he/him. LARPer, Nerd Organizer, Web Dev.
Mastodon admin, joeterranova@leftist.network
Not the CNBC guy but I’ve got Nihilist Stock Market advice🌻

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Because their practices are anti-competitive. School kids are getting bullied for using Android phones because they’re “green texters” in iMessage. But most importantly iMessage’s connection with SMS causes all interaction to be very low quality images and videos. And when people complain to Tim Apple about the experience, his only response is “Get your grandma an iPhone”. Our only saving grace is that the EU is requiring Apple to support RCS, which should solve these issues, except they’ll probably find some new way to be anti-competitive about it.


  • Not a lot of products have to do that. The one people bandy about is McDonalds adding “Caution: Coffee Is Hot” to their stuff, but the actual coffee spill lawsuit was over coffee hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns. Few things need cautions against their intended use.

    Q-Tips / cotton swabs are an almost uniquely bad tool. It’s incredibly easy to rupture your ear drums. There’s no actual health benefit to swabbing your ears – it just feels good your ears get itchy. A safer tool could be made, but it’d be more expensive, more involved to use, and there’s probably several but I can’t be bothered to find out, and neither can you. They make a product that they know is inherently dangerous to use and has no specific benefit. So it has a warning against doing it. Same as cigarette packs have a warning that they cause cancer, even though everyone buying them knows that and smokes them anyway.




  • So the premise of the Dune series is the Butlerian Jihad, where humans destroyed all “thinking machines” and declared that no machine would ever be made in the likeness of a human mind again. That’s why everything’s analogue, humans that can do computing in their head, etc.

    But unlike what one might think, they didn’t destroy thinking machines because AI robots had taken over (though his son Brian Herbert missed that memo). They destroyed thinking machines because, after humans had created AI, they were happy to offload any and all responsibilities and decisions. Humans turned to AI to make any decision, and at a certain point AI ran the galaxy, not because it had taken over, but because humans couldn’t be bothered. They stopped learning, they stopped innovating, they stopped doing the things core to being humans.

    So as I watch humans hand over more and more tasks and control to AI, apparently including teaching their children, I expect we’re heading to the same crossroads at some point.



  • Beta blockers are usually prescribed for heart problems, but what they actually do is block boosts of adrenaline. That can help people with anxiety, because anxiety manifests as an adrenaline boost when trying to do certain things, leaving them shaky and nervous. If someone is anxious about speaking in public, or talking to new people, etc, beta blockers help with that a lot. They’re a game changer for people with social anxiety.


    • Large files I don’t care if I lose (perhaps videos of popular things): NAS. Hard drives are cheap, not worry about losing it, I can download it again if needed
    • Storage with frequent access and security compliance: Wasabi. $6.99 per TB per month, free egress. Compatible with S3. SOC2 and PCI compliance. I use this for work as a backup to S3 for website images.
    • Files I need to store cheaply, redundantly, and access often: Backblaze B2. $6 per TB per month for storage. You can download 3x the amount of storage you have per month for free, or connect Backblaze to a CDN partner like Cloudflare for free egress through them. It’s also AWS S3 compatible, so you can just the AWS SDK/CLI or tools that work with AWS S3. I use this for hosting image files for my Mastodon server. Note that Backblaze B2 also has SOC2 compliance and US region available now, so it should be as secure as Wasabi at slightly lower cost if you don’t have a ton of egress.
    • Cheap long term backup storage: AWS S3 Glacier. $0.0036 per GB per month (so $3.6 per TB). Upload your files to S3, and add a lifecycle rule to migrate them to glacier. Glacier is cold storage, extremely cheap and great for a redundant backup. I use this for backing up photos and other files I’m going to want to store forever.

    For anything I’m hosting, multiple backups. Home NAS is usually the first backup, followed by cloud storage. So if I need something now, I can get it from my NAS. If there’s a problem with my NAS, I can get it from cloud (though with a delay for Glacier)





  • This. After my first Android phone I had only gotten Nexus phones. I had a Nexus 6p when the Pixel was announced, and it wasn’t going to have a headphone jack. I tried multiple dongles with my Nexus 6p, and none of them both reliably worked with my headphones and fast charged my phone. My wife ordered a Pixel, I ordered a Note 9.

    I’ve gone Note 9, then a One Plus Nord v10, and now an Asus ZenFone 9. Every time a manufacturer ditched the headphone jack (or made it only available at ludicrous price), I just switched manufacturers. I don’t even use a headphone jack that often, but when I need it I want it to be there and just work.


  • When I was 19 I tried an IRC Vampire the Requiem game. I got banned after arguing with the admins about the rules (in retrospect I was right about how things worked but they’d already house ruled it and I should’ve just gone with it). In response I wrote a whole website for managing character sheets, and a connected IRC bot to handle dice rolls, and pull things from character sheets.

    I did all of that, and then proceeded to run a terrible vampire game on IRC for a couple months. The code was all in PHPNuke so it’s useless now. But it taught me a lot about coding for the web. During that time I showed my work at a job interview as a software dev, and I got a job while still in college. But as part of the coding questions, I learned that you can use sql to join tables. I went home and started rewriting a lot of stuff, but the game died before I was finished.



  • My solution is more complicated but doesn’t require switching browsers

    1. I run a tor client on my home server in docker, the same place I keep my vpn access, torrenting, etc
    2. I run a socks proxy on my home server, that sends all requests through the tor network (and a different socks proxy for when I want to use the VPN)
    3. On my desktop and laptop, I use the FoxyProxy firefox extension (SwitchyOmega on Chrome). I setup the socks proxy (proxies) on it, using URL patterns.
    4. When I go to a .onion link, FoxyProxy uses the pattern, and sends the traffic over my tor socks proxy


  • It’s important to note who benefited from it and how, because it explains why there was such a fight to stop an obviously cruel and barbaric practice. Even the Founding Fathers knew it was wrong, but most of them still did it. They kicked the problem down the road because tobacco wasn’t profitable to grow in America anymore, so they thought the “problem” would solve itself in a generation or two. Then the Cotton Gin made slavery profitable, so it boomed.

    We need to be able to talk how it was beneficial, and who benefited from it, so we can see why it was so hard to end. Because we have a very similar problem with fossil fuels, and capitalism. They’re both destroying the world and causing us to do barbaric things to people. But there’s resistance to ending dependence on both, because they have benefits, even though most of those benefits go to an elite few.