Do you have any solution for services that aren’t over a browser? I’ve been using Tailscale but I’m looking for alternatives. Pangolin only seems to work for either browser-based services or opening ports to the Internet, unless I’m missing something.

Ex. How do I connect a client app on my phone to my subsonic server for music without opening my home server to the net?

I’m not a software developer or used a dedicated programming AI inside an IDE or anything. Just inconsistent, occasionally scripting-heavy IT type stuff. My organization offered me whatever AI google makes available because they had more licenses than they were using so I figure whatever, sure. I think 80% of the time (when I’ve been desperate enough to look at its summary of a technical search or used it for help, even with Google products like a Sheets or Appsheet function) it has hallucinated useless answers that occasionally sent me on wild goose chases when they looked convincing. I’ve been pointed to non-existent powershell commands and multiple non-existent python libraries. To be fair, when I searched for one of the powershell commands I found AI slop articles about it. So at least it had some excuse… or maybe someone found the hallucinated results were trending and tried to capitalize on that.

I was having a rough day and figured I’d ask the chat version geared towards programming to give me a complicated Sheets formula. I saw a flaw in its formula, explained it, and ended up being gaslit as it proceeded to support the accuracy of its results step by step and literally used a different value on the one problematic step to demonstrate that it’s logic was sound.

My favorite was when I searched to see if AppSheet supported tooltips in forms. It listed the features of AppSheet including the ability to display tooltips in forms. It offered a reference link. The link was to a forum with the following, admittedly paraphrased exchange:

OP: Does AppSheets let you use tooltips in a form?

Reply: No, not within a form.

Another comment links to an article that explains it generally. NETs and “microclots” can clump together.

One possibility first raised by physiologist Resia Pretorius of Stellenbosch University in South Africa in 2021 is microclots. These are tiny, abnormally persistent blood clots that are smaller than those seen in conditions such as stroke or thrombosis, yet large enough to hinder blood flow through capillaries.

Meanwhile, in 2022, Thierry and his colleagues showed that patients with long COVID have elevated levels of neutrophil extracellular traps, or NETs. These are sticky webs of DNA and enzymes released by white blood cells to capture and contain pathogens invading the body.

Normally, NETs do their job and then quickly break down, but when they are released in large numbers or persist longer than needed, they can contribute to blood flow problems such as thrombosis and atherosclerosis.

The new research – a collaboration between Pretorius and Thierry – suggests that these two separate markers, NETs and microclots, may interact in the blood of long COVID patients.

Free access to healthcare goes a long way, and it changes the system in a number of ways.

In America, imagine an entire parasitical industry exists. It exists by collecting money from people in exchange for offering them access to healthcare. The more treatment someone receives, the less profit that industry makes. The more hurdles they place between a patient and the services they need, the more money they make.

Imagine having a medical condition but knowing that if you lose your job, you might lose access to the treatment for your condition.

If you are poor enough here in the US, you might qualify for MEDICAID. Depending on where you live, you likely have to jump through a ton of arbitrary hoops to keep your coverage. If you get a job, maybe a raise or extra hours, even a slightly better job? You might lose your MEDICAID.

Or some politician decides to cut the optional state expansion to MEDICAID. With less income from these sources, the only hospital near you might decide it’s not profitable to stay open and now you have to travel an extra hour or two to the nearest hospital.

It doesn’t need to be a utopia. It just needs to be better than this.

I don’t think it’s good, I think it’s unavoidable. For decades the right has been a party of, for lack of a better term, evil. However, they’d hidden it under a cloak of libertarianism/freedom and religiosity. This gave them plausible deniability. Sure, some voters were responding to dog whistles or were otherwise drawn in by the undercurrent of evil, but it was forgivable to vote conservative because the cloak gave them plausible deniability.

Trump threw away the cloak. He’ll bring out a fragment of it and wave it around when someone points out hypocrisy, but it’s so transparently performative that the plausible deniability is gone. Those in power on the right are openly greedy, hateful, petty, dishonest, racist, authoritarian, fascist, etc. Anyone who still supports them has to either be so ignorant and frustrating to deal with that they aren’t worth your time or so willfully ignorant that they are difficult to forgive.

