jmp242 @ jmp242 @sopuli.xyz

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537

Joined

2 yr. ago

I mean, in a lot of cases I think subscriptions are bullshit. It's also worth noting that we're not expecting to be sold a product with a fixed warranty of a year anymore either. We want software patches for 5 years, we want recalls out 10 years, we want parts availability etc etc. These all cost money too. And because of how capitalism works, we get pushed to unbundle as much as possible so the initial sale price looks the cheapest. It's why we now have movements to try and make companies show all the fees (and taxes in some cases) as part of the purchase price.

Now, personally, I think the issue is either we're not bundling enough into the purchase (i.e. build in the 5 years or whatever of software updates, battery changes, repairs and parts availability, and such) or we're bundling too much - i.e. the OS should be separate from the hardware, like with PCs.

I do think that we need some regulation if we're interested in sustainability / environment that we just won't let manufacturers sell disposable designs. We have done it with some products in some places (straws and plastic bags), and while I think those specific ones are kind of stupid - it looks like it's possible. And the idea that you can't design for repair-ability and look "modern" is... halfway between a complete lie and a place where maybe we need to as a society change what we want a modern design to be.

I'm sure they dislike oil changes too - but they probably don't like the outcome of never doing either even less.

I don't think I've gotten an update on my 2019 era android phone for 3 years? Samsung before that usually stopped after a 1.5 years. Maybe it's better now? I'd like to see a mandate to unlock bootloaders and give us root on our own darn phones, and maybe some standard like we have for PCs where MS and Linux both make generic OSs. I still don't get why Android phones can't just have generic Android updates provided by whatever distro you run.

Personally, I find that this "sleekness" was misleading anyway. What was the first thing most people did once the "sleek" era started? Bought a case, sometimes like an OtterBox or knock off. That tripled the thickness of many phones, and even the most basic protective case came close to doubling the thickness. Back in the "old days" of slide out keyboards etc, the phones themselves had a decent case built in, so the "cases" were more fashion statements. And anyway, it's not like the Note 2 with a plastic back you could pop off was especially thick at the time. Honestly - a lot of the "problem" is intentional design to force buying new ones I think.

Look at ultrabooks - Lenovo proves with the X1 you can have an easily removable bottom using gasp metal and screws. Yet still be very thin. I honestly think the better solution for phones is just to have the battery be click on / external like power tools, drone batteries, older laptop batteries. The back of the battery is the back of the phone. There's no reason the contacts can't be press fit on the back of the phone and front of the battery - i.e. it doesn't have to be especially thick / deep.

Yea, now you can do it because there's no OS updates for security vulnerabilities. Maybe they should mandate updates or unlocked bootloaders so we can use OSs that update like on PCs...

Next Generation and the like was just crazy in that every dang away mission planet just so happened to have a gas mix of 70% N, 21% O2 and the rest CO2 and inert gases at like exctly 1atm (or at least a mixture within those norms)

That was just what TOS, TAS, the movies etc did - mostly for production cost reasons. It's also why there were transporters, though I personally really like the idea and it's not a Star Trek specific thing.

I don't think Enterprise was more realistic per se, just set in a much lower tech level much closer to current day. Some parts of Sci Fi aren't "realistic" in the way if you showed a 2023 cop show to someone from 1800, they'd say it was a bunch of flights of fancy in tech (modern cars, planes, smartphones, zoom meetings etc would probably seem as realistic to them as starships do to us).

Honestly, rankings have to be almost completely subjective at a certain point. IDK if you listen to any of the Star Trek review podcasts, but there's always tension around how to rank a show. Do you try and be "objective" and take your personal enjoyment out of it as much as possible, and instead rank on production success (did the final show do what they were trying to do?), cultural impact?, Iconic level of an episode?, Number of Iconic episodes or well produced episodes or the average quality over a season or show?

Like, there are episodes that are a LOT of fun, say "Trials and Tribulations" from DS9, but it didn't really have a strong unique plot or sci fi conceit or have anything to "say" in morals. It was Iconic solely to big existing fans, and the awesomeness of the production was entirely around the technical achievement of filming in the 90s using 60s techniques and near perfectly splicing together with existing footage. It's one of the ?2? DS9 episodes I'm at all interested in re-watching frequently, and it's really really fun for me as a huge Star Trek nerd. But is it a "great episode"?

