That’s fair.

It’s one of the biggest repositories of human-to-human communication on the web.

I am showing my age and have spent decades on various web forums. These sites have thousands, or even tens of thousands, of users and huge quantities of threads some of which can be very deep. Yes, each individual site isn’t that big but there are tons of these things scattered around the web and I’m sure they’ve been crawled. One of the many, many, many manymanymany Ford Mustang forums has > 2 million replies. thirdgen.org, an 80s-early 90s Camaro/Firebird, forum has 763,427 threads with 6.45 million replies going back easily 20 years, which is well before bots.

Discord does have 154M monthly users, so you’re probably right that there is more content there than across all the various boards. It’s also probably a heck of a lot easier to crawl than a bunch of different web forums.

I don’t see that being worth much $$ given the massive quantities of that information already available on the web via forums and what not?

Lots of very general light chat and shit posts. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of revenue potential there.

Moving from enshitified closed source to a different closed source that’s trying to position itself as user first isn’t necessarily bad.

Duckduckgo’s browser uses webview as it’s main engine, which means that on a phone it will simply use blink (chromium) on Android and Windows device or webkit on Apple devices.

Agree. The default download location on iOS and padOS is iCloud and it’s pretty clear that Microsoft is chasing Apple’s monetization model.

Most videoconferencing software these days has dynamic gain to try to accommodate people using non-ideal microphone placement. See if you can turn that off. Audio pressure decreases pretty drastically with distance. Using 10 cm as your microphone to mouth distance, 2.5 m as the distance from your wife’s mouth to your microphone, and 60 dB speaking volume, your voice is 30 dB louder than your wife’s. That should be enough to make it nearly inaudible / certainly not distracting.

If you’re looking to mic shop, get a directional mic. Your current microphone is omnidirectional. A directional microphone will provide even more acoustical attenuation over your wife’s voice. A coworker uses one of these for his WFH setup. Look for terms like Cardioid, Supercardioid, and/or Hpercardioid. These are the same microphones used by vocalists on stage.

As a recent modern Mac user, this experience is so bizarre and is always a little different.

I grew up on macs (thanks mom) and built a PC as soon as I had my first real job in highschool. I recently bought a MacBook for the promise of battery life and cool running. If only it was easier to get my arm windows laptop to boot Linux…

Haha, TIL that SQL is 51 years old. IBM mainframes were still all the rage in the 70s. My assumption is that government would have not been an early adopter, but I could obviously be wrong.

That sounds surprising modern. That’s good! Or at least I would think it is good. So many things run on mainframes still.

Genuine question: do they make money from AOSP being used on third party devices? Obviously they get revenue via the Play store, but you can avoid that by either installing something like graphine or an alternative store (Fdroid, Amazon, etc).

I was thinking the same :(

If it snows “bad enough” this is very common. The roads are going to be hard to drive on, which leads to more accidents and just puts first responders in jeopardy. The day before a big snow the grocery stores are usually slammed.

I spent 15 years living in central NJ and there really isn’t much to do there, especially during the winter when you can’t do outdoors things.

We’re currently living in SE MI and the Detroit Metro has so much more to do. Yeah, it’s not the absolute best but we have a great art museum, a zoo, tons of outdoor parks, and a number of medium sized museums. Relatively cheap land and taxes means there are plenty of commercial places to take the kids to for indoor play. Between these and the museums we keep the kids busy during the winter. Every “town” in the Metro has an annual event, so when it’s warm out theres basically one every weekend. Tons of art and music festivals, along with car shows.

NYC and Philly have nicer museums, and more cultural attractions, but I suspect they don’t have as many indoor play type things. I also have no idea about the school situation. Thankfully, our public schools are pretty good here.

I didn’t realize you could own apartments, but I guess that makes sense. I doubt it would be cheap, but it’s good to know it’s an option.

Suburbia hell checking in. We have a family of four and our 3 bed 1.75 bath (shower stall vs full bath) with mortgage, taxes, and insurance is less than $1,250/mo on a 30 year mortgage. It is modest in terms of square footage, but is well maintained and has a full basement and a green space for the kids to run. We tend to buy 2-3 year old cars and then drive them into the ground. The nice thing with the house is that our monthly payment is basically fixed until it’s paid off since tax increases are capped at 2% per year. The downside to a house is being on the hook for all the maintenance.

We’re considering moving and I’m very curious to try to game out what the actual financials of moving somewhere like NYC or Philly would be. Salaries would likely go up some, rent would likely go up significantly, no cars, and the tradeoffs between owning and renting. Anything else you would point at?

Preface: I’m jealous.

That out of the way, I think this really depends on where you live and your job. Carless in single family detached housing suburbia does not sound like fun. Being carless seems like a no-brainer in a dense area with decent public transportation and/or within walking distance of your job.

I work adjacent to a group that does speech recognition. There’s a massive amount of variation in regional dialects and that’s before you get to non-native speakers. The you have people like my mother in law who doesn’t have an accent, but her diction and grammar are… unique.

If someone is speaking in sentences you can use context clues to infer intent, but it’s a lot more challenging when you’re just getting spoken commands.

I suspect it’s a training/sample gap, but it’s likely going to be really hard to get to 100%.

Eh, your account is still tied to an instance. That instance stores your subscriptions, as well as the vast majority of your preferences. If you want to get way into the weeds, that’s why Jerboa won’t persist comment sort order, but other clients will - there is a server side prefer for all/local/subscribed and new/hot/best at a post level, but not at a comment level.

The Frontier’s Q3 sales of ~16k were outpaces by the Ranger (21k) Colorado 29k), Maverick (45k), and Tacoma (57k). It did outsell the Ridgeline (13k) and Canyon (10k).

I know there are ebs and flows as models change over, but I don’t think either Nissan truck has ever been close to the front of the pack.

source

It also makes it easy to find all your subscriptions in one place. When every provider tries to get you to subscribe, hunting them all down becomes a pain.