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Chobbes,

In a large fridge a small incandescent lightbulb won’t make much difference since it turns off when the door closes and would have a relatively small thermal mass, which I think is what you’re saying. That said I don’t think it’s accurate to say that “all of the heat is in the filament.” Heat spreads, and it will leave the light bulb. If you have ever touched an incandescent light bulb that is on you would have no doubts about this! Easy bake ovens used to use incandescent light bulbs to cook things, people leave their oven lights on to keep their oven warmer to let bread rise. Larger incandescent light bulbs can absolutely warm up a full sized room, 60W or 100W is a fair amount of heat. There are stories about extremely temperature controlled rooms where they would turn on a 100W bulb when a person leaves it because a person produces about 100W of heat.

Chobbes,

What a pointless article. Yeah, people “feel” unsafe on unsecured wifi networks. VPN advertisements have been fear mongering for years. But are they actually unsafe? No. If you use https you are fine. Technically there are more attacks you can do while on the same local network, but I really wouldn’t worry about it in most cases.

Chobbes,

As an aside… it’s usually not too bad to transfer your emails to another service (though gmails limits for this are slightly annoying). Probably not your biggest hurdle, but this particular one can be dealt with.

What is something worth buying as a teen? please explain.

sense most online business are having black friday is it worth buying something or should i pass and try to save my money. im a teen i have around 200$ but i would like to limit myself to 100$ or less. im probably posting this in the wrong place but im not sure, i just want to make a smart choice when it comes to money....

Chobbes,

A lot of people in this thread are giving you weirdly specific advice about precise items to buy…

I noticed you’re considering buying a 3D printer with that budget. I think the answer depends somewhat on how often you come across money and what else you might spend it on. It’s good to be careful with your money, but part of being careful with it is doing some research to figure out when an item is too cheap to be worth it for you. There’s no one answer because it depends on what you value. In terms of the 3D printer, consider how much it will cost to run it, how much you want to use it, and what you might get out of it. I don’t know much about 3D printers, but I suspect if most people are telling you to get a $200 one instead of a $100 one it’s likely that the experience with a higher end one is noticeably better and less frustrating. If the quality of the parts is important to you and you’re not willing to put up with frustration when prints don’t work, or the printer needs maintenance, the extra money is probably well spent if you do want a 3D printer (and cheaping out might get you a 3D printer you won’t be happy with, which could be a bigger waste of money than a safer but more expensive purchase).

There are other options to consider. Libraries near you might have 3D printers you can use, and there are places to buy 3D printed models online (if you just want somebody to print them for you and are more interested in having some mini figures instead of the process of 3D printing). Buying 3D printed models from somebody else may cost less than getting a 3D printer, unless you think you’re going to make heavy use of it. It’s possible that you could also sell 3D printed stuff to recoup some costs if you do get a printer, but when making the decision I think you should assume you’ll make $0 from it and make sure you’re okay with the purchase in that case anyway.

My general rule of thumb is to wait a week or two before buying anything and then I’ll buy it if I still have the itch and am obsessing over it. There are always more sales too (and Black Friday deals will be going on all month). A 3D printer seems like a good purchase for a teen to me. There’s some cool skills you can learn that go alongside it. If you haven’t already look into some of the free software for creating models for printing (tinkercad, blender, etc). That’s a hobby you can get into with no money and might influence whether the printer would be worth it for you (can you make the things you want to make, or do you want to print models that others have made?)

Chobbes,

A bike is a super reasonable recommendation, actually.

Chobbes,

Yeah and some of these people think they’re Brave and Edgy.

Chobbes,

To be clear, the papers at conferences undergo a peer review process as well. There are journal publications in CS, but a lot of publishing is done through conferences. Arxiv, while a great resource, has little to do with the conferences and it is worth noting that the papers on arxiv do not go through a peer review process (but are often published at conferences where the paper has gone under peer review — some papers on arxiv may be preprint versions from before the peer review process).

Chobbes,

Yeah! I think if you dress up and make an effort you can trick or treat and I don’t mind giving you candy. My partner and I usually go dress up and just wander around in costume and in character to “scare” people and contribute to the atmosphere. We’re obviously in the “too old to trick or treat” category so we don’t actually go and ask for candy and usually give some out while walking around… But people here give out candy waiting outside near the sidewalks, so it’s actually pretty common for us to get a “great costume, want some candy?” Which I totally don’t need and usually decline because I’m in character being spooky (which usually involves not talking), but I appreciate it in the sense that it’s clearly just a night for everybody to have fun and they don’t just see it as a dull social obligation to give out candy just to children.

