I come from a poor background, so having any large pot of cash was always risky due to “emergencies” requiring those funds. I got out of that living situation and now finally have more money than my living expenses for the first time. None of my family were actually good with money, so that is the background for this post. So yes, correct.

Absolutely. I had some TWS headphones that were really good and I actually ended up replacing the battery in the case when it couldn’t hold a day of charge because it was worth it. I would much rather repair something than replace it and buy quality that will last as well, both of which are benefited by having the cash on hand. If you can’t afford $200 headphones but you can get $20 ones today maybe buy the $20 ones and use them while saving for the better ones. It will take time but you may be able to make the crappy ones last long enough, even if you have to get two sets to make it through.

For some items yes, but, and perhaps this is privilege from living in Australia, surely if it fails immediately you can return it and get a replacement or refund? Here we have a 12 month warranty on most things but also a reasonae expectation standard, so if it is a larger thing like a fridge or dishwasher we can get more of a reasonable warranty period.

So I guess a better way of phrasing it would include at what point it requires more money from you if it fails? So for a basic electronic thing 12 months would be the minimum that would be covered by the manufacturer and you are only on the hook for it after that time? I know that is not suitable for some other places like the USA where you are often on your own once you leave the store.

Yes, and items seem to be manufactured to exceed their warranty period by only a short time. I assume that an item will last for a year in most cases, or the warranty period if that is longer. For white goods like a fridge or a washing machine I look for statistics and use longevity as part of my purchasing process, so I aim to buy appliances which will last a fairly long time and then save based on that not being the most likely outcome. My fridge can be expected to last 5-7 years, so by year 3 I will have enough saved or room made in lines of credit to afford a replacement. Obviously it is best to have nothing accruing interest so I will tend to pay credit down first but some if the credit cards where I am actually have good terms such as a 36 month interest free period. The utility of money during that time is available for other things and I can reduce my costs in other ways.

This is why free software is so important. The company can just lie to you about their product and for some reason it isn’t illegal. I really want to have a dishwasher and washing machine with an ESP32 controller and free software to control it, ideally with Home Assistant integration, but at this point I can’t find anything.

I can see why you would feel that way but I came to a different conclusion. I agree with much of what he says given his position and circumstances.

The project is open source and anyone is welcome to fork it. He is not making something which will make money, provide a living, and secure his station as an open source guru. He is making something because he thinks it should exist and because he finds it interesting. He is not making something for end users, it isn’t for them, it is for people who have enough interest and knowledge to figure it out given the massive leg up he has provided already.

This means he does not do a bunch of things that would pull beginner users in. For example, there is not a simple GUI installer for this. He doesn’t sell kits to root your device. He doesn’t sell little server boxes based on a raspberry pi. He doesn’t have an app for quick discovery and configuration. All of these things would entice beginners and therefore induce them to install unsupported firmware on their several hundred to over a thousand dollar robot vacuum.

This would be hell. Each user with a new and unique way of not understanding the instructions would come up with new failures in an area where bricking your very expensive machine is easy. Can you imagine how much of a dick he would have to be to say “Nah, this is super easy, come give it a go” when the outcome would definitely be causing at least some people to lose hundreds of dollars in a few minutes? That would be him acting like a dick.

What he is doing has a second function. I have just ordered my first custom PCB. I have some components on the way and will be doing my second major electronics project once the parts arrive. I am much more experienced on the software end of things so I get all of the basics around using a terminal etc but now I am learning about using the UART interface and while it is a little bit sink and swim I am at a level where I understand how far outside my knowledge base this is and can take a reasonably informed risk. I am learning and growing and I am actually really excited. If it doesn’t work I will know enough to be helped through by the community but my expectation is I will fail at first and maybe take a few weeks to figure it out. Because of that expectation I am not doing this after my last vacuum broke and now I just desperately need this to work, that would add so much stress, instead I am doing this in the least stressful and most enjoyable way possible.

If I had been correctly scared off early I wouldn’t have lost a bunch of photos accidentally wiping a drive while installing Linux for the first time, so I would have used virtual machines for longer, but I also would have eventually gotten there. I got there by losing some data, but if I had a community around me it would have been better. He actively encourages community building and sharing knowledge. I think that is cool and would be an awesome outcome. I know I will be posting about my spare adapters once I am done making them to see if anyone else wants to learn how to do it.