Compare to "In the Pale Moon Light" or "Measure of a Man", or "City on the Edge of Forever". Those are Iconic for a reason, and most of them work pretty stand alone. They're arguably "better" in context, but they have pretty good production - it seems to achieve what they set out to do, they have a message, they have a moral idea they're playing with, and they throw in some Sci Fi too.

Then there's the same thing but over an entire show. I think TOS and TNG and DS9 had very high highs, but also some pretty low lows throughout the run. "The Alternative Factor" or "Code of Honor" don't exactly stand up as "better" than Picard. By Voyager, I think they still had a bunch of 3/10s but mostly avoided 1/10s, and honestly Enterprise seemed to hit that middle 4-6/10 range very consistently. I haven't "done the math" but I'd be willing to believe if you averaged ratings of every episode, Enterprise might well rate higher on that average than TNG. It's just that if you're selective you can watch probably 30 episodes of TNG that are 8-10/10 and there might be 2 in Enterprise.

I will say - if you like reading, and you like SNW a lot - I'd suggest trying the novelizations of TOS and TAS by James Blish. They fix all the production limitations of 60s tech and budgets, but keep the good stories and characterizations. It's actually how I got into TOS originally, back before streaming or releases of the show on DVD. I think in many ways I wouldn't love TOS as much as I do if my main exposure was actually the episodes. Balance of Terror as a case in point basically bored me to death in the middle where for the 52 minute runtime they just linger in a countdown set of scenes for way to long. Similar for The Trouble with Tribbles - the reason they could slice it up for the DS9 inserts is there was like 8 minutes of a bar fight you can mostly cut and lose NOTHING. For on screen - the TOS Movies really cemented them IMHO.

I don't disagree, and I suppose captains get a LOT of leeway with how they run their ships. What I'm actually talking about is

I think in that case they let "easter eggs" for fans get in the way of coherently telling the story they wanted to tell. At least with your (and my) take -

It's closer to Old Trek. But in the last episode of S1 ::: spoiler spoiler where they take original TOS dialog for parts and mix it with modern dialog - man you really see the difference. Love it or hate it, the TOS dialog feels a lot more martial and IMO fits way better with having ranks on a ship. :::

There's good stuff in it, but they also seem to really have a problem making any non-quippy character, to the extent that I actually think it affects characterization. To that end, Ortegas still

Spock is certainly "in between" The Cage and TOS, but I think they're going to have to re-do something like Kohlinar to explain his change in the last episode of SNW.

It's reasonably good, but significantly different too.

It's certainly the best of the live action modern Treks. Lower Decks also works surprisingly well.

I haven't rewatched any Enterprise except the mirror duology since first run, but I really never got the hate people had for it. I think I always thought it was pretty good. I don't know if I'd say it was better than Voyager overall, I think my main ding was what I think is a stupid idea of a prequel. But take that out of it, and I'd think they were even. I used to think they were tied for the bottom two, but Discovery and Picard have really lowered my opinion of what bad Trek can be, so Voyager and Enterprise look a lot better by comparison lol.

I have ~4TB of data, a mix of media, backups of various phones, computers, etc, and pictures and video. Pictures take up more space than you might think for a modern MILC - If you do RAW + JPEG, that's ~65MB per image. Plus copies that are edited / cropped and exported to jpeg. Video is even worse. I use a 128GB card in my camera, and that's on the smaller side if you were going to do video.

I lost about 4TB when my RAID died without backups, but that was mainly media that isn't that important. Some pictures and such. The problem is it's easy to do large RAID devices, it's hard to back them up. My upload is only 10Mbit so initial upload to a cloud service of 4TB I think took 3 months or so, because the backup software would hang, and just upload times. I don't think it's actually realistic for me if my actual data grows much more. I might have to go back to standalone spinning disk drives to be backups for cost effective and fast enough.

My current NAS has 22TB usable, and when I cross 5TB I'm not entirely sure if it'll work to the cloud anymore.

