greybeard

WebRTC is a thing. You don’t have to build all that from scratch. It’s very reasonable to piece together a lot of standard technologies to make this progress much quicker. I haven’t looked into this project, so I don’t know, but I know it was pretty trivial to setup a WebRTC app 10 years ago, which would appear to be a fully functioning video app.

Not really, Jellyfin will run just fine on old hardware. You don’t need a lot of power to do it. That said, if a USB HDD works for you, that’s fine too.

The hardware requirements are quite steep, but I’ve got local AI running in my house. It’s mostly just there for when I want to screw around with it, but technically I could setup OpenClaw and point it to my AI server to use as its brain.

I’m not stupid enough to do that on any real computer I use, but it might be cool to do on a VM where I can tightly control what it can see and have access to. Of course, that limits its usefulness, but security has a cost.

At the same time, I can see the allure of a real digital assistant. I’m old enough to remember when professionals had personal assistants that not only helped them keep track of their work life, but also their personal life. Scheduling their personal life like doctors appointments or house repairs. Dealing with vendors to make sure stuff actually gets done, and making sure they are in the right place at the right time. That would be rad to have.

For sure. Working in IT and being a hoarder has its benefits.

More so now, I still have lots of old RAM laying around. No need to pay markup prices for me.

Not the one you were replying to, but I’m answering you from a Framework 13. It’s the best laptop I’ve owned. It’s solid, runs well, is theoretically repairable without having to buy used equipment off ebay, and runs Linux quite well. I’ve put a few distros on it, and they’ve all just worked, even the finger print reader.

It’s certainly not the best price for performance, but I like the build quality, and it let me bring my own RAM and NVME, which really helped close the price gap.

Kinda like a rich person saying “You have more money than I do because you only have $100k in debt” to a normal person because they have a $2 million dollar loan for a house, but only have $500k in easily liquidated assets.

As countries find success, others will follow. Not only because it isn’t seen as risky, but also because the tooling will be better refined, and talent will exist in those tools. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Microsoft 365 has a lot of problems, but a shortage of techs who know how to make it mostly behave isn’t one of them.

They don’t have to do that at all. These are “Work or School” accounts, and generally with Schools they are on a specific education products on top of that. All they have to do is make the company/school enter ages for all their accounts if they are using EDU products. Microsoft can reasonably trust that data.

If you sign into a Microsoft account during setup, Microsoft automatically turns on bitlocker and sends the key off to Microsoft for safe keeping. You are right, there are other ways to handle bitlocker, but that’s way beyond most people, and I don’t think Microsoft even tells you this during setup. It’s honestly a lifesaver for when bitlocker breaks(and it does), but it comes at a cost. In the business world, this is seen as a huge benefit, as we aren’t trying to protect from the US government, mostly petty theft and maybe some corporate espionage.

As is often the case, the real solution is Linux, but that, too, is far beyond most people until manufacturers start shipping Linux machines to big box stores and even then they’d probably not enable any encryption.

Yes, but the amount of gas in an AC system is insignifcant compared to the CO2 generated just making the AC system in the first place. Hell, delivering it probably generated significantly more pollution. Not saying we shouldn’t strive to make it better, but it’s not as actively harmful as it was 30+ years ago.

I don’t know about Floatplane or Nebula, but Dropout uses Vimeo as their back end. So this could impact some of the independent guys.

No, lets make it a personal responsibility issue, because that’s worked so great the plastics industry.

Mine is on a map, but in a radius of around 10 miles. Close enough to let people know I’m here, but not accurate enough to easily track me down.

That said, if someone wanted to hunt me down, they certainly could triangulate me pretty quickly.

Individuals don’t pay their own taxes, their employers do. When you “pay your taxes” at the end of the year, you are just paying difference between what you should have paid and what you did pay. The exception being contract workers.

And if you don’t pay your taxes, the government can just seize the money from your bank accounts. Of course, if everybody stopped paying, employers included, the federal government would have a hard time processing it all, but if it wasn’t a sudden massive stop, they would just start raiding people’s bank accounts, probably without due process.

Because it feels right.

If I’m ever sworn in to something, I want it to be on a VHS recorded copy of the “Drumhead” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. If that isn’t available, “Measure of a Man” is also acceptable.

NFC payments are nice, but honestly I could use a case with a credit card shoved in it to get the same effect. A good camera is important, but the “screen mirroring” of Android Auto and Apple Car Play are hard to go without.

Especially since most modern cars don’t allow you to replace the stereo. I’ve got a double-din, I could mount a tablet or raspberry pi, setup some sort of a system to automatically turn on hotspot on bluetooth connect, sync my podcasts between phone and car, and I’d have something about 80% of the way there and about 90% more janky.

Apple always refers to iPad’s OS as “iPad OS”, not iOS. I wonder if the browsers make the same differentiation in their user agent strings.

ChromeOS is pretty far from normal Linux. It’s closer to something like Android. Uses the Linux kernel, but doesn’t bring the freedom, flexibility, or even GUI tool that come with a Linux desktop. SteamOS does come with all of those.

And, importantly, improvements and software for SteamOS is, generally, improvements and software for most Linux distros.