Lettuce eat lettuce

Right on!

Yet again, FOSS showing why it’s always the way to go vs proprietary tech. So glad I started my self-hosting journey with Jellyfin!

The traffic data, at least in my area of the US, is pretty good.

Road closures are a rough point for sure. Generally, Magic Earth does have them marked, but not always. And the map data is only updated once a month. So even if a new closure does show up on Magic Earth, it takes several weeks to a month.

This isn’t a terrible issue for me in my area, because I know the major roads and highways decently well, but when in other states or cities, it can be a problem.

That being said, it’s still about 80% accurate on the whole. And on rare occasion, it has actually had a closure marked correctly that Google Maps didn’t.

The #1 Google service/app that I used in the past was Google Maps. I’ve replaced it with Magic Earth for the last few years and it’s been great. It uses Open Street Map for its navigation data, handles addresses very well, has live crowd-sourced traffic and hazard data, and can record rolling footage if you want it to act like a dashcam.

It works on Android and iOS, and supports Apple watch and Android car play if you use those.

For email I use Protonmail, for Google drove I use Proton Drive and my own self hosted NAS. For browsing I use several different Firefox forks like Zen, Floorp, LibreWolf, etc. UnGoogled Chromium for the rare times that a website “needs” Chrome to run.

My phone runs GrapheneOS which works great.

Big Soylent fan here, firstly, Soylent isn’t designed as a 100% meal replacement, or at least it isn’t approved as such.

That being said, the inventor claimed in an interview that he had gone for a month on pure Soylent, and there have been many people who make similar claims.

Stay hydrated, Soylent does make you poop, it’s just delayed because of the high fiber. Trust me, try it for a few days straight, you’re colon will get cleaned out lol.

Make sure you drink lots of water, that goes for any diet, (lots of people are mildly dehydrated without realizing it.)

“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”

I would be so far ahead of where I am right now if I had just decided on a course and committed instead of analyzing all the choices to death.

In general, if it isn’t open source in every sense of the term, GPL license, all weights and parts of the model, and all the training data and training methods, it’s a non-starter for me.

I’m not even interested in talking about AI integration unless it passes those initial requirements.

Scraping millions of people’s data and content without their knowledge or consent is morally dubious already.

Taking that data and using it to train proprietary models with secret methodologies, locking it behind a pay wall, then forcing it back onto consumers regardless of what they want in order to artificially boost their stock price and make a handful of people disgustingly wealthy is downright demonic.

Especially because it does almost nothing to enrich our lives. In its current form, it is an anti-human technology.

Now all that being said, if you want to run it totally on your own hardware, to play with and help you with your own tasks, that’s your choice. Using in a way that you have total sovereignty over is good.

Dude, if you wanna believe in ghosts and aliens, just say you think they are real because vibes.

Don’t try to justify it with a clunky, misunderstood, and incorrect usage of “statistics.”

The issue is structural, there are no “good cops” in the same way there are no “good pimps” or “good slave owners.”

There were some slave owners who were kind to their slaves, taught them to read, allowed them to have some free time and make a small amount of money.

That doesn’t mean that what they were doing was morally acceptable. They still were buying and selling human beings like property.

Policing, especially in the USA is rotten to the core. There are absolutely some cops who are kind people, who become police officers out of a naive belief that they can do good for society as a whole in that profession.

But those people don’t usually last long. They either leave after seeing the ugly underbelly, or they become corrupted by the system. The police will always act in the interest of the rich and powerful, or else they get fired. If they are told to break up a protests, they will always comply. If they are told to block a corporate skyscraper so that protesters cannot get into it to stage a sit-in, they will do it, even as ultra wealthy oligarchs stream safely past them to conduct horrifically corrupt dealings that hurt and kill millions of people across the world.

The cop’s job is also to go around trying to bust people for crimes. If a cop comes up to you out of the blue and starts up a conversation, 99% of the time they are fishing for information, trying to sus something out. They aren’t just trying to be friendly, they are doing their job. In the US at least, the cops are allowed to lie to you in an investigation in order to try to get you to admit guilt. They are allowed and trained to do it, to use all kinds of trickery to manipulate you into a confession, or to get Intel that helps them.

In addition, the examples people frequently cite as good things the cops do would be better done by non-cops. First aid? Suicide intervention? Disaster relief? Theft deterrence? Wellness checks? Those are all things that would be better done by non-cops if we funded and grew those kinds of organizations instead of further militarizing the police.

