I don’t really consider blahaj as an “identity politics” instance, but I think I know which users you’re referring to (or at least their style). I’ve probably had those blocked for a while now.

Edit: A few of those have older hexbear alts which kind-of explains things.

Don’t want to start any drama by listing specifics, but basically any instance that advertises itself as “a space for {insert flavor of identity politics here}”.

I was surprised by that, too. When I went looking for a way to decode them with RTL-SDR, I assumed it wouldn’t be parsing the audio but a narrowband data stream. TIL also.

Yeah, I may have to settle for woodworking. I could set that up in my basement safely enough but definitely can’t be welding or have other fire hazards.

Only limitation with woodworking in insufficient ventilation if I want to paint or varnish or something.

Metalworking. It’s not so much beyond my ability so much as it’s out of my price range to get into it. I just don’t have any of the necessary tools nor an appropriate workspace, and I’d basically have to build a workshop and start from the literal ground up.

They kind of do, or at least used to.

If memory serves, they would take higher-end chips that didn’t pass QA for that product line, disable some cores or whatever, and sell it as a lower-end chip.

If the artist is constantly in the news reminding me what a POS they are IRL, then no, I can’t enjoy their works because that’s always in my mind. Otherwise, if they just fuck off into obscurity, then I can enjoy the works independently for what they are.

Last fall I bought a 1 KWh Anker power station, and I’m loving it. It charges from 800 watts of solar and powers all kinds of random stuff around the house each day. Useful for power outages, too.

That’s what I’ve done for years. Makes managing things much easier, and I run multiple APs (all with the same SSID/PSK) and you can just roam to the best one. One upstairs, one downstairs, one in the weird dead zone in my office, and one on the back patio (it’s not hardwired and uses the mesh connection for uplink).

These are all old Aruba APs running OpenWRT but that’s the plan for this Cudy Model. I may pick up a few more and just replace all of my trusty but very old Arubas.

I bought this one last month when it was on sale for $39: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRK3CYY3

Haven’t deployed it yet, but it’s fully supported by OpenWRT. I would only be using it as an access point, though. My router is a USFF Optiplex with an extra NIC and runs OpenWRT.

Honestly, for me, it’s when someone knows when to keep their mouth shut or opinions to themselves. I could, in theory, consider the dumbest person in the world “intelligent” so long as they don’t open their dumb mouth and make situations worse.

Basically, any idiot can speak, but it takes intelligence and/or wisdom to know when not to.

I’d get a new weather app that only shows the weather. If you’re on Android, try BreezyWeather (F-Droid link).

The F-Droid (“freenet”) one only mainly uses OpenMeteo as the source (which is pretty good) but the releases on Github offer additional sources. Not sure why there’s a discrepancy, but I use the Github release and Accuweather as the source. YMMV which gives the best results for your area, but I often wasn’t getting severe weather alerts with OpenMeteo.

The world is just as fucked up as it ever was. The only difference now is that every fucked-up thing that ever happens anywhere is getting pushed to your always-on doomscroll device in real time with people attaching their mostly ignorant opinions to it.

This is where the “touch grass” advice comes into play. In broad terms, the real world is not nearly the hellhole social media portrays it to be.

Star Trek lied to us about the competency levels of our co-workers.

Kayhla, but spelled in very complicated ways for zero reason. A machine wouldn’t do that even if it was trying to force an awkward acronym.

I have an Omega Molecule joke, but we’re not allowed to talk about it.

It’s not an “or” situation. It is and always has been an “and”.

My gripe is with people refusing to do anything on a personal level because “what does it matter when X industry pollutes more in 5 minutes than I do in a year?”.

I get what you’re saying and the “individual carbon footprint” is often used to blame shift to regular people just living their lives, but we do still have a carbon footprint. It may be a tiny, rodent-sized footprint compared to the Kaiju-sized ones of big industries, but our actions and choices do have an effect (especially collectively).

I just don’t like dismissing the individual carbon footprint as total propaganda because it’s not wrong (though I acknowledge it is abused). Dismissing it like that just puts out a defeatist “nothing I do matters” message when our individual choices do matter and add up.

Can you live a totally carbon-neutral life in the modern age? No, probably not. But we also shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and do nothing.