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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • WxFisch@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    6 days ago

    Kagi doesn’t hide that they use API calls to multiple sources for each search, they are fairly upfront about honestly. The benefits of use Jagi IME are the results are great, the site is fast and gets out of the way, it’s fairly affordable for what it provides, and the goals of the company is in line with mine (namely to find a thing I’m searching for). They are well funded enough to give me confidence that I’m not going to have to configure yet another search engine, and the integrate into pretty much all my access points easily as a default search engine.

    I have seen no reason to think they abuse their position to impact my privacy, and bring closed source does not automatically make them evil. You included no alternatives that are open source, and the ones I explored were either difficult to get setup, required me to run something on my own infrastructure, or didn’t provide the integrations or results I expect. Kagi does.

    Kagi isn’t perfect, and there are a ton of suggestions on their feature tracker that users rightly want implemented (including open sourcing more of their code-base). But as a paid search engine that makes me not the product, it does that job well.


  • The Enbrighten Zigbee switches I installed in some rooms work exactly as you note, if the zigbee network collapses for some reason, they still control the outlet or light they are hard wired to like any other dumb switch. I think for hardwired switches this is the normal behavior. For anything like Hue or Ikea Tradfri switches that are battery powered I think it highly depends on what they are connected to.


  • Looks from the article like it was stolen by infecting the PC of a third party analytics firm user who had privileged access to Hot Topics snowflake data warehouses and didn’t have MFA enabled. That is just inexcusable in this day and age and $100k is a small price for Hot Topics snowflake to pay for that fuck up (assuming the bad actor actually follows through and doesn’t sell the data if HT pays the price set). Pro tip (or really amateur tip), MFA all the things. Even SMS based MFA is better than no MFA even though it’s not ideal.




  • So still not addressing the myriad problems the player has, especially on AppleTV where it’s been reported for nearly half a decade to not work well. But hey you get yet another place to do photos things (which they admit literally no one wants or uses, they’d be better off dropping support for photos altogether).

    This is super frustrating because plex is very polished despite its clear bugs and misdirection. I just switched over to JellyFin and it’s faster and much more focused but just still has a lot of rough edges. I’m not sure which will be my long term solution but plex needs to attract folks to subscribe and focusing on features that 1/5 of a percent of users utilize is not how you do that.


  • The article title is misleading, but the research is interesting. Essentially it’s saying that when the rocket self-destructed due to it performing off nominal (as the first test ever of this vehicle) it ionized a large swath of the ionosphere from Mexico to the SE US which can impact the accuracy of GPS for systems that require high precision. The ionosphere reionizes very quickly naturally though so the effects are short lived (hours to maybe a day) and the impact to navigation at least should be small because of how GNSS works with built in corrections for exactly these types of errors. It feels like Nature is stretching a bit with the doom and gloom headline that the authors don’t even point to in the article (though I have not read the paper to be fair).


  • Like most here I work in IT. Unlike most here I have a BS in earth sciences (meteorology). While in school I did some summer volunteer work for the NWS near my home outside of DC that I found through an Alum that worked there. After I finished school that turned into a full time federal contractor position doing instrumentation testing and design. The facility was smaller and so I split my time with my friend (the alum that helped me in the first place) doing IT work. A few years down the road and I got a masters in information security (because sometimes a piece of paper matters). I turned that into a full time IT position at the same facility (still as a contractor).

    For personal reasons I later moved out of state which was pretty difficult to find a job, most places assume you want relocation assistance or otherwise aren’t interested in out of state applicants. I used an employment agency to help, and got a good job as a jack of all trades IT admin at a small engineering company (about 200 employees total). I stayed there for a few years before moving to a large enterprise. I wanted to go somewhere with growth potential. I liked that job and made a lot of great friends and professional contacts. I ended up leaving for a verity of reasons (bad management, poor company outlook, and seeking more stability).

    I eventually found my current job through someone I was working with who moved to my current company. I work for a national laboratory doing IT security work making good money in a super stable career (I’m a contractor so protected from a lot of the politics but the lab does work for the DOD so funding is never really in question).

    My general tips would be:

    1. Get to know alum at your school (if you choose to go to school)
    2. Don’t be afraid to work outside your major
    3. Start broad then generalize. I work with tons of folks that specialized in their field from the start, and while they are super smart at the one thing, they are locked into it and often can’t see the forest through the trees. Having a broad base makes it way easier to ask questions that help move projects forward.
    4. Ask dumb questions. Chances are if you don’t understand it, others don’t either. Don’t be afraid to look ignorant, every good manager I’ve ever worked for has rewarded curiosity and questioning as long as it’s productive generally.
    5. Know when to cut your losses and look elsewhere. This may be the millennial in me, but you don’t owe your company anything. Know when you’re unhappy and talk with management to see if there’s a solution. If not (or if management is the problem) look to move somewhere else.
    6. Goes with the above but the best time to find a job (and usually a promotion with it) is when you have a job.

