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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I am of two minds on this. I love repairing electronic equipment, it’s what I do for a living, and I buy old tech to fix up all the time.

    Replaceable batteries seem like a good thing, in terms of reducing waste for devices that are otherwise still useful… theoretically.

    Realistically, the charge management circuitry and the battery chemistry in phones has gotten so good today that most batteries have a useful lifespan that is longer than the useful life of the device. Three years is easily doable for any mid-range phone on the market.

    At five years you’re probably going to be disappointed with the battery performance, but how many people are continuing to use a 5-year-old phone? At that point the internal technology has changed substantially and there might even be a new network standard that you want to use, so you’re probably replacing the whole device even if replacing only the battery is an option.

    On top of that, giving the user access to the battery means the phone body can’t be fully sealed against moisture and dust, plus the access panel is a big mechanical weakpoint which means the body will be less rigid than a fully enclosed device and thus more prone to breaking when dropped or sat on. Adding those weaknesses back into mobile devices will make them more fragile and (I predict) will lead to more frequent failure and replacement of the entire device, which will offset any waste-saving benefit from the replaceable battery.

    Plus, the addional space required to fit in the replaceable battery casing, the removable access panel and the contact points for the battery means either the whole device will have to be bulkier or the battery will have to be smaller (than it would otherwise be with a permanent internal battery).

    Replaceable batteries made a lot more sense in 2010 when the batteries were shit (and sometimes still NiCad) and the charge management was basically nonexistent (so the battery cycling wore it out faster). Today it’s weight and bulk, plus fragility that will probably lead to equivalent or increased e-waste.



  • The issue is more that trying to upgrade everything at the same time is a recipe for disaster and a troubleshooting nightmare. Once you have a few interdependent services/VMs/containers/environments/hosts running, what you want to do is upgrade them separately, one at a time, then restart that service and anything that connects to it and make sure everything still works, then move on to updating the next thing.

    If you do this shotgun approach for the sake of expediency, what happens is something halfway through the stack of upgrades breaks connectivity with something else, and then you have to go digging through the logs trying to figure out which piece needs a rollback.

    Even more fun if two things in the same environment have conflicting dependencies, and one of them upgrades and installs its new dependency version and breaks whatever manual fix you did to get them to play nice together before, and good luck remembering what you did to fix it in that one environment six months ago.

    It’s not FUD, it’s experience.









  • Does Proton really support Trump? A deeper analysis

    One thing to note is that while on Reddit, people are alleging that Proton is a company run by a fascist, pro-MAGA, pro-dictatorship CEO, users on X are accusing Andy and the company of being anti-MAGA/anti-Trump.

    So, in the face of all the evidence I’ve found, to compare Andy to a tech oligarch like Zuck and Elon, who are now bootlicking on display for all to see, is not supported by the evidence.

    […]

    However, being disillusioned with one party on one issue doesn’t mean that all of a sudden Andy Yen changed all of his stances and that now he’s actually pro-Republican or pro-MAGA. All of the evidence gathered suggests the exact opposite.

    Considering how many users here have expressed similar disillusionment with the current Democratic party, it seems a bit hypocritical to judge Andy Yen for having the same feelings (or expressing them on occasion).

    This whole “Proton supports MAGA” thing is another example of internet mob-think where everybody has an opinion informed by no facts at all, actively ignores or dismisses the larger context in order to protect that fragile opinion from reality, and most haven’t even looked at the original statements that sparked the controversy.


  • I need to store my emails for later reference, so I print them out.

    But I don’t want to keep stacks of printed emails around, so I scan the prints and save them as pictures because that’s what the scanner does automatically.

    But I need to search through the emails, so I found a browser plugin that can scan a picture for text and give me a summary in a new file.

    But my company computer won’t let me install browser plugins so I email the scanned pictures to my personal address and then open them on my phone and use the app version of the browser plugin to make the summaries and then I email those back to my company address.

    But now I want to search through the summaries, which are Word documents, but Office takes forEHver to load on my shitty company computer so I don’t want to use the search in it, so I right-click -> Print the summary files and then choose “Print to PDF” and then open them in Adobe Reader so I can search for the information I want that way. I usually have 200 tabs of PDFs open in Reader so I can cross-reference information.

    I have a great custom workflow. I’m the most computer literate person in my office.