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  • 36 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • “I drive for free”

    So your solar panels didn’t cost anything? Look I’m very pro-solar but rooftop solar for residential makes sense for very few people. It’s not very efficient (even with the best panels available at the time) and the efficiency falls off over time as the panels degrade. Most rooftop solar savings calculations use absurd estimates for power costs in the future to justify themselves and take 10+ years to pay off. Furthermore selling a house with rooftop solar is harder due to having to find someone to take over the lease (which is needed to pay for it for most people).

    None of this even starts to address the solar rooftop companies that have gone out of business while leaving their customer high and dry.

    Again, I like solar but rooftop just doesn’t make sense for most people.



  • I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I think this is actually a great thing for Mastodon. The truth is the majority of people are just never going to sign up for a Mastodon server as they stand today. The majority of people want algorithmic feeds run by a central entity. I know the people here don’t want that, but that’s what the majority of people do want. Will I use Threads? No but if this breathes more life into Mastodon and exposes more people to the concept then that is a good thing. Being able to use a client of your choice to interact with people on something like Threads is also a very good thing. The alternative is a completely closed social network like Twitter.

    I know, I know “embrace, extend, extinguish”, but literally this is the best that we can hope for unfortunately. The alternative is everyone goes and uses a closed system.


  • Wordpress. Or some other hosted blog/cms.

    Yes you can go crazy with SSGs or write your own site but especially if it’s rare that you will blog/update then it’s way better to just use something off the shelf. That’s what I’d do as a software developer. Heck I paid for a static site with a simple web UI to update it just last week to serve as the marketing site for my software product (that I wrote from scratch).

    Unless you enjoy tinkering and know programming I would shy away from the SSGs. I used them for years and now I self-host Ghost and even that I’m considering just paying someone else to do since it’s not how I want to spend my time (maintaining it).


  • “Camera”, “Web Browsing”…. In name only.

    I had the phone pictured in the post. I even activated the browser. It was 100% trash. WAP sites and browsers were nothing like even the first iPhone. That’s what made the iPhone such a shock, no one had browsed the web like that on a phone before and it was, no exaggeration, a game changer.

    As for the camera the first iPhone camera was garbage comparatively but still was better than most if not all flip phones. I have picture back from when I had that phone pictured in the post and they are a grainy mess.




  • How is it that all these comments miss the fact that there are zero leaks from the board (even anonymously) that this is the case? This is so clearly a move by Altman and his supporters to chum the waters and make the board look incompetent (when there is no evidence to corroborate it). “People in the know” is what you say when you can’t be more specific and could literally be any from my Altman himself to disgruntled employees. You can bet your bottom dollar if they had a real line into the board you’d give something much less wishy-washy.

    Stop reading headlines as facts people.




  • I’m not understanding the CoPilot hate. It’s an amazing tool if you are competent. Even when it gets it wrong it still saves me 90%+ of the typing then I just correct what it did differently than how I want it.

    Boilerplate becomes a breeze and I work way better when I have something to iterate on rather than coming up with it from scratch. It lets me play with and test ideas way faster and sometimes even does it differently than I’d do it which leads to learning new things and/or looking at the problem in a different way. I don’t blindly follow its output, sometimes I reject it wholesale, sometimes I edit it, sometimes it’s literally exactly what I would have typed myself.



  • I think the current startup scene leads to some pretty perverse incentives, as we’ve seen. However, I agree with you, and something needs to fill the void. A number of these startups have a very hard to no path to profitability but the ideas they come up with and execute on aren’t happening at larger corps.

    I think maybe with less of a monopoly/duopoly/etc we can move past the “you have to own the whole market or it’s not worth it”-mindset. That’s one thing I hate so much about SV/startup culture. You’re either a unicorn or you’re a failure, which is total bullshit but when VCs and the like are involved those are the only 2 options.

    I have my own side business, it’s small right now but it could grow to support me fully. It will never be a billion dollar idea, it will never “change the world”, but it’s an honest job and over time if I keep growing it I could go full time on it. I wish more people aimed for something like that.

    I’ll also get up on my soapbox and talk about how things like UBI, universal healthcare, and similar programs would make this path 10000x easier for people. Having a safety net and not having to pay a second mortgage for healthcare would be nice.