Just so I am clear, nobody has made the pun “end-to-end-to-end encryption” yet? Really?

I have just purchased a Dreame L10s Ultra and have had the PCB for a breakout board made and components for setting it up ordered. In a few days I should get the last bits and I will be able to root the device and have it connect to Valetudo managed through Home Assistant. Fully local operation with basically the same features but none of the privacy issues. As soon as I can get it connected I will be able to use it just like a robot I actually own should without some random third party being involved in every single operation.

What I don’t get is why they don’t make a model with more battery space to flatten out the back. I would love a phone with 10Ah instead of 3Ah and I already carry a battery pack for this exact reason. The lack of options is super annoying.

Yep, and surviving longer increases cancer rates. Cancer used to be a death sentence, now it is far less so. Many cancers which were a short time from death at diagnosis are now routine to remove or fix. Others that were soon fatal have 5 year survival over 90%, and some are even higher.

We haven’t cured cancer just like we haven’t cured industrial accidents, but honestly, so few people are eaten by hungry machines and left disfigured that it is likely you know less than a handful. Not cured but reduced to a much more manageable level.

The crazy thing is we actually do have things that work in humans but not in mice. Mice are omnivores and are very different in terms of optimal energy state. They tend to run in glucose more easily than on fat and their whole biology is built to be small and fast, with short life spans.

Checking how DNA repair works in an animal which lives for maybe 2 years is great for understanding DNA repair in short lived organisms, but we have tk repair damage for 50 times as long. It is just so much more complex and requires such different tools when you switch from maybe 2 years to maybe 80 years, it really isn’t sane to assume it will all carry over.

Now for an accute toxin, say tobacco, sure, some things work just fine. There is not a huge difference between humans and mice when subjected to cyanide or arsenic. Being crushed by a falling piano is going to kill both of us. But a chronic poison? That will take decades to kill? That is very different. We can shed cells in a different way to how they can. We have more mass to store things. We have more energy storage. We have bigger kidneys with more opportunities for filtering. We are different.

When we enter ketosis we have some fairly significant cancer responses. When we maintain fasting for 5+ days we have a fairly large bump in autophagy, a state where the body kills off and recycles damaged cells. This state can cause some types of cancer to be more obvious to our immune systems and allow the tumor to be attacked. In some cases otherwise inoperable tumors can be removed after shrinking them through fasting. This does not replicate in mice. So yes, some treatments (not cures because that doesn’t really apply) do work in humans and not in mice.

A quick point to add. Adding fat to your meal makes it more filling and for longer. The worst fats are trans fats, second worse are polyunsaturated fats, and mono seem to be fairly good along with most saturated fats. In terms of cost some of the vegetable fats are much cheaper but they often have trans fats which are essentially toxic and they also go rancid very easily.

Saturated fats are generally solid at room temperature and don’t absolutely need to be refrigerated on cool to moderate weather days. If you would sweat the butter would too, so put it in the fridge.

If you add a small amount of mince to your beans it will stretch really far and add tonnes of flavour and protein without breaking the bank. Cheaper mince comes with more fat but if you are making beans you want that, so get the cheaper mince, lean is not helpful.

Beans on rice freezes well for weeks. Beans without rice is good for months frozen. Beans with rice and any cheese or sour cream is not OK frozen. Beans with cheese microwaves well, but add sour cream after heating.

To make it more satisfying you can add a little bit of some chilli sauce. Hotter sauces go further, but the best is fermented sauces. The cheapest chilli sauces are full of sugar and water, so they just sweeten and dilute rather than flavour your dish.

If your beans tastes sour add a small amount of sugar, stir for a minute, and test again. Sugar fixes the sourness quite well.

For extra flavour a stock cube can be added. I would recommend beef stock for beans, but it will work with chicken or fish too. Most stocks are now vegan because they re synthetic, but they add a lot of flavour and are perfectly fine to eat.

The best option if you can manage it is to learn how to make a beef broth from bones. You boil the bones for hours, around 8 or so should do, and the bones will start to soften and become translucent. At this point all the nutritional goodness of the bones is in the broth. You can then use this as a base for making stew, beans, soup, etc, or you can reduce it by open top heating it and letting the steam leave. This will make a strong stock you can use to add flavour and nutrition to other meals for the cost of some energy and cheap bones.

