sj_zero
@sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
- Comment on Top economist on the economy’s dirty truth: The only people who feel good are ‘making over $200,000’ and ‘have large stock portfolios’ 17 hours ago:
Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered. Usually it's retail investors who end up getting slaughtered.
Even people going deeply into risky bets usually have a "barbell" strategy where they'll rebalance from the high risk high growth to low risk low growth so they can see growth but in a downturn they aren't facing huge losses.
- Comment on Amazon to announce largest layoffs in company history, source says 17 hours ago:
I suspect that Amazon is starting to take advantage of the lead it got from being a loss leader in so many markets.
Amazon the store is effectively a loss leader I think for stuff like AWS, since people go "Oh, if the largest store in the world uses this hosting, we can use it for our business/government/project".
I've seen it a lot in the past 5 years, where things they couldn't possibly have been making a profit sending to our house (like groceries) went way up and now local stores make more sense. A lot of stuff where they still have a price advantage is basically just because they're a marketplace for direct factory sales from places like China.
If people like me and a lot of others are correct, we might be facing a period of extreme uncertainty and likely big recession. Amazon would be quite sensible to get in front of that and start cutting now so they don't need to take the pain at the same time everyone else is. Ford made a similar move prior to the 2008 financial crisis and that ended up being a great move for them in the medium term since they didn't need to be bailed out like GM. I wouldn't be surprised to see more competition in the AWS space in such a situation because platforms like that are actually pretty expensive compared to a few servers. I know if I were a CIO or CTO and my choice was to keep my staff and spend some capital or keep using AWS, in a downturn I'd be looking pretty carefully at on-prem for a lot of things.
- Comment on Scientists have been studying remote work for four years and have reached a very clear conclusion: “Working from home makes us thrive” 6 days ago:
I appreciate this as a balanced take.
I've done a little work from home, and it's nice being home, but it's still work. If you're doing your job right, it's still your job.
Unfortunately, I've also seen that while some people are great at WFH and even do better, a lot of people either don't get anything done, or look very "productive" because they're harassing people still at work with meaningless busywork like sending emails that don't do anything or asking other people to do parts of their job they'd be able to do if they were at work.
I think that partially goes to the point of "what is productivity?" since someone can look busy but not be doing anything that actually does anything positive for either boots on the ground micro views or mile high macro views. "Oh, look at how many emails got sent" great, did that actually help the business run? And sometimes the answer is "yes, and we should let this WFH worker continue at all costs", and in others the answer is "No, and we need to get this person into the office or eliminate the position because either would be better than the status quo"
It's a bit managerial in the way to look at it, but in order to justify WFH, the people working from home must be providing enough value to justify their employment, because too much overhead waste and the business ends, maybe every business embracing WFH ends, and then all that's left is the ones that didn't. To be clear, that's not a moral stance, but a purely pragmatic evolutionary stance: Those things which survive continue and those that die do not.
- Comment on Dozens killed in Gaza as violence erupts between Hamas and armed clans 1 week ago:
Fair enough.
- Comment on Dozens killed in Gaza as violence erupts between Hamas and armed clans 2 weeks ago:
So the war with Israel ends and the war between groups within Palestine begins?
Just can't win!
- Comment on In coal-addicted Poland, partisan politics throttle geothermal’s growth 3 weeks ago:
Hawaii is an odd one. By definition as a volcano they can have virtually unlimited energy, and yet there's something like 90% imported coal for their energy utilization. Far as I'm concerned that should be at the top of every environmentalists wish list.
- Comment on Crunchyroll Faces Cancelation: Why Anime Fans Are Choosing Piracy After Latest Update 3 weeks ago:
"Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better."
They're called anime fans.
- Comment on Gremlin Grandma 4 weeks ago:
This guy gets it.
- Comment on Gremlin Grandma 4 weeks ago:
I'll still put magus in my party every time.
Fight me.
