It seems more important to ensure Larry Ellison’s good behaviour than Joe Schmoe’s. Ellison is able to be far more destructive. Maybe some surveillance at Oracle HQ could help.

C, C-like, or Rust

As always, Ada gets no respect.

My mom has quite severe hearing loss but is not totally deaf. She uses TV captioning and generally can’t tell whether the TV sound is on or off. I generally want it to be off because it is annoying, so when she leaves it on by accident, I just shut it off and she doesn’t notice or anyway doesn’t care.

If only there was a way to communicate without videos. The Mesopotamians had something like that but the technology was unfortunately lost.

Look on Starlink.com. I don’t expect it’s much worse than your typpical evil ISP or phone caerrier in terms of privacy. Certainly you could route everything through a VPN and that might help a little.

Added: in the UK doesn’t it rain all the time? Maybe you just need some catchment area and a storage tank, instead of a well.

I’d either get an older model for cheap, or get a 9 because of the satellite capability. I wonder if GrapheneOS supports the latter, and for that matter whether it supports the 9 at all yet.

I’ve never owned a home but what people have told me is that you will spend 13 or 14 monthly payments per year, 12 of them on the loan, and the other 1 or 2 on the related expenses. Insurance has gone up a lot around here since then though.

I know you can rent a tiny home plot with water and sewer in the (expensive) SF Bay Area for $800/month including some amenities (deltabay.org) so that is sort of an upper bound. This includes an electric hookup but you have to pay by the KWH for power. You can order a 400 sq foot tiny house (container home) on Amazon for about $20K (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D9Q3391S) though that’s just for illustration purposes. I don’t know enough about them to actually recommend that approach, plus I hate Amazon. So I would try to buy direct if I pursued that.

Mobile internet coverage is pretty good now, unless you’re waaay out in the boonies to the point where you have to ask whether there are even roads to get there with. So if you don’t use a lot of data, that gets you online fairly inexpensively. The next thing after that is Starlink, which is way less expensive than I thought, $300 for the dish tranceiver plus around $150/month for “unlimited” service.

The deal with well water depends a lot on the location. In the western states there are often legal restrictions. In drier places you have to drill very deep, which is expensive. If there is surface water, it’s less bad. In the desert (Joshua tree), a 1000 gallon truck delivery is around $100 (10 cents a gallon) iirc. I looked into this because a friend was interested in building a biodome there. So you are ok for careful usage but typical suburban use with frequent laundry and toilet flushing could get expensive. If you use a well, you might have to process the water to get rid of dissolved metals and solids, some of which can be toxic.

Propane, again, some company delivers a 400 pound tank every few months, which means there has to be a road that can get it there, or you need some other way (ATV) to move it. I guess you can use smaller tanks if that’s easier. A friend of mine had this and I think they swapped the tanks around, as opposed to refilling stationary tanks from a truck, but I can ask her. It’s possible that I’m confused.

Solar electricity and solar hot water are very doable now. You can buy a pretty good ready-made battery bank from Home Depot or similar, almost as cheaply as you can DIY without serious scrounging. Again I know a guy with around 10KW of solar panels and 10KWH of batteries iirc. He may have spent around $15K on this though he DIY’d. There is a substantial tax credit against solar expenditures here in CA, plus he gets paid when he feeds surplus power back to the utility (net metering), so he is doing pretty well with it. I think that setup is enough to run all normal household stuff most of the time. Maybe you want a backup generator around.

There is a really good old reddit post about solar hot water. I think it is here: https://old.reddit.com/r/diySolar/comments/b5leqm . The person made a huge coil of black PVC tubing exposed to the sun, with the water circulating through a big tank, and this was enough to give him plenty of hot water year-around with a few K$ worth of stuff, plus electricity to run the pumps.

Lately there are developments in ways to extract water directly from atmospheric humidity, even in the desert. I like to say that this is just like the moisture farming I used to do back on Tattooine ;). Web search: “atmospheric water harvesting”. Maybe this will become practical soon.

There are a lot of homesteading forums that might be better places to discuss this stuff.

