A lot, depending on your interests and the hardware itself. I’m running a NAS (TrueNAS) on an old machine that also runs a bittorrent client and immich as TrueNAS “apps.” I’m running an *arr stack and jellyfin on another old machine. I’ve got another old machine running an i2p router, hyphanet node, and a few other services. In the past, I’ve used old machines as routers (pfsense), openhab/home assistant machines, game servers, ZoneMinder server, etc.

Never had one fail. Bought a faulty one once. Took me months to figure out why I was having data corruption issues. Thought it was one of the old HDDs I was using in a ZRAID array, so I would swap one out and try again until I’d eventually get a corruption error again. Finally found the issue after about 10 minutes of running a memory test of a bootable USB.

I think it’s ok for switching to be hard if the UI is built for productivity. I’m not really a “creative” worker in the most common sense, so I’m guessing GIMP’s UI sucks even after you learn it, but I do know VIM is not intuitive at all, yet improves productivity compared to most IDEs/text editors. I’ve also worked on an application, working closely with our somewhat technical users, and they would suggest UI changes that were often not intuitive, but increase their productivity a bit (less need for using a mouse, less keystrokes/clicks and stuff like that).

I think California recently passed the Digital Age Assurance Act, which was backed by Google,Meta, and OpenAI. I think it goes into effect in 2027.

I find it detrimental to my productivity when integrated into an editor/IDE. I’ve found the “autocomplete” causes subtle bugs that I end up overlooking because I’m trying to go fast and putting too much trust in the generated lines/snippets. Tracing down these bugs becomes a huge time-sink. I do use chatbots in the browser for various things; mostly as a kind of “search” for alternative ways of doing things, frameworks, libraries, and algorithms. Agentic vibe-coding is ok for small one-off tools/scripts you wouldn’t need to maintain, IMO.

Well, this is a meme. But I personally am anti-surveillance. With the way things are going, these will almost certainly be “upgraded” to ALPR/“AI” systems for 24/7 surveillance and tracking; I’m guessing some probably already are.

Indeed, and I give them credit. China is unironically leading the world in scientific progress. I wouldn’t recommend using their services though, for privacy reasons (same with the US).

If you’re not paying, you’re the product. Even on Chinese services. Alibaba does train my favorite local models though (Qwen).

I’ve been going down this rabbit hole myself. Already set up a solar Meshtastic node and MeshCore repeater. Kinda cool, very low bandwidth and pretty unreliable though.

It’s my understanding that encryption is illegal on amateur radio bands. I’m thinking about getting a license anyways; looks fun.

HaLow, BATMAN, Reticulum and stuff like that also look cool, but I haven’t messed around with those yet.

I think radio will always have bandwidth/congestion problems. It’s like everyone within range is using the same “wire.”

I also like overlay networks like Tor and I2P, but it’s possible those will eventually be blocked or made illegal in many countries, if governments keep heading in the direction they seem to be heading.

As states, they’re very similar. You’ll see people flying the Confederate flag in rural parts of all states, and pockets of significant hispanic population in nearly all states as well. I’ve been to all those places. Many states have kind of a “fractal” geo-demographic phenomenon that kind of mirror the US as a whole (I.e. Ohio with backwards south, liberal-ish north, plenty of hispanic people, and fairly diverse cities). The differences between states are quite minor, IMO.

I think European countries actually have their own significant cultural differences (and language barriers) that’s keeping them from centralizing further. US states are more or less the same culturally. The geographic-based cultural divide would be urban vs rural.

There’s an intersection like that near me (android auto always drops). I haven’t figured out what’s causing it though. Haven’t spotted a Flock camera there. There’s some down the road, but none that I’ve noticed at the intersection. There are what look like the normal traffic cams there. I too wonder if it’s something that’s purposely forcing disconnections so devices start broadcasting SSIDs/MAC info or something like that.

OpenAI just bought the raw wafers? WTF.

I think the RAM manufacturers were found to be guilty of colluding/price-fixing in that case (maybe this case too).

It’s ok. It seems a bit ad-hoc to me compared to some of the higher-level academic languages I like (Haskell, Scala, Clojure, Chapel, etc). It’s much simpler than C++, and more expressive than C though.

I could be wrong, but I think Linux would be horrible for the kind of security you’d want in a smartphone. At least that’s what I read from the GrapheneOS folks…

It seems like a “great firewall” is where all this will lead. Projects like xray-core may become important to a lot more people in the future.

I think you may have a misconception of what the bottom 25% of earners do. Or, maybe I do. I don’t know anyone that does that stuff regularly, not even the high earners I know.

"We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat” Freeman [an advisor to Reagan] said. “That’s dynamite! We nave to be selective on who we allow to go through (higher education). If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people. That’s what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.’

Not really. TSMC has a near monopoly on the advanced fabrication, and ASML has a near monopoly on the lithographic machines TSMC uses. Nvidia is a fab-less designer. Google has its TPUs, and Amazon has some kind of custom chip too.