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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • US yes, maps no.

    There are less dumb dumbphones that do a bit more, but I went for quite literally phone-calls-and-sms-only.

    I have navigation in the car that works fine, so I personally don’t need that, and am using an iPod, so I don’t need any media functionality.

    The camera is shit, but again, if I’m going somewhere specifically to take pictures then I’ve got a reasonable DSLR.

    Like I said, not for everyone but works great for what I want and makes it where I basically spend zero time on the internet unless I explicitly sit down at my desk.


  • I’m with you on phone reduction, and I’m closing in on like 8 months of using a dumbphone.

    If you’re really serious about removing distractions, a Nokia that feels like it fell out of 1996 is a shockingly good way to do it.

    A bit harsh, perhaps, for a lot of people and I won’t deny there’s a lot of compromises you have to make, but if your goal is to reduce distractions and be in the present, it’s pretty much the gold standard.

    No social media, no group messages, no email, no push notifications, no advertisements masquerading as ‘important’, nothing. If you want me you can call or text, and if you don’t want to do either then I guess whatever it was turned out to not actually be that important anyways.

    Also mine lasts like 10 days on a charge, and doesn’t cost $1000.

    My compromise to survive in modern society was an iPad mini. It’s loaded down with all the crap my phone used to have, but it’s also something I do not take to bed or out of the house, so I can still do banking apps and totp 2fa, and take and send pictures via email and all that stuff without it being a device that’s attached to my hip most of the time and thus in easy reach of noise and nonsense.




  • The chances of both failing is very rare.

    If they’re sequential off the manufacturing line and there’s a fault, they’re more likely to fail around the same time and in the same manner, since you put the surviving drive under a LOT of stress when you start a rebuild after replacing the dead drive.

    Like, that’s the most likely scenario to lose multiple drives and thus the whole array.

    I’ve seen far too many arrays that were built out of a box of drives lose one or two, and during rebuild lose another few and nuke the whole array, so uh, the thought they probably won’t both fail is maybe true, but I wouldn’t wager my data on that assumption.

    (If you care about your data, backups, test the backups, and then even more backups.)


  • You can find reasonably stable and easy to manage software for everything you listed.

    I know this is horribly unpopular around here, but you should, if you want to go this route, look at Nextcloud. It 's a monolithic mess of PHP, but it’s also stable, tested, used and trusted in production, and doesn’t have a history of lighting user data on fire.

    It also doesn’t really change dramatically, because again, it’s used by actual businesses in actual production, so changes are slow (maybe too slow) and methodical.

    The common complaints around performance and the mobile clients are all valid, but if neither of those really cause you issues then it’s a really easy way to handle cloud document storage, organization, photos, notes, calendars, contacts, etc. It’s essentially (with a little tweaking) the entire gSuite, but self-hosted.

    That said, you still need to babysit it, and babysit your data. Backups are a must, and you’re responsible for doing them and testing them. That last part is actually important: a backup that doesn’t have regular tests to make sure they can be restored from aren’t backups they’re just thoughts and prayers sitting somewhere.





  • Unlike incarcerated residents with jobs in the kitchen or woodshop who earn just a few hundred dollars a month, remote workers make fair-market wages, allowing them to pay victim restitution fees and legal costs, provide child support, and contribute to Social Security and other retirement funds.

    Interesting if that’s really true, given how prison labor being slavery is pretty much how it works otherwise.

    I’d love to know how fair-market the wages are, becuase I somehow suspect that:

    1. They’re way lower than someone not in prison would get paid and
    2. The benefits don’t exist (no PTO, no insurance, no 401k, etc.) and
    3. The coercive incentives of being able to report your employee to their guards would drive all sorts of abuses

    This reads to me as a feel-good whitewashing piece so fragile white liberals can point to it and go ‘See? Prison labor isn’t that bad!’, but perhaps I’m wrong.




  • The biggest problem for smart homes for people who aren’t enormous nerds is that nothing works together with each other in a simple, coordinated way.

    And, of course, one of Apple’s biggest strengths is that they’ve built a cohesive ecosystem that, usually, works just fine with limited fiddling.

    Right now you’ve either got 14 apps for different shit, or you’ve built something like Home Assistant to try to glue together all this garbage into a coherent solution. I’ve gone that route, and it works mostly, usually, typically, fine-ish.

    It’s a shit experience, still, because it’s a pile of random plugins and code from random people glued into something that can’t stop fucking with existing and working features and thus is perpetually in need of updates and maintenance and fiddling.

    I wouldn’t bet against Apple being able to make a doorbell, security cameras, light switches, and a thermostat and then turning that into something that actually works properly in homekit, is kept updated, and is easy to configure and use and secure.

    That’s really the missing piece that nobody seems to have been interested or willing to go after.