I saw Marques Brownlee’s review of the Xiaomi SU7 yesterday, and the contrast with this Lucid review is amazing. MB spent his time gushing over how amazing and bug-free the software was, how great the UI/UX, and all the little quality-of-life details in the hardware and design.

The “resist government tyranny” people have always been a (very vocal) fringe group. Quasi-historical, quasi-fantasy, a little bit like historical re-enactors, but with a plot that makes it seem like they could be talking about today and real life. AFAIK, no one outside the groups actually think they will be the people to lead an armed resistance, mostly because no one outside of the groups actually thinks there will ever be a circumstance involving a widespread, armed resistance.

The one I knew, we’re sitting in this little pizza shop having lunch, and he starts going on about how he’s mapped the exits and positions of cover in the restaurant, in case a crew would barge in to rob the cafe and its patrons. Had his eye on a couple of people who might be troublemakers. Obviously had his gun with him, but probably too many people around to use it if the place did get raided. All in this nice, quiet, suburban neighborhood.

A lot depends on how many users you expect and how much media you expect. For one or two users with that stack, transcoding media is really the only CPU load. If most of your media is already in your desired format, then that’s not a big deal.

My stack is pretty similar (no *arr, plus tvheadend, homeassistant and a kodi frontend) for two users and it sits near idle all day long. It runs on an N100 NAS system off Aliexpress with 16GB and will transcode 1080p to x264 at just about playback speed… System runs from a 100 GB nvme, with a couple half-full 4 TB WD Reds for data. 35-ish Watts, maybe an extra 5 when actively transcoding. Used to be ~150 USD,

If you want a lot of 4k content, then I’d definitely go with the GTX 1660.

Republicans are always looking for small populations to fuck over. There’s only ~25M people on ACA, or about 7% of the population. The rules are complicated and mostly hidden behind automatic calculations done by marketplace websites, so most people’s experience is just that the website gives them a price list and they choose one to pay. Can’t tell if price hikes are due to actual insurance company rate hikes, changes in the tax credit structure, or their own increased income.

For politicians, it’s a pretty safe bet that the size of the affected population and obscurity of the cost structure will prevent any serious organized blowback. Insurance companies are going to be scapegoats for this.

Same. Eventually upgraded to a Pi 4, which doesn’t have any trouble with 1080p content. Pi 3’s onboard wifi was also problematic, and I had to run it over wired networking. Kept that for the Pi 4, so I don’t know if its wifi is any better.

The GOP got where it is today by repeatedly replacing establishment Republicans with more conservative republicans, until ‘right wing nutjob’ became the baseline. I no longer believe that replacing Republicans with corporate democrats will make things change. Slow the bleeding, maybe, but not change. Replacing corporate Democrats with progressives is the only way we’re going to move the needle now.

If he knew what he was doing, would he need to be vibe coding? The target audience are exactly the people most susceptible to collateral damage.

It’s giving me vibes like…other people have been signing stuff in Trump’s name that he only discovers later, or that he’s signed a bunch of stuff that - discovering later - he wants to blame on other people.

Or maybe he just thinks he was President during Biden’s term. But I’m pretty sure even Trump can’t govern via social media post.

“Infinite” universes, like NMS or Starfield sound good in marketing, but if you’re really moving around them, at scale speeds, they can’t help but feel isolated and instanced. Even LNF, if it’s a whole ‘earth like’ planet, is huge. Earth has about 50M square miles of habitable surface - if you drop 10,000,000 people in there randomly, you’re going to have to walk half an hour to have a chance to find another player, if they happen to be on at the same time. It shouldn’t have the sharp breaks between biomes that fast-travel to a different planet gives, and I expect that will make it feel a lot more coherent.

The landscapers and cleaning staff are probably fine people.

Brother?

Even more frustrating, because when she turned 70, she admitted that she never liked cooking anyway, but will still tell us we’re doing it wrong.

Equivalent performance requires equivalent software, and developers have a long history of spending substantially more effort optimizing Windows performance than Linux performance. The video has several examples where shit still doesn’t work “right” in linux, even setting aside their explanation of why you can’t directly compare “120 fps” on their specific linux setup with “120 fps” on a specific version of Windows running on the same hardware.

I made a self-hosted forgejo repository of /etc. Commit messages aren’t always informative, and I’ve never actually gone back to the repository to figure something out, but it’s there, just in case. Me cosplaying a sysadmin.

What else is going to drive corps to build faster rockets? Without WW3, the profitable strategy is to keep building the same rockets, just cheaper & crappier.

In my area, the “retail” cost of ACA’s benchmark plan for a single 50-year-old is $1145/month (up from $925 in 2025).

In 2025, you’d have to earn $130,000 to actually pay that, and someone making $60k would have paid just $466 after tax credit. Same person could have gotten a cheap “Bronze” plan for $340. You could get a bronze plan for $0 out-of-pocket below $40k income.

In 2026, anyone earning over $62k will have to pay the full $1145/month. Someone earning just $58,000 could get that plan for $466/month (after credits), or a Bronze plan for $280. Have to make less than $34k to get a bronze plan $0 OOP.

Got a https://www.amazon.com/Vollrath-Carbon-Steel-Fry-Pan/dp/B001TA773I to use on my induction. Seasons very much like ground cast iron, seems to sear and brown much better than my stainless (and far better than nonstick). It’s basically a stamped steel sheet, mill texture, smooth but not mirror. I don’t use the stainless anymore. The bottom of the specific pan I got is not flat, but slightly domed, so there’s always a dry spot in the middle with a ring of oil around the edges, which isn’t great, but I was shocked how noticeably different from stainless it behaved. It’s a hot, flat surface: what else is there?

My HA runs on a Pi for various reasons, including GPIO devices, but I’ve moved its database to the ‘big’ server. That means a lot less load on the SD card, no loss of data if the card fails, and just generally feels like a better way to do things. As I’ve accumulated containers, I don’t like that each of them runs its own database when I could just have one database to manage & backup, and not have a lot of replicated overhead.

Team Trump took the US trade deficit with each country, divided it by our exports, and called that a “tariff” being imposed by the trading partner. They then imposed “reciprocal tariffs” of 50% of that trade deficit, with a minimum of 10%. It is shockingly stupid from a regime known for shocking levels of stupidity.

Dunno, man: 40% of Americans believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old. Only 2% of them believe it’s flat, though. We are not an information-rich culture.

I want it to be a successful product, that I can buy, and will be supported for a useful number of years. $800-1200 feels OK for that. $2000 feels like Apple Vision territory.

Jesus, man: haven’t you ever been excited about a thing before it’s on shelves? Speculated about a sports game before it’s over? Talking about your anticipation is part of the fun.