@dan@upvote.au avatar

dan

@dan@upvote.au

Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
d.sb
Mastodon: @dan

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dan, (edited )
@dan@upvote.au avatar

I’m an Aussie that’s been living in the USA for 11 years, and what I’ve noticed in the US is that there’s a lot of people that mostly care about themselves (or at most, their family) rather than the community as a whole. People don’t want free and universal health care, because they don’t want their tax dollars going towards other people, because that’s “communist” and therefore bad.

I guess the thing they don’t take into account is that their own medical expenses would also go down in price with a good universal health care system.

This is also a reason why the divide between rich and poor people is significantly larger than in other countries. People that are well-off have high paying jobs, very good health insurance, a nice place to live, etc. It’s a great country for someone that’s doing well in life. On the other hand, it’s a horrible place to be if you’re down on your luck. Once you’re homeless, it’s very hard to live day to day, and recover to where you once were. Nowhere near as much support as in other countries, since again, some people don’t want their tax dollars going towards assisting others that are less fortunate.

American laws also tend to favour companies over individuals, compared to other countries where the government focuses more on individuals.

dan,
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I’m not against gun control, but it seems to me that a state level fix ain’t it.

Views like this are why nothing gets done. Starting small is better than doing nothing at all.

It’s hard to change things for the whole country. It’s a lot easier to change things just in one state and observe the effects. If the changes work, other states may choose to do the same thing.

dan,
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Even if they huff and puff

Be careful - there’s a correlation between huffing, puffing, and houses being blown down.

dan,
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Does the constitution say that guns need to be free?

dan,
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Searx is dead. You’ll want to use SearxNG instead.

dan, (edited )
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The family didn’t call the cops in this case. They called a mental health crisis team, and that team called the cops due to the presence of a weapon.

dan,
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Bad take. Just because one group of people had to go through some pain, doesn’t mean other groups should have to go through the same pain.

A long term strategy would still be better, but for now, this is a good move.

dan,
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A few Australian universities attend college fairs in the USA, because even after you include the price of the flights, accommodation, and the uni itself, studying in Australia can still end up cheaper than the USA. Americans seem to love the idea of going to Australia, too.

dan,
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English is the most spoken language in the world.

I assume you mean languages that are either spoken as a first or second language, because if you just look at native speakers, more people speak Mandarin than English.

dan,
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smasnug

Not sure if this is a reference to f4mi’s video but she’s one of my favourite YouTubers. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJGqbDr5qBE

dan,
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It’s interesting how light KDE has gotten. It used to be the big, bloated desktop environment that you wouldn’t even try using on old hardware. It seems to have traded places with GNOME.

Corporate astroturfing is the norm

Went to Google Play to complain about Hulu. I noticed Google advertising that over 300 reviews had the verbatim quote “watch and movies that you love”. It’s always confusing that buggy corporate apps have >95% 5 star reviews until you see that the majority are just completely fake, and no one cares or is doing anything...

dan, (edited )
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adding “reddit” to the end of google search

As if there’s no astroturfing on Reddit :) there’s plenty of companies in the comments there, posts promoting particular brands or products that get to the front page, etc.

dan,
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If you want true honesty, read some of the 3 star reviews and below.

There are a lot of one star reviews that are astroturfing too (e.g. companies paying for negative reviews of competitors).

dan, (edited )
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AFAIK Biden has plans to change the long-term capital gains rate to match the ordinary income rate, but I’m not sure of the current status of that.

For what it’s worth, people with low incomes (less than $47k) aren’t taxed on long-term capital gains at all.

dan,
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In my opinion, it peaked in Windows XP. XP’s themes were way more customizable than 98’s. You could patch the uxtheme DLL (disable the signature check) to allow third-party themes.

dan, (edited )
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Uh… You must not know much about the history of browsers. Practically every browser designed for consumer operating systems cost money back then. Netscape Navigator was made free, but only for individuals, academics and researchers. Many individuals still paid for the full Netscape Communicator suite though. Netscape’s IPO was probably the most successful tech IPO ever at the time, and their revenue increased significantly quarter over quarter. People would go to shops and buy boxed copies of Netscape.

That was the case until Microsoft bundled IE with Windows. That was one of the major points of the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit - browser developers were losing a lot of money because Microsoft were abusing their dominance and bundling IE for free.

Netscape became fully free in 1998 since there was not other way they’d be able to compete with IE. The code was open-sourced and became what we know as Firefox today.

dan,
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I’m on Windows 2000 which is 1987 versions ahead of Windows 13.

dan,
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9x had versions too… 95 was 4.0 and 98 was 4.1. They were mostly just used internally though.

dan,
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I remember using Windows 2000 at school. That OS was solid. Far more reliable and stable than what I was running at home (Windows 98, first edition).

dan,
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This is a myth. The Win32 API doesn’t even have a method that returns the string “Windows 95”! Windows version numbers are numbers, not strings. Windows 95 was actually 4.0. Windows 98 was 4.1, ME was 4.5, and XP was 5.0.

Actually it’s not entirely a myth - there was some Java library that did this - but it wasn’t widespread at all, and certainly not the documented approach to check the version.

dan,
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Thanks for the correction :)

dan, (edited )
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Energy consumption is essentially the same, as it’s using the same radios.

For what it’s worth, I have several SSIDs, each on a separate VLAN:

  • my main one
  • Guest. Has internet access but is otherwise isolated - Guest devices can’t communicate with other guest devices or with any other VLANs.
  • IoT Internet: IoT and home automation devices that need internet access. Things like Ecobee thermostat, Google speakers, etc
  • IoT No Internet: Home automation stuff that does not need internet access. Security cameras, Zigbee PoE dongle (SLZB-06), garage door opener, ESPHome devices, etc

(to remotely access home automation stuff, I use Home Assistant via a Tailscale VPN)

Most of these have both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz enabled, with band steering enabled to (hopefully) convince devices to use 5Ghz when possible.

This is on a TP-Link Omada setup with 2 x EAP670 ceiling-mounted access points. You can create up to 16 SSIDs I think.

dan,
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It’s hard because Mozilla need money to survive, and the world needs Mozilla, but it’s been hard for them to find a stable source of funding. Mozilla relying on their main competitor (Google) for most of their income is a massive risk. I can understand why they’re trying approaches like this, even if the users don’t like it.

Does anyone here have a suggestion as to a better way for them to increase their income?

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