Ah, you mean the hydrogen that could theoretically be made from water but is actually in practice made from natural gas? The perfect infinitely renewable fuel indeed! Someday, it could even be zero-carbon! Someday in the future, after the oil companies have finished getting even richer and decide they finally have enough money now. Could happen any day now. Won’t. But could!
Yeah, you have to go back to the 2000s-2010s era and when abundant spare parts and junkyards start to run out, be prepared to invest new-car level cash in custom fabrication and mechanical work to keep it on the road. Cars don’t really have to be as complicated or expensive as they are, but for now, they’re always going to be. People have always been custom-building cars for show, for history, for racing, for performance, and pretty soon we’re going to start doing it for daily drivers too, and it’ll stay that way until they start changing the laws to try to force these cars off the road for environmental reasons. Until then, support your local custom car builders, they’re going to become the future of repairable cars, at least when it comes to the pre-EV gas guzzlers.
I’m not sure about hate, but people have a pretty understandable aversion to them I would say. People don’t really have an opportunity to see or interact with normal healthy wild bats very commonly, and that’s probably a good thing. They are not really possible to be kept as pets and it is not really responsible to try. They aren’t popular at zoos because they are hard to keep in captivity and hard to exhibit as their activity schedule is pretty incompatible with ours. The bats people are most likely to interact with are rabid wild bats, because they are acting strange and erratic and unhealthy and end up in places and at times where humans will be in a position to interact with them. And they are, as you noted, freaking adorable, and they seem hurt or injured, so people will naturally be inclined to interact with them, and now they’re interacting with a rabid bat. This means if any typical human is typically interacting with a typical bat, there is a good chance they are about to get bitten and get rabies and have a really really bad time. Bats, therefore, don’t have a great reputation, because that’s how typical interactions with them usually play out.
The bats going out and eating bugs at night while we’re all sleeping aren’t bothering or attracting the notice of anyone and the vast majority of people don’t even know they’re there beyond a vague understanding that they exist.
Not with the protections that Cloudflare provides, no. The DNS itself can be self-hosted, yes. You will likely have even more downtime from your own problems and screw-ups than you will from ever using Cloudflare. There is likely little practical benefit. But I don’t think it’s as hard as people make out. So without further ado:
##The really simple guide to self-hosted authoritative DNS:
###Step 1: glue and static IPs (the hardest part)
“Glue records” are used to tell the root servers about your authoritative servers, and very specifically, what IP they have. For reasons that will become obvious, this needs to be a pretty static IP if possible, because the glue records will need to be changed whenever your authoritative DNS moves. Two or more authoritative DNS servers are “recommended” and in some cases assumed, but for self-hosting purposes it’s really over-encouraged in my opinion. A single authoritive DNS is not ideal, but neither is self-hosting with limited resources, which is something we all do. Worst case scenario, if they force you to have two DNS servers, just use different names and set them to the same IP, that usually works. You do not need to (or want to) use glue records for ANY other DNS entries, IPs, or any normal day-to-day changes to your DNS. Only if your static IP changes.
“Glue records” are typically not hard to update, but they do often take quite a lot of time, called “propagation delay” and during that time, your DNS will be intermittent or down. In modern times I find the propagation delay for glue records is sometimes a matter of minutes and typically less than an hour for like 90% of users, but it can be up to several days in the worst case scenarios. This is why static IP is important, changing your glue records is free to do but very disruptive.
In order to actually do this, get a domain from, or transfer your existing domain to, a registrar that lets you set up glue records for self-hosting authoritative DNS. This is effectively not self-hostable, this has to be done through a registrar. In my experience, this is most of them that aren’t big-names. Cloudflare is a notable exception, you should not be using them as a registrar for self-hosting authoritative DNS. I have used misk.com for decades and am happy and familiar with them, and they call these custom nameservers. I have heard the best reviews lately for porkbun.com and their documentation for the process is here](https://kb.porkbun.com/article/112-how-to-host-your-own-nameservers-with-glue-records) but I do not use them personally. “The best” is a moving target, anyway. In any case, review the documentation and support for your chosen provider to figure out how to specify a glue record, which in almost all cases is as simple as putting in a name (the traditional old-school choice is “ns” or “ns1”) and an IP address associated with that name, which you will then use to specify as the “nameserver” for all your other domains. There should be no additional charge for this. Once it’s “glued”, then you wait. Eventually, it will start working, and third-parties outside your network will be able to ping that ns1.yourdomain.com address and get the IP you specified.
