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 suspect at least one comedian will cross some line but I also suspect that showing which lines are okay to cross now is the Saudi government’s reason for doing this all in the first place.

Their government is in a super precarious position both economically and socially. Oil revenue is shrinking and the younger generation doesn’t identify so heavily with the wahabists. But the wahabists historically held nearly as much power as the house of Saud and heavily oppose all social change. The pace at which Saudi society has westernized is remarkable considering where they were just 10 years ago, even if brought about by an authoritarian ruler consolidating power from religious fundamentalists. This is yet another step in the direction of pushing the wahabists further aside for the sake of westernizing their economy.

I really don’t envy the position MBS is stuck in. He faces enormous pressure from the wahabists who criticize the limited social changes he has brought, he faces distrust from the house of Saud most of whom he essentially accused of mass corruption, and criticism from the West for Saudi’s poor human rights record. And amid all of this the country faces the economic crisis of the world moving away from oil. It’s no wonder the dude is focusing on stupid mega projects as that’s just about the only thing he can do without upsetting a huge number of people.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like if Saudi Arabia were a democracy. I suspect their politics would be far more divided and heated than any Western country.

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 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.

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

All Holiday Inn Express locations have these now. They do not make acceptable quality pancakes imo since the batter must be squeezed from above to get the top cooked. It’s a fun concept but I suspect many business travelers preferred the waffles.

These things are absolutely not a replacement for waffle machines. They barely cook the pancake all the way and the batter often has a rubbery texture worse than any store-bought mix. Also you can easily make better pancakes at home.

Meanwhile, hotel waffles are crunchy on the outside with a soft interior and malty flavor thanks to the big heavy specialized waffle makers. They taste much more fresh, and most importantly you can’t make them at home without the expensive specialized equipment. Home waffle makers just don’t have the same mass of heated metal to get the same results.

I actively avoid Holiday Inn Express for business travel because of these things. I prefer the breakfast at many Quality Inns which are often 1/3 the price. Hampton Inn does it right with waffles and two flavors of batter nationwide.

As the Republicans love to say, it’s largely a problem of mental health. Now if only they supported public healthcare…

What is in this article that we didn’t already know? Is there any new legislation in process of being passed? This just sounds like the same playbook we used for the 2024 election to me.

Unfortunately I suspect that the people who it would reduce costs for most wouldn’t consider taking the bus in the first place.

It’s definitely a minority, but easy to fix if you encounter such a site even a single time. There are also some sites which refuse to load on Firefox but work fine if you change the user-agent to Chrome.

Nobody on Lemmy cares but a portion of Trump’s base absolutely does. That’s why this is somewhat reassuring to see, as although the Republicans are great at ignoring Democrat’s demands, they can’t completely ignore their own party’s.

My pixel 6a screen stopped working (the glass isn’t even broken), but I was able to use talkback to get my IMEI and $100. What a win.

I’m an American often in China for my job. If you want to be in a tier 1 city rent relative to income is insane even compared to Canada (and by extension the US). If you’re a foreigner in a skilled profession who can secure a job there, this would be pretty easily avoided as your salary will typically be far above average and housing likely even paid for by the company sponsoring you.

The downside is that the expectation of workers and office culture is also drastically different than in the US. Your savings also won’t go as far should you ever choose to leave. Mandarin is pretty difficult to learn, particularly for reading characters which is more or less essential to get around New areas efficiently.

People are surprisingly quite nice to foreigners. I’ve never had a problem with the complete lack of privacy personally, since everything in public is tracked/recorded crime is incredibly low. But I have the ability to make that choice while others don’t, so I can get why it’s an issue for some. It’s a weird contrast from the US where the police are most certainly not your friend and the government is too disorganized to help even when they have all the relevant information. The urbanism is everything you’d imagine it to be, even in tier 2/3 cities it’s incredibly easy to get around without a car. If I weren’t tied to my family in the US I’d likely consider spending a few years working there while still young. But even then it would be hard to justify such a huge pay cut from US engineering salaries.