Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)EB
Posts
0
Comments
184
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Homeschool isn't only at home, though. My kids, and all of the other homeschooled kids I know are out at some activity, museum or educational "thing" at least twice a week. Depending on their age, they can also volunteer or work somewhere that interests them. For example, my oldest loves reading, so she volunteers at the library once a week, where she gets to meet people of all ages.

    Also, it's much easier to travel when you're homeschooling. You can go pretty much anywhere anytime as you don't have to be back home before school starts. As an example, we recently came back from a year on our sailboat traveling up and down the US East coast and the Bahamas. My kids spoke a different language (we're not anglophone), tasted different foods, met people from all the places we saw, but also from all over the world (you tend to meet a lot of other travelers when you travel), saw incredibly diverse fauna and flora, made friends incredibly quickly, etc. How's that for a microcosm?

    Homeschooling's biggest misconception is that it's at home, when in reality, it's wherever you are. It's like remote work for kids.

  • Yeah, at first it was the "glorified golf cart" angle, but when Tesla proved that wasn't true, it turned into "they're too expensive", "ackthually they pollute more", "rare earths", etc... There will always be something.

  • It's a 4.2 inch e-ink screen from waveshare driven by an ESP running ESPHome. Nothing fancy, really. I used to change it "manually", but the lightbulb moment happened when I realized I had the entities I needed in the HA desktop app.

  • I never said they got revenue from a link. They make their revenue by showing you ads, and they use various strategies to make you stay longer on their website so they can show you more ads. One of these strategies is to include news articles in your feed, either shared by your friends, shared by the news organizations themselves (in a desperate bid to get you to visit their website), or just as suggested stuff.

    They captured a huge chunk of the advertising market, and it's happening at the expense of other businesses who provide a useful service to the people. I won't pretend that they aren't useful themselves, but I think they reached a point where they've stopped seeing that as a goal, and are instead focused on antisocial objectives (showing you more ads).

  • That's obviously something we need to decide as a society, I just took it as a given since that's what our government is trying to do.

    As to why, well I think the issue is that the social media companies inserted themselves as middlemen through monopolistic behaviours and captured all the ad revenue the news organizations used to get. The fair market isn't always fair, and monopolies are one of its failure modes. Market failure is one good example of situations where government intervention is warranted.

  • I think it's a bit of both. The law has good objectives (making sure news organizations can have some revenue), but the way they implemented it is terrible (paying to post a link). Meta just complied in the most dick-move way they found.

    EDIT: I think a better way they could've done this is to tax the hell out of ad revenue from Canadian users. Then just subsidize the news with this money.

  • The bible is clearly not a single book, it's a collection of writings by different authors hundreds of years apart. Of course it's contradictory. Also, not everything in there is equal in terms of importance. The 10 commandments are pretty high up there in terms of importance, but even they were supplanted by the teachings of Jesus (which can be summarized as "love one another").

    Bigots usually find their justification in Leviticus, which is a minor book explaining rules for the Hebrew society in like 1000 BC. That's the only place where homosexuality is mentioned, for example. But then, it also says women in their period have to sleep in a separate tent.

    Anyway, if you research it properly, you'll see that stuff like hating gays is actually a worse sin than being gay. I haven't researched abortion specifically, but even if you consider it a sin, all the hate around it is a worse sin anyway. Jesus said that heaven is happier with a sinner who repents than with someone who never sinned anyway.

    I'm not really religious, but I was raised in a religious family that actually follows that philosophy (love one another).

  • I have a e-ink screen next to my office door that displays the date, or a warning icon when I'm in a meeting. It uses the "camera in use"/"microphone in use" entity from the desktop app for meeting detection.

    My kids really like it.

  • I'll second the Zigbee valve, I got mine on AliExpress for about 50$ CAD. It's a big gray thing with a button on the side, it looks like it's all the same model. It exposes a switch in HA, on when the water can flow, off when it can't. Pretty easy to automate.

  • I guess it could be construed that way, but there's a fairness element to it, too. I have waited for my turn, I'd like my time to be respected, especially by people who will be less inconvenienced than me. They will most likely make it to their destination way before me, too... Which only makes their impatience more frustrating.

  • I'm sorry, but when I'm walking 2 miles to the nearest store, I'll adopt a steady pace. When it's my turn to go at the intersection, I'll take the time I need to go through.

    All these impatient drivers are sitting in their air-conditioned car anyway, I'm not breaking a sweat just so they can save a few seconds.

  • Since you mention Canada, I'd just like to let you know that in Québec (2nd-most populous province), more than 90% of homes are all-electric. I've never even lived in a house that had a gas connection, and in all my relatives I only know of one who does. And yes, that means we use electricity for heat in our -30°C winters.

    It's at the point where if somebody wants a gas range, they have to install a tank outside their home, because the gas network just isn't there. It's much cheaper to cook electric (and almost everybody does). The only common use for gas is for barbecues, and that's almost always using 20-lbs propane tanks.

  • Lexical (rich text editor by Facebook) recently "migrated" their Github discussions to Discord... I have a question that I can see was asked on the discussion, as it appears in my search results on DDG, but I get a 404 when I try to open it. The fuckers deleted the discussions!

    Of course, Discord only has poor-quality answers to that questions as it gets asked every week and maybe gets answered in a different way every time. Quality of discussion is much lower.

  • Well, yes. But when all your friends are already on Facebook Messenger, good luck getting them to install Signal only to talk with you. Network effects are important; a messaging app has no use when you have nobody to message on the app. Supporting SMS was taking advantage of its network effect, and I don't think their network was big enough to be self-sustaining for most users (it wasn't in my case, my only contact in there is my wife).

  • I wasn't actually quoting this, but yeah, I think that's the point. Supporting SMS was helping adoption by promoting a seamless transition for users. Dropping it feels like prioritizing #2 to me. (All this comment thread about opsec, compartimentalization, activism, etc is really about #2, IMO)

  • Well, I happen to disagree. I'm a privacy-conscious person, but I'm not an activist. Most of my contacts in real life (i.e the people I need a messaging app to talk to) are non-technical, and not really privacy-conscious. They're not going to install a different app just to talk to me. The big draw of TextSecure (before it became Signal) was that they could just set that as their default SMS app, and it'd magically start to send encrypted messages if the other end was also using TextSecure, and they had to change exactly 0 of their habits.

    I guess it depends on how you view it:

    1. Move as many people as possible over to encrypted comms with the least friction possible, or
    2. Provide a niche secure messaging platform for niche activists with niche needs.

    I thought the goal was 1, but turns out it was 2. All my contacts are now back to Facebook Messenger...

  • Signal had something good when it could simply be your default messaging app on your phone, and it'd transparently send either encrypted messages, or plain-text SMS. Now that they've removed SMS, they've just turned into a worse Whatsapp (because nobody is on it). Network effects are important in messaging apps.

  • So you patiently wait for your little white man signal, and as soon as it finally comes on (after 2 full cycles of the traffic lights) you start crossing only to get honked at by some lady who wants to turn right on her red light...