###Step 2: the DNS servers
You’ve done the “hard” work of getting the glue pointed at your IP, but that’s just a single DNS name and a single IP, and you’re not actually self-hosting anything yet. Now you have to make sure an authortitative DNS server is responding on that IP so people can get all the real details for any and all of your domains right from the source, YOU, authoritatively. That’s why it’s called authoritative DNS, you are the final authority for your domains and everyone knows it thanks to those glue records.
This is when you fire up a DNS server, the standard traditional choice for old grumpy curmudgeons like me is “bind” (version 9) to be specific, which has all kinds of crazy functionality that you don’t really care about because all you’re really going to be using it for is to read a text file called a “zone” file for each of your domains, which has an ugly archaic format but at it’s simplest is just an $ORIGIN line saying what domain it is, a $TTL line (how many seconds other DNS users are supposed to cache things before coming back to you to check if its changed), the SOA line which is a mess of stupid arbitrary info most of which is irrelevant these days and in this configuration, then a whole bunch of lines with other records (mostly A records for IPv4 addresses, but there are plenty of other options for different types of DNS records for various purposes)
So, install bind9, add a zone into the configuration for each of your domains that has type master; and file "/your/zone/file/path"; and create each text zone file for it to read. Then reload or restart bind, and your DNS should just start working.
It’s not magic and it’s really not that complicated, it’s just telling someone to start pointing your domain at your server’s IP, and then running a program on that IP that turns turn some text files into DNS. Then you can go ahead and make it complicated, if you want. There are lots of ways to make it complicated. This isn’t one of them.
###Conclusion: Why and why not
Cloudflare brings a lot of value to the table, which is why they’re so popular, but there is a cost for that. They need full control of everything and have it running on their own networks so they can protect it from DDoS and other attacks. They’re your bodyguard, they’re standing in front of you to protect you from bad guys, but the downside is, you’ll always have that guy standing in front of you. It can be kind of annoying. It’s a question of priorities. If you want to self-host your DNS, you’re effectively giving up Cloudflare’s protections. If you want Cloudflare’s protections, you’re effectively giving up self-hosting DNS. Your call, either way.
Self-hosting my own DNS, I have little to no protection from DDoS attacks. Sure I get hammered by the occasional password attempt bot or data scraper that makes my server slow and overwhelmed, that mostly gets dealt with manually or with defensive monitoring tools like fail2ban. A larger, more targeted or sophisticated attack could easily wipe my sites off the internet and probably even my intranet. If it didn’t stop, my only resolution would be to unplug the targeted machine or machines from the internet. Maybe unplug my whole network. And just wait it out. Maybe I’d have to rely on my phone hotspot, or even change ISPs if it refused to stop. I actually don’t know, because it’s never happened. If I was hosting anything controversial or highly lucrative, I might have a different experience and I might make different choices. But I’m not, I’ve never been attacked on a large scale for a long duration and I can’t really imagine any motivation or purpose that I ever would be.
Already ate crayons when food ran low. Too tired from work for unnecessary grunts.
They definitely have electrolytes – there’s no electrolyte a billionaire can’t afford.
GE Profile PFQ97HSPVDS. Not a sponsor, and not even a recommendation. It feels icky even admitting it. The only reason I am mentioning it at all is because I did manage to get it to (eventually) stop aggravating me about installing the app and connecting it to wifi and now it just works without annoyance as it should have from day one, and I recognize the possibility of having access to that feature alone may be valuable to someone. I can’t guarantee the one you buy now will even act the same way, as these things can be and are updated without notice.
I found some third-party home assistant stuff for GE smart home products on github if that’s important to you, but I haven’t even tested it for this as it still involves the appliance phoning home and everything is still gatekept through GE’s website and like I said I refuse to ever let this thing touch any form of internet connection or wireless.
