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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 9th, 2025

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  • Some friends own a farm in Pennsylvania. They will tell you their food is “grown organically” but they can’t say it’s “organic” because that is an official certification endowed by the USDA. To be “organic” many requirements must be met (which they do), the last of which is to pay a hefty fee to the USDA (which they don’t). The way they phrased it, the fee is so high they can’t afford it.

    So all their food is organic in every way except the name. It would be illegal for them to even say it’s organic aloud.

    In case there was any uncertainty that organic food is a scam, it is! The extra markup you pay goes straight to The Man. Fuck the USDA!








  • I used to pitch signal’s encryption first. I got into so many pointless arguments that I stopped even mentioning encryption. What’s signal? Its an app with group chat and video calls. That’s all you need to know.

    Two of my friends independently discovered the secret to converting their families to signal. Make it a premium form of communication. Tell people close to you that you check your whatsapp or facebook occasionally because of the spam volume… The best way to reach me is on signal.

    Had a kid this year and we don’t post pix of him to social media. They all get sent to a signal group. You want the baby pix? You get signal! Even his 90-year-old great grandma is in it.






  • I thought about building a gravity battery in my yard.

    The math is E = mgh. Not complicated. I think the conclusion was that to charge my cell phone from zero to 100% I would have to lower 1, 000 pounds from a height of 100 feet. Had to make some assumptions about my phone battery capacity… But still… Wildly inefficient.

    That was before losses and this video says the building is 80% efficiency.

    So whenever I see one of these grav batts actually being built, I wonder if they checked? I mean, it has some capacity but will it ever be worth the construction costs?




  • tldr: A used x86 desktop is better than a pi

    I’ve never understood why so many people self-host on pis. If it’s at home and not on a sailboat or drone, don’t worry about the power consumption. Worry about having enough power for a smooth operation.

    Like imagine your jellyfin skips during videos. Now you have to chase down the bottleneck and when you do, probably can’t upgrade the hardware anyway.

    Plus if the project doesnt have an ARM binary or container, you have to create a compilation workflow.

    Hospitals and schools upgrade their hardware every five years or so (when windows starts to slow down). The x86 workstations go up for auction for cheap. I buy them direct at govdeals.com (usa) where they usually sell in lots. If you just need one, look on ebay where the units are typically resold. Either way you can find something decent for $50-$100.

    So buy an x86. It will live forever and you can use your pi in a weather station or drone or similar project where size and power consumption matter.

    In my own setup, I have jellyfin on one $50 workstation and homeassistant/frigate on another. I would not have space (resources) for both on one machine because frigate is doing object detection on six cameras (even with a hardware detector). So the homeassistant computer has that NPU and zigbee dongle and a big hard drive for the recordings. In the Jellyfin machine, I put a 12tb hdd for the media and graphics card that is really good at transcoding (I travel a lot and stream videos from home).