JDubbleu

Glad to help!

The reason it works is because telecom providers use DNS-based throttling instead of deep packet inspection to selectively limit bandwidth to video sites. They have a massive list of all the popular streaming sites (YouTube, AppleTV, Netflix, etc.) and then throttle the sites in the list. When providers say "unlimited 480p video streaming" they actually have no clue what video quality you are watching. They just pick a bandwidth limitation that would only allow 480p video to play without buffering.

They could in theory use network traffic analysis to identify video websites which have bursty bandwidth patterns (due to the nature of video buffers), but this would be more difficult, more expensive, and extremely prone to false positives.

I've been using Google's Gemini and it's pretty good at interpreting fucked up or imperfect smart commands. For example we have some lights named "Chrimas Lights" and it will turn those on and off by referring to them as Christmas lights. It can also do multiple commands in a row without being overly explicit. So you can say "set lights to x%, make them yellow, and turn them off in an hour and set my TV to volume x" and it'll do it no problem. The old assistant could not do anything even close to this.

It's also much faster and processes words as fast if not faster than a human can. From finishing a command to the command being executed seems to be about 1/10th of a second which makes me wonder if it's doing any sort of inferencing on the back end. It's one of the best LLM integrations I've seen so far.

I've had ProtonVPN for 3 years now and I have 0 complaints.

It's the only VPN I've ever used that doesn't have less bandwidth on VPN than off. I regularly saturate my gigabit connection for hours at a time with 0 issues or throttling, and tunnel my torrent client's traffic through it 24/7. It also allows me to watch 4k content on mobile data without throttling and circumvent my phone provider's restrictions on hotspot/tethering that they want me to pay $30/month to remove.

Best $5/month I've ever spent.

I've noticed it's less common in the city and more common in rural areas. I live in SF and people here don't call them gas stations unless they have gas, but in the Central Valley this is extremely common.

I grew up there and I always forget how much more "proper" I speak at home vs where I grew up. My partner sometimes struggles to understand what I'm trying to say a lot of the time when I slip back into it when speaking with my family. Gas station is just one of the many overly generic terms. Another one is "Vallarta" which doesn't necessarily mean the chain grocery store Vallarta, but a Mexican grocery store usually selling produce and with a meat counter.

Gas station is a somewhat colloquial form of bodega/corner store in the US. Often corner stores without gas stations will still be referred to as gas stations. Sometimes they're also called convenience stores.

Auto save with Google Docs style snapshots has so little overhead I'd hardly consider it a trade-off. We have insane amounts of disk storage and extremely reliable non-volatile memory. The only reason against it that I can conceive of is confidential data you don't ever want to exist outside of volatile memory.

All modern word processors use auto save and it kinda blows my mind libre does not do this.

This is part of why getting credit cards early (if you're capable of being responsible with them) is so important. All my oldest credit lines are credit cards (I have 4 of them), so any future loans will be taking my average credit line down instead of up. As a result I'll always have those old credit lines and my score will only go up when I pay things off completely.

I got stopped with a Panettone once. Thankfully this was in EWR so the Italian-American gate agent understood why I'd be smuggling one to the west coast.

That's interesting given that in California pre-school is 4-yo and kindergarten is the year after that.

Almost every personal computer that isn't a MacBook is poorly secured due to the lack of filesystem encryption as a default. No one encrypts their data at rest, and as such you just have to pull their drive and read it with another computer. Hell, I don't encrypt my entire file system despite being aware of this because of the inconvenience of added boot time, but everything that matters is encrypted and backed up across multiple devices.

The best thing anyone can do is keep the amount of critical, digital data they have to a minimum, keep that data encrypted and backed up, and use a password manager properly. That alone makes it exceedingly unlikely you will ever be a victim of cybercrime solely because you're more of a pain in the ass to compromise than 99.9% of the world.

I personally have almost 10TB of data between all my systems, but of that maybe 10 MB is actually valuable to anyone but me.

I don't think so because it requires you to provide proof you work there actively, and those who leave are assigned alumni and grandfathered in. It's mainly just lots of PIP and toxicity that is discussed, and memeing about how dog shit things are.

Even within SF there's plenty of great areas, but "peace and tranquility in the sunset district" doesn't make headlines. SF has a ton of problems and I really hope we can fix them in the long term, but they tend to only be in certain parts of the city. Saying all of SF is like this is akin to saying the entire bay area is like SF. They're both massive overgeneralizations.