Banks have made it really difficult to rent safety deposit boxes lately. It used to be a common account benefit but I can’t find any within a reasonable distance of me since 2023, and none which are included as an account benefit. A fireproof safe is good enough and the types of documents I put in it aren’t truly irreplaceable anyways, just really hard/annoying to replace. I doubt many people use their fireproof safe for truly valuable items that would be attractive to thieves. My fireproof safe doesn’t even have a proper lock.

I use 1.1.1.1 so I don’t think it’s easily ignored by changing DNS. But interestingly while using Revanced and NewPipe on my phone I don’t have any of the same problems. Maybe my computer is ignoring my router’s DNS? Maybe mobile YouTube is delivered from a different server? I wish I knew but ultimately using a VPN still works for me and is a very low effort fix.

What I don’t get is why it’s only YouTube they choose to throttle. I’ve never noticed any issues on other streaming websites and fast.com which literally uses Netflix servers is also full speed.

They’re 5g based, so I suspect it’s within the terms of service somewhere that they can limit the streaming quality? Historically I’d only ever noticed deprioritization, never a hard bandwidth limit.

My ISP has started throttling YouTube to ~2mbps when viewed from desktop. Using a VPN gets around this and lets me watch in HD. Luckily I’ve not encountered this error yet, but if I do I guess it’s no more YouTube for me, 480p is just way too blurry to put up with.

I have one with 65W USB-PD and it’s a lifesaver for work travel. But lately I’m hesitant to take it anywhere outside of the US even though it’s under 100Wh, airlines are cracking down significantly on power banks particularly in Asia.

Last time I was in China I noticed many power banks have integrated video game systems on one side (a basic NES/GBC emulator). I wonder if that’s to get around the difficulty of travelling with them?

Although they use milk, they consider egg a meat. They treat their cows like gods, so if you’re vegan only for the reasons of animal suffering then I’d argue being vegetarian in India is philosophically identical

I also always call him Dear Leader. We can’t normalize these behaviors from a president, and using the “Dear Leader” title makes it unambiguously clear that his selfish actions are not presidential.

AI companies and investors are absolutely overhyping its capabilities, but if you haven’t tried it before I’d strongly recommend doing so. For simple bash scripts and Python it almost always gets something workable first try, genuinely saving time.

AI LLMs are pretty terrible for nearly every other task I’ve tried. I suspect it’s because the same amount of quality training data just doesn’t exist for other fields.

An old PC is the best NAS, even if you choose a dedicated NAS box it’s likely that you’ll want to “upgrade” to an old PC in a year or two. Unlike premade NAS boxes you have full control over the software and can modify the hardware as needed. You can undervolt/underclock to save power too, so the main difference is only the physical space it takes. Having the ability to run docker containers and VMs on the same device is incredibly useful, and you’ll get significantly faster transfers despite the drastically lower cost.

I mostly seed stuff that’s on the verge of being lost media and my ratio is often insane because there just aren’t other seeds. Ironically for many old/unpopular films the Internet Archive is a lot better than any torrents.

The comment on this internet archive review in particular had me laughing.

Leaving ADB open to unverified apps is more than I was expecting. ADB is reasonably straightforward to use even without actually being an Android developer.

There was never any way they’d integrate it to play protect and still allow play protect to be disabled. I prefer this to being required to use play protect personally, though the services do seem somewhat redundant. Presumably the whole point of doing this is to create an Apple style walled garden (which is of course very profitable). Google likely doesn’t want to fully lock it down and risk legal trouble, they just need to make it difficult enough that the masses don’t bother installing unapproved apps that may not act in Google’s interests.

I still hope the EU takes legal action against this anyway.

That’s kinda the case here with Debian being on the extreme opposite of Ubuntu. I don’t see any benefit of putting up with the stability issues and complexity of other distros when Debian “just works”. And once you debloat Ubuntu you just get Debian.

I have no idea why Canonical moved Ubuntu to rely so heavily on snap, it’s wasteful of limited system resources. Removing it sped up both my Ubuntu machines significantly (especially the one with only 4GB of RAM).

Absolutely but after a while you’d likely run out of cheap hobbies and need more money than your 2% to fund it. The better way to do it is taking a year or two off in the middle of your career imo.

A 4% withdrawal rate is intended for a 30yr retirement when accounting for inflation, so you’d need to keep your expenses well below that, probably closer to 2%. But more importantly in my opinion this relies on the assumption of a mostly stable market, which over the course of a ~70yr retirement is riskier a bet to take compared to a ~30yr retirement.

Also what would you do on such a tight budget for ~70yr that you wouldn’t get bored of?

Graphene is only supported on Pixels for now, but by their own FAQ this isn’t the plan forever. With Google blocking third party apps at their own discretion on Android, there will certainly be motivation to officially support more devices.

To add bootloader unlocking probably isn’t going anywhere soon so at least you have the option to run something like graphene on Android devices.

You can still get some Android phones with relatively easily repaired hardware. And for innovative third party hardware your only option is still going to be Android.

I wish there were some way to effectively protest this decision they’ve made, but I can’t think of anything they’d actually care about unless nearly all developers objected.

There’s no alternative that won’t have major limitations. I predict it’ll just be more like going back to the days of jailbreaking to install unsigned apps. Unfortunately AOSP is already pretty much unusable without Google services installed for the vast majority of apps.

I suspect a lot of it comes down to your ISP. Like the original commentor I also frequently can’t pass CloudFlare turnstile when on Wifi, although refreshing the page a few times usually gets me through. Worst case on my phone’s hotspot I can much more consistently pass. It’s super annoying and combined with their recent DNS outage has totally ruined any respect I had for CloudFlare.

Interesting video on the subject: https://youtu.be/SasXJwyKkMI