Inb4 someone writes a program and calls it AdblockAI. It gets trained on the shape of corporate logos and on the fly in-paints those regions of the screen to remove the logos.

On that same note, how about AR glasses that put black bars over ads and logos you encounter in real life so companies don’t get to subliminally advertise at you.

Rereading that, it’s not super clear who “they” is referring to. Here is what I was trying to say: In the past, some of our media has been revised to make it politically correct, books, film, and other media. I don’t agree with this, but I do think some of those people have good intentions. Putting ads on cultural artifacts (like our media) retroactively is whole new level of evil: supervillain evil. It’s like “Stonehenge, brought to you by CocaCola and Nestle” or “Skip the line at the Great Pyramid with Amazon Prime”. One is motivated by a misguided desire to protect everyone’s feefees. The other one is just pure greed.

They edited all the movie dialog to be woke/ now they’re gonna edit all the graphics to grab more money. :-D

The doorbell is gone. I replaced it with a different one that works locally. At this point it’s just the a keypad I need to acquire. I agree with you that I should vote with my dollar. It seems that there aren’t a lot of options. I see a round radial-like one out there from a few different sellers but there’s really a dearth of information. Perhaps I’ll have to dig a bit more. Other than the HA forum, is there anywhere in particular you would recommend looking?

Not a mean question at all. I haven’t had more difficulty keeping a working system than I did on Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, etc. I get everything I need in Arch and the packages are always fresh off the grill. I also like the emphasis on text config files and a ground-up install. That helped me better understand my system and how it works.

No idea about performance. My performance recommendation is “don’t run Windows!” :)

You are correct. That wasn’t the most descriptive statement on my part :D

The black Reolink WiFi doorbell one was what I purchased. I was tempted by the PoE one because it would avoid using WiFi bandwidth but there’s no cable in that area.

My partner had a preference for the wider FOV so I got the black one. It paired no problem and after banging my head against the wall for a while I got the stream working in Home Assistant, VLC, then Frigate. I haven’t decided how I want to handle the recording. I have yet to set up notifications and I’m not certain if my doorbell circuit is providing enough power, which would explain why the Bezos Bell sucked at keeping a charge (also surveiling your customers all day takes a lot of juice). This may become a slightly bigger project if I have to rerun the wiring.

There was a lot of hype around this bell and that naturally makes me skeptical, but rarely have I had a device pair and get to a functional state that quickly, even in most proprietary apps. We’ll see how it works out once I have it wired in.

Yeah, easier is better. I’ll have to confirm what apps outside of Jellyfin and Chromecast are needed, but I’ll compare some basic Roku devices. I could probably score one a online neighborhood marketplace for a few bucks.

Thanks for weighing in.

I noticed the same thing with KDE and Wayland. Sometimes my curser still grows 10 sizes or shrinks as I pass over certain windows or between monitors but things are more consistent and predictable than they used to be.

My Minecraft pals used mumble at various points. It’s less polished than some options. I like the FOSS and the simplicity but the certificates confused me as a noob. Would still recommend.

Every cycle of enshittification sends more people looking for alternatives. Remember the rebirth of “piracy” which streaming had all but killed for the most normal normies? People crave the system, but it’s possible they’ll slowly come around. Will it be fast enough. That’s for us to find out. I gently encourage people to think about more than just tomorrow because that short term proprietary bullcrap isn’t worth it in the long term. Definitely hear you though and it does feel that uphill sometimes.

Not to mention you can fit more Reddit on a 1TB hard drive than YouTube, which makes it much easier to exfiltrate content.

I have a feeling that the YouTube apocalypse will be much harder to watch (as in “more sad/unpleasant”) than the Reddit apocalypse.

I was curious about that. I settled on the black one for my space, though I haven’t ordered yet and I probably would also be happy with white. There is a long straight wall to the right of my door, so I need basically no FOV to the right and the left can sweep the whole yard in the background.

I do sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Is there any reason to not combine the commands since the output always prompts prior to changes anyway?

It sounds like we were similarly inquisitive children, perhaps to the point of making adults uncomfortable.

My European mother is the reason religion didn’t fuck me up worse than it did. I was also forced to go to church as a kid, but even within our own family there were differences in thought and opinion that still managed to exist in civil dinner table discourse. My mother seems to have gone through her own questioning process, it just didn’t take her to extreme atheism but rather she arrived at more of a mystical Abrahammic monotheism. When I was older, I fell into the trap of religion on my own (Evangelical Christianity) and it’s changed the course of my life significantly in both good and bad ways.

A decade to a decade and a half later I’m mostly over it. I’m comfortable with my current belief system and I live life openly and honestly with 95% of people I meet. If I had to describe myself I’d call myself a self-rolled Buddhist-Atheist.

I’m not envious of those Christians with enough of a conscience to realize what’s going, but who are reliant on “American Christians™” for their community, support, spirituality/philosophy/introspection. They have difficult and painful decisions ahead of them. You can only ignore your conscience for so long, but the first to defect will be shunned and hated and will likely lose their entire social circles. That happened to me. They will also be susceptible, as we all are, to similar tactics and abuses as those doled out by their former religion. You don’t leave and suddenly become a mastermind at spotting abuse of power and become immediately immune. If anyone reading this falls into that category, I would recommend finding a nice, non-religious hobby where you see people from different walks of life on a regular basis. Bicycling groups, social dances, gardening collectives, etc. People are pretty nice outside of the bubble. You’ll be okay.

I’m a Buddatheist who grew up with both cultural Catholicism and later Christian Evangelicism.

I like how this hints at the nature of the self. If I leave someone behind am I not also leaving myself behind?

For me, ethical acts are those that increase the freedom of the self and others. We all suffer. That’s a fact of life. If we dissolve our concept of the self and acknowledge our link to others and the world itself we can see ourselves more as threads going through human experience. If we are kind to ourselves and “others”, we have a better chance at reducing that suffering.

Imagine the time a stranger forgot their wallet and you paid for their coffee. A version of that experience could still exist in that person’s mind long after you die. It could get blended with other experiences and reinterpreted. It could be told as a story to a friend who was inspired by the act. The cascading effects of that person being properly caffeinated on that day could have world changing effects. In a similar way, I carry the shared experiences of my own ancestors and even strangers who have shared their stories with me. They are still alive as a small part of me because my true self is humanity or even some animating life force of the universe or something like that and the name that people call me just refers to the limited perspective and incomplete view I have of existence. Essentially I see existence as blinders limiting my perspective like a race horse, but the true self is a satellite view of the track. When I act, I do so based not only on my experience, but the collective experience of every perspective and experience that has been conveyed to me in every way, but I am still one human body, in physical space, subject to time. I hope that when I die, those blinders will be lifted and I’ll exist as pure conscious perception of everything that ever was is and will be. Able to see through anyone’s eyes, in any time. To feel any and every feeling felt my an animal or human. To view the entirety of existence as a completed masterpiece from outside time itself.

You can probably see why I like the Buddhists.

I find that when you acknowledge the interconnection of things compassion becomes easier.

I hope that people rediscover that within themselves and others.

Last night’s Southpark kind of hinted at this topic a little bit. I’m curious to see where they take it, but I won’t post any spoilers here because I don’t know who has seen it.

If it was a German story, someone would have shaved all the heads of all the little snot-noses laughing at him, a la “The Inky Boys”

The cables seem to increase exponentially don’t they? First, you have a few computers and a half dozen cables powering things and linking everything together, then you add a couple servers, maybe a second nic on your NAS, and another switch or two since things are now further from the router. Suddenly your office looks like a giant bowl of spaghetti covered in prop 65 stickers.