Chobbes,

I think this comic might have been from the era when you did have to pay for new versions of OS X… they stopped doing that around Lion I think in 2011 or so.

Chobbes,

I’m convinced that the “ugh, decaf, what’s the point?” crowd don’t actually like coffee and should just take caffeine pills, lol.

Chobbes,

I’m not a windows user but it seems every time there’s a new version people swear they’ll never use it and that the old version should be supported forever… and then eventually that “horrible” version becomes the next version that people won’t let go of… Are you guys okay?

Would you prefer if games had a separate difficulty setting for boss fights?

I usually play games on “normal” difficulty these days, for a balanced challenge. However, I don’t particularly enjoy boss fights, or at least I don’t enjoy the extra challenge associated with them. Was thinking it would be nice if games had a separate setting so I could just set boss fights to “easy”, while not...

Chobbes,

Yeah I was going to say… in many cases bosses seem to be easier than the normal fights. The bosses sort of focus on being a novel gimmick with easily telegraphed attacks, which often ends up being easier than normal fights in some games.

Chobbes,

In a very real sense I do think that the command line is ever so slightly too maligned as a beginner friendly tool. I definitely agree that it’s intimidating for people and that it’s easy to mistype a command or whatever… but good god is it ever nice to be able to tell somebody to “just copy and run this command” instead of guiding them through a GUI. Of course that has its own problems (ideally you don’t run commands you don’t understand), but it can be a really nice way to quickly help somebody. Macs strike a good balance with this in my opinion. There are GUI options for more or less everything (that seem to be front ends for command line tools), but also command line versions available, giving you the best of both worlds.

Chobbes,

For sure! The command line definitely lacks discoverability and just isn’t the mode of interacting with a computer that the average person is used to. That said there are situations where it is very much the right tool for the job and there’s plenty of times where it’s the easy way to set something up, even for a beginner.

If I’m being perfectly honest I do find that a lot of the complaints about the command line come across as a bit… silly, sometimes? I can absolutely acknowledge that it has its problems and seems intimidating, and I’m not expecting the average technology illiterate person to deal with it… But there really is not that much to it, and I think people are far more afraid of it than they need to be. Plus I think the amount of command line knowledge required for somebody to start using a mainstream distro is greatly exaggerated. You may eventually want to learn it (and shouldn’t be scared to!) and you may rarely run into something where the best way to solve a problem involves the command line… but you’ll be fine :).

Chobbes,

I’m hesitant to share my opinion because I think it’s unpopular and I don’t want to upset anybody, but in the interest of making others like myself not feel so alone… I think if we’re being deeply honest with ourselves, it probably isn’t? I have a good enough life, but if I never existed I couldn’t be sad to not experience it. I want to enjoy things to the best of my ability (and have made some pretty good strides towards this lately), and don’t want to go through the potentially painful and scary process of dying, and some people depend on me, so I’m here for the time being and I think that’s good enough for now :). But truthfully if I had the choice I think I’d rather not go through this, even though I’m perfectly happy right now. I just find it very hard to go through life and I’d be grateful to not have to work and worry so much. I kind of wish it was less taboo to talk about this because it’s hard to have these thoughts alone, and I think it’d be nice if we could come up with better answers.

Chobbes,

This proposal isn’t that you wake up at 7:00am Greenwich time regardless of where you are on the planet, though. The proposal is that you wake up at sunrise (or whatever), which might be at 19:00 Greenwich time, and everybody just has an absolute measure of time that’s the same everywhere, abolishing timezones (potentially making it easier to schedule a meeting across timezones).

I’m not necessarily in favour of this plan, I think I’d be fine with it, but I think timezones are a somewhat useful abstraction. The one thing that always bothers me related to this, though, is the argument about whether or not we should have permanent DST or no DST based on whether we should wake up “earlier” or “later” in the sun cycle or whatever… And like… It doesn’t matter. You can call it 6:00am or 7:00am, you’re waking up at the same time. It doesn’t matter if we call the hours that business are open from 9:00-17:00 or 8:00-16:00… When the clocks don’t change the times are just arbitrary names. Ultimately I really don’t care, I just want people to stop fucking with clocks every 6 months… But because the numbers are somewhat arbitrary I think we should settle on no DST because then noon more accurately corresponds to solar noon, which I think makes more sense and would help people be more in tune with the solar cycle.

