The irony of the autistic person using a metaphor, and someone else taking it too literally. You have to laugh!

And people who have no time install gentoo? Pull the other one :D

I started in 2012, and it wasn’t that difficult. I’d say I do about 30mins of maintenance every other month. It took me a while to work out the config originally, but I wrote a guide afterwards which was really popular for other people doing the same thing (it’s quite out of date now but the principles are the same).

Started out using a raspberry pi (which was also hosting a website at the time) but when I moved house to somewhere with a worse internet connection I migrated to a VPS, so there is a cost but it’s not enormous, maybe £20/month.

Don’t even bother if you can’t use a static IP, because all your email will be bounced if your PTR record for the IP (reverse DNS record) doesn’t match your domain name.

It got a bit more complicated when people started adding extra layers of spam protection like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but those are mostly set and forget.

Overall, I’d say it’s worth it but only because I find it quite interesting/fun.

Google is unavoidable but I do my best to mitigate the worst parts of their privacy intrusions.

I have a pixel phone running grapheneOS with Google Services Framework installed but without Google Play or Gboard or any of that stuff. For me that’s a balance that works.

I host my own email server so no Gmail.

I also host my own Matrix server and avoid WhatsApp where possible (not Google but just as bad if not worse).

I use YouTube but via Newpipe or using Ublock origin on Firefox (not logged in obviously).

Chrome is genuinely worse than Firefox now that Google have made adblocking more difficult with manifest v3.

You just have to decide what the best tradeoff is between privacy and convenience.

Thicc

Interesting, I think it’s different for structural engineering because you’re doing calculations in accordance with a code of practice and the spreadsheet needs to be adapted to tweak the inputs and outputs of a standard formula and apply it slightly differently for different bridges / structural arrangements. I’ve written loads of spreadsheets that have been used and adapted by other people in my company, I honestly don’t think they are that difficult to understand (or people wouldn’t have been able to build on them and adapt them).

I can see that lab software is quite different, especially if you have very well defined procedures and you are repeating exactly the same test again and again with the same inputs and outputs.

In structural engineering (bridge design etc), we use quite complicated spreadsheets for calculations; a database wouldn’t be the right tool for that job. We use excel because everyone knows how to use it and it’s easy to print to PDF and see the inputs and outputs and any graphical summaries you have added. Using a spreadsheet makes it easy to check and easy to adapt/change when you want to do a slightly different calculation next time.

I’ve tried building spreadsheets of similar complexity in libreoffice and it’s true they are very slow in comparison and more prone to crashing.

Libreoffice works well for some tasks and I enjoy using it at home but honestly if I tried to use it at work it would cut my productivity significantly. I’m probably using it more intensively than most people though.

It’s really an agreement to work towards disarmament, not to just unilaterally disarm regardless of what everyone else is doing.

Article VI: Each party “undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control”.

I can’t see how for example Russia could be disarmed under strict and effective international control in the current climate.

We’re not increasing the number of our warheads in service, just replacing old ones with a new design.

Was not expecting that! What a dark character arc :D

What do you use nowadays?

The one thing AI LLMs seem to be actually quite good at is generating lots of quite ‘real’/‘genuine’ sounding comments and replies, so it really could be bots. It probably doesn’t actually take that much effort either in relative terms, if you decide you want to AstroTurf an online space.

It’s a shame because it could basically kill discussion on the internet as we know it. It’s mad to think it, but in a few years we could be telling younger generations of a time when we wrote words to each other online and it was reasonable to assume that we were talking to a real person…

Are they real though, or bots? It’s increasingly difficult to tell these days.

I’m just grateful to have a place to discuss niche topics where there’s a reasonable balance of power between users, mods, and admins.

Federation means no more rug pulling after years of building open source apps to access proprietary services.

Proper ‘competition’ between instance owners means nobody can degrade the quality of experience for a quick buck.

Thank you for your part in building a better alternative!

Thanks for the recipe! I hope you don’t mind me posting it directly in case the google docs disappears…

Some random Italian pasta sauce recipe

Ingredients

4 - 28oz cans San Marzano Peeled Tomatoes (whole or blended depending on whether you like chunky or smooth, you can also blend 3 cans and add the last one whole for a mix) (tip for shopping for these: prefer DOP if you can afford it and also look for cans with the LEAST amount of ingredients, san marzano “style”  is fine) (if the canned tomatoes you buy has calcium chloride added, PUREE IT. Calcium chloride essentially “embalms” the tomatoes making them firm and difficult to break down naturally, ie from heat)
1 - 6oz can tomato paste
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp dry basil
1 tsp dry parsley
1 tsp dry thyme
1 tsp crushed red pepper
1 small/medium yellow onion. Minced.
1 head garlic. Minced.
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil (add between 3 tbsp to up to an entire cup, I like my sauce a bit oilier so I add more)
½ cup red wine (Cabernets or Pinot Noir) (optional)
1 tsp crushed red pepper
2 - 3 bay leaves
Parmesan rind (optional)

Instructions

Heat olive oil in a pot on medium-low. Then add the onions. Cook until onions are translucent.
Add garlic and sauté for 30-60 seconds. Stir constantly to keep garlic from burning.
Add tomato paste and stir until onion, garlic, tomato paste mixture is uniform.
Add all 4 cans of tomatoes into the pot. Add red wine, salt, crushed red pepper, black pepper and bay leaves. Mix well. Partially cover with lid, and simmer on LOW heat for 2+ hours. Stir every so often to avoid burning. Note: if using a parmesan rind, add it in this step and let it simmer with sauce until finished. Remove and discard rind when ready to serve.
Near the 2 hour mark, add basil, parsley and thyme. Remove bay leaves and discard. Mix and taste. Season with additional salt & black pepper if needed.

Bonus

Store & keep fresh: Let sauce cool to room temperature then store in an airtight container or glass jars. Chill in the refrigerator for up to 5 - 7 days.

How to freeze: First, let the sauce cool to room temperature – then store in an airtight container or ziplock freezer bag. Freeze for up to 3 to 4 months

How has nobody asked for the recipe yet?

Spill the beans!

The real cost of having kids is the loss of one parent’s earnings for about 2-3 years. You lose it either way: work and pay or stay home.

Early years care is more expensive than when kids are older because you need more staff per child so the first couple of years are worst, but even when you get “free hours” it doesn’t cover the full cost because the “hours per week” are term time hours, 30hrs/week doesn’t cover a full working day, and the extras like food and snacks are on top…

Oh baby

That looks delicious. How was the steak cooked? What’s in the compound butter?

Auto updates works really well for me so far!

I’ve wanted this for years; in the past manually flashing the privileged extension after every system update was such a pain that I quickly gave up on it.

Wouldn’t this be quite slow to transmit messages? When you send email between federated servers your mail goes in a queue on your server to be sent and depending on the connection speed and how busy it is you could easily wait 5 minutes before it’s delivered at the other end. Not that the messages caused by this app would be big enough to slow things down a lot, but if the server you are using is also being used to send normal emails with large attachments then you could end up waiting a while.