  • From my reading this is misleading at best and likely wrong. I don’t work with CrowdStrike Falcon but have installed and maintained very similar EDR tools in enterprise environments and the channel updates referenced are the modern version of definition updates for a classic AV engine. Being up to date is the entire point and so typically there are only global options to either grab those updates from the vendor or host them internally on a central server but you wouldn’t want to slow roll or stage those updates since that fundamentally reduces the protection from zero days and novel attacks that the product is specifically there to detect and stop. These are not engine updates in that they don’t change the code that is running, they give the code new information about what an attack will look like to allow it to detect malicious activity as soon as CrowdStrike knows what the IoCs look like.

    In this case it appears that one of these updates pointed to a bad memory location which caused the engine to crash the OS, but it wasn’t a code update that did it (like a software patch). That should have been caught in QA checks prior to the channel update being pushed out, but it’s in CrowdStrikes interest to push these updates to all of their customers PCs as quickly as they can to allow detection of novel attacks.


  • For me as the driver of not one of these cars, I think the driver monitoring and sheeting is perhaps one of the most important parts of these systems. I 100% want your car to scream at you for not paying attention while use the driver assist features because it’s such a common and easy thing to do (if it works 99 times without issues, human nature is to assume it will work that 100th time, so checking that email from work real quick is probably fine). When the consequences of a driver failing to post attention while using these systems is potentially other people dying in a horrific crash, your discomfort at an alert because you happen to be a perfect driver that never does other things in the car while driving doesn’t matter.




  • A lot of these depend on the model and where it’s installed (geographically and within the house). In many areas of the US, there is a drain in the floor near all water heaters as a matter of code, you can drain condensate directly to that (and unlike gas appliances, the condensate is clean and does not need treated to go in household drains). I honestly think the noise concern is hugely overblown and used as an excuse for people that don’t like change. Sure it exists, but if your water heater is in the basement or garage like the majority are at least in my areas of the US, you’ll never notice it. I also look at the cooling air as a benefit for at least half the year, I can close all the vents in our basement for the whole spring/summer and it’s super comfortable. In the winter it’s a tad chilly, but not uncomfortable. Drying the air is also great for our basement, it’s literally a dehumidifier in what’s usually a pretty damp location for many people. Ours (a rheem unit) has a flimsy plastic air filter you vaccuum off once a year as well so not really a huge deal. I think most are like this.

    I agree that folks should do their homework and understand what they are getting. Heat pump water heaters are great, but are overpriced at the moment. Even with electric company rebates and a tax credit it cost more than a decent gas replacement would for us. It’s likely to only pay off because we have solar and so don’t really pay for electricity for a large chunk of the year. But I expect costs to come down over the next 5-10 years as these become the go to for most electric installs (and with fewer new gas hookups in new and renovated buildings that’s like to be most installs). Once these hit that $700-$1000 price point there’s really no good reason most people shouldn’t default to installing one.



  • YMMV of course, and will highly depend on how many people are in your house and how you use hot water, but a 50 gallon heat pump water heater easily supplies a dishwasher and two long showers with 1/3 of a tank of available water left in our house (and I take pretty hot showers that are not always as short as they should be). Sure, it takes an hour or two to fully recover but we aren’t ever looking to use much more hot water at one time. If you have a household of four, it may be a bit more of a problem, but then you can easily schedule other hot water uses to happen “off peak” like a dishwasher.


  • Idk, I DIY swapped out old gas water heater for an electric heat pump water heater heater and it was super straight forward. If you have the plumbing and electrical skills to add a circuit and move your hookups (since on most gas water heaters they are on top and most heat pump water heaters they are on the sides top and bottom), you probably have the skills to safely disconnect and cap off the old gas line. Just be sure to use pipe dope that is rated for gas, and check with soapy water once you pressurize the line again for leaks.




  • Asking broadly like this is akin to asking for a guide on how to cook, it’s generally too broad for there to be a single guide. You first need to figure out what your goals are (you state one already, you’d like it to be externally accessible), determine what services you want to host, and then start looking at how to do so.

    The advice I’d give is to start with a solid base, you’ll need something to self host on and it really shouldn’t be the PC you use for other things. Get it setup to run a virtualization OS such as proxmox and use that as your starting point. Then do a lot of reading. I spend probably three to four times as much time reading about the service I’m planning to deploy compared to actually doing the work to deploy it. Lastly, plan. You should have a solid plan in the beginning of how you want your service to work (what will be external vice internal only, how will you setup the networking stack to do that, are you going to have a domain, and will you use subdomains or folders to divide services, what does your IP space look like, will you host your own firewall to make the networking more controlled or fight with your ISPs router, do you want to use docker, kubernetes, or maybe full VMs for each service, do you want/need a UI to manage things from or are you comfortable with CLI, etc). These answers will lead you to guides for various services as well as service specific forums where help is more focused.


  • I grew up in Loudoun county and lived in prince william county for a bit. It’s important to note that the wealth in Loudoun, prince william, and Fairfax counties are concentrated in pretty specific areas. Outside of Ashburn, South Riding, and the western estates of Loudoun it’s not terribly rich. The data centers bring in a ton of wealth though on top of the very large government contracting companies such as Lockheed, Raytheon, GD, etc. Additionally, DC and the surrounding cities just don’t have the density like other cities do, which spreads the wealth out a bit more (while still concentrating it in various counties around the area).