My nephew has a new baby. Her parents are constantly waving their phones in her face; sending pics back and forth; generally doing ‘millenial things’ with their phones when not actively attending the baby. Then proceed to get all freaked out when the baby expresses interest or curiosity in the phone.

Kids mimic their parents behavior and interests. If you want kids with healthy internet use, you have to have parents model healthy internet use.

The trouble with living in a panopticon is that becomes suspicious to not be on a list.

You don’t think that individualized price gouging will improve life for Jeff Bezos?

I have a n ESP32 with a thermocouple stuffed down my (gas) oven chimney, so I can tell what temperature it actually is (about 40°F/20°C cooler than the dial).

I have one plugged into an addressable LED matrix, which has yet to get mounted, but will eventually be a closet/dressing light. There’s a few places where I’d like a ‘normal’ warm white light, with the option to switch to a blinding daylight for chores, and maybe a low-light, colorful animated nightlight.

I have a Pi-0w reading temp/humidity/CO2 in a grow tent that’s a good candidate for ESP32-ification. I have an air quality sensor plugged directly into a Home Assistant server that could go on ESP32 if I wanted it in a different location. Humidity in the bathroom, with a controller for the bathroom fan is another good candidate.

If I can come up with a good way to put them on battery, with a 6-12 month lifetime, then temperature in the attic, and on the input/output sides of the HVAC would be useful.

I only one I know about https://socprime.com/blog/cve-2025-27840-vulnerability-in-esp32-bluetooth-chips/ which is a bluetooth thing, presumably meaning that you’d have to be in bluetooth range to exploit it.

My paranoid concern is that I’m going to buy these $2 ESP32 boards from some unknowable Chinese company, and how could I know if there’s an extra, malicious supervisor element added. So, my ESP32 devices live in the ‘untrusted’ VLAN. They could, theoretically, discover each other and send their sensor data to some nefarious broker, but they don’t have microphones or cameras. I don’t even see how they could get enough information to discover my physical address, without cooperation from my ISP.

I was really intimidated by ESP32. Liked RPi, back in the 3b days, because I could comfortably sit in the python interpreter, play with sensor interfaces, and get immediate feedback of what & where I screwed up. Familiarity led me to RPi4 for libreelec and 0w for more sensors.

Recently took the plunge on some ESP32s, though, and, just…wow. I mean, I’m going through esphome, but every sensor and control I’ve checked is just a couple of lines of YAML away. And low enough power that I’m starting to think about batteries. ESP32 is still pretty intimidating for noobs, but the ecosystem that’s grown up around it is fantastic once you get over that hump.

Treat LLMs like “boss’s idiot nephew,” both in terms of whether the business should give them a privilege and whether the business should be liable for their inevitable screwups.

So I should tell my fitness watch I’m doing cardio before I light up? Move those heartbeats from ‘stress’ to ‘healthy.’

If I write a crappy email, I get reprimanded by the boss, or I lose a contract, or people just stop emailing me.

If a billionaire writes a crappy email, their correspondent still wants their money.

The problem isn’t necessarily corporate services - the problem is corporate services with no practical competition. If there’s an actual marketplace, then enshittification is limited, because you can just hop providers when service degrades. If there’s an actual marketplace, then you can hop providers when some government takes control your provider.

Putting fun services behind the wall of ‘you must be this technically competent to participate’ isn’t going to fix the broken system.

I suspect that some of the ‘lazy union worker’ stereotype is workers following their contract and refusing to do non-contracted work, which is, of course, essential to maintaining the value of that contract. Pride in your own work/trade doesn’t mean cleaning up after the other trades; professionalism in your own work doesn’t mean unpaid overtime to fix someone else’s fuckup.

Malicious compliance?

Hateful branding is always easier than inclusive branding. Just think about how many different words Americans have historically used for black people: all “they” have to do to turn a positive term into a slur is to say it with a sneer.

Nothing says, “ICE is a legitimate government agency serving an unfortunate but necessary purpose,” like “answer this survey or answer to ICE.”

This is what frustrates me about the people saying that posting memes on social media is bullshit and waving signs won’t change anything. Waving signs and parades were fundamental tactics of the Civil Rights movement. Those iconic photos from the Edmund Pettis Bridge? Just a bunch of people marching to the voter registration office. The Freedom Riders? Just people, including a bunch of privileged, white college students on a bus tour. Most of the marches, protests, etc we never even hear about formed the foundation, and it’s only when those boring, “useless” protests met ridiculous opposition that stirred MLK’s “white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice” to attention.

That doesn’t mean that going to peaceful protests & remaining peaceful while the fascists fash is the only valid action. But it is the most accessible to the most people, and it is the one easiest to scale as more of those moderates get motivated. Resistance looks boring, until it suddenly isn’t.

Use the launcher to install, then just run the exe. Point is you don’t need to interact with the launcher, its ads, and its bugs every time you want to play.

Nothing from GoG requires their launcher.

Just think how many people started making sourdough bread during covid lockdowns. That may not have been intentional advertising, just a few people starting a thing & then it was everywhere, and so many people who’d never cooked a day in their life became obsessed with sourdough bread. Advertising fills in the blank when you say, “Fuck it, let’s just _____”

In the old days, university IT put essentially no access controls on their networks, so students’ dorm computers were completely exposed to the internet. Any service you started was immediately, globally accessible. Some big sites, including slashdot and facebook, got their start in some kid’s dorm room. I feel like access controls really got going in the early 00’s - first for residential, then for broader campus.

Check with your IT people - they may have policy or conditions under which they will expose ports on your personal computer to the internet. Otherwise, your best bet is probably free-tier AWS or Oracle.

Not free, but there are some ‘KVM VPS’ providers out there that will rent you a small, internet exposed computer pretty cheap. They can be a good platform for experimenting with self-hosting services, without exposing your personal equipment or home network. eg: 1CPU/1GB RAM/24GB SSD $12/year https://my.racknerd.com/cart.php?a=add&pid=903

If there’s a protest with 200 people openly armed and standing in ranks, I imagine it would keep the 50 ICE clerks far enough back that they couldn’t kick old ladies or shove photographers. I also imagine they would quickly call it an illegal demonstration and bust out the tear gas.

If there’s a protest with 200 people scattered through the crowd with concealed handguns, it’s not going to change ICE tactics at all.