- Comment on James should have used his money 4 weeks ago:
It's a kid's show, of course he is.
- Comment on FFS Plex, the server is on my local network 4 weeks ago:
Well, let me tell you a story.
Recently I needed to use BitTorrent to download a very large file from an independent project. Usually I can just use my web browser, but this one was in the hundreds of gigabytes there just was no way.
So I installed the original official bittorrent client, because I'm really out of the game I haven't torn today anything outside of my browser in years now.
I had to pay close attention to not install multiple pieces of unwanted software. I had to uncheck a bunch of stuff and carefully navigate the installer. Even after that, the client was junk and constantly showed multiple videos ads at all times, and besides that it just didn't have the horsepower to download my torrent for me.
I remembered using transmission on Linux so I decided to try getting that instead, turns out it had a Windows version.
Downloaded, ran the executable, pressed next three times, opened up the torrent file, pointed to my existing download hoping it'd figure out what parts the file needed and in fact it did and the download was done quickly.
If I had failed to uncheck any of the boxes, I guess you could call me stupid for non-un checking them, but to me it seems a lot simpler using the FOSS products that never had any checkboxes to uncheck in the first place.
Meanwhile, and honestly I didn't use Plex very much because it just didn't seem like a very good product, but I also seem to remember I kept on ending up on the plex.net website instead of my own server. I think it was something along lines of if you go in to change certain settings it'll change domains on you? Either way, it was just not very well set up compared to Jellyfin, which had everything that I was using right there I never even remotely tried to send me somewhere else.
- Comment on FFS Plex, the server is on my local network 4 weeks ago:
Zero with jellyfin.
- Comment on FFS Plex, the server is on my local network 4 weeks ago:
By default for me it seems to really want me to get off of my server altogether and get onto their servers, and it seems to really want to get me off of my media and onto their half-baked streaming service.
Really complex compared to just having my media show up.
- Comment on Those who are hosting on bare metal: What is stopping you from using Containers or VM's? What are you self hosting? 4 weeks ago:
I'm using proxmox now with lots of lxc containers. Prior to that, I used bare metal.
VMs were never really an option for me because the overhead is too high for the low power machines I use -- my entire empire of dirt doesn't have any fans, it's all fanless PCs. More reliable, less noise, less energy, but less power to throw at things.
Stuff like docker I didn't like because it never really felt like I was in control of my own system. I was downloading a thing someone else made and it really wasn't intended for tinkering or anything. You aren't supposed to build from source in docker as far as I can tell.
The nice thing about proxmox's lxc implementation is I can hop in and change things or fix things as I desire. It's all very intuitive, and I can still separate things out and run them where I want to, and not have to worry about keeping 15 different services running on the same version of whatever common services are required.
- Comment on FFS Plex, the server is on my local network 4 weeks ago:
Honestly, I lowkey hated plex when I was using it. We never used it because it wasn't very good at the one thing it was supposed to be fore.
It was trying so hard to get me to use their media, when what I wanted was to watch my media. By contrast, jellyfin just shows me my media.
If you have a few bucks, the chromecast with android TV is what I'd recommend. The jellyfin app for android TV looks and works great -- as good as any paid streaming service imo. I got my wife using it daily, and she's not a tech person at all.
- Comment on Yes, That Great-Looking 'Star Trek: Voyager' Game Will Let You Spare Tuvix 4 weeks ago:
The big question is: Can you replicate Tuvix, then split the replicated tuvix back into the Neelix and Tuvok, then toss all 3 into the warp core?
I really want to go full Janeway on this.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 5 weeks ago:
Diablo 2. Not reloaded or whatever, the one you can install run and play without an internet connection.
- Comment on Upgrading ungrounded two-prong outlets to grounded three-prong? 5 weeks ago:
Ideally the ground should be as close to the cold water pipe entering the house as you can get, yeah.
