This is basically me every night. Unless I go to bed at 3am, I usually toss and turn for an hour or more. So, I listen to audiobooks. Nothing heavy, usually just sci-fi or fantasy. Basically cotton-candy for the mind. Unless I have a good lecture going, the Great Courses stuff is soothing. But, that usually distracts me enough that I finally fall asleep. I use a single ear bud in my right ear and set a sleep timer so that the book shuts off after a reasonable time. That usually gets me close enough to sleeping that I can finally get the rest of the way.

The only downside to this plan, is when you get a really good book, with a good reader and you start getting towards the end of the book. The temptation to go just one more chapter is hard to resist.

Overall, love it. We had a hybrid RAV 4 and wanted to move to a larger vehicle. When we discovered that Toyota was releasing a hybrid Sienna for 2021, we jumped at it. We get ~35mpg on average. And we’ve put just a bit over 55k miles on it since we got it. Maintenance has mostly been routine, though we did have an odd issue with one of the sliding doors filling up with water. According to the tech at the service center, there is a drain which was clogged and needed to be cleared. This was likely exacerbated by the fact that it’s parked outside, in a wooded area. So, it sees a lot of leaf litter. And that is one down side, the back hatch can accumulate leaves and crap in the space between the top of the door and the body of the vehicle. Annoying, but you just have to clean it out on the regular. The adjustment rails for the rear seats are also hard to clean, if anything gets in them. So, that can be annoying.

As for performance, it moves well enough. It’s a mini-van, so you’re not going to beat a small car off the line, but you do get up to speed at a good clip. The turning radius is surprisingly narrow for such a large vehicle. At speed, the vehicle feels stable and handles ok. I’ll also say that the adaptive cruise control is insanely addictive. I’ve been driving in traffic this week and I can go a long time without touching the pedals. I’d also recommend getting to the trim level where you get the backup camera with the false overview of the vehicle, makes parking super simple.

We mostly use it for routine tasks like getting groceries or taking the kids places. We also go camping regularly and we can pack all our stuff into the back and put the kayaks on top. Its not a vehicle I’d take off road on anything challenging, but it handles unpaved roads ok.

So ya, we’ve been happy with it and I’d give it a recommendation.

American made car? Ya, I own a Toyota Sienna. And ya, I don’t think I’d buy an American brand again.

Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme with a really long time horizon. In a way, any fiat currency kinda is as well. The difference is that a government backed fiat currency like the US Dollar is backed by the US Government saying “you will accept the USD, or else”. That backing keeps the game running. Bitcoin has nothing like that. The only reason it keeps going is because of speculation, money laundering and the purchase of black market goods.

So, as long as you can go buy drugs or move money across borders with Bitcoin, it will have value. As long as it has value, some folks will speculate on it. That can keep prices up, right up until it doesn’t. So, as is always the case for speculative assets, caveat emptor.

Did folks not learn this from the response to Hurricane Katrina ? The people of New Orleans were basically left to rot while the State of Louisiana and Federal Government were standing around holding their dicks. When they finally did respond, it was about as bungled as it could be.

Whatever area you live in, figure out what disasters are possible/likely and plan to deal with the fallout from one of those, with zero help for a two weeks or more.

I happen to be a prime example of how bad US Rail is this week. I’m taking my son from near Fredericksburg (the real one), up to Ballston for a summer camp. We have a couple options:

1. Drive

• Distance: ~70 miles one way, ~140 round trip
• Time: 1 hour and 45 minutes one way, with traffic. ~3.5 hours round trip.
• Cost:
  • 4 gallons (US) of gas @ $3.50/gal: $14
  • Wear and tear: estimate at 0.5 gas cost: $7
  • Parking: $11
  • Total: $32/day

2. Virginia Railway Express (VRE) and Washington Area Metro (WMATA)

• Distance: N/A
• Time:
  • Drive to Fredericksburg station: 20 minutes
  • VRE (Fredericksburg to L’Enfant station) - 1 hour 20 minutes
  • WMATA (L’Enfant to Ballston) - 20 minutes
  • Total: 2 hours one way, 4 hours round trip
• Cost:
  • Drive: we’ll just ignore this, it’s close enough to zero.
  • VRE: $23.56/person * 2 people: $47.12
  • WMATA: $3.45/person * 2 people: $6.90
  • Total: $54.02/day

So, for the low, low cost of about 1.68 times the cost of driving, we can take slightly longer to get to our destination and have zero control over our schedule, which makes the actual time devoted to travel considerably longer. We tried the public transit route last year, and it meant leaving earlier in the morning (about 30 minutes) to catch a train to get us there on time, and getting us home around 45 minutes later. And this is right around the US Capitol, which has some of the better transit options. Needless to say, we’re driving this year.

I really want to be able to take transit, but it’s basically dead in the US. Earlier this year, I needed to go to Boston for work. Catching a train from Washington, DC to Boston meant an 7 hour train ride (using the “high speed” Acela line) at ~$500 round trip. Flying was 1.5 hours and cost ~$300 round trip. Wanna guess which option I used?