Unfortunately not, but I am proud to be compared to him.
Incorrect, no connection to outdoors is required for these appliances. In the case of the ventless combo, it literally hooks up to nothing other than the standard washing machine hookup. 1 normal 15 amp power outlet, 1 hot water hose, 1 cold water hose, 1 drain hose. No dryer vents, no other tubes or hoses, no drilling or cutting, no changes at all required. It is literally a drop-in replacement for any washer, but it also dries, with a heat pump, powered from the same circuit the washer uses and the same drain the washer uses.
Also, let me blow your mind a little bit: theoretically, the cold water main running to your house contains enough heat energy to completely heat your house all winter on its own. It is cold to us, but thermodynamically it’s a goldmine and you have an extremely generous supply of it. Water represents an enormous reservoir of heat, and you can play some really fun games with latent heat of evaporation and condensation (which is exactly how heat pumps work in the first place). Dehumidifiers add as much or more heat to a room than a space heater does, using a fraction of the electrical power. That’s the power of the heat contained in water. I’m not saying that a heat pump dryer is doing this with your water supply, simply pointing out that once water is in play, it becomes way more of a complex issue than performance figures on paper actually represent.
Obviously, clean drinkable water is also a scarce resource, so using it directly for any form of heating would be wasteful in its own way, but the point is that it would be technically possible. Including water in the discussion adds a lot of really interesting possibilities to the way we manage heat and energy, and we will eventually need to start understanding how much heat we literally throw away down the drain and how wasteful that actually is. And in the process we’ll learn to save some money and maybe even make our lives a bit more convenient.
That doesn’t work either. The technology itself requires training on absolutely bonkers massive datasets to function the way we expect it to. You can’t just “only train it on Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street” because that won’t result in an LLM model anymore, it will simply be a tiny “Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street word model” with such extremely limited capabilities that you won’t even recognize it as an AI or chatbot at all. No matter how much you train it on such a limited dataset it will never appear any “smarter”. Having read and consumed almost all of humanity’s entire corpus of collective knowledge and fiction and having near instant access to everything added to it over time is the special sauce. That’s what it takes to make it appear “smart”. But it’s not. And after undoing that then restricting it to such a limited dataset, it will never even appear to be in the first place.
Even if you expanded it to be trained on every possible “suitable for children” piece of content you can find, even if such a thing were possible to define and acquire, there is probably simply not enough such content available in the world to train something into the same sort of thing that we currently use for chatbots in a safe way that you can be sure it will be safe and suitable for children. Insofar as anyone can be sure about a random typewriter not eventually producing Mein Kampf Children’s Edition. It’s random, it’s just an infinite generator for finite probabilities, the most we could perhaps say is that it would probably be safe with a very generous statistical amount of certainty. But not actual certainty, because it’s random and safety is not a fixed target anyway, it moves.
The whole thing is a fool’s errand. We’re being fed bullshit for profit and to misinform and manipulate us. It was bullshit from day 0. It’s still bullshit. It was never about and will never be about anything other than profit and manipulation. The technology itself is very interesting and MAY have real applications, with real value, but right now what it’s being sold as and for is almost exclusively pure, high-grade bullshit, that the entire economy has started snorting and getting high on thinking we have finally reached the tech singularity, won capitalism and solved all the world’s problems. They are wrong. We will have to be ready to make sure the consequences of them being so wrong are not inflicted on innocent people, because if we can do that, then the consequences will simply be really funny and satisfying to watch. I’m not holding my breath for that, but a man can dream.
I just want everything with a heating element to use a heat pump instead. Electric heating elements are so horribly inefficient and wasteful in comparison.
