sharperguy

We were living in a "simulated" reality, where tech corporations produced amazing things a ran services practically for free asking very little in return, because it was all being funded by "stimulus" money - effectively the country getting into debt and creating money out of thin air. Once we reached the limit of this we had to face the reality of these companies actually having to pay their own way.

Instead of a tank I was also using an open dripper head on the vape, so I could basically limit how many drops of liquid I was putting on the actual coil. And I would basically just look at the clock to see when it was time to add more.

I did something similar but without the gum stage. Since I was buying concentrated nicotine liquid and diluting it with a PG/VG mix, I would just reduce the strength until I was literally putting a single drop of the strong nicotine liquid into my 10ml vial of PG/VG. Then to prevent just vaping more I would count the number of puffs per hour and reduce it until after one puff per hour I'd go to one puff every 2 hours etc.

I drew it out over several months. The thing I was really surprised by was that when I finally stopped, I still felt withdrawal symptoms, which is a testament to how addictive nicotine is, given what a tiny amount I had reached.

Honestly the advent of coding agents means that a company could just instruct the agent to strip out any code in their backend that they can't release for legal reasons, and dump a non-compiling zip out into the public and have someone in the community fix it up and make it runnable. The costs of doing it are much lower than in the past.

It's only a matter of time until most of these games get vibe-coded back end clones. Still not as good as a full ROM but at least and improvement over complete unplayability.

It's worse than that. I have an LG TV which I never connected to Wifi at all. Instead we use the Amazon FireStick which just contains all the same spyware that the LG TV would've had but sends it to Amazon instead.

In fact, due to DRM licensing, it's not possible to have a legit TV streaming device that isn't full of spyware and still allows you to watch streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ etc in full resolution.

Without the DMCA you could run legitimate businesses reselling jailbroken TVs with features vastly superior to what the manufacturers are offering.

Option A: If you have 1 ton metal machines powered by exploding liquid driving at 60 miles per hour around your neighborhood make sure the wheel is properly pointed in the right direction. Designate specific areas where the machine are allowed to move. Train parents to keep their children or impaired away from those areas. Ensure adequate processes are in place from training the drivers of the machines so they know where they are allowed to drive and where not. Take into account evolving environmental regulations. Ensure safety barriers are used in areas where the vehicles are liable to lose control. Place signs around to remind forgetful drivers of the specific rules of driving in a specific area, or issues such as ice and snow that could cause the vehicle to crash. Make sure drivers pay large insurance premiums to ensure they can pay for any damages caused by their vehicle. Give traffic police their own vehicles in order to apprehend anyone not following the rules. Budget for all of this and ensure there is a long term plan for maintaining the car and everything that goes with it.

Option B: Walk everywhere

I honestly think it would be completely legit to build a completely separate ecosystem on top of the same protocol. A separate set of relays, separate apps which connect to those relays by default, no lighting payments, different defaults, marketed to a different audience. Ultimately it is not just a single network. If users need interoperability eventually they can easily add other relays. But it's true that many people are put off by the current community.

I agree that if someone asks you something, you should at least write "I asked AI and it said..." rather than pretending the AI response was your own. If you ask me something and my first response is to ask AI, it's probably because I only know enough on the subject to ask AI, and don't know much more beyond that, which would be the real answer.

The irony is that this is the exact opposite of the "let me google that for you" meme of the previous decade. If you have a question that could've been answered by AI, maybe you should've used AI in the first place.

I tried to self host my email but I immediately ran into the issue that basically every ISP and VPS host available to me block outgoing connections on the SMTP ports. This is a fairly new development in the last few years and is done mainly so that users can't cause their providers to end up on a blacklist.

For some time it was possible to just send a special request to the provider asking them to unblock the port, but this is becoming less common, for often they simply deny the request.

Users who have been hosting their own email for many years have often been grandfathered in so they might not even be aware of this.

If someone can solve the spam problem in email without just manually whitelisting specific providers that heavily monitor their users, then they can completely reverse the direction of this problem. Unfortunately it doesn't seem likely someone could do that.

I don't see it the same way. I see it as akin to building a machine which can do the cooking for you. There is a lot of experimentation in terms of how you can construct that machine and how you can set it up, and for some people the payoff is in exactly this process.