Chobbes,

In fairness, when you install the nix package manager you’re going to get a full toolchain with all necessary dependencies in addition to your system ones. On NixOS these are your system ones as well so you don’t necessarily have duplicates. The same will be true of Guix afaik.

Chobbes,

I don’t get the sense that people hate Gentoo, I think it’s mostly just people joking about it. That said gentoo is really cool and doesn’t always get the respect it deserves, but I think most people who actually follow through with it have some appreciation for it!

Chobbes,

To be fair “stupid rednecks that are compensating” is different from “elitist who is forcing their lifestyle on everyone”.

Chobbes,

Eh. Depends where you live maybe. I’ve definitely had plenty of conversations and overheard people with exactly this opinion about cyclists.

How much bigger would a gnu/linux operating system be if there were no library packages and every program included its own libraries?

I’m talking about things like “python3-blabla” and “libsomething”. How bad would it be if nobody used these library-packages and everyone just added all kinds of libraries as part of an application’s package?

Chobbes,

Packages can share dependencies in NixOS, and often do for packages in the same version of nixpkgs. It’s not quite the same as statically linking everything, but it basically gives you the perks of that with fewer downsides and other advantages.

Chobbes,

I feel like when there is a small phone released, though, it has compromises on battery life and camera quality that people might not accept. I think a lot of people who “want a small phone” want a small phone with no other compromises other than the size of the phone.

Chobbes,

In my experience the problems with self hosting email mostly occur when something is misconfigured. I think it’s good for people to try to self host it, and if you pull it off it’s great (I love having mine self hosted, and it’s convenient to be able to have as many email addresses, storage, and accounts as I want). It is difficult to get right and debug when something is going wrong, but it’s far from impossible. If you set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC and have rDNS pointing to your mail server’s domain name you’ll likely find success. It’s possible I’ve just gotten lucky, but I have never had a problem with IP ranges getting banned.

Chobbes,

For what it’s worth, this has not been my experience after self hosting my email for nearly a decade. It has not been a constant battle at all… it has just worked, and I get responses whenever mailing random people all the time and have not had delivery issues to my knowledge. That said, I have talked to people who have had issues and every time there has been something wrong with their configuration (usually DKIM or rDNS is not set up properly). There’s enough that can go wrong that I wouldn’t recommend people send important emails with it unless they’ve been doing it for a while and they’re sure it’s working, but in my experience this is all fear mongering. Self hosting your email is very doable and is generally not a constant battle against getting put in the spam slammer. There’s a lot of picky little things to set up at first, but once it’s set up it’s usually fine.

Chobbes,

I’ve had good luck on a couple of cheap providers. I think a lot of them block port 25 by default, unless you ask, which maybe gives you a better chance. Plus DKIM and stuff are starting to help. There’s probably always some stupid mail server that will block huge swaths of IPv4 if somebody farts in the neighborhood, but I think the situation is improving.

Chobbes, (edited )

I think there are lots of easily measurable metrics by which things at least seem better today than in the past. If nothing else, technology has definitely gotten better and cheaper over time (particularly computers and microchips). These metrics may be naive and not capture the full picture, of course, and even if things are just objectively better now there’s lots of scary things happening right now and on the horizon that make the future a little uncertain and troubling. Overall I’m not sure I would believe that people in general are happier or better off now than they were at certain points in the past… I’m certainly struggling with that in many ways and some modern day problems are definitely impacting me and on my mind… That said, I’m not sure what time period in the past I’d rather live in instead? Maybe one where housing is cheaper, haha.

Chobbes,

Of course not, but it’s a very easy to see indication of technology improving (and something that is used to develop more technologies and solutions to help people in the future). There are plenty of medical examples too, things like the MRNA vaccines recently have a lot of potential to make the world better, there are better pharmaceuticals today, and we have better tools, diagnostics, and knowledge than ever before. Cancer treatments are better, etc. Is it perfect? No. Is it distributed equitably? Absolutely not. But these are things that are better and hopefully we can improve access to these things in the future.