I still think they can figure it out, but the leopard will likely need to eat their face and the faces of everyone they love and go on a villainous “This was my plan all along mwahahahah” speech before that happens. Or Trump will just say “AI, Fake News” and they’ll find more loved ones’ faces to feed them.

The left hand won this round.

It is like encouragement for the thing you were already likely to do, which is the goal of targeted advertising.

It’s the claim of targeted advertising. The person I saw talking about this actually ran the numbers, comparing two very similar geographic markets. In market A they paid for advertising, but in B they did not.

When comparing market A to market B, market A had a marginal increase in sales for the advertised product vs. market B. However, they were charged for orders of magnitude more conversions than the actual increase in sales.

The idea is that when compared to something like actual click-through purchases, where a user literally clicks on an ad and then buys a product, it’s extremely deceptive.

I literally had bets on whether or not someone would respond exactly as you did, bragging about never seeing ads because of ad blocking.

There is actually an argument that advertisers like Google are abusing micro targeting to extract advertising revenue from clients while, at least in some cases, delivering few actual new customers.

Here’s the process.

1. Google sees that your profile (browsing habits, demographics, search patterns, etc) suggest you are interested in product A.
2. Google blasts you with advertisements for product A, essentially marking your browser session and claiming you as a recipient of their advertising. Ever look at a particular product and find you are being advertised for that product incessantly for a while?
3. If you happen to buy product A around the time that your session was shown an advertisement for that product, Google claims you as a conversion and gets paid for convincing you to buy the product. Advertising works!

So if Google’s algorithm thinks you are already going to buy product A, they show you an ad for product A constantly because it means they’ll claim you as an advertising success and get paid extra.

Are we now protesting that they reversed their decision?

…no? I’m not really protesting so much as offering what I think the other person is trying to say. I think they are saying that Google crossed a line, and walking it back doesn’t change that fact.

In my opinion, Google has crossed countless lines over the last 5-10 years. I’m looking for alternatives that meet my own needs. That search has accelerated over the last few years, when the things Google has done have been most egregious. This isn’t a protest. This is disillusionment. I’m abandoning ship.

I’ve had a pretty good experience with it aside from this recent problem with my phone - Pixel 8 Pro. It’s a big deal right now - I have a number of self hosted services I use on my phone accessed through a shared subnet via tailscale. When I left it enabled, multiple times a day I’d lose connectivity entirely. It would get fixed if I just quickly disable-enable it… at least until it randomly happens again in an hour or two. I started using spit tunneling, which I think fixed the connectivity issue for internet-dependent apps but nothing I tried fixed calls and texts.

Unfortunately, my mother has been having a number of health issues so there is no fucking way I’m going to risk missing calls and texts…so I just deal with being disconnected from my servers for now. I really wish there was a solution or something I could do to figure out what’s going wrong. I can’t keep trying random things and risk it. Calls from my mother are virtually the only calls I get, other than spam.

I’ve had to stop using it on my Pixel. In the last few months I have more and more suddenly lost all connectivity outside of my tailscale network. I tried excluding apps but I still will randomly fail to receive SMS or calls, suddenly getting them delivered in a rush when I disconnect from tailscale.

If anyone has any tools to recommend troubleshooting the phones connection let me know. I have no idea how to learn more about the problem beyond the obvious “If tailscale isn’t on, it doesn’t happen.”

I think it was fairly obvious that the move was going to piss people off, they just misjudged to what extent. Modern business strategy is to claim to listen to customer feedback and just quietly plan to implement it anyway, just do it more subtly, more quietly, and more slowly.

It is very hard to make a device that is affordable, compact, efficiently cooled, and modular. Offering complete support is also infinitely more difficult when hardware is not controlled for. GPU and CPU are both customized AMD chips and the power supply is designed for their anticipated power draw.

If you want to swap your GPU, build your own SFF. Hopefully they’ll have SteamOS available for general use soon.

Twice.

