Tell the truth, and quote the customer without that feature. Make it clear that that feature doesn’t exist, and your company can’t make it, and your supplier isn’t interested in working on it.

Your boss had time to sort this out, and failed. He asked you to move forward as if it was solved, which means lying. Instead, tell the truth.

You could run it by your boss before sending it to the customer, but don’t let him insert any bad-faith statements if you’re the one signing the quote.

“Your computer is sending automated requests.”

If you’re trans: Start making plans to flee. You don’t have to carry them out right now. But do get a passport, even if it has to have your deadname. Canada or Mexico probably wouldn’t accept a US refugee just for being trans right now, but that will change in the future.

If you’re an immigrant, or even a permanent resident: It’s unsafe in the US right now. I wouldn’t fault you if you left today. However, everyone’s circumstances are different. Maybe you want to stay and support your spouse and kids who are citizens, and you’re willing to risk your life to do it. It depends on the circumstances.

Anyone else: Stay and fight.

I think quantum computers may be impossible. But if they are possible, they will be a USB/PCIe accessory that works alongside an ordinary processor running an ordinary operating system.

I expect Linux will have a driver for quantum computers before Windows.

It seems crazy to me too, but I tested it numerous times. Closing port 80 and 443 stopped the blocks, and re-opening them started the blocks again.

From several years of experiencing it in person. Datadome was the worst and most consistent. It stopped the moment I switched my webserver onto an exotic port number (above 10,000).

Datadome sent me captchas at every domain they firewalled. After correctly solving, I would always be completely blocked:

(not my screenshot)

Here is a page listing some system requirements for Peertube. It says 4 cores and 4GB RAM for 1000 viewers, which some Raspberry Pi systems have.

Yes. However, hosting things from your home connection will make it difficult for you to visit many websites. Blocklists such as Datadome, Cloudflare, and F5 will give you endless captchas if they detect port 80 or port 443 open.

Calling yourself bisexual/pansexual would not be inaccurate. I think “Kinsey 2” or “Kinsey 1” might be good concise descriptions to use, but only you can decide what is best.

(The Kinsey scale is a model, and therefore imperfect, but useful.)

A lot of people are influenced by alt-right news (Fox News, Newsmax, OAN) who keep repeating the false claim that undocumented immigrants are mostly gangsters and violent criminals. In truth, undocumented immigrants are way less likely to commit a violent crime than an average American citizen.

Trump said, regarding the first deportation flight:

Three hundred people sitting on a plane. Every single one of them is either a murderer, a drug lord, a kingpin, the head of the mob, or a gang member

Yet none of those deportees had any criminal conviction in either country (according to Newsweek, a slightly-right news source).

Of these 3, the Pixel 9. It can run both GrapheneOS and CalyxOS.

The Pixel 8a can also run both, but it only costs $400. CalyxOS will support both phones until 2031.

I wonder if part of the magic is being hand-written. Would it not work as well if it was typed? Does it matter what color ink or what type of paper you use? Or am I totally on the wrong track, and this person just prefers writing over typing?

Either way, I find it incredibly tragic. Seems like their car was involuntarily towed, which is already a bad situation, and this is going to make things worse. At best, it will cause delays.

The “specifications” section is a collapsed section about a quarter of the way down. It starts out collapsed on every page, even if you open it up every time.

Check out this screenshot from Home Depot’s website.

About 1/8 of the page is the product. Almost NONE of the page is the “specifications” section, which is the most important section.

The majority of the page is “frequently bought together”, “More from this brand”, and “Customers also viewed”.

I have NEVER bought anything from any of these useless lists. But they have slowed down the page sufficiently that I stopped using their website and went elsewhere. Try browsing with just 10 product pages open on this site – you will start having tabs unload or crash due to memory consumption. Some of these product lists have a dozen items in them if you scroll right, so it consumes gigabytes of RAM.

Why are hospitals drug-testing pregnant women without their consent?

As far as I’m aware, Trump plans to remove all immigrants, whether documented or not, and even green card holders. I don’t think he will have much luck with it, but maybe I’m wrong.

Start applying for jobs outside the US. Finding a job is usually the longest part of moving.

You may want to try applying for citizenship at the same time, assuming you even want to stay for 2025-2028.

I’m speaking as a US citizen whose life would be improved by your presence in the US.

Sure. First you set up a RAID5/6 array in mdadm. This is a purely software thing, which is built into the Linux kernel. It doesn’t require any hardware RAID system. If you have 3-4 drives, RAID5 is probably best, and if you have 5+ drives RAID6 is probably best.

If your 3 blank drives are sdb1, sdc1, and sdd1, run this:

mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=5 -n 3 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1

This will create a block device called /dev/md0 that you can use as if it were a single large hard drive.

mkfs.btrfs /dev/md0

That will make the filesystem on the block device.

mkdir /mnt/bigraid
mount /dev/md0 /mnt/bigraid

This creates a mount point and mounts the filesystem.

To get it to mount every time you boot, add an entry for this filesystem in /etc/fstab

The man page at https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/mkfs.btrfs.html says:

RAID5/6 has known problems and should not be used in production.

So those profiles have unknown, unspecified problems.

But btrfs is safe on top of md-based raid1/5/6. It also has the advantage that you only need to encrypt one volume.

The easiest way to disable unnecessary services is to uninstall them with aptitude, or whichever package manager you like. Try terminating services one by one, and see if anything bad happens. If nothing bad happens, you can probably uninstall it. On the other hand, if the system does get wonky a reboot should fix it. Or, you can research the services by name and decide whether to uninstall them. (avahi-daemon for example is a good idea to uninstall.)

To make the GUI not run, uninstall your display manager (gdm, xdm, nodm, or whatever) and uninstall your xorg server or wayland server. There may be GUI programs remaining after that, but they will only be consuming disk space, not RAM or CPU.

If the battery is old and holds little charge, you may save a few watts by removing it and throwing it away, instead of letting the system keep it topped off.

Get a power meter, such as a Kill-a-watt device. Then, experiment with different settings. If it’s consuming less than 30 watts, you’re probably fine. If you live in the US, one watt-year is about one US dollar (or a little more), so for every watt it consumes, that’s about how much you will pay per year for its electricity.

That first part is eerily similar to what I was about to post.

In 2011, I was a lonely introvert. I spent my time binging TV shows and reading.

In 2012, on an IRL meetup thread on the 4chan x (paranormal stories) board, I met a new friend. I think deciding to meet them was the critical moment. They introduced me to a local arts and crafts club, a certain sci-fi fandom, and Minecraft.

The arts and crafts club became the basis of a friend group that is still my main friend group today. They brought me to a local convention in 2013 where I discovered I was trans.

In that sci-fi fandom, at a 2016 convention, I met my current partner, and a bunch of new friends.

I played a lot of Minecraft from 2012 to 2016, but then my partner in 2016 introduced me to Factorio.