zlatiah

Second this. Also link to relevant Cory Doctorow article for those interested: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/17/free-as-in-freefile/

Personally, last year my taxes were somewhat complex, but I filed my taxes using the fillable electronic forms alone anyways; IRS actually nicely corrected mistakes I made on the tax form and sent me back a check… For most ppl you can probably just go to a random free provider as suggested by the IRS.

No need to use TurboTax for anything unless tax situation is super complex & you can’t/don’t want to read the IRS instructions

mailbox.org and skiff are „too expensive“ with 3€/month.

Ah… I do use mailbox.org and I’ve self-hosted with docker-mailserver before.

I agree, selfhosting mail is a really big pain, and at least where I live most ISPs don’t open the ports necessary for mailservers, so I had to spin up my own server & it was more expensive than just using a mail provider. Could potentially be the cheapest option if I could host it from home & just use a RasPi or something

I’m happy with mailbox.org; the Standard Tier price is 2.50 Euro/mo if paid in full if that helps. Probably not the cheapest option especially since it’s not unlimited, but they do allow domain matches at Standard tier or above, and there are other goodies like calendar/video conferencing/cloud storage & stuff.

Daily drive Gnentoo, not sure if I could ever wholeheartedly recommend it since it’s not really accessible for beginners…

If I need a VM I’d probably spin up an Arch or Alpine since they are relatively minimal & are not that difficult to set up once you’re familiar with stuff (well Arch is one-command setup now). For servers… pretty much Debian always since that’s what everyone supports

Stability-wise… I guess it depends on what type of “stability” I want? If I meant stability by having stable programming environments then it’s not compatible with having new updates, Debian probably would be best for that. If I meant stability by the system not breaking too often, then most rolling release distros are probably fine? Arch/Gentoo have a lot more room for user error which is probably where most of the instability comes from, but otherwise they typically don’t have too many issues I believe. Fedora is great but there’s been some issue with RHEL going close-source, so I guess some ppl won’t want to support that endeavor

Yes and yes! Couldn’t contribute that much but I try to

I think having a highly important FOSS project that is not controlled by a company known for shutting down many of its beloved products (I’m talking about you Google) is pretty nice…

Also I think map quality is location-dependent. I live in a large metropolitan area in Southern US; OSM is usable, but there are no house/building numbers, and a good number of businesses are missing. In contrast I think the map is a lot better in Chicago which is a lot more pedestrian-friendly? Also, when I looked at Germany it seems OSM is on-par or better than Google Maps… in fact one of the larger rental websites use OSM instead of Google Maps (imagine Zillow doing it in US lol)

Out of curiosity… Anyone use the Steam Deck as a computer beyond just gaming? I don’t play games that much but I’d love a decent spec portable computer that I can also use to play video games, the price is quite generous given what its specs look like so…

Self-hosted SearXNG. Very easy to self-host, and (for the most part) works just fine

I had a good bit of thought about this too… This kind of mindset should never be allowed in customer-facing fields in the first place (cough cough all the social media privacy hellhole we are in today…), let alone ones that risk human lives tbh.

Not sure how much of it is “predatory” behavior and how much of it is just a combination of being a masterful salesman + being really, really dumb, “drinking his own Kool-aid”… The dude was piloting the sub on every expedition after all

Not sure if this has anything to do with me being Autistic but I eat the same thing every meal… pasta, with veggies and protein (depending on what I have). Breakfast just means additional coffee. If I really don’t have time then it’s bakery and fried burrito from the nearby supermarket.

Tried to have a more “typical” American breakfast for a while until I realized I’m lactose intolerant so that never went anywhere…

Excellent read. Have just re-posted this on 'key, thanks for sharing this.
I agree that Meta is doing something very dangerous to the fediverse… hope they could be stopped in their tracks.

Ah so there are some people on the fediverse who believe that any restriction is bad… Like the ppl who think domain blocks are too strict and stuff like that.

Pretty much everyone I’ve seen on Mastodon knows that Meta is bad. However, I’ve seen quite a few people echoing the sentiment that “hey I know Meta is bad but blocking is wrong & they haven’t done anything wrong on the fediverse”. The thought comes across as a bit naive to me but… to each their own.

From my paltry observations it seems like opinions about federating with Meta spread into the following:
1: All for-profit corporations bad, so no federation
2: Meta bad, so no federation
3: Meta bad, but wait & observe first
4: Growing the influence of fediverse is usually preferred
5: Free speech for all

Honestly the article resonates with me a lot. I assume many old-guards of Mastodon are ppl who are fully aware of how federation works & are somewhat left-leaning and anti-capitalist, so they have a tendency to not want to federate with Meta.

So it certainly doesn’t help that a few very influential people signed the NDA to join the Meta meeting, which would almost signal that they are more right-leaning (which is not what most people are like on fedi). Regarding the NDA part: people sign NDAs for too many things in pharma (my undergrad field) so I didn’t realize it was such a big deal… I think it probably rubbed too many people in the wrong way.

Also, for large general instances, I wouldn’t be surprised if many people have ideological differences with their admin or their neighbors, which probably resulted in some “fun” discussions.

Finally, PSA: I know some people hate their admins now but please do not ever send death threats to people, seriously

Was not feeling well for most of the week, and my city is experiencing historical heat waves (feels like temp is over 110 degrees F / 43 degrees C), the two may or may not be correlated… Not the worst I suppose?

And as a PSA: YouTube might or might not be secretly cracking down on 3rd party clients. There have been issues with Invidious & yt-dlp and I have had a few instances where NewPipe on Android bugged out. Let’s see where this leads to