I have a ventless heat pump combo washer/dryer. It takes up half the space that two machines would, plugs into a regular 110V outlet, gets HOT (way hotter than I expected a heat pump has any right to achieve), drains all its drying water into the drain, vents none of my indoor air outside, doesn’t require changing laundry from one machine to the other. Practically and mechanically it seems brilliant and I can’t imagine why I would ever buy a traditional machine ever again. Except…
It’s chock full of horrible apps and shit that I’ll never use. It’s way too “smart”, and those “smarts” are not there for my benefit. After a month or two it finally gave up trying to pester me to connect it to a network and install the app, which I’ll never, ever do. It’s never going to see an update or new firmware if I can help it, but I’m afraid that if/when it ever breaks, I’ll have no choice. I know it’s going to do things like eventually refuse to work until the computer has been “updated” to be “compatible” with new parts. And it’s not even just that it’s going to be expensive. It’s that I don’t trust it, and I don’t trust it to remain functional in the future, even if there are parts, that they won’t let me install the parts, or will require me to agree to play by their “rules” before I can.
Right to repair needs to be a thing, and people need to be able to break the ridiculous amount of both legal and practical control these manufacturers have over their devices after they’ve left the factory. We cannot and should not trust the manufacturers to support it. We need to allow independent repair.
In a better timeline, the US would be invading El Salvador to free these people.
The author makes some good points, but I’m in the group of comments they refer to as “hates XML” and I am forced to conclude that they really desperately underestimate how MUCH I hate XML, and the suffering it inflicts on me when I am forced to deal with the XML horrors they so affectionately craft, so I find it hard to not be excited that yet another ugly XML-based technology is dying. With shitty motivations and as part of a malicious strategy perhaps, but I am still not mad that it’s dying. It’s sad to understand that people still use it and rely on it and even like it but I’ll never be one of them and while I have empathy for them, I just can’t generate much sympathy. I have my own technologies that I’m fond of that have been replaced with ones that I am personally not fond of, so I know how it feels, but I’ve accepted that I’m probably the one who’s wrong in those situations, and… XML just really sucks, and XSLT is built entirely for and with XML.
His response that you can use it for JSON too is maybe technically true, but I really don’t need to or want to use it with JSON either. His argument there is sort of like responding to someone complaining that a boat is unsafe for a transatlantic voyage by telling you you could just put wheels on it and use it as a car instead and then you won’t have to worry about whether it’s safe to take it out to sea. Like, technically, yes that’s true, but I don’t want to do that either, that’s missing the whole point of the dislike. XSLT sucks because it is attempting to solve a problem for XML that wouldn’t be a problem if XML wasn’t an ugly, overcomplicated, verbose nightmare. Once you’re already using JSON, a versatile, flexible, universally available and equally turing complete tool that does everything XSLT does for JSON is… actually I’ll give you a hint, you can just look at the first two letters. And many, many other options are available for JSON too, XSLT simply doesn’t need to be one of them, no matter how much some people apparently defend and love it.
You will never get to zero surveillance, surveillance capitalists will find ways, but if you make regulations that require all data to be properly anonymized and limited, demand open source and open hardware for everything, and develop programs to make things auditable and inspectable, you can keep the surveillance corruption to a probably quite small minimum. Over time though, even this system will become corrupted and the surveillance will quietly grow, unless society makes it a priority and a non-negotiable. And it’s not clear society ever will make it a priority or non-negotiable. People will trade away their privacy so easily. So in the long term, maybe not.
I really hope the answer isn’t “fast motion civil war”
I really hope so too.
How do we do that though
More protests, for the time being. Start organizing and connecting to and through the people organizing, if you’re in any position to, or at least start organizing your own life to prepare for the need for even more serious protests ahead. The thing about pressure is you can’t let up, or the pressure goes away the moment you do. The pressure must continue to build.
There is a general strike being talked about. It’s likely a couple years away, but it’s a serious threat to the establishment, and you should take it seriously. Whether you’re unionized or not, expect to participate, and start preparing for it. It’s not going to be easy, especially if you’re not in a union. Save what money you still can by not funding the things you don’t have to. Become the austerity they want to impose on you. Build support systems. Find a community that can help support you. You don’t need to live off grid and be totally self-sufficient. We live and thrive in communities and collaborative societies for a reason. Find people who need your help and can help you in turn. Find people you can rely on. Work to be less reliant on your paycheck, and be more involved with other real people who are likely in the same situation as you, like your neighbors and coworkers, even if you don’t like them personally. It’s not going to be easy, they’ve rigged the economy and our means of communication and socialization to make sure it isn’t easy. Have backup plans, and have backup plans for your backup plans. Expect that shit will get rough, things will be different, things will happen that you have not planned for. Success will look different from everything your entire life has told you success should look like, success will be survival. Expect that your desire for financial and social stability will get tested. Don’t cling to the established way of doing things or your pursuit of stability and the status quo will drag you down as it goes, things must be unstable if the status quo is going to change and you’ll have to let go eventually. Be prepared to find a new way to live. For the world to change, we must all be ready to change with it.
