UART to USB adapter, use a terminal multiplexer on your laptop

Depends on what you buy. You shouldn’t be buying PSUs or TVs or something of the sort from there, but try finding cheap clothes, accessories, electronics like that on Amazon

After coming back from a break, I realised I might have leaned too hard into “protecting Chinese companies”. I will say this right now for everyone reading: I have no love for the nationality of said companies. I don’t care if Aliexpress or a clone of theirs was Chinese, Korean, Brazilian, Swiss, Russian, Iranian, Australian or Japanese (incidentally I spend time on buyee.jp because the cheap deals on CDs sometimes). What I care about is providing competition to the bigger mammoths here. If I find a USB adapter for a quarter of the price with free shipping and refunds from a Chinese shop with a decent reputation (Aliexpress, Banggood, TaoBao and now TEMU), I’ll take it. I hope this forces big American retailers to maybe give better, fairer prices to their customers.

I’m not quite convinced that Amazon is no longer the giant with worms as we knew it. Can you explain?

Well, at least you’re consistent with your views. Being anti-consumption is a fine stand. In my case, I usually go to these sites for cheap deals on microcontrollers, tit-bits like USB adapters, metal stands, IEM cables etc. I’m not buying expensive/essential stuff from them.

What I do not understand is why people are biased against certain companies in such a discussion. If your arguments are correct, then Amazon is a horrendous beast that should have been killed by now with “viral boycotting”. And here we are. Is anyone demotivated by knowing that people still buy from Amazon and make them billions? Why all the hate against TEMU specifically, when they’re trying to undercut Amazon and other stores? Let’s not pretend that Amazon and Best Buy and Walmart are a collective bunch of saints and can mean no harm. Where is the action in this case?

Let me speak the bitter truth for you: the majority of the population here is American, with an inherent anti-chinese mentality when it comes to capitalistic ventures/operations. That is the reason for the hate. Alibaba faced the same issues, and in case someone wants to bring up Huawei for their actions, remember that AT&T runs an NSA spy-mission in Manhattan. Where is the outcry in this case?

I might have veered off-topic, but bad QC and cheap deals aren’t inherently a Chinese thing. Hence, I do not follow the propaganda against Chinese shops who are beating American companies at their own game.

Edit: since I’ve been called guilty of waiving away untoward actions, please enlighten me on how the general American population has stayed “responsible” and managed to put any dent in other non-Chinese companies that have their ethics in the dumpster and actively harm the environment and people (I’m looking at you Nestle, Spotify and OpenAI)

Other than torrenting what else do you use port-forwarding for?

I’m happy because it’s competition for Aliexpress.

Arguments against carbon emissions and carbon footprints against corporations isn’t very helpful unless you can do something about it. This is somehow a very unpopular opinion here, for some reason people don’t like being told that they don’t have much power. Boycotting it by yourself won’t work either, because even if the west gives up on it, the East will not. Carbon emissions will remain unless strict regulations are maintained, and we know who buys politicians these days. If I can do nothing about the climate, then yes I’d rather pay less. And I’m not explicitly anti-China like some people here because America is just as hypocritical.

Yes there are really bad products and their QC is horrible. I’ll say the same for Aliexpress, Taobao, Amazon, Walmart and Bestbuy. Unfortunately for everyone here, we’re going to have to choose between shit options, so yes I’d rather pay less if it’s shit I’m going to get anyway. Besides, I’m smart enough to not make bigger purchases on these sites because I know of their QC situation.

I know but they’re also cost-effective in comparison depending on what you’re looking at

With how cheap they are, people will and should buy from TEMU. Aliexpress as a general store never had much of a competition for English speakers outside of Banggood for select electronics. Taoboa is good but it’s harder to use

So uh, openback headphones get any interest?

How about a 100*million*million dollars? Put them out of business and T-Mobile will be frightened enough to not try this shit any longer.

If they can slap fines with whatever amounts, why don’t they just ask enough to finance the country and make the company bankrupt? It’s not like the CEO is indispensable

Lol

How do you reach into your server with SSH disabled without lugging a monitor and keyboard around?

I’m using k8s at work and am planning to set up k3s at home, because even though PVCs and Ingresses are not the easiest to grasp and write in templates, I think the way I want to do storage is beyond the capabilities of podman which I used earlier. Also, Kubernetes on either end so knowledge transfer is ready

You can run a VPN and tunnel your outbound DNS queries over that. Heck, you could tunnel your DNS queries over TOR

Then you must surely know which OS I’m running my DNS server on?

I’d like a blog please

It’s actually better privacy since it talks directly to the root servers instead of cloudflare knowing all of your DNS traffic. Quad9 is a good alternative with better data policies

I guess my support goes to AI companies this time, even though I don’t like it.

Sorry, I’m too stupid to heed warnings