a little too proud to admit he doesn’t understand it.

This is why Republican party completely abandoned an issues bases platform, aside from completely fabricated pearl clutching social issues like those scary tRaNs PeOpLe or AboRtIoN. They know full well that they have nothing when it comes to meaningful solutions to actual problems and if they did, the few supporters they have with functioning brain cells would start to ask to many pesky questions. A divide and conquer strategy is much simpler and more effective; albeit incredibly destructive.

They do maintain an x86 build. I haven’t used pfSense but I have used OpnSense so that’s that closest thing I have to compare it to. I think the upside and downside to RouterOS/Mikrotik is the same thing: it allows very granular control over almost everything. Maybe to a fault. It’s probably overkill for most home networks.

Set up a VPS. Create a VPN tunnel from you local network to the VPS. Use the VPS as the edge router by opening ports on the VPS firewall and routing incoming traffic on those ports through the VPN tunnel to servers on your local network.

I used to do this to get around CGNAT. I ran RouterOS in a Digital Ocean droplet and setting up a wire guard tunnel between it and my local Mikrotik router.

It will obscure your local WAN IP and give you a static IP but that’s about the only benefit. And you have to be pretty network savvy to configure it correctly.

It does not make you immune to DDoS attacks and is honestly more headache to maintain (albeit just a small headache).

There’s a big difference between the market capitalization and book value. Tesla’s stock is probably way overvalued but I can’t say for sure since I don’t own any of their stock and haven’t looked into their financials.

Wells Fargo specifically committed widespread, systemic fraud and identity theft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scandal?wprov=sfla1

Friendly reminder that Wells Fargo is a criminal enterprise masquerading as a bank.

I tried it once. Installed the app on my phone. The error rate in the data they collected was ridiculously high. Get a phone call while driving? Welp, now it says you were on the phone for 45 seconds. Playing music through the stereo? No, you were clearly using your phone the entire time. Phone slides around on the console? You clearly must have mashed the brakes.

I decided that the best way for them to determine I was a safe driver was the fact that I haven’t had an accident claim in years.

I left Reddit because of their shenanigans. The Tiktok crowd deciding Reddit was cool was what guaranteed I would never go back. Now if anyone asks me if I use social media, I just say “No”.

Nice to see they’re still chugging the AI Koolaid after completely blundering their test rollout of AI search results.

Mail servers are the one thing I refuse to self host. Years of managing enterprise email taught me that I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life

Oh, I wouldn’t if I could avoid it. The “fun” of tinkering with IT stuff in my very limited spare time vaporized many years ago. If I could pay for services that did exactly what I wanted, respected my privacy, and valued my business while charging a fair price, I would stop self-hosting tomorrow. But that’s not usually how it works.

Self hosting isn’t super high maintenance once you get everything set up but it still takes up probably 10-12 hours per month on average and I would not mind having that time back.

This is a pretty good summary. In enterprise networking, it’s common to have the ‘DMZ’, the network for servers exposed to the internet, firewalled off from the rest of the system.

If you have a webserver, you would need two sets of ports open, often on two separate firewalls. On the WAN firewall, you would open ports 80/443 pointing to the webserver. On the system firewall, between the DMZ and LAN, you would open specific ports between the webserver and whatever internal resources it needs; a database server for example.

This helps limit the damage if a malicious actor hacks into your webserver by making sure they don’t also have unrestricted access to other parts of your system. It’s called a layered security approach.

However, someone self hosting may not have the expertise or even the hardware to set up their system like this. A VPS for public facing services, as long as it’s configured properly, can be a good alternative. It also helps if you have a dynamic WAN IP address and/or are behind CG-NAT.

Edit: maybe good to mention that securing your local network behind a VPN, even one hosted on your local network, is more secure than allowing public facing services. Yes, it means you still have to open a port. But that’s useless to a malicious actor without the encryption keys. Whereas, if you have a webserver exposed publicly, malicious actors already have some level of access to your system. More than they would if that service didn’t exist anyway. That’s not inherently bad. It comes with the territory when you’re hosting public services. It is more more risky though. And, if the exposed server is compromised, it can potentially open up the rest of your system to compromise as well. Like the original commenter said, it’s about managing risk and different network configurations have different levels of risk.

Apparently offshoring basically all of your manufacturing while not giving a shit about the loss of engineering capability and institutional knowledge has significant downsides. Who knew? Who could possibly have seen this coming?? I’m serious. I would ask the people in engineering but they all got fired like twenty years ago.

Data Rule Numero Uno:

Garbage in, garbage out.

Have fun training your LLM on a big steaming pile of hot garbage. That’s 80% of Stack Overflows content.

Now you can have a computer tell you that you’re an idiot and your question is stupid rather than actual person.

The MPAA should give themselves a great big pat on the back. They, and the studios they represent have done much to not only enable piracy, but also to increase the sophistication of piracy tactics and – somewhat by extension – the quality of the material being pirated. Turns out, fucking over your customers at every possible turn has consequences.