FWIW, I’m not an optimist, and I think there are many things wrong with the world right now socially and politically, but technology and knowledge (as well as access to these things) has definitely improved dramatically, and these are useful tools that can (and do) make people’s lives better (and possible) in a bunch of different ways, and they do give us more tools to tackle future problems as well (even if there may be problems with their usage). To be clear, I am also not a fan of the assumption that technology will rescue us in any scenario and am fully of the opinion that it is very much a double edged sword, and I do think there’s a particularly problematic belief that we should expect future technologies to save us from preventable disasters now (this could end up being the case, but it seems bad to depend on it happening)… But that said, at the end of the day this is something that has objectively improved over time, and I think has largely made the world a better place for it. I don’t feel like everything is hunky dory in the world right now, either, and we definitely face a number of issues… But I’m also not totally convinced I’d be better off living hundreds of years ago or whatever.

Chobbes,

… So what’s everybody’s favourite additions to the Linux kernel lately?

Chobbes,

Lol, I was thinking more like… I dunno, BTRFS?

Chobbes,

It’s always been weird to me how people use Brave. Like there’s a big class of Brave users who seem like people who would just be better off on Firefox? I guess it’s some of the best evidence I have seen that marketing works.

Chobbes,

As long as you don’t transmit you’re fine, so you can use them as a scanner without a care in the world (although baofengs kind of suck at scanning because they’re so slow). I wouldn’t want to transmit unlicensed, though. You’d be risking some pretty serious fines, especially if you don’t know which bands are safe to transmit on… and if you are going to learn what bands are safe to transmit on you might as well just get a license because it’s not that much harder, and it’s kind of fun. Then you’ll have a lot of permissions and can mess around as much as you want :).

Chobbes,

I doubt that Bluetooth and wifi antennas on phones are going to be great at long distances. Text is going to be a much better bet as it needs less bandwidth and doesn’t have to be received in real time (so you can store and remit messages later).

Chobbes,

Honestly if you’re interested in this stuff I’d encourage you to get a radio license. You’d probably be interested in repeaters, satellites, and HF, but you might also be really interested in stuff like APRS (which is sort of a giant radio mesh net). I don’t know what country you’re in, but usually licenses are really cheap and just require you to pass a relatively easy (with some studying) multiple choice exam. The hardest part is usually just figuring out where you can take a test (at least in the USA tests are run by volunteers, so you have to do a little bit of searching to see when they do them in your area).

Chobbes,

I’m definitely in the minority, but remasters in general aren’t my cup of tea. I’d generally rather play the thing as it was. If a game was noteworthy for some reason I’d like to see it in roughly its original historical context, especially if it’s noteworthy for what it did with the hardware at the time. Remaking it can really take away from that in my opinion.

I don’t always mind it, especially when it makes a game that’s hard to run on modern computers readily available and has options that are faithful to the original… and sometimes it’s just nice to have shiny new graphics (like with the Spyro remakes). Other games it just seems silly for… like Bioshock and Mass Effect aren’t that old and the remasters don’t seem that different, so why bother? I guess they come as a bundle, so that’s a win? And I guess these releases are also good for consoles, but they seem silly on PC.

I won’t yuck anybody’s yums, though. If you like remasters that’s great… I just don’t really see the point most of the time, but maybe it’s because I like seeing old graphics and seeing where we came from and stuff.

Chobbes,

Yes the control remapping can be a big deal for sure coughsystemshockcough

I had a dream about windows and have decided to setup Linux on my laptop. What distro should I use?

I used Ubuntu once a few years ago but had compatability issues so I went back to windows. Not a great programmer but I’d like to learn. I’m not looking to do much gaming beyond DOOM2 and factorio. Mostly looking for privacy and a way to get back into programming (I have this pipe dream of learning Assembly). I’m not to...

Chobbes,

You don’t need to be a programmer to use Linux. I’d probably recommend you go with something like mint. Avoid things like Arch or Gentoo or NixOS for now as they involve a lot more manual configuration and it’s probably best to understand the landscape of things first.

Chobbes,

Could be, but I don’t know anything about it! Of course there are distributions based on Arch (like SteamOS) and Gentoo (like ChromeOS) that can be perfectly usable for beginners to the Linux world. In general, though, I’d probably recommend using something common, and not using a rolling release distro as a beginner.

Realistically, though, the distro probably doesn’t matter too much for a first install, as long as you pick one where you get a reasonably well featured desktop environment out of the box. Beyond that the biggest difference between most distros is the package repository and package manager… You’ll probably pick up pretty quickly that you need to use dnf or yum or whatever on something like Fedora vs the apt suite on something like mint. It’s also kind of a time honoured tradition to do some distro hopping when dipping your toes in Linux, which I think is a good idea because you’ll learn about some of the different things that are available :). It’s not even too big of a deal if you preserve your home partition between installs (have a backup if you mess this up, though).