Honestly, I wouldn't want to just use my cold water line well into the house as a ground for exactly that sort of reason.
- Comment on Dressed to Impress 5 weeks ago:
I bet a guy who is mostly paralyzed is a freak.
What you gonna do? Beat his ass? You'll be the guy who beat a guy in a wheelchairs ass forever, and he won't even feel it anyway.
- Comment on Upgrading ungrounded two-prong outlets to grounded three-prong? 5 weeks ago:
In many jurisdictions, connecting to the copper cold water line is acceptable. The copper line runs through the ground and so is essentially the same as a grounding electrode.
- Comment on Trump’s $100,000 H-1B visa fee could hurt US growth, economists warn 5 weeks ago:
I think normal people who need things like food and shelter might not see the benefits of all the economic growth that makes the top 0.1% even wealthier.
The only one who gets paid in % of GDP is the government.
Trump isn't ultimately the guy to change any of that, but "economists warn" "could hurt [...] Growth" isn't a good reason to do or not do anything.
- Comment on Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2025, Week 38] 5 weeks ago:
Sad that uglymug epicfighter is almost over.
- Comment on "Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon" Season 3 Announced with New Visual 5 weeks ago:
What!
3 seasons?!
Tbh liked the books more than the anime.
- Comment on Study finds that fast walking can reduce lung cancer risk by 50%: A simple health indicator for cancer prevention 1 month ago:
Once again procrastinating proves the top strategy.
Nothing but up, my friends!
- Comment on ‘Opposing the inevitability of AI at universities is possible and necessary’ 1 month ago:
The key is that we need to get out of the cargo cult of credentialism and start refocusing on what schools in general are actually for: making sure individuals learn.
If we tell people the piece of paper is all that matters, of course they'll do whatever it takes to get the piece of paper. By contrast, you can't cheat learning. You're only cheating yourself.
- Comment on I wrote a book called Future Sepsis 1 month ago:
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=GauEEQAAQBAJ
Yes, it didn't show up in search for me either. Really bizarre. (I probably didn't buy enough advertising)
- Comment on Nextcloud (Docker) calendar sent email reminders for a few days, then stopped. Cron job is working, test emails also work 1 month ago:
Since calendar is an app, but fundamental email service isn't, one thing that I found is that apps can interact in ways that are completely unintuitive.
For example, I activated the ncdownloader app, and it caused mail to stop showing emails, or I activated nextcloud music and it stopped nextcloud news from updating.
You should check your logs, because usually when there's a problem it will show up in there. The logs I'm referring to are in your administrator panel. It will be completely unintuitive as to what exactly is going on. The other thing that you can do is just pay attention to which apps you've installed, and if there are any that are a little bit unusual, just try to disabling them and seeing if calendar mail works after that.
- Comment on I wrote a book called Future Sepsis 1 month ago:
I've been keeping an eye on it, and this morning future sepsis went live on Google Play books.
- Comment on US high school students lose ground in math and reading, continuing yearslong decline 1 month ago:
The fact that a nontrivial number of grade 12 students are functionally illiterate is a civilizational disgrace.
Part of the problem is the cargo cult of the diploma. People who tend to be successful financially finish high School, therefore the numbers for people who finished high school look better, so people assume that it is a piece of paper that makes them better and not the sort of attributes that would let you graduate from high school. But that's not how it works, it's the other way around.
Unfortunately, the United States isn't magic. It had good people becuse it had high standards, but once those high standards go away oh you're left with is a nation full of people who aren't good enough to compete in a global market.
We just haven't realized it yet because the economy is still largely supported by boomers.
- Comment on Sources to purchase mp3s? 1 month ago:
I personally used 7digital to rebuild my music collection. They sell good licensed mp3s.
I have absolutely nothing negative to say about them. The prices were decent, the files are boring DRM free MP3s, and they had a really good selection of music.
Honestly it looks almost exactly the same as when I used it for the first time like 15 years ago.