There are more “low stakes” situations where removing the filibuster has been more or less normalized.

Passing the budget is a different beast altogether.

While Steam is more or less the best big solution we have, it does leave a lot to be desired. The only reason they are the best is because they clawed their way to the top early, kept themselves “good enough” compared to the competition, and haven’t yet sold out their entire customer base.

At this point, they completely dominate. It’s insanely difficult to compete with them. So long as they make half of an effort to improve things and continue to be somewhat benevolent they’ll likely keep their crown.

However, Valve is not ideal. They are still looking out for themselves, primarily. Many of Valves improvements have just been reactions to competitors and other threats not an inherent desire to deliver the best product possible or do the right thing. It’s just the fact that most competitors are more obviously greedy and immoral that makes Valve look like the heroes.

Without Epic and others throwing cash on the fire trying to compete I doubt we’d have seen even the slow upgrades to the Steam experience we’ve seen in recent years.

Without the Australian lawsuit, we’d have no return policy.

Without the clever abuse of arbitration by a group of lawyers, Valve would still have forced arbitration in the agreements.

Steam OS was only a thing, and Proton only got backed by Valve, when Microsoft first started positioning itself to eat Valve’s lunch by exerting control over Windows and pushing for things like UWP and the MS/Windows/XBOX storefronts on PC.

The vast majority of Valve’s storefront improvements are algorithms and crowd sourcing solutions. They want to be as hands off as possible because being hands on is hard and comes with liability. The whole skins market and gambling fiasco kind of shows that they’d much rather just not get involved if possible - same risk/reward cost/benefit analysis used by every greedy company. If that means lying about how aware they are of it that’s what they’ll do.

Don’t get me wrong. The least worst is, unfortunately, the best we’ve got. I love gaming and use Steam a lot. It’s just that the other big players are just so terrible that I think Valve gets a free pass. Hell, much of the tech industry is swallowing tactical nukes hoping that the radiation will somehow mutate them into a good business. In the meantime they are using the illusion of “expansion” from the resulting explosions to make themselves look bigger for investors. I support anyone not doing that.

I don’t think it’s necessarily all Manchin’s but I wouldn’t be surprised if 30-70% were on a Manchin-like spectrum. I’m pretty sure that when most mainstream Democrats champion anything remotely progressive, they don’t really want it to fully succeed (if at all) and would actually vote against the original legislation as written. The supposed champions are depending on Republicans and the open Manchin’s to negotiate it down to something the champions would actually be willing to vote for.

I remember, years ago, Republicans put some extremely unpopular legislation up for a vote as a performative gesture knowing it would receive zero Democrat votes. Then one or maybe a few Democrats strategically voted in favor, knowing it would be catastrophic for the Republicans approval if they actually passed it in a Republican controlled Congress. Suddenly the remaining Republicans were forced to vote against the bill in order to prevent it from passing. I recall it was considered a very ballsy and impressive move from Democratic leadership.

Without the filibuster, the roles could absolutely be reversed… but the bill would be extremely popular and Republicans could show the true nature of the Democratic party as the Democrats purposely tank it to prevent it from actually passing.

They may have been “protecting” the filibuster. If Republicans removed the filibuster, it would pave the way for Democrats to do the same thing. If Democrats were to lose the excuse of the Republican filibuster stopping them from passing legislation, they’d be forced to reveal that there are many more fucking disingenuous pieces of shit just like Manchin and Sinema ready to tank progressive legislation.

One is to expect the workers to love their job.

Honestly, loving one’s job doesn’t mean never needing a break. Working Class jobs pay because they are hard work that you need to pay someone to do. Whether or not you enjoy the work doesn’t change the fact that it is hard work.

I am extremely privileged with my job. I don’t get paid as well as my counterparts elsewhere but the personality and leadership style of my superiors has kept me here. I don’t expect I’d be able to do what I do how I do it anywhere else. Considering all this, I wouldn’t say I love my job. There are parts that are tedious and unpleasant. However, I do like my job. Even the parts I like are challenging and can be exhausting. I still need a break occasionally.