Slow motion civil war. This is not actually about immigration, illegal or otherwise. Understand and accept this: They’re coming for you, eventually. Picture yourself as the person tackled to the ground, put in handcuffs, whisked away without trial, maybe never to be seen again. No one is safe from this. Not the people who think they’re just normal people doing their jobs, not the people just trying to live their own lives in peace, not even the people celebrating this and relentlessly loyal to the regime. Everyone is a potential target, for reasons real and imaginary, it makes no difference. Fascism doesn’t care, it is arbitrary and cruel, it isn’t reasonable and it cannot be reasoned with, it is the pursuit of absolute power and the relentless application of that power is all that matters. This is what the first stage always looks like, but there’s always a second stage, and there’s always someone new who needs to be rounded up, and sooner or later, it’s going to be you. Either stop it here, or wait until it’s gotten even stronger. Your choice.
No, it was your intense, Gowron-like stare that truly drilled into my heart.
FWIW, between what’s going on with EA/Sims 4 and Inzoi, most of the life-sim community seems to be pinning their hopes on Paralives now, which does look like it’s going to be a banger, but relying on a single successor to the genre is a lot of pressure and the community is putting a lot of weight on their shoulders which is not a great or healthy situation to put them in. Especially for a genre that requires so much work to meet the community’s expectations.
Oh well, at least if it all goes to shit, we’ll always have Sims 3 and all its mods and expansions. Still the best life-sim out there in my opinion, as long as you can withstand the instability, bugs and crashes.
Some bearded and cutlass-wielding fellow needs to create a definitive hacked community edition of that game, ideally with all the mods and fixes already implemented and ready to roll, all the awful EA store and social media shit mercilessly excised. Or even better, some project just needs to reimplement the whole engine from scratch, OpenTTD style.
Yes. The original expectation was that it could serve as an early-access placeholder until more content and functionality could be implemented (which in the case of the Sims series its competing with, often takes many years and hundreds of dollars of DLC expansions before it starts to approach a satisfying level of content). From that point of view, it doesn’t seem like it’s automatically so terrible that the game heavily relies on it, as the expectation would be that the reliance would reduce over time as the game develops, which everyone understands is realistically going to take a long time.
Now that Krafton has revealed that they’re fully onto their villain arc, it’s pretty clear that this is not temporary and is not going to be eventually reduced by replacing it with a whole bunch of lovingly human-crafted content, if anything it seems like it will certainly expand the use of AI even further. As Krafton’s largest currently released IP Inzoi is likely going to be the poster child for Krafton’s attempt to turn “AI-slop: The Game” into a money faucet to fund their other misadventures.
You think you can turn them off. Temporarily. They mysteriously turn back on. For no obvious reason. I have literally never in my life been successful at actually permanently disabling Windows Updates. And god knows I have tried. The setting re-enables itself. The disabled service re-enables itself. Some installer quietly turns them back on. You change some unrelated setting and suddenly, there’s Windows Update again! There’s no escape.
Windows: “Oh, I know you already told me you didn’t want important updates, but I just assumed you still wanted critical updates? Okay, okay, I get it, you don’t want critical updates either, I hear you…” <3 weeks later> “I’ve been trying to warn you about this for the last 2 weeks but you’ve had your notifications turned off, but now I really have to because Microsoft told me this next update is SOOO important that I really need to install it just this once, okay! But really, you should have at least critical updates too. I mean, installing this update requires them anyway, and all the important updates too, so I’ll just turn those back on for you to make this whole process easier next time Microsoft has a super-critical-urgent-mega-feature-emergency-update for you, sorry for all this inconvenience!” <reboots in the middle of your work>
Linux is the only solution that has worked.