All you really have to do with Zerotier is set up your network routing appropriately, and the end server would do reverse NAT, presumably via IPTables in most situations. Zerotier is just a virtual cable, everything else is the same as if you plugged in an ethernet cable between the two endpoints and you can run network services there just the same. Oh, you do have to enable the ZeroTier client to route public IPs for this to work.

I found the vending machine one to be strangely interesting in a stereotypical kind of way. Kenshin I'll probably drop, seemed like a direct copy or close enough of the original and live action movies. I liked My Happy Marrige a lot more than I expected and really need to see the next episode to make a determination. I really didn't like The girl I like forgot her glasses. The production is... something, and not in a good way. And the story isn't catching me.

IDK the tax software already also does state taxes too, and asks about at least some relevant city taxes. The software can be made - we have it already. It just doesn't seem like the government couldn't run the same stuff we do at home really.

Sure, but I'll say that FLOSS distros and builds have a much better privacy trust record than the alternatives - though I also have to say that at least I haven't seen the news articles about Apple or Microsoft that you do about Google, Facebook et al. Some of this is literally around business models - Microsoft and Apple aren't ad-tech companies really. They have obvious revenue streams that do not need to invade your privacy, and may actually hurt their business if they do. Not that I trust big corps to actually make sound business decisions though, and any cloud stuff is right out the window WRT privacy from governments.

I'm also left personally in a really weird situation - I don't especially like or trust Google, but I use Android. There are several competing interests here - While Google may spy on me, Android (so far anyway) does allow FDroid and third party apps like AdGuard much easier than iPhone from what I understand. So at least for quite a while I was trading OS level telemetry vs every app and website telemetry. I think Apple might be better now, but I still think you have to jailbreak to install non App Store apps. In the third party apps are things like Syncthing, which lets me basically back up and sync my phone contents without touching any cloud at all.

The other benefit of Android is just the huge variety of vendors and phones available - I can get a brand new Android phone that's "good enough" for $300, and my current one has lasted over 4 years (but at the cost of security updates, so YMMV). I'd love to get a phone I had root on, but most of those cost a stupid amount (to me) and also seem like the fun I had with the Pyra - they're "in development" for 5 years with no real sign anything is actually going to come out, and then when one does it's 5 years old tech.

It's also not particularly useful to have Android without the play store. I tried that once a long time ago with a chinese tablet. You couldn't install apps really. Like, yes, I can get FDroid - but how do I get my online bank's app? - kind of needed to deposit checks, and they no longer have the scanner from a computer option. How do I get ParkMobile - now used instead of putting coins in the meter? Most shopping apps? Yes, you can make your smartphone de-googled, and about as useful as a feature phone from 2010, but then why bother - just get the cheapest flipphone I guess.

I don't have answers - most companies don't want to make privacy respecting tech, so unless you can realistically live your life mostly outside of current society - you're sort of screwed.

In your usecase, it probably doesn't matter. I usually suggest DIY with more disks and XigmaNAS for ZFS and RaidZ2 or RaidZ3 depending on disk size and number. The cost is usually in the disks, and I tend to prefer smaller disks and more for cheap replacements when they die, cheaper initial purchase, and getting more spindles so I can use cheaper "everything" and still get decent performance. I usually wouldn't consider a 2 bay NAS myself, mostly because I'd just do what you're already doing and plug in a large single external disk. In the past (15 years ago now though) the single disks lasted quite a long time, though I did buy internal disks and used my own enclosures. Recent Amazon reviews imply that is the best plan even today in that model because the prebuild MyBooks etc at 12TB or whatever are supposedly horrifically unreliable, but maybe you've had better luck.

I don't know if the US is that far ahead here - we have the regular credit score which is used for all sorts of stuff it really ought't be. And it's proprietary, so honestly who knows what goes into it. We just get hidden companies rather than the government - and often the government hides behind the companies so they don't have to do pesky things like get a warrant. I'm not sure which is better.

I thought it was weird at first, but actually liked it. I didn't really get the hate - there's plenty of shows I like a lot that I like the theme a lot less and especially today you can easily skip it.

I know this is probably going to get me booed, but I actually liked Enterprise's theme. Heck, I can sing along! And I loved the visuals.

Hilariously it kind of makes me think of like The Orville - you know all those "Star Trek" themes without copyright issues.