ACAB has never meant that all cops are evil people, it means that no matter how good of a person a cop is, they will always be empowering a corrupt and evil system.

Why don’t we see the same sentiment about paramedics, firefighters, and heck, even soldiers? Because the systems that those folks are a part of don’t have the same corrupting effect. Even soldiers are generally looked on much more favorably than cops, even though politically and socially, there is a large amount of overlap. Part of this is propaganda, but another factor is the standards soldiers are held to in the US. They are expected to carry themselves extremely well, and can be severely punished, even jailed for misconduct.

As a personal anecdote, I grew up in both worlds. My dad and several members of my family were both in the military and were cops. I was around both cultures a ton. I’ve had many bad encounters with police officers over the years, and that’s with me knowing all the classic, “always keep your hands visible and comply” stuff that my dad and his cop friends told me.

I’ve never had a single negative encounter with an on-duty soldier. They’ve always been extremely respectful and grounded. Like I said, just an anecdote, but interesting to think about. If cops could be fired or even jailed for relatively minor infractions, even have their lives destroyed like soldiers who are dishonorably discharged, ACAB would probably never have became a thing.

After about an hour of using the mouse or controller gaming, I have to take a few seconds to massage my hand because it gets sore and stiff.

Didn’t happen until I got into my 30’s 😔

Oh yeah, it’s real. For instance, I constantly have to use black magick as a sys-admin to get my company’s printers to work.

Been a Bitwarden user for several years now, both personal and deployed at multiple small businesses.

It has been fantastic the whole time. Pricing is great, open source, runs on basically everything, and easy to use.

KeypassXC if you’re uber-paranoid or a hardcore Stallmanite, otherwise, Bitwarden all day 100%

Right on. Yeah, Timeshift isn’t a backup solution, you still need 3-2-1 for your data, but it’s great for as a system-wide Ctrl+Z for mistakes or broken updates.

Use Timeshift! Saved me several times after experimenting a little too much with Debian.

Are you fully conscious but trapped in the body of a guinea pig?

The difference is putting them on because you actually understand the problem you’re trying to treat lol.

So amazing, the amount of incredible science we’ve been able to do with the Voyager program.

4,000 years ago, we were doing trigonometry, but just 200 years ago we were still putting leeches on people and not washing our hands before doing surgery.

Also, we sent people to the moon and got them back using less computing power than a smart watch.

If the government collapses, you’re gunna have much worse things to worry about than taxes.

IMO, there are three “levels” of economic hardship:

1. Severe recession: Where the economy shrinks, many small/medium businesses go bankrupt, unemployment hits around 7-10%
2. Legit depression: Numerous core institutions in most or all sectors of the economy go bankrupt. Even highly skilled people cannot find work and are reduced to charity, begging, or stealing. Unemployment hits 15-25%
3. Total economic collapse: All major institutions in all sectors fail, or cease having any legitimacy. The country’s currency becomes worthless due to either hyperinflation or governmental collapse. All people except the super wealthy elite, become destitute.

The last time the US experienced the second level was the Great Depression, where during the depths of the dust bowl and the depression, unemployment hit about 25%

If you genuinely think we are in for anything worse than level 2, you should flee the country now, or buy a gun and stockpile ammunition, food, and medicine.

Realistically, level 3 isn’t going to happen. Level 1 very likely will, level 2 I would give a 5% chance personally, but that is based only on vibes.

Have some savings in cash, a few hundred bucks mostly in small denominations should be alright. Don’t do more than that.

Buy cheap bulk foods. Beans, chickpeas, lentils, raw oats, rice, four, potatoes. Buy several of those big 24 packs of bottled water. Most large retailers have them for 4-6 bucks a pack. You need A least 5-6 bottles a day to stay minimally hydrated. That’s roughly 4 days of water per 24-pack. You should have at least a week of water per person.

Other folks here have good advice. Connect with a local community. If not your direct neighbors, then a group that meets nearby. You need other people for support. If you’re in a really bad place, they will be the last line of dependable aid.

Quit your vices. Cigs, alcohol, excessive caffeine, and junk food all cost a lot of money, aren’t healthy, and will make you much more vulnerable to economic upsets. It also allows others to take easier advantage of you, because of your desperation to get a fix.