“I drive for free”

So your solar panels didn’t cost anything? Look I’m very pro-solar but rooftop solar for residential makes sense for very few people. It’s not very efficient (even with the best panels available at the time) and the efficiency falls off over time as the panels degrade. Most rooftop solar savings calculations use absurd estimates for power costs in the future to justify themselves and take 10+ years to pay off. Furthermore selling a house with rooftop solar is harder due to having to find someone to take over the lease (which is needed to pay for it for most people).

None of this even starts to address the solar rooftop companies that have gone out of business while leaving their customer high and dry.

Again, I like solar but rooftop just doesn’t make sense for most people.

So we can let Mastodon die on the vine or chance it dying? Ok, I know my choice.

It’s not like the majority of people are already on open protocols. I’m sure Threads dwarfs Masrodon usage just as Twitter and possibly even BlueSky.

IF Mastodon was dominate I might have a different view but it’s not. If Threads federates then there is an opportunity to push people to other clients which make switching to a Mastodon/ActivityPub server much easier. That’s literally only upside. It’s not like the people on Mastodon now are going to leave it for Threads.

Honestly, this was a pretty stupid policy in the first place. The maintenance and upkeep for all the houses is way more than just putting solar in the field somewhere. It was a policy that sounded good on paper, but did not actually work in practice. A much better policy would be a community owned solar power facility. The solar panels we have today will be obsolete in five years time if not sooner, a dedicated solar facility would be able to update panels overtime and handle the maintenance at scale. Much easier than trying to upgrade or maintain solar panels on top of a bunch of peoples houses.

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think this is actually a great thing for Mastodon. The truth is the majority of people are just never going to sign up for a Mastodon server as they stand today. The majority of people want algorithmic feeds run by a central entity. I know the people here don’t want that, but that’s what the majority of people do want. Will I use Threads? No but if this breathes more life into Mastodon and exposes more people to the concept then that is a good thing. Being able to use a client of your choice to interact with people on something like Threads is also a very good thing. The alternative is a completely closed social network like Twitter.

I know, I know “embrace, extend, extinguish”, but literally this is the best that we can hope for unfortunately. The alternative is everyone goes and uses a closed system.

I agree with you overall though I will say that MS throwing their weight around is really just a lot of hot air at the end of the day. They don’t have a board seat and they were told from the start that their invest should be seen as more of an investment. The non-profit is in control and MS can’t change that.

This made me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

Didn’t you fan boys learn after Elon? Altman is not something I’d recommend idolizing. From his crypto BS, to his preper stuff (saying he will survive in the apocalypse… sure), to the stuff his sister is saying he did to her, to his general doucheyness, to his attempts at regulatory capture…

That hasn’t been confirmed at all. No one from the board has commented even anonymously as far as I’ve seen. This is a play by Altman and his supporters to try and influence public opinion and make the board seem incompetent.

Anything the CFPB wants to regulate I’m 100% in favor of. The CFPB is an AMAZING tool to push back against corps with horrible customer service (to be fair Apple’s customer service has always been good for me). I’ve used the CFPB to get a corp to reply to me after brushing me off.

If money is involved at all and a business is giving you the run around I encourage you to file a complaint. They have to contact you with a few days and they actually want (or are required) to solve your issue.

Dealing with this now at work. Got a dev whose time in the industry should make him a senior dev but he gives off massive junior vibes.

• The need to change everything he touches

• Wanting to write clever code over straightforward code

• Everything “needs” a refactor

• Just deprecates things when he doesn’t want to learn them and writes a new implementation without updating old code

• Thinks he knows best while not understanding huge swaths of the codebase

• Everything he can’t understand in <5 min is stupid and wrong

If he was less competent (when kept in a box and closely monitored) I’d be pushing even harder to get rid of him.

Steam deck verified sucks because it tells you if it will run well on the deck, but doesn’t tell you if it’ll play well on the deck. If a game doesn’t have controller support then I’m not interested.

I mean Uber started as a black car service and wanted it to be possible for drivers to do it full time if they wanted. Neither Uber nor Lyft were ever billed as “make some money sharing a ride to where you are already driving”, the platform doesn’t even account/allow for that.

I fully agree on Airbnb but I don’t think the Uber example works.

I really wish there was a distinction between “runs well on deck” and “plays well on deck”. I know that you can connect a monitor/mouse/keyboard but I’m mainly looking for games that I can play directly on the deck so mouse-heavy games are a pass for me (occasional mouse or only in certain menus is fine but not in regular gameplay).

Thankfully protondb is an amazing resource and answers most my questions along with Steam’s “full controller support” badge. I just wish there was a simple badge that covered both. There are some “Great on Deck” games that I strongly disagree with, like Human Resource Machine. It’s a great game, I love it, but great on deck it is not. It runs fine but it needs a mouse, the trackpads are way too finicky and the text too small IMHO.

I just got my steam deck a month or so ago during the summer sale but I think it’d be an instant upgrade for me.

I love the thing and anything it improves on I’d want. Even better if they make the upgrade/migration seemless so I can just “clone” my existing deck to the new one.

The state AGs are slow on complaints but next time reach for the CFPB, they don’t mess around and you’ll get a call from a human (from Amazon) in a short amount of time.

I spent hours on hold with a company (not Amazon) and they kept giving me the run around. After filing a complaint I got a call back in less than 2 days by someone who immediately fixed the issue.

As if we needed another sign that ZDnet was trash…

I fucking hate these obviously bullshit articles. “Gen Z is using feature phones”, “Gen Z are using paper maps”, “Gen Z is doing XYZ”.

No, they aren’t. At best some sad excuse for a journalist found a handful of tweets and wrote a whole article on it like it’s a “trend”.

Look, I know “journalists” are being squeezed to produce at an unreasonable rate but if you write drivel like this then you have no business calling yourself a journalist, hell I don’t even think you can call yourself a “writer” or “contributor” either. It barely passes as writing and you are contributing nothing to society.

Stardew Valley and Halls of Torment

I’m still in the honeymoon period (2-weeks since I got it), but I find myself gaming with it every single day pretty much (I’ve put over 40, maybe 50 hours into it already). It’s so much easier to use (and more comfortable) than my computer, whileI don’t have a full gaming computer I’m playing games on my deck I could have played on my computer.

There are definitely games that work better on the steam deck than others but I found a large library of games that I enjoy playing. Also, emulators are a ton of fun and a way to recapture the nostalgia of my youth.

Gigabit symmetrical or GTFO.

I pay something like $110/mo for my symmetrical gigabit fiber line (plus static IP). This should be the standard, not 100Mbps.

Yep, typical. Spectrum in my area (like 5-7 years ago) suddenly over doubled everyone’s speeds almost overnight once competition came in. I loved telling them to pound sand as I got symmetrical gigabit installed.

If only Firefox wasn’t so slow and such a terrible developer experience. Oh, and my bosses don’t give a fuck about Firefox so I’d have to retest in Chrome/Safari anyways.

Lastly Mozilla sucks. Like wtf are they doing over there? They put all their effort into shitty product they kill faster than Google does. Then they turn around and half-ass their browser while taking money from Google to make it the default search. Mozilla sucks and Firefox leaves a lot to be desired.