I’ve been in Unix land pretty much my whole life and I’ve been on Gentoo and NixOS for a long time so I’m not totally up to date on the beginner friendly distros either haha. Frankly, as long as you pick something with a short and simple install process (which most distros have) you’ll be fine in my opinion.

Chobbes,

Smart TVs are god awful, and I hate the OS on our LG TV. That said there is finally a Jellyfin app on WebOS so it has that going for it now… I’m too cheap to buy a separate box for Jellyfin and stuff for the TV, so I guess it’s good enough… but in general I wish the TV OS got out of the way a little more.

How reliable is it to self host SimpleLogin, AnonAddy (addy), etc? (kbin.social)

I have a private @gmail and a business @company.com (also via gmail), which I heavily rely on. Due to a recent data-leak somewhere, I'm now receiving unstoppable spam on my @gmail, and decided to set up a new account on proton and ditch @gmsil in favor of @example.com. I came across SimpleLogin, and thought that I could use that...

Chobbes,

In my experience self hosting email it has pretty much been “set it and forget it”. I feel like there’s a lot of fud from people with misconfigured email servers (because there is a lot that can go wrong on setup). In every case I’ve seen where people are complaining about email deliverability I’ve found that they haven’t configured DKIM or rDNS properly. That doesn’t mean there can’t be issues, and I am sure it is technically possible to get sent to oblivion, but I feel like this issue might be somewhat overblown.

Chobbes,

Absolutely this. I am really enjoying Memmy and I hope the devs understand that we appreciate the work that’s been done so far! I hope they can continue to improve it without damaging their mental health… but if they can’t I hope they take the break they need to :). Memmy is great, but it is not worth them feeling guilty over and going through burnout and depression over. I really wish them the best.

Chobbes,

This is why I really hope we prioritize public transit as much as possible. Cars are insanely expensive, and if we spent a fraction of that money on public transit it could be awesome. I don’t want people like you to end up in a situation where your car breaks down and you can’t get around and can’t afford to fix it / get a new one. That’s really scary :(. Having good public transit infrastructure is an important social safety net.

Chobbes,

Most people would probably end up paying the subscription rather than relearning everything they already know. It may have long term impacts, but, like… I don’t think this would make the average person switch to Linux. If any migration happens I’d expect more people to switch to Macs than Linux over time because that’s more of a mainstream option.

That said there’s lots of interesting stuff going on in the Linux world right now, and it’s slowly but surely becoming a more interesting option for a lot of people. Valve’s work on Proton / Linux in general is pretty huge. I still think you’d need a huge marketing push to convince the average person (which people on Lemmy are not) to install Linux themselves, or prefer buying a laptop with Linux pre-installed, though. It could happen eventually, and has happened in special cases (like the Steam Deck)… But short term I think most people are just going to pay a yearly subscription rather than upend their entire computing life.

Chobbes,

Yeah, I use Linux full time and have always used unixy operating systems and have never really used windows. So, like, sure, I think a lot of people could switch to Linux and be perfectly happy… but I’m under no delusions that people will and wouldn’t just pay a little more for a windows license instead. There’s probably a good chunk of people (particularly here) who would be more on the edge and willing to just drop the windows in this situation… but I doubt the average computer user is dying to try Gentoo in the event that Microsoft charges a subscription fee, haha.

Chobbes,

Depends how Microsoft handles education licenses. I think historically they’ve been pretty good about giving university students licenses for free, and if they consider the education sector important enough (which they probably should) I am certain they could provide generous terms. If the schools don’t have to pay for the licenses I’m not sure they would bother switching off of windows at least. It will be interesting to see how the ChromeOS dominance in education plays out in the future, though!

Chobbes,

Honestly, I’m still not sure I would recommend Arch to those people. I think most of those people would be better off on something like Gentoo or NixOS (depending on the class of weirdo we’re talking about). Arch in my experience is just more painful than it needs to be. Like, honest to god, there is no reason the user should have to fiddle with the keyring when updating… Figure it out.

Chobbes,

Kiwix is great and Wikipedia is surprisingly small :).

Chobbes,

The human genome one was the one that stood out to me. I’d be curious to see a source from the time if you’ve got one!

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