A slow cooker can make cooking all of this much easier and safer. Electric slow cookers are able to be set up in the morning and have dinner most of the way ready by dinner time. The slow steady heat is great for bones and for softening meat and the easy of use is just fantastic.

Coal is dying as an investment but existing coal plants will likely run for a long while. Overall demand for energy is rising, the new demand is being met mostly with renewables, but there is a small amount of that increase that is being met by a small increase in coal usage. As renewable manufacture gets faster and more efficient I expect the coal growth will reverse, but it is all about when. If it happens quickly we have less apocalyptic damage. If it happens slowly then we will be more fucked.

Solar is far and say the cheapest form of new energy to roll out. Wind is a not so close second. Coal is getting more expensive by the day. The only reason to roll out coal is insufficient production of solar and wind. It takes time to increase manufacturing capacity but we are getting there and we can do this.

Much as I feel genital mutilation is awful and should be a thing of the past this will unfortunately harm people on the way. The religious who believe circumsision is a good idea will keep doing so, but along the way women who are pregnant will have their only reasonable option for pain and fever relief stigmatised, ironically potentially increasing the rate of autism. There is some evidence that maternal fever may increase the likelihood of autism in the child, so not using paracetamol to control fever may increase the rate.

Also, never side with Nazis. If they say the sky is blue you don’t say you agree, you say that the sky is blue. They will always try to pull people in to agreeing with them and then change their opinion later and try to pull people along with them.

Yep, it started going bad when Google took over it fully and started making changes that didn’t go through to the Chromium browser project. And killing ad blockers. And the telemetry.

I would recommend trying a few of the Gecko engine based browsers. Zen is pretty cool and has become my desktop default recently but other people prefer different ones. In my opinion if you can’t read the code you can’t know what they are doing, so shouldn’t trust it. Not personally read the code, I mean I principle.

Yep, and he had to also solve the problem of the week given everything they could figure out in the 7 days following it happening. A cool set of limitations for the writers, the execution was a little sloppy, but overall a cool idea.

Yep, and not to mention the position of our solar system in the Milky Way or our galaxy in the local cluster. In fact, without a specific reference frame you would have to make corrections very rapidly for even a tiny jump in time.

Yeah, it is absolutely insane to think that as a person with a literal disability in attentional regulation I have had fewer collisions than most people who are not disabled. It seems like if it is too easy people stop trying and don’t take it seriously, so they text or change the music or reach over the back. I know I can’t do that without risking a major issue and I actively have to maintain focus, so I simply do not ever “let it slide” or “just this once”. Rules can save lives if followed, but do nothing if ignored.

The unfortunate thing about people is we acclimatise quickly to the demands of our situation. If everything seems OK, the car seems to be driving itself, we start to pay less attention. Fighting that impulse is extremely hard.

A good example is ADHD. I have severe ADHD so I take meds to manage it. If I am driving an automatic car on cruise control I find it very difficult to maintain long term high intensity concentration. The solution for me is to drive a manual. The constant involvement of maintaining speed, revs, gear ratio, and so on mean I can pay attention much easier. Add to that thinking about hypermiling and defensive driving and I have become a very safe driver, putting about 25-30 thousand kms on my car each year for over a decade without so much as a fender bender. In an automatic I was always tense, forcing focus on the road, and honestly it hurt my neck and shoulders because of the tension. In my zippy little manual I have no trouble driving at all.

So imagine that but up to an even higher level. Someone is supervising a car which handles most situations well enough to make you feel like a passenger. They will switch off and stop paying attention eventually. At that point it is on them, not the car itself being unfit. I want self driving to be a reality but right now it is not. We can do all sorts of driver assist stuff but not full self driving.

It is more than that. In previous studies from the authors they have controlled for the nutritional content and the processing and found that the content itself, so carbs fats etc, have a certain amount of causal influence on health, but the processing also has a separate and significant effect. Just having less processing seems to have a meaningful effect. This means less of the additives like milk powder, xanthan gum, sweeteners, flavourings, extracts, and so on. The exact mechanism seems to vary depending on the specific case, but separating components of food and then remixing them as well as adding non food components and processing with heat and pressure seems to make these things no longer digestible and safe.