Basically, all of the incentives are stacked against transit options in the US. Except within certain metro areas, driving or flying is always cheaper and faster. Yes, inside those metro areas, public transit can be great. I used to work in Washington, DC and used the VRE I mentioned earlier to get there and then WMATA or the Capital BikeShare to get to my office. That was great, since I didn’t have to drive into DC every day, which sucks big donkey balls. But it probably wasn’t cost effective and wasn’t really time efficient either.

First question which popped into my mind was, “Will they force Defender out as well?”
Or, is Microsoft about to abuse it’s position to stifle competition? Again.

do anticheat count as antivirus?

No. But, from the article:

Microsoft has been speaking with game developers about how to reduce the amount of kernel usage

The CrowdStrike fiasco was finally enough for Microsoft to look at forcing drivers out of the kernel. This is absolutely a good thing and will hopefully lead to a more stable Windows.

There’s plenty of fraud, waste and abuse. It’s just conveniently called “contracting”, so money can be shoved out the door to private companies which do half the work at twice the price and end up delivering shoddy results. The reason DOGE didn’t find anything was that they weren’t looking at the contracting companies and instead were looking at the agencies themselves and the employees working for them. I won’t say that some of those agencies aren’t a complete waste of money (see: TSA, ICE, DOGE); but, DOGE was hyper-focused on agencies which actually do useful stuff (e.g.: SSA, NOAA).

Theoretically, browsers could even stop from the JS engine from being started for the site in the first place.

The NoScript extension is basically this. Most of the client side stuff is off by default and you can enable it per-domain. It breaks a whole lot of websites, but often in ways where the main content of a website is still readable. Over time, you can build up a list of “allow by default” domains and most of the web you care about works. Though, you may have to spend a moment or two sorting out permissions when you visit a new site.

If you repeat a lie enough times, eventually you start to believe it. Others might also start believing it. Get enough people fully wrapped up in your lies and now you have a cult. Your cult followers will happily swallow any lie you tell them and defend it, often to the point of torture and death. This is pretty much where we are with MAGA, it’s a cult of personality and it’s followers will happily slurp up anything which dribbles out of Trump.

I’m curious to see if the cult outlives its original prophet. Once Trump kicks it, does the cult undergo a transition to a full blown religion? Or, does it fizzle out without it’s original charismatic leader?

That actually sounds like a reasonable response. Driving assist means that a human is supposed to be attentive to take control. If the system detects a situation where it’s unable to make a good decision, dumping that decision on the human in control seems like the closest they have to a “fail safe” option. Of course, there should probably also be an understanding that people are stupid and will almost certainly have stopped paying attention a long time ago. So, maybe a “human take the wheel” followed by a “slam the brakes” if no input is detected in 2-3 seconds. While an emergency stop isn’t always the right choice, it probably beats leaving a several ton metal object hurtling along uncontrolled in nearly every circumstance.

That’s the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. And for as much as it is a foundational document of the US, it’s also not a legal document.

Violence is always a bad option. Sometimes however, it’s the least bad of the bad options. And knowing when that point has been reached is incredibly hard, and often misjudged.

Not a specific word or phrase, but Google Dorking is useful for limiting down search results. Just the basics of putting things in double quotes (e.g. “Find this exact text”) and negating words/phrases (e.g. -NotThis) can go a long way in refining search results. The “filetype:” modifier is much less useful than it was a decade or two ago, as SEO assholes have gotten wise to it and so include tags to show up on results using it. The “site:” keyword can be really handy, when you are pretty sure what you want is on a specific site/domain. Or, if you are trawling a website for specific information. You can also negate the “site:” keyword. So, you can add something like “-site:expertsexchange.com” to a search and get rid of useless advertising sites.

It’s a good thing the American people would never elect a demented narcissist to the office of The President.

Fuck.

No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it.

While I’m all for fresh ideas, one of the advantages to sticking with well known naming is that folks will often look for those things and might end up missing the community, if the name isn’t obvious and easily searchable. While “LFG” does imply that one is looking for a group, rather than maybe just a single other person, it also has a very long history in gaming and is a well known acronym. I suspect a lot of folks are going to specifically look for that acronym when starting their search. So, I’d argue with sticking with that classic.

That said, it is your community and you should build the identity you want to build. So, don’t let some old curmudgeon like me push you away from doing something that interests you.

Same. I had gotten the paid version because the dev deserved something for such a great app. RIF died and I did a hard cutover to Lemmy. Deleted my Reddit account and probably caused some confusion for the cordcutters subreddit. I had a post which was part of the sidebar for about a decade.

Ya, sadly there is still a lot of useful content in the technical subreddits. So I find myself ending up there via search engines on a fairly regular basis. But, I specifically use the Redirector plugin for Firefox to auto-magically force the use of old Reddit. If I hit the site on my work computer, I’m quickly reminded about why I quit the site.