In the garden, there are two chickens.

It would be a more meaningful discussion if the government wasn’t controlled so much by large corporations and oligarchs.

Or maybe God likes it. Maybe God is thinking, “I wish I had thought to make something so horrific. This is art in its terribleness.”

I have self hosted my email since 2006. I gave up on self hosting outgoing mail in 2021, but I still keep the server up for incoming mail, and still set up throwaway accounts on there.

The hard part of hosting email is getting Google and Microsoft to accept outgoing mail. Tons of businesses that do not have visibly outlook .com or gmail .com addresses are still hosted by those servers.

I had SPF, DKIM, and a static datacenter IP address with no reputation problems. I still couldn’t get through to Microsoft, not even in people’s junk mail directory, until they manually whitelisted my address. Microsoft didn’t allow them to whitelist a whole domain. Google was a little easier, but they added new demands monthly.

In 2025, I can’t get reliable delivery to gmail .com addresses even sending from a hotmail .com address in the outlook .com web interface.

Yeah, true, but that’s mostly fixed costs, and has a pretty low incremental cost for each video delivered. The fixed costs we have to pay regardless.

Electrical engineer here. There is almost no difference.

The cost of streaming video from a server to your computer is pretty small, basically just transferring the bytes from a hard drive to a network card. This happens in a datacenter on a big server designed to be efficient at it, and serve a ton of people at once. Your own electricity consumption on your viewing device is likely much higher than that. You can calculate your electricity consumption using a Kill-A-Watt or similar device, but here are some averages of measurements I’ve made on my devices:

• PC with 27" LCD monitor: 150W
• 50" TV: 300W
• Laptop with internal 14" screen: 40W
• Phone with 5" screen: 10W roughly, but it’s complicated
• Phone with screen off, speaker only: 2W (guessing here)
• Handheld FM radio: less than 1W

If you look at your computer’s CPU usage while watching video, it’s mostly idle. So most of the power consumption is the screen’s backlight.

Assuming worst-case coal power, releasing 0.4kg of carbon per kWh, and a large TV, and let’s say 10% overhead for the server’s energy cost, that’s 0.13kg of carbon per hour. So don’t worry about it.

I loaded a bunch of articles until it prompted me to pay. I got the screenshot below. In my opinion, this is an intentionally misleading fake 50c/month offer.

Not sure how much you’re paying for your VPN, but a virtual private server can be had for about $5 per month. You’ll get a real IPv4 address just for you, so you won’t have to use non-standard port numbers. (You can also use the VPS as a self-hosted VPN or proxy.)

$5 per month doesn’t get you much processing power, but it gets you plenty of bandwidth. You could self-host your server on your home computer, and reverse-proxy through your NAT using the VPS.

a slide out menu needs JavaScript

A slide out menu can be done in pure CSS and HTML. Imho, it would look bad regardless.

When if you said just send the parts of the page that changed, that dynamic content loading would still be JavaScript

OP is trying to access a restaurant website that has no interactivity. It has a bunch of static information, a few download links for menu PDFs, a link to a different domain to place an order online, and an iframe (to a different domain) for making a table reservation.

The web dev using javascript on that page is lazy, yet also creating way more work for themself.

He’s also one of the inventors of Javascript as a browser feature. I feel like that would matter to OP.

Search is easier to implement without Javascript than with.

<form method="GET" action="/search">
<input name="q">
<input type=submit>
</form>

The point of the blockchain is to achieve distributed consensus of what’s in the database. That way, one entity can’t unilaterally change what the database says.

If you have a public non-profit institution maintaining the database, obligated to serve all legal customers, with serious consequences for tampering with it, you can get pretty much everything blockchain can do, for a billionth of the computing power.

But with that system, you would lose these features:

• partially-anonymous participants
• service of all customers, even illegal ones
• immunity to court orders

Cloudflare has IP banned me before for no reason (no proxy, no VPN, residential ISP with no bot traffic). They’ve switched their captcha system a few times, and some years it’s easy, some years it’s impossible.

“Digitally signed” in this headline refers to pasting an image into a PDF file, not an actual digital signature.

Piper is less than 2MB, and allows reconfiguring Logitech mouse buttons. It’s available in Debian and Ubuntu package managers.

Screenshot:

I had to use Piper to get exotic features like having mouse 6, 7, 8 buttons function as mouse 6, 7, 8, rather than the default of alt-tab and ctrl-v.

This is actually a serious problem in parts of China (Shenzhen, at least). You can never predict what kind of wall outlets will be in a building. Either the UK style (popular in nearby Hong Kong), American style (NEMA 5-15), or Europlug, and sometimes multiple types in one building. At the company I was mostly visiting, each conference room had universal power strips, which accepted all three styles of plugs as well as pinky fingers. I never figured out what the voltage/frequency was, and made sure to plug in only devices that could handle 120-240V.

Bar soap dries out my skin really badly. Besides, moisturizing body wash is not too expensive.

This survey doesn’t distinguish between levels of cloud service provider, so I was a little confused.

Virtual private servers, cloud virtual servers (like AWS), cloud-based software where you provide code or a program and the cloud system runs it on a server of its choosing, and cloud-based systems where someone else provides the software (like Google Docs).

I can’t get into the details, but I’ve used UKG/Ultipro in the past and it is absolute shit. Way worse things that just what dirtycrow is showing here.

Kanopy looks like they use Widevine DRM. I will continue using other DRM-free sources.