Is there a location you are thinking about? For now, my own interest is sort of academic, but I have been following stuff a little bit.

All told though, I always hear that city and suburban nerds like me often think this lifestyle sounds great, but they get sick of it quickly when they actually attempt it.

Those security vulnerabililties are because of buggy old software, and updating the software in the old devices does as good a job of fixing the vulnerabilities as selling you a new device does. A significant e-waste tax on every new device, accompanied by credits for keeping old devices working, might help with that. Anyway, if it’s an app (rather than OS) vulnerability and you can’t fix it with an update because the new version of the app requires a new OS, that’s mostly likely an app that you don’t need to use. I’m getting by ok with F-droid apps instead of Play Store apps, for example.

Best still would be to debug the software before shipping it, so it wouldn’t have those vulnerabilities in the first place. There are various forces that get in the way of that, but a significant one is that web development is now driven by delivering more advertising rather than useful information to the user.

The laptop (Thinkpad X220) that I’m using is much older than the iphone 7 and it runs current Debian just fine. Lots of people are running current LineageOS on similarly old Android phones. Why can’t the phone vendors do the same? Planned obsolescence doesn’t change by wrapping it with nice marketing words.

I have figured that if I needed to get an iphone for some reason, it would be a 6+, since that is the last version with a headphone jack (similarly for Pixels, it would be a 4A). But I guess that strategy won’t work any more.

https://kevinboone.me/headphonejack.html

They need “This show depicts stupidity” but they will never have it.

Interesting. Cost is also very important for large scale deployment of course. I wonder if this stuff can become competitive in $ per watt with the current silicon cells.

It would help if you gave some numbers. How much data, within a factor of 1000 say? A few megabytes? A few gigabytes? A few terabytes? A few petabytes? The approach you need will change depending on the level. What is your budget?

What bothers you about cloud storage? Are any of the photos edgy?

Anyway it sounds to me like you would be fine with a decent web hosting plan and a basic photo gallery app.

I don’t know what Cohost was but I’m pessimistic about Lemmy these days. Note that the link is to an article moaning about the centralization of sites like Reddit and that Cohost (whatever that was) failed because it was run by the same type of people. At first I didn’t click on the link because it says “audio” so I expected it to be audio and I didn’t feel like listening to one. It’s a written article though.

I was young then too, but it seemed to me that while Reagan was popular among Republicans during his Presidency, he didn’t get an actual personality cult til after he left office. His popularity came from evoking nostalgia, so afterwards, he himself became an object of nostalgia. He died in 2004 and his funeral was turned into a tremendous media event glorifying him. It was sometimes called the “Reagasm”.

It seemed to me that Barack Obama had a personality cult of his own, at least during his campaign and early time in office. I think that his followers got disillusioned after that, but he retained some popularity and got re-elected despite intense opposition from the other side.

This exact same thing happened with the very simple ELIZA chatbot back in the 1960s. Joseph Weizenbaum (ELIZA’s author) wrote about it in his book “Computer Power and Human Reason”. He was shocked and scared. He had written ELIZA as a cute demo, and people treated it as if it were human.

You’re broadcasting to family who will likely be using gmail, so what difference does it make? Google will get all the emails either way. Anyway, logical argumentation is completely useless in a personal situation like that.

If you want the address to be stable in the long term, you should probably use your own domain name instead of gmail or proton, if you’re not already doing that. After that, it’s possible to switch the hosting without changing the email address.

Never heard of U-prove but for what you are asking, is FIDO2 similar?

This seems terrible. You can get a nice laptop for a lot less, including some that you can configure as a tablet, e.g. Lenovo Yoga.

It’s up to the moderators whether to allow those kinds of posts. Sometimes I’ll look at the linked article and post a summary (often just the first sentence after the headline) but I’d rather that the original poster was required to do that. I started !savedyouaclick@lemmy.world and made a few posts there, but no one else posted anything, there so it’s deserted for now.

I saw a minute or so of it because someone else had it on, but I wasn’t interested in watching, I’ll catch a summary online later, or will look at this thread now and then Will try not to reload obsessively. I need to protect my fragile brain from this crap ;).