FYI there are alternative matrix servers to Synapse. I’m playing around with Tuwunel, it’s a single binary and you’re done.

It uses rocksdb so you just give it a directory and it puts everything there,. ie no need to spin up a db. And there is a config option to disable federation if that’s something you don’t want.

Could it scale to thousands of concurrent users? Probably not but it seems to be the simplest chat app to self host I’ve found.

I more surprised by how slow the start menu is. It’s absolutely incredible. Windows 7 start bar was faster on my core 2 duo with spinning hdd both to open and search than windows 11 on my 9800X3D with nvme ssd.

In addition, too many people don’t even care enough to use the correct bin. Every bin day my neighbours bins are overflowing with no recyclables in their recycling bin. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bins were meaningless and it all went in a hole in the ground

Papa’s here

Wait till you hear about zfs anyraid. An upcoming feature to make zfs more flexible with mixed sized drives.

Not sure where you’re from, but it’s pretty common here in Australia. I think there are a few things to addresses.

There are two mechanisms a company might make you take leave.

1. A company shut down period. Eg company is closed over Christmas to new years and requires employees to take a week of leave then.

2. Over a threshold of leave. Leave won’t evaporate at the end of a calendar year, it builds each day and can only be used or paid out. Companies will often have a threshold, for example 8 weeks of leave before they may require you to create a plan to use it, or pay it out. The reason an employer does this is staff leave is a liability on the books. Eg If you make $100k, 8 weeks leave is approprimately a $16k liability for the employer.

Many phones support it. My old mid range Samsung galaxy phone from 2020 had it, as does my Pixel 9a.

Inconsistent within the same airport.

One time the line split into two, with announcers for each line shouting different instructions. One had you take all electronics out of bags, the other didn’t. One lines instructions included taking your shoes off, the other didn’t. The line without shoes off instruction had agents insulting people for taking their shoes off for not listening to instructions. 10M away there is an agent shouting at people to take your shoes off.

And won the GOAT (greatest of all time) tournament against James Holzhauer and Brad Rutter.

Wow that’s crazy we had such different experiences. I think mine locked up once in 5 years.

If Samsung came out tomorrow and said “we’re bringing it back into support for the next 2 years” I’d probably go back to it and put my pixel in a drawer.

I used the A71 early 2020 till about a month or two ago, and it was a fantastic phone. Only reason I moved was it’s out of support, so no more security updates.

The battery was still rated at >90%. And I’d believe it, I never had to worry about it lasting a whole day. My only complaint about the phone was even during its support period the security patches were infrequent.

I contemplated Samsung again but chose a Pixel 9a due to the monthly security updates for 7 years. And in doing so I’ve given up dual sim, headphone jack and sd card slot (but few phones have all those features now).

I’m curious what made your experience with the A71 so terrible?

I don’t have asthma, but can find what’s normal in Australia. On a pharmacy website

Zempreon 100mcg CFC-Free Asthma Inhaler with Dose Counter 200 Doses - Salbutamol (S3)

One of those inhalers is $9 AUD, or about $6 USD

If you’re in Google Cloud, you should have data backed up in something other than Google cloud, this is no different to having all your data in a basement which could be hit by natural disasters, randomware etc.

Hopefully the Unisuper example provides a good enough example for IT professionals to argue for funding for external backups and that the cloud isn’t a reason to not have them.

And other Chinese brands!. The MG4 is super popular in Australia too. Can get it for about $38k AUD ($25k USD).

Even if Tesla wasn’t tarnished by association with Musk, they have absolutely nothing at the budget end of the market. ie for buyers that traditionally bought corollas, little Mazdas and Hyundai’s.

And BYD has the whole range, if I want a luxury sedan the BYD Seal goes toe to toe with the model 3.

I think China is going to eat everyone’s lunch here in the same way Japan did in the 70s/80s, and Korea went in even cheaper in the 90s and 00s (how many Hyundai Excels/Accents were there in Australia in late 90s early 00s).

One of the biggest bottlenecks in many workloads is latency. Cache miss and the CPU stalls waiting for main memory. Flash storage, even on an nvme bus is two orders of magnitude slower than ram.

For example L3 cache takes approximately 10-20 nano seconds, ram takes closer to 100 nano seconds, nvme flash is more than 10,000 nano seconds (>10 microseconds).

Depending on your age you may remember the transition from hard drives to ssds. They could make a machine feel much snappier. Early PC ssds weren’t significantly faster throughput than hard drives (many now are even slower writing when they run out of SLC cache), what they were is significantly lower latency.

As an aside, Intel and Microns 3d xpoint was super interesting technically. It was capable of < 5000 nano seconds in early generation parts, meaning it sat in between DDR ram and flash.

Gigabytes plural? Maybe a while. Gigabyte singular? Already a thing. AMD EPYC 9684X(https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/4th-generation-9004-and-8004-series/amd-epyc-9684x.html)

I think “long covid” is something that has existed for a long time, well not long covid specifically but long term side effects of colds and flu.

A few years before covid I got a terrible cold or flu. Name a symptom of the flu and I probably had it, it was hard to even get myself to the toilet.

But what was so unique is even after the aches, the cough, and sore throat etc symptoms disappeared I didn’t recover. I was exhausted. Even weeks later I’d fluctuate between days of being fine to the next barely able to get out of bed.

It took at least 3 months after traditional flu symptoms had finished till that started to taper off. And at least another 3 before I started feeling truly myself again.

I never had one (but did want one, just financially couldn’t justify it at the time), but it would have a great fit for me. I just wanted a watch to tell the time, and display my phone notifications plus vibrate to alert me to them. That would have been legitimately useful for the job I was in at the time which was challenging to carry a phone (but it was nearby in my bag).

Now, I have no use for any of that. But I am now interested in a heart rate monitor that doesn’t hoover my data to replace my old dedicated Polar heart rate monitor (which also told the time, but I only wore it exercising), so the more expensive model is tempting!

This is one of my motivations for dumping my games and modding my consoles. Pull out Wii sports and it doesn’t work? No problems I’ll run it off usb.

To add another example to your great post.

And when there are exceptions, they are based on the type of good. Eg in Australia GST isn’t charged on fresh fruit and vegetables in a grocery store. It doesn’t matter whether an orange was grown in Australia or internationally it will be tax free.

Whereas with a tariff, a orange grown locally will be tax exempt whereas the imported one (from a tariff applied country) will.